In November, Microsoft released some important news regarding Azure management services. Through these articles released on a monthly basis, we want to provide an overall overview of the main news of the month, in order to stay up to date on these arguments and have the necessary references for further information.
The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles:
Configure
Azure Automation
Support for Availability Zones
Azure Automation has introduced support for Availability Zones so that it can provide greater resiliency and reliability to the service, runbooks and other automation resources. In case a zone is inactive, no user action is required to recover from a zone fault, in fact, the service will be made accessible through the other available areas. In addition to high availability, this feature is useful for implementing a disaster recovery strategy for the Automation Account, often a key component in DR plans in Azure.
Govern
Azure Cost Management
Updates related toMicrosoft Cost Management
Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Microsoft Cost Management, the solution to provide greater visibility into where costs are accumulating in the cloud, identify and prevent incorrect spending patterns and optimize costs . Inthis article some of the latest improvements and updates regarding this solution are reported, including:
- Ability to use tag inheritance to group subscriptions and resource groups.
- View cost change over previous period, in the cost analysis preview.
Azure Advisor: new cost recommendations for Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Azure Advisor has expanded the recommendations to include cost optimizations for Virtual Machine Scale Sets as well. Recommendations will include recommendations for shutting down resources that are not being used, recommendations for changing the SKU and downscaling for underutilized resources versus provisioning.
Secure
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud development is constantly evolving and improvements are being made on an ongoing basis. To stay up to date on the latest developments, Microsoft updates this page, this provides information about new features, bug fixes and deprecated features. In particular, this month the main news concern:
- Protecting containers in a GCP environment with Defender for Containers
- Ability to validate Defender for Containers protections via sample alerts
- Governance rules at scale (preview)
Protect
Azure Backup
Cross-subscription recovery for VMs in Azure (preview)
The Cross Subscription Restore feature was announced in preview and allows you to restore Azure virtual machines, by creating or restoring new disks, in any subscription, starting from the restore point created by Azure Backup. By default, Azure Backup restores in the same subscription where the recovery points are available. With this new feature, you get the flexibility to perform restores in any subscription of the tenant. Cross Subscription Restore is also supported for restore with Managed System Identities (MSI), while it is not currently supported for Azure encrypted virtual machines and Trusted Launch VMs.
Migrate
Azure Migrate
New Azure Migrate releases and features
Azure Migrate is the service in Azure that includes a large portfolio of tools that you can use, through a guided experience, to address effectively the most common migration scenarios. To stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the solution, please consult this page, that provides information about new releases and features. In particular, this month the main news concern:
- Support for using a sudo account to perform agentless dependency analysis on Linux servers running in environments VMware, Hyper-V and for physical systems or in other cloud environments.
- Support for selecting VNets and Subnets during test migration (Using PowerShell) for the agentless VMware scenario.
- OS disk swap support for agentless VMware scenario.
- Support for pausing and resuming replicas using PowerShell for VMware agentless scenario.
Azure Database Migration
Offline Azure SQL Database migrations with the Azure SQL Migration extension
To perform offline migrations of SQL Server databases running on-premises, SQL Server on Azure virtual machines or any virtual machine running in the cloud (private, public) to Azure SQL Database you can use the extension Azure SQL Migration
New Azure SQL Migration extension migration feature provides an end-to-end experience to modernize SQL Servers in Azure SQL Database. The extension allows you to check the readiness of the migration with actions for: remedying possible migration blocks, export assessment results and get appropriate Azure recommendations.
Evaluation of Azure
To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.
