This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.
Azure
Compute
Latest generation burstable VMs – Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 (preview)
The Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 series virtual machines are the latest generation of Azure burstable general purpose VMs, providing a baseline level of CPU utilization and capable of expanding to higher CPU utilization as workload volume increases. This is ideal for many applications such as development and test servers, low traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers, and code repositories. These new B series v2 virtual machines, compared to B series v1, offer up to >15% better price-performance, up to 5X higher network bandwidth with accelerated networking and 10X higher remote storage throughput.
Azure Dedicated Host – Resize (preview)
With Azure Dedicated Host’s new ‘resize’ feature, you can easily move your existing dedicated host to a new Azure Dedicated Host SKU (e.g., from Dsv3-Type1 to Dsv3-Type4). This new ‘resize’ feature minimizes the impact and effort involved in configuring VMs when you want to upgrade your underlying dedicated host system.
Networking
Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer is now generally available
Azure Load Balancer’s Global tier is a cloud-native global network load balancing solution. With cross-region Load Balancer, you can distribute traffic across multiple Azure regions with ultra-low latency and high performance. Azure cross-region Load Balancer provides customers a static globally anycast IP address. Through this global IP address, you can easily add or remove regional deployments without interruption.
ExpressRoute private peering support for BGP communities
ExpressRoute private peering now supports the use of custom Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) communities with virtual networks connected to your ExpressRoute circuits. Once you configure a custom BGP community for your virtual network, you can view the regional and custom community values on outbound traffic sent over ExpressRoute when originating from that virtual network. These values can be used when applying filters or specifying routing preferences for traffic sent to your on-premises from your Azure environment.
Azure Virtual Network encryption
With Virtual Network encryption, customers can enable encryption of traffic between Virtual Machines and Virtual Machines Scale Sets within the same virtual network and between regionally and globally peered virtual networks. This new feature enhances the existing encryption in transit capabilities in Azure.
Sensitive Data Protection for Application Gateway Web Application Firewall logs (preview)
Azure’s regional Web Application Firewall (WAF) running on Application Gateway now supports sensitive data protection through log scrubbing. When a request matches the criteria of a rule, and triggers a WAF action, that event is captured within the WAF logs. WAF logs are stored as plain text for debuggability, and any matching patterns with sensitive customer data like IP address, passwords, and other personally identifiable information could potentially end up in logs as plain text. To help safeguard this sensitive data, you can now create log scrubbing rules that replace the sensitive data with “******”.
Storage
Azure Managed Lustre now generally available
Azure Managed Lustre is a managed file system, designed specifically for HPC and AI workloads on a pay-as-you-go model. It delivers high-performance distributed parallel file system with hundreds of GBps storage bandwidth and solid-state disk latency. The system fully integrates with Azure services such as Azure HPC Compute, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Machine Learning.
Key benefits include:
- a customizable Lustre file system that can be deployed on demand in minutes;
- the high throughput needed for computationally intensive workloads;
- easy integration with other Azure services;
- managed pay-as-you-go model that allows organizations to save costs on maintenance and infrastructure setup.
Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage is now available in more regions
Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage is now available in Switzerland North, Japan East, Korea Central, South Africa North, Sweden Central, Canada Central and Central US regions. This next-generation storage solution offers advanced general-purpose block storage with the best price performance, delivering sub-millisecond disk latencies for demanding IO-intensive workloads at a low cost. It is well-suited for a wide range of enterprise production workloads, including SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, MongoDB, big data analytics, gaming on virtual machines, and stateful containers.
