Category Archives: Microsoft Azure

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (August 2021 – Weeks: 33 and 34)

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

Placement polices for Azure VMware Solution (preview)

Placement policies are used to define constraints for running virtual machines in the Azure VMware Solution software-defined data center (SDDC). These constraints allow you to decide where and how the virtual machines should run within the SDDC clusters. Placement polices are used to support performance optimization of virtual Machines (VMs) through policy, and help mitigate the impact of maintenance operations to policies within the SDDC cluster. When you create a placement policy, it creates a vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) rule in the specified vSphere cluster. It also includes additional logic for interoperability with Azure VMware Solution operations.

New VM series supported by Azure Batch

The selection of VMs that can be used by Azure Batch has been expanded, allowing newer Azure VM series to be used. The following additional VM series can now be specified when Batch pools are created:

Azure Virtual Machines: retired series

Microsoft is retiring:

  • H-series Azure Virtual Machine sizes (H8, H8m, H16, H16r, H16m, H16mr, H8 Promo, H8m Promo, H16 Promo, H16r Promo, H16m Promo, and H16mr Promo) on 31 August 2022.
  • ND-series virtual machine sizes on 31 August 2022.
  • Basic and Standard A-series VMs on 31 August 2024.

Azure Government Top Secret now generally available for US national security missions

Azure Government Top Secret is available for US and this is a significant milestone in Microsoft commitment to bringing unmatched commercial innovation to US government customers across all data classifications. This announcement, together with new services and functionality in Azure Government Secret, provides further evidence of Microsoft’s relentless commitment to the mission of national security, enabling customers and partners to realize the vision of a multi-cloud strategy and achieve greater agility, interoperability, cost savings, and speed to innovation.

Storage

Azure Blob storage inventory

Inventory provides an easy way to gain insights into the containers and all block, append, and page blobs stored within an account. Blob Inventory can be selected to provide a full listing of all blobs and containers on a daily or weekly basis. Prior to Inventory, either a separate catalog system or, listing of all blobs and analyzing added complexity and cost to solutions that used blob storage. With inventory, all blobs and containers that match an optional filter will be listed on a daily or weekly basis to a CSV or Parquet file that can then be processed for insights.

Azure Archive Storage events for easy rehydration of archived blobs

The Azure Archive Storage provides a secure, low-cost means for retaining cold data including backups and archival storage. When your data is stored in Archive Storage, the data is offline and not available for read until it is moved to the hot or cool tier. Previously, the only way to determine when blob rehydration was complete and available to be read was to repeatedly poll the status of the rehydration operation, increasing complexity and cost. Azure Event Grid now supports events that fire when a blob is rehydrated from the archive tier. The Microsoft.Storage.BlobCreated event fires when a blob is copied from the archive tier to a new destination blob in the hot or cool tier. The Microsoft.Storage.BlobTierChanged event fires when the archived blob’s tier is changed to hot or cool. Your application can handle these events in order to respond to blob rehydration.

Azure Blob storage: last access time tracking

Last access time tracking integrates with lifecycle management to allow the automatic tiering and deletion of data based on when individual blobs are last accessed. This allows greater cost control as well as an automatic workflow including deletion of data after it is no longer used. Last access time can also be used without lifecycle management by any solution that needs to understand when individual blobs are last read and then take action. Lifecycle management with last access time tracking is available in all public regions for accounts with flat namespace used. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 will be supported later this year.

Networking

Network Insights: enhanced troubleshooting experiences for additional resources

You now have access to rich insights and enhanced troubleshooting experiences for four additional networking resources in Network Insights: Private Link, NAT Gateway, Public IP, and NIC.

With the onboarding of these resources, customers can access:

  • A resource topology showing resource health and connected resources
  • A pre-built workbook showing all key metrics along multiple
  • Direct links to documentation and troubleshooting help

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (August 2021 – Weeks: 31 and 32)

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

Automatic Azure VM extension upgrade capabilities

Azure Virtual Machine extensions are small applications that provide post-deployment configuration and automation on Azure VMs. The ability to automatically upgrade VM extensions is now available for Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets. If the automatic extension upgrade feature is enabled for an extension on a VM or a VM scale set, the extension is upgraded automatically whenever the extension publisher releases a new version. Azure manages the upgrade rollout and the upgrades are safely applied following availability-first principles, keeping your environments more secure and up to date.

Storage

Azure File Sync agent v13

Improvements and issues that are fixed in the v13 release:

  • Authoritative upload: authoritative upload is a new mode available when creating the first server endpoint in a sync group. It is useful for the scenario where the cloud (Azure file share) has some/most of the data but is outdated and needs to be caught up with the more recent data on the new server endpoint. This is the case in offline migration scenarios like DataBox, for instance. When a DataBox is filled and sent to Azure, the users of the local server will keep changing / adding / deleting files on the local server. That makes the data in the DataBox and thus the Azure file share, slightly outdated. With Authoritative Upload, you can now tell the server and cloud, how to resolve this case and get the cloud seamlessly updated with the latest changes on the server. No matter how the data got to the cloud, this mode can update the Azure file share if the data stems from the matching location on the server. Be sure to avoid large directory restructures between the initial copy to the cloud and catching up with Authoritative Upload. This will ensure you are only transporting updates. Changes to directory names will cause all files in these renamed directories to be uploaded again. This functionality is comparable to semantics of RoboCopy /MIR = mirror source to target, including removing files on the target that no longer exist on the source. Authoritative Upload replaces the “Offline Data Transfer” feature for DataBox integration with Azure File Sync via a staging share. A staging share is no longer required to use DataBox. New Offline Data Transfer jobs can no longer be started with the AFS V13 agent. Existing jobs on a server will continue even with the upgrade to agent version 13.
  • Portal improvements to view cloud change enumeration and sync progress: when a new sync group is created, any connected server endpoint can only begin sync, when cloud change enumeration is complete. In case files already exist in the cloud endpoint (Azure file share) of this sync group, change enumeration of content in the cloud can take some time. The more items (files and folders) exist in the namespace, the longer this process can take. Admins will now be able to obtain cloud change enumeration progress in the Azure portal to estimate an eta for completion / sync to start with servers.
  • Support for server rename: if a registered server is renamed, Azure File Sync will now show the new server name in the portal. If the server was renamed prior to the v13 release, the server name in the portal will now be updated to show the correct server name.
  • Support for Windows Server 2022 Preview: the Azure File Sync agent is now supported on Windows Server 2022 Preview build 20348 or later. Note: Windows Server 2022 adds support for TLS 1.3 which is not currently supported by Azure File Sync. If the TLS settings are managed via group policy, the server must be configured to support TLS 1.2.
  • Miscellaneous improvements:
    • Reliability improvements for sync, cloud tiering and cloud change enumeration.
    • If a large number of files is changed on the server, sync upload is now performed from a VSS snapshot which reduces per-item errors and sync session failures.
    • The Invoke-StorageSyncFileRecall cmdlet will now recall all tiered files associated with a server endpoint, even if the file has moved outside the server endpoint location.
    • Explorer.exe is now excluded from cloud tiering last access time tracking.
    • New telemetry (Event ID 6664) to monitor the orphaned tiered files cleanup progress after removing a server endpoint with cloud tiering enabled.

More information about this release:

  • This release is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 Preview installations.
  • A restart is required for servers that have an existing Azure File Sync agent installation if the agent version is less than version 12.0.
  • The agent version for this release is 13.0.0.0.
  • Installation instructions are documented in KB4588753.

Networking

Re-size Azure virtual networks that are peered (preview)

Virtual networks in Azure have had a long-standing constraint where any address space change is only allowed if the virtual network does not have any peerings. Microsoft is announcing that this limitation has been lifted, and customers can freely resize their virtual networks without incurring any downtime. With this feature, existing peerings on the virtual network do not need to be deleted prior to adding or deleting an address prefix on the virtual network.

Azure VPN Client for macOS

Azure VPN Client for macOS is available with support for native Azure AD, certificate-based, and RADIUS authentication for OpenVPN protocol.

Native Azure AD authentication support is highly desired by organizations as it enables user-based policies, conditional access, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for P2S VPN. Native Azure AD authentication requires both Azure VPN gateway integration and the Azure VPN Client to obtain and validate Azure AD tokens. With the Azure VPN Client for macOS, you can use user-based policies, Conditional Access, as well as Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) for your Mac devices.

Azure ExpressRoute Global Reach: 2 new locations

There are 2 new locations for ExpressRoute Global Reach:

  • South Africa (Johannesburg only)
  • Taiwan

For more information about ExpressRoute Global Reach and available locations, visit ExpressRoute Global Reach webpage.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (July 2021 – Weeks: 29 and 30)

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

Storage

Shared disks on Azure Disk Storage are now generally available on all Premium SSD and Standard SSD sizes

Shared disks can now be leveraged on smaller Premium SSDs from 4GiB to 128 GiB and all Standard SSDs from 4 GiB to 32 TiB. This expands shared disk support to Ultra Disk, Premium SSD, and Standard SSD enabling you to optimize for different price and performance options based on your workload needs.

Immutable storage with versioning for Blob Storage (preview)

Immutable storage with versioning for Blob Storage is now available in preview. Immutable storage provides the capability to store data in a write once, read many (WORM) state. Once data is written, the data becomes non-erasable and non-modifiable, and you can set a retention period so that files can’t be deleted until after that period has elapsed. Additionally, legal holds can be placed on data to make that data non-erasable and non-modifiable until the hold is removed. Immutable storage with versioning adds the capability to set an immutable policy on the container or object level. It also allows for the immutable protection of all past and current versions of any blob.

Networking

Next-generation firewall capabilities with Azure Firewall Premium

Microsoft Azure Firewall Premium is now available with this key features:

  • TLS inspection: Azure Firewall Premium terminates outbound and east-west transport layer security (TLS) connections. Inbound TLS inspection is supported in conjunction with Azure Application Gateway allowing end-to-end encryption. Azure Firewall performs the required value-added security functions and re-encrypts the traffic which is sent to the original destination.
  • IDPS: Azure Firewall Premium provides signature-based intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) to allow rapid detection of attacks by looking for specific patterns, such as byte sequences in network traffic or known malicious instruction sequences used by malware.
  • Web categories: Allows administrators to filter outbound user access to the internet based on categories (for example, social networking, search engines, gambling, and so on), reducing the time spent on managing individual fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) and URLs. This capability is also available for Azure Firewall Standard based on FQDNs only.
  • URL filtering: Allow administrators to filter outbound access to specific URLs, not just FQDNs. This capability works for both plain text and encrypted traffic if TLS inspection is enabled.

Application Gateway: new features for Web Application Firewall (WAF)

  • Bot protection: Web Application Firewall (WAF) bot protection feature on Application Gateway allows users to enable a managed bot protection rule set for their WAF to block or log requests from known malicious IP addresses. The IP addresses are sourced from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed. This rule set can be used alongside the OWASP core rule sets (CRS) to provide additional protection.

  • Geomatch custom rules: Web Application Firewall (WAF) geomatch custom rule feature on Application Gateway allows users to restrict access to their web applications by country/region. As with all custom rules, this logic can be compounded with other rules to suit the needs of your application.

Azure ExpressRoute: 3 New Peering Locations Available

Three new peering locations are available for ExpressRoute:

  • Campinas
  • Sao Paulo2
  • Dublin2

With this announcement, ExpressRoute is now available across 79 global commercial Azure peering locations.

New insights in Traffic Analytics

Azure Network Watcher Traffic Analytics solutions is used to monitor network traffic. It now provides WHOIS and Geographic data for all Public IPs interacting with your deployments and further adds DNS domain, threat type & threat description for Malicious IPs. Now, it also supports inter-zone traffic and VMSS level traffic insights.

Azure Management services: What's new in July 2021

Microsoft constantly announces news regarding Azure management services and as usual this monthly summary. The aim is to provide an overview of the main news of the month, in order to stay up to date on these topics and have the necessary references to conduct further exploration.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

New built-in policies for Log Analytics workspaces and linked automation accounts

When designing and deploying Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspaces, it is advisable to adopt specific criteria to distribute them consistently, in compliance with the compliance of their environment. Thanks to a new built-in policy it is possible to automate and control the distribution of Log Analytics workspaces and the Automation Accounts connected to them in your own environments.

Better integration between Azure Monitor and Grafana

Grafana is a very popular open source visualization and analysis software, which allows you to query, view and explore various metrics from multiple data sources in a centralized way. Recently, some updates have been made to the Azure Monitor plug-in for Grafana that allow you to enable additional data sources and easier authentication via managed identity. Among the main improvements we find:

  • Azure Resource Graph in the Azure Monitor Grafana data source. Azure Resource Graph (ARG) is a service in Azure that allows you to perform large-scale queries on a given subscription set, so that you can effectively govern your environment. With Grafana 8.0, Azure Monitor data source supports querying ARG.
  • Managed Identities are supported for the Grafana data source hosted in Azure and for Azure Monitor. Customers hosting Grafana on Azure (e.g.. App Service, Azure Virtual Machine) and have enabled managed identity on their virtual machine, they will be able to use it to configure Azure Monitor in Grafana. This aspect simplifies the configuration of the data source, requiring it to be securely authenticated without having to manually configure credentials through app registrations in Azure AD for each data source.
  • Direct links to the Azure portal for Grafana metrics. To allow easy exploration of Azure Monitor metrics directly from Grafana, when a user selects the result of a query, a menu appears with a link to “View in the Azure portal”. Selecting it will redirect you to the corresponding chart in the Azure Metrics Explorer portal.

Direct proxy and Log Analytics gateway support for the new agent

Following the recent announcement on the availability of the new Azure Monitor agent (AMA) and data collection rules (Data Collection Rules), support for direct proxies and support for Log Analytics gateways is introduced for this agent.

Configure

Azure Automation

Support for User Assigned Managed Identities (preview)

Azure Automation has introduced support for User Assigned Managed Identities, which allows you to eliminate the effort of managing RunAs Accounts for runbooks. A User Assigned Managed Identities is an independent Azure resource that can be assigned to the Azure Automation account, which can have multiple associated user-assigned identities. The same identity can be assigned to multiple Azure Automation accounts.

Govern

Azure Policy

Azure Policy built-in for Network Watcher Traffic Analytics

Traffic Analytics is based on the analysis of NSG flow logs and after an appropriate aggregation of data, inserting the necessary intelligence concerning security, topology and geographic map, can provide detailed information about the network traffic of your Azure cloud environment. The following new built-in policies have been introduced to facilitate the deployment of Traffic Analytics:

  • An audit policy: Flag flow logs resource without traffic analytics enabled
  • DeployIfNotExists policies: Enable Traffic Analytics on NSGs in an Azure region of a subscription or resource group

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toAzure Cost Management and Billing

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Azure Cost Management and Billing, 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:

Secure

Azure Security Center

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center 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:

Protect

Azure Site Recovery

New Update Rollup

For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 56 that solves several issues and introduces some improvements. In particular, this update introduces the following new features:

  • Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (services): Improvements have been made to enable replication and new protection operations to be faster than 46%.
  • Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (portal): Replication between any two Azure regions around the world can now be enabled. You are no longer limited to enabling replication on your continent.

The details and the procedure to follow for the installation can be found in the specific KB.

Evaluation of Azure

To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (July 2021 – Weeks: 27 and 28)

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

Free Extended Security Updates only on Azure for Windows Server 2012/R2and SQL Server 2012

On-premises Windows Server and SQL Server customers looking to migrate and modernize can take advantage of the extension of free Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for Windows Server 2012/R2 and SQL Server 2012, as follows:

  • Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Extended Support (ESU) will end on October 10, 2023. Extended Support for SQL Server 2012 ends July 12, 2022. Customers that cannot meet this deadline can protect their apps and data running on these releases for three additional years when they migrate to Windows Server and SQL Server on Azure and take advantage of free ESUs on Azure. Customers running Windows Server and SQL Server on these releases and on-premises will have the option to purchase ESUs.
  • Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 three-year ESUs are coming to an end on January 10, 2023, and July 12, 2022, respectively. Customers who need more time to migrate and modernize will be able to take advantage of a Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 on Azure, we will now provide one addiitonal year of extended security updates only on Azure.

Virtual Machine (VM) bursting is now generally available on more VM types

Virtual machine level disk bursting is a now enabled for our Dsv4, Dasv4, Ddsv4, Esv4, Easv4, Edsv4, Fsv2 and B-series VM families, which allows your virtual machine to burst its disk IO and MiB/s throughput performance for a short time daily. This enables your VMs to handle unforeseen spikey disk traffic smoothly and process batched jobs with speed. There is no additional cost associated with this new capability or adjustments on the VM pricing and it comes enabled by default.

HPC Cache on E-Series VMs Support of Blob NFS 3.0

The Azure Blob team recently announced that Blob NFS 3.0 protocol support is generally available and now, Azure HPC Cache will follow suit with general availability using E-Series VMs.

Storage

Azure File Sync agent v13

The Azure File Sync agent v13 release is being flighted to servers which are configured to automatically update when a new version becomes available.

Improvements and issues that are fixed in the v13 release:

  • Authoritative upload. Authoritative upload is a new mode available when creating the first server endpoint in a sync group. It is useful for the scenario where the cloud (Azure file share) has some/most of the data but is outdated and needs to be caught up with the more recent data on the new server endpoint. This is the case in offline migration scenarios like DataBox, for instance. When a DataBox is filled and sent to Azure, the users of the local server will keep changing / adding / deleting files on the local server. That makes the data in the DataBox and thus the Azure file share, slightly outdated. With Authoritative Upload, you can now tell the server and cloud, how to resolve this case and get the cloud seamlessly updated with the latest changes on the server. No matter how the data got to the cloud, this mode can update the Azure file share if the data stems from the matching location on the server. Be sure to avoid large directory restructures between the initial copy to the cloud and catching up with Authoritative Upload. This will ensure you are only transporting updates. Changes to directory names will cause all files in these renamed directories to be uploaded again. This functionality is comparable to semantics of RoboCopy /MIR = mirror source to target, including removing files on the target that no longer exist on the source. Authoritative Upload replaces the “Offline Data Transfer” feature for DataBox integration with Azure File Sync via a staging share. A staging share is no longer required to use DataBox. New Offline Data Transfer jobs can no longer be started with the AFS V13 agent. Existing jobs on a server will continue even with the upgrade to agent version 13.
  • Portal improvements to view cloud change enumeration and sync progress. When a new sync group is created, any connected server endpoint can only begin sync, when cloud change enumeration is complete. In case files already exist in the cloud endpoint (Azure file share) of this sync group, change enumeration of content in the cloud can take some time. The more items (files and folders) exist in the namespace, the longer this process can take. Admins will now be able to obtain cloud change enumeration progress in the Azure portal to estimate an eta for completion / sync to start with servers.
  • Support for server rename. If a registered server is renamed, Azure File Sync will now show the new server name in the portal. If the server was renamed prior to the v13 release, the server name in the portal will now be updated to show the correct server name.
  • Support for Windows Server 2022 Preview. The Azure File Sync agent is now supported on Windows Server 2022 Preview build 20348 or later. Note: Windows Server 2022 adds support for TLS 1.3 which is not currently supported by Azure File Sync. If the TLS settings are managed via group policy, the server must be configured to support TLS 1.2.
  • Miscellaneous improvements:
    • Reliability improvements for sync, cloud tiering and cloud change enumeration.
    • If a large number of files is changed on the server, sync upload is now performed from a VSS snapshot which reduces per-item errors and sync session failures.
    • The Invoke-StorageSyncFileRecall cmdlet will now recall all tiered files associated with a server endpoint, even if the file has moved outside the server endpoint location.
    • Explorer.exe is now excluded from cloud tiering last access time tracking.
    • New telemetry (Event ID 6664) to monitor the orphaned tiered files cleanup progress after removing a server endpoint with cloud tiering enabled.

To obtain and install this update, configure your Azure File Sync agent to automatically update when a new version becomes available or manually download the update from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

More information about this release:

  • This release is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 Preview installations.
  • A restart is required for servers that have an existing Azure File Sync agent installation if the agent version is less than version 12.0.
  • The agent version for this release is 13.0.0.0.
  • Installation instructions are documented in KB4588753.

Azure Blob storage: container Soft Delete

Administrators can set a retention policy and recover data from a deletion of a blob container without contacting support.

HPC Cache for NVME-based Storage, Storage Target Management, and HIPAA Compliance

The latest release of HPC Cache adds support for high throughput VMs as well as enhancements to storage target operations.

Disk pool for Azure VMware Solution (preview)

With disk pool, Azure VMware Solution customers can now access Azure Disk Storage for high-performance, durable block storage. Customer can scale their storage independent of compute and handle their growing data needs more cost-effectively.

Networking

Azure Bastion Standard SKU public (preview)

With the new Azure Bastion Standard SKU, you can now perform/configure the following: 

  • Manually scale Bastion host Virtual Machine instances: Azure Bastion supports manual scaling of the Virtual Machine (VM) instances facilitating Bastion connectivity. You can configure 2-50 instances to manage the number of concurrent SSH and RDP sessions Azure Bastion can support. 

  • Azure Bastion admin panel: Azure Bastion supports enabling/disabling features accessed by the Bastion host. 

Azure Web Application Firewall: OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set 3.2 (preview)

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) ModSecurity Core Rule Set 3.2 (CRS 3.2) for Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) deployments running on Application Gateway is in preview. This release offers improved security from web vulnerabilities, reduced false positives, and improvements to performance. Microsoft is also announcing an increase in the file upload limit and request body size limit to 4GB and 2MB respectively.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (July 2021 – Weeks: 25 and 26)

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

Azure VM Image Builder service: custom image building process

Azure VM Image Builder service is a managed service to build custom Linux or Windows virtual machine (VM) images with ease, and be compliant with your company’s security policy across Azure and Azure Stack. With Azure VM Image Builder, the Microsoft managed service built on HashiCorp Packer, you can describe custom images in a template using new or existing configurations and enables VM image building immediately without setting up and managing your own image building pipeline.

New Azure VMs for confidential workloads (Limited Preview)

Microsoft is announcing the limited preview go-live of the DCsv3-series and DCdsv3-series Azure Virtual Machines, starting in the East US 2 region. Leveraging Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), you can allocate private regions of memory, called enclaves, giving you more granular protection against processes or administrators with higher privilege levels. These new VMs enable you to protect the confidentiality and integrity your code and data while in use.

Storage

Azure Blob storage: NFS 3.0 protocol support

Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol support for Azure Blob Storage is generally available. Azure Blob Storage is the only storage platform that supports NFS 3.0 protocol over object storage natively (no gateway or data copying required), with object storage economics. The data stored in your storage account with NFS support is billed at the same rate as blob storage capacity charges with no minimal provisioned capacity required.

Azure NetApp Files: regional Capacity Quota

The default capacity quota for each subscription will be changed from no quota to a quota of 25 TiB, per region, across all service levels. This capacity change will not have any impact on your current service but will ensure (new) capacity pool creation or capacity pool size increases will succeed based on available regional capacity. Any regional capacity quota increase does not incur a billing increase, as billing will still be based on the provisioned capacity pools.

Expansion of credit-based disk bursting to Azure Standard SSDs E30 and smaller

Credit-based disk bursting is now available on Azure Standard SSDs E30 and smaller (less than or equal to 1TiB). With credit-based bursting, your disks can burst IOPS and throughput for a short-time (up to 30 minutes) to handle unexpected disk traffic and process batch jobs with speed. Now you can deploy your disks for their average performance needs instead of for peak performance, enabling you to achieve cost savings. All your existing or new Standard SSD disks (less than or equal to 1TiB) will have credit-based bursting enabled by default with no user action or addition costs.

Expansion of on-demand disk bursting for Premium SSD to more regions (preview)

Microsoft has now expanded the preview of on-demand disk bursting to all production regions. You can enable on-demand bursting on existing or new disks following instructions here.

Networking

VPN NAT (preview)

Azure VPN NAT (Network Address Translation) supports overlapping address spaces between customers on-premises branch networks and their Azure Virtual Networks. NAT can also enable business-to-business connectivity where address spaces are managed by different organizations and re-numbering networks is not possible. VPN NAT preview provides support for 1:1 Static NAT.

Azure Management services: What's new in June 2021

In June have been announced, by Microsoft, a considerable number of news regarding Azure management services. Through these articles released monthly we want to provide an overall overview of the main news, 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, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

The new Azure Monitor agent and new Data Collection Rules features are available

Azure Monitor introduces, for some months now, a new unified agent (Azure Monitor Agent – AMA) and a new concept to make data collection more efficient (Data Collection Rules – DCR).

Among the various key features added in this new agent we find:

  • Support for Azure Arc server(Windows and Linux) 
  • Virtual Machine Scale Set support (VMSS)
  • Installation via ARM template

With regard to the Data Collection, these innovations have been made:

  • Better control in defining the scope of data collection (e.g.. ability to collect from a subset of VMs for a single workspace)
  • Single collection and sending to both Log Analytics and Azure Monitor Metrics
  • Send to multiple workspaces (multi-homing for Linux)
  • Ability to better filter Windows events
  • Better extension management

All the preview features are ready to be used even in production environments, with the exception of the use of custom Azure Monitor Metrics (still in preview).

Collection of Syslog events from the Azure Monitor agent for Linux distro (preview)

Azure Monitor introduced a new concept for configuring data collection and a new unified agent for Azure Monitor. This new agent (AMA – Azure Monitor Agent) allows you to improve some key aspects of data collection from virtual machines, as reported in the previous paragraph. There was an issue on this front where Syslog data collection was not working as expected. This problem has been solved and the latest version of the agent includes support for the collection of Syslog events from Linux machines (using version 1.10 and later), available for all supported distributions.

Azure Monitor cost changes to achieve significant savings

Microsoft recently made several changes to Azure Monitor Log Analytics costs, which allow for significant savings, if important amounts of data are merged into the workspaces. It should be noted that a new naming has been introduced with regard to capacity reservations, which are now called “commitment tiers”. These changes have been made available since 2 June 2021:

  • New commitment tiers (higher). New engagement levels are introduced for Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor Log Analytics for data ingestion: 1 TB/Day, 2 TB/Day, and 5 TB/Day.
  • Changes to the billing method for importing data that exceed the commitment tiers. Data imported beyond the commitment tiers will be billed using the actual commitment tiers rate, instead of the pay-as-you-go rate, with consequent cost reduction.
  • Simplification of commitment tiers: it is now possible to select from eight distinct commitment tiers and it is no longer necessary to manage tiers due to minor changes in the data ingestion. As part of this change, all workspaces with a commitment tier greater than 500 GB / day will be reset to the lowest available commitment tier: 500 GB / day, 1 TB / day, 2 TB / day or 5 TB / day.

Govern

Azure Policy

Changes in compliance for Resource Type Policies

Starting from 16 June 2021, the policies in which the resource type is the only evaluation criterion (e.g.. Allowed Resource Types, Disallowed Resource Types) they will have no resources “compliant” in compliance records. This means that if there are no non-compliant resources, the policy will show compliance with the 100%. If one or more non-compliant resources are present, the policy will show it 0% of compliance, with total resources equal to non-compliant resources. This change is to respond to feedback that resource type policies skew overall compliance rate data (which are calculated as compliant resources + exempt from total resources in all policies, deduplicated for unique resource IDs) due to a large number of total resources.

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toAzure Cost Management and Billing

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Azure Cost Management and Billing, 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:

  • Display of amortized costs in the cost analysis preview.
  • Cloudyn is withdrawn from the 30 June.
  • News regarding Cost Management Labs.

Secure

Azure Security Center

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center 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:

Protect

Azure Backup

TLS 1.2 enforcement per il MARS backup agent

Starting from September 1st 2020, Azure Backup will enforce the presence of the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS) version 1.2 or later. To continue using Azure Backup, you need to make sure that all resources use the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services agent (MARS) updated to use TLS 1.2 or superior.

Cross Region Restore of SQL / SAP HANA running on VM in Azure

In Azure Backup, restore between different regions of Azure (Cross-Region Restore – CRR), available for virtual machines, has also been extended to support SQL and SAP HANA. Cross Region Restore allows customers to restore their data to secondary regions (paired region) at any time, essential in the event of the unavailability of the primary region. Geo-replicated backup data can then be used to restore SQL and SAP HANA databases running on Azure VMs to the “paired region” from Azure, during planned or unplanned incidents.

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 new geographies of the public cloud.
  • The ability to register servers running SQL Server, with SQL VM RP, to automatically install the IaaS SQL agent extension. This feature is available for VMware (without agent), Hyper-V (without agent) and agent-based migrations.
  • Evaluation via CSV file import supports up to 20 disks. Previously, there was a limit of eight disks per server.

Support for Azure private links

Private Link support allows you to connect to the Azure Migrate service privately and securely via ExpressRoute or via a site-to-site VPN. Thanks to this method of connectivity, the instrumentsAzure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment andAzure Migrate: Server Migration, they can be used by connecting privately and securely. This method is recommended to use when there is an organizational requirement to access the Azure Migrate service and other Azure resources without crossing public networks or if you want to get better results in terms of bandwidth or latency.

Evaluation of Azure

To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.

Azure Management services: What's new in June 2021

In June have been announced, by Microsoft, a considerable number of news regarding Azure management services. Through these articles released monthly we want to provide an overall overview of the main news, 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, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

The new Azure Monitor agent and new Data Collection Rules features are available

Azure Monitor introduces, for some months now, a new unified agent (Azure Monitor Agent – AMA) and a new concept to make data collection more efficient (Data Collection Rules – DCR).

Among the various key features added in this new agent we find:

  • Support for Azure Arc server(Windows and Linux) 
  • Virtual Machine Scale Set support (VMSS)
  • Installation via ARM template

With regard to the Data Collection, these innovations have been made:

  • Better control in defining the scope of data collection (e.g.. ability to collect from a subset of VMs for a single workspace)
  • Single collection and sending to both Log Analytics and Azure Monitor Metrics
  • Send to multiple workspaces (multi-homing for Linux)
  • Ability to better filter Windows events
  • Better extension management

All the preview features are ready to be used even in production environments, with the exception of the use of custom Azure Monitor Metrics (still in preview).

Collection of Syslog events from the Azure Monitor agent for Linux distro (preview)

Azure Monitor introduced a new concept for configuring data collection and a new unified agent for Azure Monitor. This new agent (AMA – Azure Monitor Agent) allows you to improve some key aspects of data collection from virtual machines, as reported in the previous paragraph. There was an issue on this front where Syslog data collection was not working as expected. This problem has been solved and the latest version of the agent includes support for the collection of Syslog events from Linux machines (using version 1.10 and later), available for all supported distributions.

Azure Monitor cost changes to achieve significant savings

Microsoft recently made several changes to Azure Monitor Log Analytics costs, which allow for significant savings, if important amounts of data are merged into the workspaces. It should be noted that a new naming has been introduced with regard to capacity reservations, which are now called “commitment tiers”. These changes have been made available since 2 June 2021:

  • New commitment tiers (higher). New engagement levels are introduced for Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor Log Analytics for data ingestion: 1 TB/Day, 2 TB/Day, and 5 TB/Day.
  • Changes to the billing method for importing data that exceed the commitment tiers. Data imported beyond the commitment tiers will be billed using the actual commitment tiers rate, instead of the pay-as-you-go rate, with consequent cost reduction.
  • Simplification of commitment tiers: it is now possible to select from eight distinct commitment tiers and it is no longer necessary to manage tiers due to minor changes in the data ingestion. As part of this change, all workspaces with a commitment tier greater than 500 GB / day will be reset to the lowest available commitment tier: 500 GB / day, 1 TB / day, 2 TB / day or 5 TB / day.

Govern

Azure Policy

Changes in compliance for Resource Type Policies

Starting from 16 June 2021, the policies in which the resource type is the only evaluation criterion (e.g.. Allowed Resource Types, Disallowed Resource Types) they will have no resources “compliant” in compliance records. This means that if there are no non-compliant resources, the policy will show compliance with the 100%. If one or more non-compliant resources are present, the policy will show it 0% of compliance, with total resources equal to non-compliant resources. This change is to respond to feedback that resource type policies skew overall compliance rate data (which are calculated as compliant resources + exempt from total resources in all policies, deduplicated for unique resource IDs) due to a large number of total resources.

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toAzure Cost Management and Billing

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Azure Cost Management and Billing, 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:

  • Display of amortized costs in the cost analysis preview.
  • Cloudyn is withdrawn from the 30 June.
  • News regarding Cost Management Labs.

Secure

Azure Security Center

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center 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:

Protect

Azure Backup

TLS 1.2 enforcement per il MARS backup agent

Starting from September 1st 2020, Azure Backup will enforce the presence of the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS) version 1.2 or later. To continue using Azure Backup, you need to make sure that all resources use the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services agent (MARS) updated to use TLS 1.2 or superior.

Cross Region Restore of SQL / SAP HANA running on VM in Azure

In Azure Backup, restore between different regions of Azure (Cross-Region Restore – CRR), available for virtual machines, has also been extended to support SQL and SAP HANA. Cross Region Restore allows customers to restore their data to secondary regions (paired region) at any time, essential in the event of the unavailability of the primary region. Geo-replicated backup data can then be used to restore SQL and SAP HANA databases running on Azure VMs to the “paired region” from Azure, during planned or unplanned incidents.

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 new geographies of the public cloud.
  • The ability to register servers running SQL Server, with SQL VM RP, to automatically install the IaaS SQL agent extension. This feature is available for VMware (without agent), Hyper-V (without agent) and agent-based migrations.
  • Evaluation via CSV file import supports up to 20 disks. Previously, there was a limit of eight disks per server.

Support for Azure private links

Private Link support allows you to connect to the Azure Migrate service privately and securely via ExpressRoute or via a site-to-site VPN. Thanks to this method of connectivity, the instrumentsAzure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment andAzure Migrate: Server Migration, they can be used by connecting privately and securely. This method is recommended to use when there is an organizational requirement to access the Azure Migrate service and other Azure resources without crossing public networks or if you want to get better results in terms of bandwidth or latency.

Evaluation of Azure

To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (June2021 – Weeks: 23 and 24)

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

Confidential Computing price reduction on DCsv2 virtual machines

DCsv2-series protects the confidentiality and integrity of your data and code while it’s processed in the public cloud. Microsoft is announcing a price reduction on DCsv2-series Azure Virtual Machines by 37%. The new pricing is effective June 1st, 2021, and applies to all the regions where DCsv2-series is available.

New datacenter region in Arizona

Microsoft is launching a new sustainable datacenter region in Arizona, known as “West US 3.” For more details you can read “Expanding cloud services: Microsoft launches its sustainable datacenter region in Arizona“.

Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series are available in Australia

Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in Australia East, Austria Southeast will launch in the coming weeks to provide disaster recovery capabilities.

Storage

Azure Blob index tags

Prior to index tags, solutions that required the ability to quickly find specific objects in a blob container would need to keep a secondary catalog. Blob index tags provides a built in capability to add tags and then quickly query for or filter using this information. This provides a simpler solution without requiring a separate query system. This includes the ability to set index tags both upon upload or after upload. You can utilize these indexes as part of lifecycle management that automates deletion and movement between tiers.

Networking

New Azure private MEC solution announced

An evolution of Private Edge Zones, Azure private multi-access edge compute (MEC) expands the scope of possibilities from a single platform and service to a combination of edge compute, multi-access networking stacks, and the application services that run together at the edge. These capabilities help simplify integration complexity and securely manage services from the cloud for high-performance networking and applications.

In addition to the Azure private MEC solution, we are announcing the following Microsoft and partner services and solutions:

  • New Azure Network Function Manager (public preview) service
  • Metaswitch Fusion Core third-party services on Azure Stack Edge
  • Affirmed Private Network Service third-party service on Azure Stage Edge
  • New Azure Marketplace solutions from our partners’

Default Rule Set 2.0 for Azure Web Application Firewall (preview)

The Default Rule Set 2.0 (DRS 2.0) for Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) deployments running on Azure Front Door is in preview. This rule set is only available on the Azure Front Door Premium SKU. DRS 2.0 includes the latest changes to our rule set, including the addition of anomaly scoring. With anomaly scoring, incoming requests are assigned an anomaly score when they violate WAF rules and an action is taken only when they breach an anomaly threshold. This helps drastically reduce false positives for customer applications. Also included in DRS2.0 are rules powered by Microsoft Threat Intelligence which offer increased coverage and patches for specific vulnerabilities.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (June 2021 – Weeks: 21 and 22)

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

Storage

Azure Storage Blob inventory is now available in all public regions (preview)

Azure blob storage inventory provides you the ability to understand the total number of objects, their size, tier, and other information to gain insight into your object storage estate. Inventory can be used with Azure Synapse to calculate summaries by container. Microsoft has expanded preview to all public regions for blob inventory.

Key Rotation and Expiration Policies

Key rotation is one of the best security practices to reduce the risk of secret leakage for enterprise customers. Customers using Azure Storage account access keys can rotate their keys on demand, in the absence of key expiry dates and policies customers find it difficult to enforce and manage this key rotation automatically. The new feature will allow you to not only set key expiration duration but also add policies that can mandate anyone deploying storage endpoints to specify key rotation duration. Furthermore, you would be able to monitor key expiration and set alerts if a key is about to expire. For accounts that are nearing key expiry, you can rotate the keys using APIs, CLI, Powershell, or Azure Portal.

Networking

ExpressRoute Global Reach Pricing Reduction

Microsoft is annoucing a 50% decrease in the data transfer price for ExpressRoute Global Reach. This pricing change will go into effect as of June 1, 2021. For more information about ExpressRoute Global Reach pricing, visit the ExpressRoute Pricing webpage.

Azure Stack

Azure Stack HCI

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI

Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI simplifies the Kubernetes cluster deployment on Azure Stack HCI. It offers hybrid capabilities and consistency with Azure Kubernetes Service for ease of app portability and management. You can take advantage of familiar tools and capabilities to modernize both Linux and Windows .NET apps on-premises. Furthermore, its built-in security enables you to deploy your modern applications anywhere: cloud, on-premises, and edge.

Free Trial Now Available

The Azure Stack HCI team has extended the built-in free software trial from 30 days to 60 days giving more time for customers and partners to evaluate their virtual workloads on Azure Stack HCI in planning their purchase decision. There’s nothing you need to do to enable the trial duration, it’s been automatically extended.

Available in China

Azure Stack HCI is now available in the China cloud – making it very easy to get all the benefits of Azure Stack HCI.

New feature called Network ATC

The next update available to Azure Stack HCI subscribers will be 21H2 which is in preview right now. With this update comes a new feature called Network ATC, which simplifies the deployment and management of networking on your HCI hosts.

If you’ve deployed Azure Stack HCI previously, you know that network deployment can pose a significant challenge. You might be asking yourself:

  • How do I configure or optimize my adapter?
  • Did I configure the virtual switch, VMMQ, RDMA, etc. correctly?
  • Are all nodes in the cluster the same?
  • Are we following the best practice deployment models?
  • (And if something goes wrong) What changed!?

So, what does Network ATC actually set out to solve? Network ATC can help:

  • Reduce host networking deployment time, complexity, and errors
  • Deploy the latest Microsoft validated and supported best practices
  • Ensure configuration consistency across the cluster
  • Eliminate configuration drift

Network ATC does this through some new concepts, namely “intent-based” deployment. If you tell Network ATC how you want to use an adapter, it will translate, deploy, and manage the needed configuration across all nodes in the cluster.