Azure Announcements from Microsoft Ignite
A couple of months later than last year, it’s time for the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida. I’ll be here all week, but first thing Monday morning is when we saw the keynotes and all the announcements got released. If you keep an RSS feed of Azure articles you’ll have seen it going crazy with all the Microsoft announcement posts getting released.
It can be hard to keep up with all the many announcements, especially as this cover topics including cloud, Office 365, Windows and more, so in the rest of this article I’ve cherry picked what I think are the most important Azure related announcements, and where you can get more information about them. I’ll be diving into some of these in more detail later, but for now, let’s get to the announcements.
New Services
A lot of what you will see at Ignite are announcements of improvements and incrementally changes to existing services, but there are also some big announcements about brand new services.
Azure Arc
Azure Arc is a brand new service that allows you to extend the Azure management interface to your on-premises resources. In the initial preview you will be able to manage Windows and Linux VMs and Kubernetes clusters in your on-premises datacenters using Azure. This includes management, governance and inventory through a consistent experience in the Azure portal.
Azure Data Services
Built on top of Azure Arc this service allows you to run Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL on-premises. This includes running on virtual machines and inside Kubernetes clusters. This includes being able to take advantage of cloud services such as Advanced Threat Protection, business continuity and Azure Policy.
Azure Internet Analyzer
Internet Analyzer is a tool that you can embed in your web applications to provide you with data about the latency from end users to your service. It allows various types of testing and scenarios to help you tune your service.
Azure Peering Service
Azure Peering is a partnership with service providers to provide optimized and reliable connectivity to Microsoft Azure, along with telemetry and monitoring around performance and security.
Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse is a replacement for Azure SQL Data Warehouse with a number of new capabilities around on-demand querying of large volumes of data.
Virtual Machines
- New VM Sizes
- Da_v4 and Das_v4 - high performance featuring AMD EPYC CPUs are now GA - https://cogan.to/4d
- Ea_v4 and Eas_v4 - high performance featuring AMD EPYC CPUs are now GA - https://cogan.to/4d
- HBv2 Virtual machines coming soon
- NVv4 - with AMD MxGPU in preview
- NDv2 - with NVIDIA Tesla v100 are now GA
- Generation 2 Virtual Machines are now GA - https://cogan.to/3k
- Azure Bastion is now GA - https://cogan.to/3l
- New Virtual Machine Scale Set Features - https://cogan.to/37
- Ability to create empty Scale Sets and later add various VM sizes
- Scale in policies to determine which machines are removed
- Termination notifications
- Instance protection to prevent scale down
- Azure HPC Cache is now GA - https://cogan.to/4b
Storage
- Smaller Azure Disk sizes supporting 4, 8 and 16GB sizes in premium and standard SSD
- Applicable Premium SSD disks can now burst up to 30x provisioned performance
- Server side encryption for managed disks with customer managed key in preview
- Managed disks now offer incremental snapshots
Networking
- Azure Expressroute Satellite connections in preview - https://cogan.to/3v
- IPv6 for Azure vNets is now GA - https://cogan.to/3w
- Network Insights for Azure monitor - a single console to provide health information across a customers virtual networks - https://cogan.to/4m
Web Applications
- App Service managed certificates - free TLS certificates - https://cogan.to/3z
- Azure Functions Premium plan now GA - https://cogan.to/4h
- Azure Functions PowerShell now GA - https://cogan.to/4g
- Azure Spring Cloud - A fully managed Java Spring cloud service in preview - https://cogan.to/30
Kubernetes & Containers
- Prometheus support in Azure Monitor is now GA - https://cogan.to/3u
- Azure Security Center vulnerability assessment for Azure Container Registry - https://cogan.to/3p
- Availability Zones for AKS now GA - https://cogan.to/38
- Cluster Autoscaler for AKS now GA - https://cogan.to/3y
- Multiple Node Pools in AKS now GA - https://cogan.to/34
- Authenticated IP to lock down Kubernetes API is now GA - https://cogan.to/4a
- New diagnostic tools with a guided UI and a new CLI tool - Periscope - https://cogan.to/3x
- Hourly pricing for Openshift - https://cogan.to/32
- Azure Container Registry now supports Open Container Initiative artifacts - https://cogan.to/31
Data Platform
- Large increase in maximum memory for Azure SQL - https://cogan.to/3n
- Azure Database for Postgres SQL Hyperscale is now GA - https://cogan.to/4f
- Azure SQL Serverless is now GA - https://cogan.to/35
- Azure Data Share is now GA - https://cogan.to/33
Governance and Security
- Security Centre now supports community content - https://cogan.to/4l
- Support for custom policies in security center - https://cogan.to/3t
- Security Center “quick fix” to remediate issues on multiple resources - https://cogan.to/3i
- Advanced Data Security for Azure SQL - https://cogan.to/3s
- Vulnerability Assessment - A solution powered by Qualys included as part of the Security Centre standard SKU - https://cogan.to/3r
- Threat Protection for AKS - https://cogan.to/3q
- Workflow Automation - use logic apps to initiate playbooks automatically on a security event - https://cogan.to/3o
- Export of Security Centre data to event hub, log analytics and more - https://cogan.to/4k
- Azure Firewall Manager in preview - https://cogan.to/3m
- Azure Key Vault and ADLS now support Event Grid
