//BUILD Azure IaaS Announcements
//Build (henceforth known as just Build) is Microsoft’s annual developer conference held last week in San Francisco. As you might expect there were a large amount of announcements, including a lot of Azure ones. Many of the Azure ones where IoT and Analytics focused but there were quite a few IaaS announcements that I am going to summarise here. I’m sure I have missed some, and I won’t go into great detail here, expect upcoming posts on some of these areas.
###Azure Storage Encryption
Transparent encryption for SQL Azure storage is now in public preview. This means you can just turn on encryption and it should just work, no need to change your applications, Azure takes care of encrypting and decrypting data. Key functionality includes:
- Requires a V2 (Azure Resource Manager) storage account
- Supports both Standard and Premium storage
- Supports all storage types (LRS, GRS, ZRS and RA-GRS)
- At the moment only supports Blob storage encryption (not tables, queues etc.)
- Can be used for VM OS and Data disks
- Only encrypts data uploaded after encryption is turned on, it will not encrypt data already present when turned on
More Details### Azure Scale Sets GA
Azure Scale Sets are now in GA. Scale sets allow you to elastically scale up and down the number of VM’s, where all VM’s are configured the same.
More Details###VM Alert Re-mediation with Run Books
Azure VM alerts configured for your VM’s can now call out to Azure Automation Run Books and trigger a script. This directly integrates with Azure Automation rather than going via Webhooks, which has been possible in the past.
More Details### KeyVault Support in ARM Templates
You can now have your Azure Resource Manger templates talk directly to Keyvault to retrieve sensitive values. I’ll cover this more in another post.
More Details### New debug functionality in ARM templates
Additional functionality has been added to ARM to help with debugging template errors or misconfigurations.
