Azure Weekly Updates - June 03rd, 2024

New Regions Availability

To meet new workload demands, Azure Firewall Basic, Standard, Premium and Azure Firewall Manager are now generally available in these four new regions:

1. Israel Central
2. Italy North
3. Mexico Central
4. Spain Central

With these new regions, Azure Firewall is now available in?64 regions worldwide, utilizing the Microsoft global network backbone.?

Graph Semantics in Kusto

We are thrilled to announce that the Graph Semantics extension to Kusto, the powerful database engine behind Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and more, is now generally available! Based on the valuable user feedback, we made it ready for production use.

Now that the graph semantics extension is generally available, we encourage all users to integrate this powerful tool into their data analysis workflows. Whether you're looking to enhance your understanding of complex datasets or uncover hidden patterns in your data, the graph semantics extension offers a robust framework for achieving these goals.

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

Reporting Capabilities for Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery is introducing reporting capabilities to enable your BCDR Admin get rich insights into your estate protected with Site Recovery for audit and tracking purposes. These reports are highly customizable and are available out of box on Business Continuity Center, Recovery Service Vault and Backup Center. They cover the following reporting scenarios:

• Site recovery reports are available to provide historical information on Site Recovery Jobs and, Site Recovery Replicated Items??
• Site Recovery reports are supported for Azure VM replication to Azure, Hyper-V?replication to Azure, VMWare replication to Azure – Classic & Modernized. You can find them as filterable options under Replication Scenario: Azure/ Hybrid.???

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.

Monitor effectively using Azure Monitor for Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now surfaces default alerts via Azure Monitor for critical events such as replication health turning unhealthy, failover failures, agent expiry, and so on. You can monitor these alerts via the Azure Business Continuity Center, Azure Monitor dashboard, or your Recovery Services vault and route these alerts to various notification channels of choice (Email, ITSM, Webhook, SMS).?

We recommend using built-in Azure Monitor alerts over classic alerts to leverage the following benefits of Azure Monitor:?

• Ability to configure notifications to a wide range of notification channels supported by Azure Monitor?
• Ability to select which scenarios to get notified for?
• Ability to have a consistent alerts management experience for multiple Azure services including backup, with at-scale management capabilities?

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.

Azure NetApp Files application volume group for Oracle

Application volume group (AVG) for Oracle enables you to deploy all Azure NetApp Files volumes required to install and operate Oracle databases at enterprise scale, with optimal performance and according to best practices, in a single one-step and optimized workflow. The application volume group feature is using the Azure NetApp Files ability to place all volumes in the same availability zone (as the VMs)?to achieve automated, latency-optimized deployments. Application volume group for Oracle has implemented many technical improvements that simplify, standardize and streamline the entire process of volume deployments for Oracle. All required volumes such as up to 8 data volumes, online redo log and archive redo log, backup and binary volumes are created in a single 'atomic' operation (through portal, RP, or API).?

Azure NetApp Files application volume group for Oracle will shorten database deployment time and increase overall application performance and stability, including the use of multiple storage endpoints. The application volume group feature supports a wide range of Oracle database layouts from small databases with a single volume up to multi-hundred TiB sized databases with up to 8 data volumes and with latency-optimized performance and only limited by the database VM's network capabilities.??

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.

Visual Studio Code extension for Azure Web PubSub now in preview

To minimize?context switching between development tools and improve developer productivity, Azure Web PubSub?now offers?a Visual Studio Code extension (in preview).??

Developers can use this extension to:

• View, create, delete, and restart Azure Web PubSub resources
• View, create, and delete hub settings
• View, create, delete and update event handlers
• View resource metrics
• Scale up and scale out
• Check resource health

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.

Azure API Center Extension for VS Code

The Azure API Center extension for Visual Studio Code is now generally available.?You can use this extension to build, discover, try, and consume APIs in your API center.?

1. Build APIs - Make APIs you're building discoverable to others by registering them in your API center. Shift-left API design conformance checks into Visual Studio Code with integrated linting support. Ensure that new API versions don't break API consumers with breaking change detection.?
2. Discover APIs - Browse the APIs in your API center, and view their details and documentation.?
3. Try APIs - Use Swagger UI or REST client to explore API requests and responses.

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

VM Hibernation for General Purpose VMs

VM hibernation for?general-purpose VMs is now generally available in all public regions. Hibernation is supported on both Linux and Windows operating systems. This feature enables you to hibernate your?VMs to save compute costs.?When you hibernate a VM, Azure persists the VM’s in-memory state in the OS disk and deallocates the VM. As a result, you don’t have to pay for the VM when its hibernated and you only pay for any storage and networking resources associated with the VM. When you later start the VM, the applications and processes that were previously running resume from their previous state, allowing you to quickly pick up from where you left off. You can use this feature on existing and new VMs.

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

Activity log alerts can now run in EU Data Boundary

Activity log alert rules can now be saved in one of the following EU Data Boundary regions:

• North Europe
• West Europe

This capability is avilable when creating a new activity log alert rule. Saving the rule in a European regions ensures that the alert rule metadata and its processing remains within EU Data Boundary.?In all other cases you can select the default Global region.?

Note that?action groups can also be saved in EU regions. This means combining an EU-based activity log alert rule with an EU-based action group will ensure an end-to-end experience within Europe, encompassing alert evaluation and actions.

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

Azure NetApp Files support for large volumes up to 500TiB in size

We are announcing the general availability?of?Azure NetApp Files large volumes feature, allowing the creation of new volumes between 50TiB to 500TiB in size.?Regular Azure NetApp Files volumes are limited to 100TiB in size. Large volumes enable a variety of use cases and workloads that require larger volumes with a single namespace, like High-Performance Computing (HPC)?in the EDA and O&G space.

Azure NetApp Files large volumes is now also?supported with cross-zone and cross-region replication. This capability is particularly beneficial for HPC,?AI/ML, and large file content repositories, ensuring data resilience and business continuity across various scenarios.

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

Advanced Container Networking Services for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

Microsoft’s Azure Container Networking team is excited to announce a new offering called Advanced Container Networking Services for?Azure Kubernetes Service?(AKS).?

Advanced Container Networking Services is a suite of services built on top of existing networking solutions for AKS to address complex challenges around observability, security, and compliance. The first feature in this suite, Advanced Network Observability, is now available in Public Preview.

Advanced Container Networking Services?enhances the operational capabilities of your AKS clusters and is designed to address the multifaceted and intricate needs of modern containerized applications.

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.

Azure Chaos Studio supports a new Pause Process fault for Windows virtual machines

Azure?Chaos Studio now supports a new agent-based fault action for Windows virtual machines.

Pause Process:?this?new agent-based fault allows customers to pause a Windows process running in an Azure virtual machine for a specified duration as part of a Chaos Experiment. This can help test applications inside virtual machines and their resilience to stutters, maintenance events, or resource constraints.

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

Azure Load Balancer health event logs

We are announcing the public preview of Azure Load Balancer health event logs. With health event logs, you can collect, store, and analyze information to help understand the health of your Azure Load Balancer resource. These built-in logs help you troubleshoot specific scenarios and allow you to identify and alert on availability issues affecting your load balancer. Examples of scenarios where Load Balancer health event logs can help are:

• Traffic distribution issues: When your load balancer may not be distributing traffic as intended, due to causes ranging from misconfiguration to Azure platform issues.
• Port exhaustion: When your load balancer may be experiencing outbound connectivity issues due to SNAT port exhaustion.
• No healthy backends: When your load balancer’s frontend has no healthy backend instances to distribute traffic to.

With Azure Load Balancer health event logs, you can monitor the health of your load balancer, without having to set up and manage complex metric-based alerts or build a custom data ingestion pipeline.

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.

Azure NetApp Files backup

Azure NetApp Files online snapshots are enhanced with backup of snapshots. With this backup capability, you can offload (vault) your Azure NetApp Files snapshots to a Backup Vault in a fast and cost-effective way, further protecting your data from accidental deletion.?

Backup further extends Azure NetApp Files’ built-in snapshot technology; when snapshots are vaulted to a Backup Vault only changed data blocks relative to previously vaulted snapshots are copied and stored, in an efficient format. Vaulted snapshots however are still represented in full and can be restored to a new volume individually and directly, eliminating the need for an iterative full-incremental recovery process.??

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

Azure Load Balancer now supports Admin State

We are announcing the public preview of Azure Load Balancer Administrative State (Admin State) to make managing your VMs in the backendpool of Azure Load Balancer simple and effective. With Admin State, you can override your Azure Load Balancer’s health probe behavior for each individual backend pool instance (usually VMs or VMSS instances) without making changes to your network security rules or closing ports on your VM. You can set the Admin State of the backend instance to be up or down, overriding the Load Balancer health probe. This setting will change how the Load Balancer directs new or existing connections to the backend instance. With Admin State, removing virtual machines from the backend pool for usual maintenance, patching, or simply applying fixes is easy and doesn’t require any additional overhead of closing ports or updating security rules.

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.

Azure Action Groups

Action groups has recently updated the?Email notification when using Resource Manager.

In the?previous?behavior, emails would send only to users who were assigned an RBAC role as a user assignment with an email address configured in their user object profile. Emails in this previous behavior would not have been sent to users who inherit the relevant RBAC role through a group level assignment.

In the?new?behavior, the users who inherit a role assignment from being a group member will start receiving emails. The emails will be sent to users regardless of role inheritance or direct user assignment, including to users inheriting role assignment through group-level assignment on Azure Lighthouse. This new behavior was rolled out mid May 2024.

AVAILABILITY: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information you can click here.

Analyze data using Log Analytics Simple mode

Azure Monitor Logs is excited to introduce the next leap in log experience: Simple mode.

Azure Monitor Logs offers a powerful set of capabilities for users to explore their logs and derive meaningful insights from their data estate.

Until now, Azure Monitor Logs relied on KQL for users to express their questions as queries. KQL is a powerful, easy to learn query language, however, as any query language it requires some knowledge to operate.

Simple mode experience was created to bridge this knowledge gap - allowing most popular KQL operators and actions to be utilized using a very simple,?point-and-click experience requiring no KQL knowledge at all!??

KQL Mode gives advanced users the full power of Kusto Query Language (KQL) to derive deeper insights from their logs.

Simple mode is currently an opt-in experience. To try it, select?Try the new Log Analytics. You can switch back to the classic Log Analytics experience at any time.

AVAILABILITY: IN PREVIEW

For more information you can click here.