Azure Weekly Updates - June 6th, 2022

General availability: New portal experience for Microsoft Artifact Registry

Microsoft Artifact Registry, also known as Microsoft Container Registry (MCR), is the primary registry for all Microsoft published container images. It offers a reliable and trustworthy delivery of container images with a syndicated catalog.

Today, we are announcing a new Microsoft Artifact Registry website. With this update, you can now browse for Microsoft artifacts and container images on the Microsoft Artifact Registry website. Through our continued partnership with Docker, users can also search for Microsoft artifacts on Docker Hub.

Availability: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information click here.

General availability: Azure Bastion IP based connection

Azure Bastion now supports connectivity to Azure virtual machines or on-premises resources via specified IP address. When IP based connection feature is enabled, Azure Bastion can be used to RDP/SSH into an on-premises resource over ExpressRoute and Site-to-Site VPN.

Availability: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information click here.

Public preview: Manage Azure Web Application Firewall policies in Azure Firewall Manager

Azure Firewall Manager now supports Azure Web Application Firewall (Azure WAF) policies for application delivery platforms, Azure Front Door, and Azure Application Gateway.

Key benefits:

Central deployment and configuration

Deploy and configure multiple WAF policies

Secure Azure Front Door Application Gateway with WAF policies at scale

Upgrade from legacy WAF configuration to WAF policies on Application Gateway

View all application delivery platforms in a single place

Gain visibility of all deployments across regions and subscriptions

Manage overall network security posture

Adopt Zero-Trust principles by managing WAF, DDoS, and Azure Firewalls all in a central platform

Availability: IN PREVIEW

For more information click here.

General availability: Conversational language understanding

Language Understanding (LUIS) has been one of our fastest growing Cognitive Services with customers deploying custom language models to production for various scenarios from command-and-control IoT devices and chat bots, to contact center agent assist scenarios. The next phase in the evolution of LUIS is conversational language understanding (CLU), which we are announcing today as a generally available feature of the new Language Service. CLU includes multilingual transformer-based models as the underlying model architecture and results in significant accuracy improvements over LUIS. Also new, as part of CLU, is the ability to create orchestration projects which allow you to configure a project to route to multiple customizable language services. This includes question answering knowledge bases, other CLU projects, and even classic LUIS applications.

Availability: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information click here.

Generally available: Azure NC A100 v4 virtual machines for AI

Azure NC A100 v4 series virtual machines (VMs) are now generally available in US East 2, US East, Southeast Asia, and West Europe. These VMs, powered by NVIDIA A100 80GB Tensor Core PCIe GPUs and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC? Milan processors, improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of a variety of GPU performance-bound real world AI training and inferencing workloads.

Availability: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information click here.

General availability: Storage optimized Azure VMs deliver higher performance for data analytics.

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of new storage optimized Azure Virtual Machines. The new Lasv3 and Lsv3 VM series have been engineered to run workloads that require high throughput and high IOPS, including big data applications, SQL and NoSQL databases, distributed file systems, data analytics engines, and more.

The new VM series provide faster processors, increased networking, and higher remote disk throughput compared to prior generation storage optimized VMs. More specifically:

The Lsv3 VM series is based on the 3rd Generation Intel? Xeon? Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processor in a hyper-threaded configuration.

The Lasv3 VM series features the 3rd Generation AMD EPYC? 7763v (Milan) processor in a multithreaded configuration.

Both Lsv3 and Lasv3 VMs provide high throughput, low latency, directly mapped local NVMe storage and one 1.92TB NVMe SSD per 8 vCPUs, with up to 19.2TB available on the largest instance.

Availability: NOW AVAILABLE

For more information click here.

Public preview: Azure Percept DK May (2205) software update

New OS/firmware USB cable update image are in public preview. Review the update strategy guidance. Updates are highly recommended in order to keep your device up to date with latest fixes and features. Learn more in the release notes.

Availability: IN PREVIEW

For more information click here.