AZURE ANNOUNCEMENTS NEWSLETTER

June 02, 2023 – June 08, 2023

Announcements Summary

Application Gateway

General Availability – 1 Update

Azure Active Directory

Preview Features – 1 Update

Backup

General Availability – 1 Update

Container Instances

General Availability – 1 Update

Container Registry

Preview Features – 1 Update

Data Explorer

General Availability – 2 Updates

Total Announcements: 7

Announcements Details

Azure Service: Application Gateway

General Availability

We are announcing general availability for private link configuration on Application Gateway.

Private link configuration for Application Gateway enables incoming traffic to an Azure Application Gateway frontend and can be secured to clients running in another Azure Virtual Network, Azure subscription, or Azure subscription linked to a different Azure Active Directory tenant through Azure Private Link.

In general availability, the limitation on traffic visibility has been removed for new private link configurations and the service is ready for production workload support.

Announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/generally-available-application-gateway-private-link/

Documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/application-gateway/private-link-configure?tabs=portal

Azure Service: Azure Active Directory

Public Preview

The public preview of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for Azure SMB Shares enables share-level read and write access for users, groups, and managed identities (MI) when accessing through the REST API. With Azure AD support, applications can now access Azure file shares securely, without storing or managing any credentials. Applications can leverage managed identities to securely access the customer-owned file shares. Azure Portal also now supports using Azure AD to authenticate requests to Azure Files. Users can choose Azure AD identity-based authentication method for the actions they take through portal such as browsing their file share contents.

Announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/azure-files-rest-oauth/

Documentation: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-storage-blog/public-preview-introducing-azure-ad-support-for-azure-files-smb/ba-p/3826733

Azure Service: Backup

General Availability

Azure Virtual Machine Backup enables you to create an enhanced policy to take multiple snapshots a day. This allows you to protect your virtual machines with Recovery Point Objective (RPO) as low as four hours.

With this capability, you can define the duration in which your backup jobs would trigger and align your backup schedule with the working hours when there are frequent updates. Understanding your need for higher retention in instant restore, enhanced policy is designed to offer instant restore retention with default of seven days retention and maximum of 30 days.

Announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/multiple-backups-per-day/

Documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/backup/backup-azure-vms-enhanced-policy?tabs=azure-portal

Azure Service: Container Instances

Public Preview

Azure Container Instances (ACI) Spot containers, now available in public preview, offers a significant discount on Azure Container Instances by allowing you to take advantage of unused Azure computing capacity at a significantly lower cost. With ACI Spot containers, you can now run interruptible, containerized workloads at up-to-70% discounted prices vs regular-priority containers on ACI and are billed for per-second memory and core usage like standard ACI containers.

ACI Spot containers are well suited for short-lived, containerized workloads that can tolerate interruptions on Azure. Common examples include parallelizable offline workloads such as image rendering, genomic processing, Monte Carlo simulations, burst workloads at scale and development or test workloads.

ACI Spot containers public preview is available in the following regions: West Europe, East US and West US2. We will expand the availability of these offers to other regions in the General Availability announcement.

Announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/public-preview-azure-container-instancesaci-spot-containers/

Documentation: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/public-preview-azure-container-instancesaci-spot-containers/

Azure Service: Container Registry

General Availability

We’re pleased to announce that version 1.1.0 of the Azure Container Registry (ACR) libraries for .NET, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python are now generally available. A Go library is currently available as a preview; the stable release is expected later this year.

Announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/announcing-the-new-azure-container-registry-libraries/

Documentation: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sdk/announcing-the-new-azure-container-registry-libraries/

Azure Service: Data Explorer

General Availability

We are excited to announce a new function in KQL: geo_info_from_ip_address().

This function allows you to retrieve geolocation information about IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, such as country, state, city, and coordinates. This can help you enrich your data analysis with geographic context, such as identifying the origin of network traffic, the location of users or devices, or the distribution of events across regions. The function uses GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, a leading provider of IP intelligence and online fraud prevention tools.

We hope you find this function useful and we welcome your feedback and suggestions. You can find more details and examples of the function in the KQL documentation. Happy querying!

Announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/geo-ip/

Documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/data-explorer/kusto/query/geo-info-from-ip-address-function

General Availability

The Kusto Emulator was released in September 2022.  Encapsulating the Kusto Query Engine and making it available on local compute in a Docker Container.

Until now the Emulator was available as a Windows Container. Today, we are excited to announce the availability of the Linux Kusto Emulator.

The Kusto Query Engine can now be run as a Linux Docker Container.  This makes it more portable, suiting a broader range of scenarios and also smaller which makes it substantially faster to start.

Announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/kusto-emulator-linux/

Documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/data-explorer/kusto-emulator-overview