Storage > Storage Accounts
- Encryption scopes in Azure Storage now generally available
Compute>Virtual Machines and Virtual machine scale sets
- Virtual machine scale sets with flexible orchestration mode are now available in public preview in the Azure portal
General > Management + Governance
- New Management Group UX: Introducing a tree hierarchy, get started page, security tab and more
Intune
- Updates to Microsoft Intune
Let’s look at each of these updates in greater detail.
Storage > Storage Accounts
Encryption scopes in Azure Storage now generally available
Encryption scopes introduce the option to provision multiple encryption keys in a storage account for blobs. Previously, customers using a single storage account for multi-tenancy scenarios were limited to using a single account-scoped encryption key for all the data in the account. With encryption scopes, customers now can provision multiple encryption keys and choose to apply the encryption scope either at the container level (as the default scope for blobs in that container) or at the blob level. Encryption scopes in Azure Storage now generally available.
The key that protects an encryption scope may be either a Microsoft-managed key or a customer-managed key in Azure Key Vault. Customers can also choose to enable automatic rotation of a customer-managed key that protects an encryption scope. When customers generate a new version of the key in their Key Vault, Azure Storage will automatically update the version of the key that is protecting the encryption scope, within a day.
Please refer to our documentation on encryption scopes for more details on the feature.
To create an encryption scope in the Azure portal
- Sign into Azure portal
- Click on ‘More Services’
- Click on ‘Storage Accounts’
- Click on ‘Encryption’ in the table of contents
- Navigate to the ‘Encryption scopes’ tab
- Click ‘Add’ to create an encryption scope and configure as desired
Compute>Virtual Machines and Virtual machine scale sets
Virtual machine scale sets with flexible orchestration mode are now available in public preview in the Azure portal
Virtual machine scale sets with flexible orchestration mode helps customers simplify the deployment, management, and scalability of their applications. This new capability provides full control of the individual VMs within a scale set, like Availability Sets, while increasing high availability for large deployments (thousands of VMs). However, scale sets will now be able to provide several additional features compared to Availability Sets, such as higher levels of reliability and performance, ability to deploy VMs in conjunction with load balancers, support for Availability Zones etc. Virtual machine scale sets with flexible orchestration mode are now available for public preview in Azure portal.
Demo steps to enable flexible orchestration mode preview:
To be able to use flexible orchestration mode you must register your subscription for preview of this feature. Follow the documentation to register your subscription.
Demo steps to a Create VMSS UX:
- Click ‘Create a resource’
- Search for ‘Virtual machine’, then select one of the options for a Virtual Machine
- Click ‘Create’
- In ‘Create a virtual machine scale set’ Basics tab select Orchestration mode to ‘Flexible (preview)’
- Follow instructions on the page to configure the rest of the settings. See documentation to learn more.
Demo steps to Create VM UX:
- Click ‘Create a resource’
- Search for ‘Virtual machine’, then select one of the options for a Virtual Machine
- In ‘Create a virtual machine’ Basics tab select ‘Availability’ options to ‘Virtual machine scale set (preview)’
- Select an existing Virtual machine scale set or create new one.
- Follow instructions on the page to configure the rest of the settings. See documentation to learn more.
General > Management + Governance
New Management Group UX: Introducing a tree hierarchy, get started page, security tab and more
The new management groups Azure portal experience provides a visual hierarchy of management groups to organize your subscriptions and resources for unified policy, security, access control and more. Traverse through the tree structure and expand or collapse nodes of management groups to build or navigate through your structure. You can also now click on a single management group to add subscriptions and apply governance conditions.
Our new experience includes the following changes:
- A new 'Get Started' page for first time users with links to documentation and examples of tree structures for planning
On the Management groups homepage, users can view and manage subscriptions in three ways:
- Click on the ‘Subscriptions’ tab on the Management groups homepage which shows all subscriptions at Root level
- Click on a single management group, navigate to the ‘Subscriptions’ tab
- NEW: Click directly on a display name to drill down to the details of single management group view
- Note: We removed the ‘details’ button
- Click on a subscription count via the tree view columns (Child subscriptions and Total subscriptions)
- Added aggregated counts of subscriptions to understand hierarchy faster
- Note: We removed the Role column
- Management groups where a user does not have owner/contributor access are now explicit through disabled links
- However, if a user has access to subscriptions within a disabled management group, they can still view these subscriptions
- NEW: More information provided in Essentials of a single management group (details view)
- Added Path
- Added Subscription count
- Added a clickable parent group for faster upward traversal of structure
- In the single management group view, we added a new section called ‘Governance’. Our current offerings include:
- Security
- Policy
- Deployments
- We added the ability to select subscriptions directly contained in a management group. You can also view all subscriptions included in its child groups.
- You can select a scope by checking/unchecking the ‘Only show direct children’ checkbox
- NEW: Security Center menu item to view secure score and recommendations for single management group
INTUNE
Updates to Microsoft Intune
The Microsoft Intune team has been hard at work on updates as well. You can find the full list of updates to Intune on the What's new in Microsoft Intune page, including changes that affect your experience using Intune.
Azure portal “how to” video series
Have you checked out our Azure portal “how to” video series yet? The videos highlight specific aspects of the portal so you can be more efficient and productive while deploying your cloud workloads from the portal. Check out our most recently published videos:
- How to get a visualization view of your resources
- How to manage applications in Azure Kubernetes Service
- How to get started in Azure using the Azure Quickstart Center
Next steps
The Azure portal has a large team of engineers that wants to hear from you, so please keep providing us your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter @AzurePortal.
Sign in to the Azure portal now and see for yourself everything that’s new. Download the Azure mobile app to stay connected to your Azure resources anytime, anywhere. See you next month!