In today’s fast-paced cloud landscape, it’s crucial to stay informed about the constant advancements in cloud computing, and Azure is at the forefront of innovation. With its robust services and powerful capabilities, Azure empowers businesses to accelerate their digital transformation, achieve scalability, enhance security, and unlock new opportunities.

My mission here at Azure Centric is to provide you with a comprehensive overview of the latest Azure updates, announcements, and features so that you can make the most of your Azure investments. From new service releases and updates to insightful tips, best practices, and success stories, I strive to deliver valuable content that helps you leverage Azure to its fullest potential.

I am thrilled to bring you the latest and most significant weekly updates from the dynamic world of Microsoft Azure.

Connect Azure Stream Analytics to Azure Data Explorer using managed private endpoint - You can connect your Azure Stream Analytics job to Azure Data Explorer / Kusto clusters using managed private endpoints

Use Stream Analytics to process exported data from Application Insights - Use Stream Analytics to process exported data from Application Insights

Generally available: Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL REST APIs - Use REST APIs for all cluster operations to streamline your ongoing management experience with one or many clusters.

Public Preview: Performance troubleshooting workbooks for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server - Save time by analyzing and troubleshooting common performance issues with Performance troubleshooting workbooks.

Generally available: Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL cluster compute start and stop - Stop and start compute on all cluster nodes to optimize cost of your Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL clusters.

Azure SQL—General availability updates for mid-April 2023 - General availability enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL for mid-April 2023

Azure Machine Learning - General Availability for April - New features now available in GA include the ability to customize your compute instance and configure a compute instance to automatically stop if it is inactive.

Public preview: Node Resource Group (NRG) lockdown - You can use this feature to stop unintended changes to AKS resources and reduce support issues.

General Availability: Azure App Health Extension - Rich Health States - Application Health Extension, Rich Health States allows for more detailed health reporting on your VM applications.

General availability: Improved scaling model for Azure Functions with Target Based Scaling - Scaling improvement for Service Bus, Event Hubs, Storage Queue, and Cosmos DB is now available for the Azure Functions Consumption and Premium plans.

General availability: Azure DevOps 2023 Q1 - In Q1 we’ve delivered multiple features across our services. These included improvements on security and new features that have been prioritized based on customer feedback.

General availability: Read replicas for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server - Improve performance and scale of read-intensive workloads with read replicas for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server.

Azure SQL—Public preview updates for mid-April 2023 - Public preview enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL in mid-April 2023

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server in the Australia Central region - Introducing Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server in Australia Central region. This expansion provides a simplified provisioning experience with the openness of the PostgreSQL database community version and more.

Generally Available: New burstable SKUs for Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server - Introducing new burstable SKU’s (B4, B8, B12, B16, B20) for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, providing a cost-effective deployment solution for burstable workloads.

Public preview: Azure Container Apps offers new plan and pricing structure - You can now run your apps using serverless, consumption-based compute, and optionally run your apps on dedicated workload profiles that offer more CPU and memory if needed.

Public Preview of query performance insight for Azure Database for PostgreSQL- Flexible Server - Introducing the public preview of query performance insight for Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server, a new feature to help you improve the overall performance of your database.

Hotpatch now available for Windows Server VMs on Azure with desktop experience - Hotpatch is now available for Windows Server Azure edition VMs running the desktop experience, allowing you to patch and install updates to Windows Server virtual machines on Azure without rebooting.

Generally Available: Azure Cosmos DB serverless container with 1 TB storage - Get more flexibility and scalability with Azure Cosmos DB Serverless containers, now with expanded storage up to 1 TB and increased RU burstability.

Generally available: Static Web Apps support for Python 3.10 - You can now build Static Web Apps applications using Python 3.10

Public preview: Azure Functions V4 programming model for Node.js - Introducing a more intuitive and idiomatic experience for JavaScript and TypeScript developers writing Azure Functions apps

Public preview: Azure Container Apps supports user defined routes (UDR) and smaller subnets - You can now define UDRs to manage how outbound traffic is routed for your container app environment’s subnet

General Availability: App Configuration geo-replication - Replicate your application configuration data across supported regions to create redundancy, reduce latency, and distribute request load.

Public Preview: Database-is-alive metrics for monitoring Azure Postgres Flexible Server database availability - Monitor the database availability for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server via Database-is-alive metric.

Private Preview: Enable Trusted launch on your existing Azure Gen2 VMs - Use this preview to enable Trusted launch on your existing Gen2 VMs to improve foundational security of your Gen2 VMs.

General Availability: NGINXaaS - Azure Native ISV Service - Natively integrated software as a service (SaaS) solution for advanced traffic management and monitoring on Azure.

Public Preview: Azure Chaos Studio is now available in Sweden Central region - Azure Chaos Studio is now available in Sweden Central region.

Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus has updated our AKS add-on to support Windows nodes - Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus has updated our AKS metrics add-on to support Prometheus metric collection from the Windows nodes in your AKS clusters.

Cheers,

Marcos Nogueira
Azure MVP
azurecentric.com
Twitter: @mdnoga