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.

New Azure Virtual Desktop features to answer our customers’ top needs - New capabilities recently released that improve storage, enhance configuration, deliver exceptional endpoint security, and more.

Public Preview : Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL Data Encryption with Customer Managed Keys - Data encryption with customer-managed keys (CMK) for Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL allows you to bring your own key for data protection at rest.

Update your IoT Edge devices on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - Ubuntu 18.04 LTS reaches the end of standard support on May 31st, 2023. To continue to receive support and security updates, we highly recommend that you update your host OS to a Tier 1 supported platform.

General availability: Microsoft Azure available from new cloud region in Poland - Microsoft has announced the opening of the newest cloud region Poland and the first in Central Europe.

Azure SQL—General availability updates for late-April 2023 - General availability enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL and Azure SQL Managed Instance in late-April 2023

Azure Advisor VM/VMSS right-sizing recommendations with custom lookback period - You can now customize the right sizing recommendations for virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets to make them more relevant and actionable for your workloads.

General Availability: Centrally Managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server - Today, we’re officially announcing the general availability for Centrally Managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server.

Public Preview: Azure API Management and Microsoft Defender for APIs integration - Take your API security coverage to the next level with Azure API Management and Microsoft Defender for APIs integration. h

Continuous Language ID in Azure Speech Service - Continual Language ID makes transcription and translation easier by identifying up to 10 languages in a single piece of audio continuously.

Public Preview: Azure Monitor Metrics Dataplane API released - The Azure Metrics Dataplane API is a new approach to Azure Monitoring that improves resource insight gathering by enabling higher querying capacity and efficiency.

Generally available: Azure Monitor alerts now suggests signals to alert on When creating an alert rule using the Azure portal, configuring the condition of the alert rule is now made simpler with popular signals and settings.

Generally Available: Operation Abort in AKS - You can now abort long running operations in AKS via the CLI.

Generally Available: Inbound IP restrictions for Azure Container Apps - You can now restrict inbound traffic by IP without using a custom solution.

Public preview: Session affinity for Azure Container Apps - You can now enable session affinity without writing code.

Generally Available: TCP support for Azure Container Apps - You can now expose arbitrary TCP ports from your container apps.

Generally available: Synthetic GraphQL - With Synthetic GraphQL, customers can create GraphQL APIs using their existing REST and SOAP APIs, allowing them to modernize their application API stack with minimal effort.

Generally available: API Management Authorizations - API Management Authorizations are now generally available, providing a simple and reliable way to unbundle and abstract authorizations from web APIs.

Public Preview: Support for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 in Azure Backup - Public preview for the support for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 in Azure Backup.

Azure Service Fabric 9.1 Third Refresh Release - This release includes new features and fixes.

Generally available: Cross-region service endpoints for Azure Storage - You can now connect Storage Accounts to Virtual Networks in all regions using global service endpoints (cross-region service endpoints).

Preview: Introducing DCesv5 and ECesv5-series Confidential VMs with Intel TDX - Today, we’re excited to announce the expansion of our Confidential VM family with the launch of the DCesv5-series and ECesv5-series in preview. Featuring 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, these VMs are backed by an all-new hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment called Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (TDX). Organizations can use these VMs to seamlessly bring confidential workloads to the cloud without any code changes to their applications.

Support has ended for Gen 4 hardware on Azure SQL Database - Gen 4 hardware on Azure SQL Database is no longer supported, effective March 31, 2023. Databases may remain on Gen 4 configurations, albeit with limitations.

Cognitive Services Custom Commands feature is being retired on April 30, 2026 - Custom Commands voice commanding solution will be retired on 30 April 2026.

App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 will be retired on 31 August 2024 - Migrate to App Service Environment v3 by 31 August 2024.

Cheers,

Marcos Nogueira
Azure MVP
azurecentric.com
Twitter: @mdnoga