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.

General availability: Azure IoT Edge supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 - The latest Azure IoT Edge releases provide official packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 on AMD64 devices.

Public preview: Azure Cold Storage - Azure Cold Storage, as the most cost-effective access tier with near real-time read latency for infrequently accessed unstructured data is available for public preview.

Public Preview: Palo Alto Networks SaaS Cloud NGFW Integration with Virtual WAN - The first security software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to be integrated in Azure Virtual WAN, allowing you to protect your workloads with a highly available NGFW.

Generally Available: Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 NVMe-enabled VM sizes - The new NVMe-enabled VM sizes of the Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM offer the highest remote storage IOPS and throughput performance of any Azure VMs to date.

Generally Available: Azure Backup Server V4 - V4 is the latest upgrade for Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS). Azure Backup Server can now be installed on Windows Server 2022 with SQL Server 2022 as its database. MABS V4 brings key enhancements in the areas of workload support, performance and security.

Generally available: Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks - Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is now generally available. This capability provides instant compute to users for their BI and SQL workloads, with minimal management required.

Preview: Cloud Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) Palo Alto Networks - an Azure Native ISV Service - The first ISV next-generation firewall service natively integrated in Azure.

Generally available: Zone Redundant Storage for Azure Disks is available in Southeast Asia, Australia East and Qatar Central - Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) for Azure Disks is now available on Azure Premium SSD and Standard SSD in Southeast Asia, Australia East and Qatar Central.

Generally available: Azure Event Hubs Dedicated self-serve scalable clusters for mission critical Kafka, AMQP and HTTPs workloads - Run you mission critical Kafka, AMQP and HTTPS event streaming workloads with consitenct low latency.

Application Gateway V1 will be retired on 28 April 2026– Transition to Application Gateway V2 - Application Gateway V1 will be retired on 28 April 2026

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.

Cheers,

Marcos Nogueira
Azure MVP
azurecentric.com
Twitter: @mdnoga