Azure Updates

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Azure main updates for month of May

  1. Azure Virtual Network Manager’s virtual network verifier feature is now in public preview, enabling you to check if your network policies allow or disallow traffic between your Azure network resources.

  2. Azure Load Balancer now supports health event logs to help you identify and troubleshoot ongoing issues affecting your load balancer resource’s health.

  3. VM hibernation for general-purpose VMs is now generally available in all public regions. Hibernation is supported on both Linux and Windows operating systems. This feature enables you to hibernate your VMs to save compute costs.

  4. Azure Firewall and WAF are now integrated with Copilot, basically allowing you to ask natural language questions

  5. Azure is announced the public preview of Azure Compute Fleet, a new service that streamlines the provisioning and management of Azure compute capacity across different virtual machine (VM) types, availability zones, and pricing models to achieve desired scale, performance, and cost.

  6. Kubernetes version 1.30, the latest version of Kubernetes, is now in public preview for AKS. Version 1.30 introduces several enhancements focused on security and orchestration capabilities of the platform.

  7. Now you can enable disaster recovery for Azure SQL Database at a lower cost using standby replica which does not incur license costs.

  8. Use LLMs to create text embeddings within your PostgreSQL database with the public preview release of azure_local_ai. This new extension for Azure Database for PostgreSQL enables you to create text embeddings from an LLM deployed within the same VM as your Azure Database for PostgreSQL database.

  9. Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server offers a smart and easy way to tune your indexes with the automated index tuning feature. It is an automated assistant that can monitor, analyze, and propose optimizations to your indexes, based on your database workload.

  10. Now with cross-region DR (disaster recovery) you can create a replica of a vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB cluster in another region.

  11. Azure will no longer charge for the data transfer across availability zones regardless of using private or public IPs on your Azure resources.

Pro tip: Now there should not be any hesitation to use multiple availability zones within a region

  1. App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 will be retired on 31 August 2024, so you need to migrate to v3 if you are using App Service

  2. Microsoft added GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship model, it is now available on Azure AI in preview.

Pro tip: You may be wondering why we should use Azure OpenAI compared to OpenAI directly?

Answer: With Azure OpenAI, customers get the security capabilities of Microsoft Azure while running the same models as OpenAI. Azure OpenAI offers private networking, regional availability, and responsible AI content filtering.

  1. Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server now supports minor versions 16.2, 15.6, 14.11, 13.14, and 12.18.

  2. Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB RU now supports MongoDB versions 5.0 and 6.0, offering expanded coverage for MongoDB.

  3. Microsoft has announced the opening of its first hyper-scale cloud region in Mexico.

Written By Michael Agarwal

Azure

Written By