Last Updated on May 14, 2024 by Arnav Sharma
Published date: 01 August 2022
Generally available: Azure Public IPv6 offerings are free as of July 31
Effective July 31 2022, all Public IPv6 Addresses and Public IPv6 Prefixes will be free. The Public IP billing meters will also reflect this change with updated naming: Basic IPv4 Public IP, Basic IPv4 Static Public IP, and Standard IPv4 Static Public IP.
Published date: 26 July 2022
General availability: VM Applications ā Manage and deploy applications to VMs and VMSS
VM App is a service that helps streamline the management, distribution, and sharing of packages in storage. Managing packages in storage accounts is essential to you. At this point, packages can be managed in storage accounts. These storage accounts are safe and reliable, but they can be difficult and expensive to scale when managing packages at scale.
You can use VM Apps to formulate a secure cloud-based application gallery in the cloud using Azure Compute Gallery. The procedure for packaging the files is typically as simple as zipping up the application’s relevant files and uploading them to the cloud.
Package management is simplified with feature grouping and versioning classes available, which allow you to make packages accessible across multiple applications in your company, on subscriptions, and to tenants only. Shared Applications give you the freedom to make package applications accessible to a virtual machine, even if the virtual machine is restricted.
Published date: 25 July, 2022
Generally available: New KMS DNS in Azure Global Cloud
Azure for Windows provisions placed in Azure over July 2022 are activated via azkms.core.windows.net. For Cloud VMs provisioned in Azure before July 2022 and activated before July 2022, the KMS DNS domain kms.core.windows.net can be utilized to activate the software.
By March 1, 2023, kms.core.windows.net will point to 20.118.99.224 instead of 23.102.135.246. This change will have no impact to Azure Global Cloud customers who have followed trouble-shooting guides to include two new KMS IP addresses.
Published date: 19 July, 2022
Generally available: Bring your own Container Network Interface plugin
AKS now supports deploying clusters with zero pre-configured Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin. This facilitates usage of any CNI plugin, including open-source or commercial ones, which allows flexibility when maintaining the same CNI across clusters both in and out of Azure or use features from other CNI plugins to enable specific requirements you may have.
Published date: 14 July, 2022
Generally available: Azure Gateway Load Balancer
With Gateway Load Balancer, you can easily add or remove advanced network functionality without the additional management overhead. It provides bump-in-the-wire technology that ensures all traffic heading to a public endpoint is sent to an appliance before it reaches an application. Gateway Load Balancer supports flow symmetry and source IP preservation. As a result, packets traverse the same network path in both directions, enabling stateful appliances, and your traffic remains transparent to both your appliances and your application.
Gateway Load Balancer is a fully managed service that allows you to fully implement, scale, and strengthen the availability of third party network virtual machines (NVAs) in Azure. You can integrate a customized appliance, either a third-party firewall, inline DDoS appliance, deep packet inspection management, or your own custom appliance into the network path transparently all with a single click.
Published date: 19 July, 2022
Generally available: Virtual machine restore points
Customers and Azure partners who are looking to build disaster recovery plans and business continuity solutions are excellent candidates for using VM restore points. These can be saved locally on the Azure platform, and these can later be efficiently restored in the event of a disk loss, a data corruption, or a disaster recovery.