Last Updated on May 11, 2024 by Arnav Sharma
Generally available: Azure Dedicated Host support for Ultra Disk Storage
Ultra-disks are highly performant disks on Azure that offer high throughput (maximum of 4000 MBps per disk) and high IOPS (maximum of 160,00 IOPS per disk) depending on the disk size. If you are running IaaS workloads that are data intensive and latency sensitive, such as Oracle DB, MySQL DB, other critical databases, and gaming applications, you will benefit from using ultra disks as data disks on VMs hosted on a dedicated host..
Generally available: Resource instance rules for access to Azure Storage
Resource instance rules enable secure connectivity to a storage account by restricting access to specific resources of select Azure services. In some cases, an application might depend on Azure resources that cannot be isolated through a virtual network or an IP address rule. However, you’d still like to secure and restrict storage account access to only your application’s Azure resources. You can configure storage accounts to allow access to specific resource instances of some Azure services by creating a resource instance rule.
Generally available: Built-in Azure Monitor alerts for Azure Backup
Built-in Azure Monitor Alerts for Azure Backup is now generally available. With this solution, users receive default alerts for critical scenarios related to backup security and job failures, that are integrated with Azure Monitor. You can monitor these alerts at scale via either the Azure Monitor dashboard or via Backup center and route these alerts to various notification channels of choice.
General availability: Read replica for Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server
The new read replica feature allows you to replicate your data from an instance of Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server to a read-only server. You can use this feature to replicate the source server to up to a total of 10 replicas. This functionality is now extended to support high availability (HA) enabled servers within the same region.
Generally available: Reserved capacity for Azure Backup Storage
You can save money on backup storage costs for the vault-standard tier using Azure Backup Storage reserved capacity. Azure Backup Storage reserved capacity offers you a discount on capacity for backup data stored for the vault-standard tier when you commit to a reservation for either one year or three years. A reservation provides a fixed amount of backup storage capacity for the term of the reservation.
Generally available: Resizing of peered virtual networks
Updating the address space for peered virtual networks now is now generally available. This feature allows you to update the address space or resize for a peered virtual network without removing the peering. Users often want to resize or update the IP address of their virtual networks as they grow their footprint in Azure. Users can now resize their virtual networks to meet their needs without downtime. This feature allows you to easily resize your virtual networks without the need to remove the peering in advance.
Generally available: Backup and restore updates for App Service
In Azure App Service, you can easily restore app backups, utilize automatic backups, or make on-demand custom backups. You can restore a backup by overwriting an existing app by restoring it to a new app or slot. Automatic backup and restore is generally available for basic, standard, and premium App Service plan pricing tiers. Custom backup and restore is now generally available for basic, standard, premium, and isolated app service plan pricing tiers.
General availability: Improvements to Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) custom rules
- New operators on regional WAF custom rules:Azure regional Web Application Firewall (WAF) with Application Gateway now supports creating custom rules using the operators “Any” and “GreaterThanOrEqual”
- Azure global Web Application Firewall (WAF) with Azure Front Door now supports custom geo-match filtering rules using socket addresses. Filtering by socket address allows you to restrict access to your web application by country/region using the source IP that the WAF sees.
Desired state configuration VM Extension for Linux, & Azure Automation DSC support for Linux, will be retired on 30 September 2023
On 30 September 2023, Microsoft will retire desired state configuration (DSC) extension for Linux virtual machines and support for Linux machines in Azure Automation DSC. Before that date, please migrate to Azure Automanage’s machine configuration feature and explore new DSC scenarios.