This newsletter is conceived so that in a few minutes you can get an overview of what has been going on in Azure last month, here in this blog for a web-based repository. Please go to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/topics/announcements/ for an updated list of Azure anouncements.
Azure generic
- Azure Availability Zones now available for the most comprehensive resiliency strategy
- New Microsoft Azure regions available for Australia and New Zealand
- Microsoft releases automation for HIPAA/HITRUST compliance
Management
- Introducing a new way to purchase Azure monitoring services
- Azure Monitor–General availability of multi-dimensional metrics APIs
- The next generation of Azure Alerts has arrived
- Announcing Azure Service Health general availability – configure your alerts today
- Support for tags in cost management APIs is now available
- Announcing Terraform availability in the Azure Marketplace
- Update management, inventory, and change tracking in Azure Automation now generally available
- Faster Metric Alerts for Logs now in limited public preview
IaaS
- Compute
- Storage
- Soft delete for Azure Storage Blobs now in public preview
- Announcing the general availability of Azure Files share snapshot
- Project Denali to define flexible SSDs for cloud-scale applications
- Announcing backup and restore performance improvements and support for large disk backup
- Announcing Storage Service Encryption with customer managed keys general availability
- Networking
- Application Security Groups now generally available in all Azure regions
- The new Azure Load Balancer – 10x scale increase (standard SKU)
- Azure DNS Private Zones now available in public preview
- SONiC, the network innovation powerhouse behind Azure
- Visibility into network activity with Traffic Analytics – now in public preview
Containers
Security and IAM
- Azure Security Center and discovery of partner solutions
- 7 month retirement notice: Access Control Service
- Heuristic DNS detections in Azure Security Center
- Azure’s layered approach to physical security
- Just-in-Time VM Access is generally available
Apps
- Create Service Fabric Clusters from Visual Studio now available
- Improved multi-member Blockchain networks now available on Azure
- Serverless computing recipes for your cloud applications
- Build Spring Boot 2.0 apps with Azure Starters and new VSCode extensions
- Public preview of Java on App Service, built-in support for Tomcat and OpenJDK
- New app usage monitoring capabilities in Application Insights
Data
- SQL
- Migrate your databases to a fully managed service with Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
- Preview: SQL Database Transparent Data Encryption with Azure Key Vault configuration checklist
- A flexible new way to purchase Azure SQL Database (vCores)
- Improvements to SQL Elastic Pool configuration experience
- Columnstore support in Standard tier Azure SQL Databases
- Azure SQL Database offers preview of zone redundant Premium databases and elastic pools
- Introducing SQL Information Protection for Azure SQL Database and on-premises SQL Server!
- SQL Database: Long-term backup retention preview includes major updates
- Modernize index maintenance with Resumable Online Index Rebuild
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse now generally available in all Azure regions worldwide
- Unlock your data’s potential with Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Databricks
- MySQL and PostgreSQL
- Azure Redis Cache feature updates
- Accelerate Data Warehouse Modernization to Azure with Informatica’s AI-Driven Platform
- Ingest, prepare, and transform using Azure Databricks and Data Factory
- Implementation patterns for big data and data warehouse on Azure
- Azure Event Hubs integration with Apache Spark now generally available
- Azure Data Lake launches in the West Europe region
- Azure Data Lake tools for VS Code now supports job view and job monitoring
IoT
- Azure IoT Hub is driving down the cost of IoT (basic tier)
- How to get support for Azure IoT SDK
- A digital transformation Journey featuring Contoso Manufacturing and Azure IoT
AI
- BigDL Spark deep learning library VM now available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace
- Using artificial intelligence to analyze roads
- Text Recognition for Video in Microsoft Video Indexer
- New machine-assisted text classification on Content Moderator now in public preview
- Microsoft and Esri launch Geospatial AI on Azure
Cloudtrooper 