Azure News (August 2018)

This blog post is conceived so that in a few minutes you can get an overview of what has been going on in Azure last month, with a compilation of Azure announcements. My highlight this month are the news around Disaster Recovery and the Vnet endpoints for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Which ones are your favorites?

Azure Stack

• Enhance security and simplify network integration with Extension Host on Azure Stack

Management

• Expanded Azure Blueprint for FFIEC compliant workloads

IaaS

• Compute:
  • General availability of instance size flexibility for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances
  • Azure Site Recovery powers Veritas Backup Exec Instant Cloud Recovery for DR
  • Migrate Windows Server 2008 to Azure with Azure Site Recovery
  • New customizations in Azure Migrate to support your cloud migration
• Storage:
  • Managed Disks migration now available in the Azure Portal
  • Azure Block Blob Storage Backup
  • Cross-subscription disaster recovery for Azure virtual machines
• Networking:
  • New locations for Azure CDN now available
  • DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) for Linux VMs now generally available
  • Announcing VNet service endpoints general availability for MySQL and PostgreSQL

Security and IAM

• Enhance your DevSecOps practices with Azure Security Center’s newest playbooks
• Respond to threats faster with Security Center’s Confidence Score

Apps

• Linux on Azure App Service Environment now generally available
• Announcing the public preview of Windows Container Support in Azure App Service

Data

• SQL:
  • Announcing general availability of Azure SQL Database reserved capacity
  • Automatic intelligent insights to optimize performance with SQL Data Warehouse
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen2 now generally available in France and Australia
• NoSQL:
  • New Azure #CosmosDB JavaScript SDK 2.0 now in public preview
  • Azure #CosmosDB reference solution: Visualizing real-time data analysis with change feed
• HDInsight
  • How to enhance HDInsight security with service endpoints
  • Azure HDInsight Interactive Query: Ten tools to analyze big data faster
  • Azure #HDInsight Interactive Query: simplifying big data analytics architecture
  • Azure #HDInsight Apache Phoenix now supports Zeppelin
• Azure Data Factory Visual tools now supports GitHub integration
• Sharing a self-hosted Integration Runtime infrastructure with multiple Data Factories

Blockchain

• Multi-member consortium support with Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.3.0

IoT

• Intro articles:
  • Getting started with IoT: driving business action through analytics and automation
  • Getting started with IoT: what do you do with all that data?
  • IoT in Action: Building secure, sophisticated solutions
• Now Available: Azure Sphere technical documentation
• Hardening the security of Azure IoT Edge
• Installing certificates into IoT devices

ML/AI

• Real example: improve accuracy, reduce training times for existing R codebase
• Accelerating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare using Microsoft Azure blueprints
• Speech Services August 2018 update: SDK v0.6.0 and .NET Standard 2.0 support, amongst other news
• Logic Apps, Flow connectors will make Automating Video Indexer simpler than ever

Have fun!
Daniel