Azure updates

Microsoft plans to establish new cloud datacenter region in Qatar

Microsoft recently announced plans to establish a new cloud datacenter region in Qatar to deliver its intelligent, trusted cloud services and expand the Microsoft global cloud infrastructure to 55 cloud regions in 20 countries.

Azure Migrate—Agentless dependency analysis is now available in preview

Azure Migrate now supports agentless dependency analysis in a limited preview.

Azure Lighthouse receives 2019 CRN Tech Innovator Award

Azure Lighthouse has been recognized as the Managed Service Partner (MSP) Technology category winner of the 2019 CRN Tech Innovator Award.

• Azure Lighthouse

New Azure PowerShell module is available in preview

The new PowerShell module for Azure provides updates to all Azure services and comes with a preview module for Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Functions.

• Cloud Shell

Azure Red Hat OpenShift region expansion

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is now generally available in Brazil South, Central India, Japan East, Korea Central, North Central US and South Africa North.

• Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Azure Private Link support in AKS now in preview

Use Azure Private Link support in AKS to Interact with the Kubernetes API server as a private endpoint in your virtual network, ensuring that all Kubernetes management operations remain completely isolated.

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Azure Private Link
• Virtual Network

Azure Service Fabric 7.0 is now available

The new Azure Service Fabric release introduces several new features as well as stability and performance improvements.

• Service Fabric

Proximity placement groups are now available

Proximity placement groups—an Azure Virtual Machine logical grouping capability to decrease inter-VM network latency—is now available.

• Virtual Machines

Azure Database for MySQL support for MySQL 8.0 is now available

Azure Database for MySQL now provides general availability support for the latest major version of MySQL, version 8.0.

• Azure Database for MySQL

Azure Functions 3.0 go-live release is now available

The go-live release for Azure Functions 3.0 is now available, so it’s now possible to build and deploy 3.0 functions in production. Functions 3.0 brings new capabilities including the ability to target .NET Core 3.1 and Node 12.

• Azure Functions

Web Application Firewall—New bot protection rule now in preview

A new bot protection ruleset (Microsoft_BotManagerRuleSet_1.0) is now in preview for Azure Web Application Firewall with Azure Front Door service.

Azure Sphere update 19.11 is now available via retail feed

The Azure Sphere preview, OS version 19.11, is now available via the retail feed. This release includes a quality release of the OS along with two new features for application development—an SDK for Linux and a Visual Studio Code extension.

• Azure Sphere

Use GitHub Actions to trigger a run in Azure Pipelines

GitHub Actions for Azure Pipelines is now available in the sprint 161 update of Azure DevOps. Use GitHub Actions to trigger an Azure Pipelines run directly from your GitHub Actions workflow.

• Azure DevOps

Custom Translator—November 2019 improvements and language models update

Target availability: Q4 2019

Here are the updates on Microsoft Custom Translator bug fixes, improvements, and new/refreshed models for November 2019.

Azure API Management Consumption tier is now available in 13 new regions

Azure API Management Consumption tier is now available in 13 more regions (19 in total).

• API Management

HC-Series High Performance Computing VMs now available in South Central US

HC-Series VMs are now available in South Central US

• Virtual Machines

Azure Active Directory B2C is deprecating login.microsoftonline.com

Target availability: Q4 2019

On December 4th, 2020, the login.microsoftonline.com endpoint will be deprecated for accessing B2C tenants. Existing tenants will need to move onto B2Clogin.com before that date, and all functionality will remain the same on the B2Clogin.com endpoint.

• Azure Active Directory B2C

Easily monitor backup storage costs for Azure SQL databases and elastic pools

Easily monitor backup storage costs for your single databases and elastic pools directly from the Azure portal.

• Azure SQL Database

Azure Spot VMs now in Preview

Buy unused compute capacity at deep discounts and run interruptible workloads at scale with Azure Spot VMs now in Preview.

• Virtual Machines
• Virtual Machine Scale Sets