Updates Archives
Monthly updates for November 2019
Update 19.10 for Azure Sphere now available
The Azure Sphere public preview 19.10 quality release of the OS is now available via the Retail feed. The 19.10 release also includes a new Azure Sphere SDK with some significant capability enhancements.
Azure Active Directory B2C now supports monthly active users billing
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) B2C now supports billing based on the count of unique users with authentication activity within a calendar month, known as monthly active users (MAU) billing.
Azure HDInsight—Autoscale is now generally available
Autoscale for Azure HDInsight is now generally available across all regions for Apache Spark and Hadoop workloads. This feature makes it possible to operate your big data analytics workloads in a more cost-efficient and productive way, so you can drive higher use of your HDInsight clusters and pay only for what you need.
Azure Data Lake Analytics U-SQL runtime upgrade
Azure Data Lake Analytics U-SQL runtime is upgrading from .NET Framework v4.5.2 to .NET Framework v4.7.2. This change introduces a small risk of breaking changes if you use U-SQL custom.
Azure Shared Image Gallery now available in Azure Government and Azure China
Azure Shared Image Gallery is now generally available in Azure Government and Azure China cloud regions.
Azure Shared Image Gallery now supports specialized images in preview
Azure Shared Image Gallery now supports specialized images in preview. This feature enables you to create specialized image versions using multiple snapshots (OS disk and data disks).
New deployment strategies and caching for Azure Pipelines
Updates to Azure Pipelines include new deployment strategies (canary for Kubernetes, rolling for Kubernetes and VMs), as well as the GA of Pipeline Caching.
HDInsight HBase Accelerated Writes is now generally available
Target availability: Q4 2019
The accelerated writes feature in the HDInsight HBase cluster attaches a Premium SSD managed disk to every region server (worker node). Write ahead logs are configured to be written to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) mounted on premium managed disks instead of standard Azure page blobs. Premium managed disks are SSD-based and offer excellent I/O performance with fault tolerance. Using premium managed disks for WALs allows us to separate write ahead log storage from Apache HBase data storage.
Azure HDInsight now enables you to customize Azure SQL Database for Ambari
A new Azure HDInsight capability enables you to customize and upgrade your Azure SQL Database for Apache Ambari during cluster creation.
Native Azure Active Directory authentication support in point-to-site VPN
Target availability: Q4 2019
Native Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication support for OpenVPN protocol, and Azure VPN Client for Windows are now available.
Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics—New languages added to sentiment analysis
Target availability: Q4 2019
Cognitive Services Text Analytics' sentiment analysis v3 now supports 10 languages including English, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German, and Dutch.
Azure SQL Database—Billing for managed instance backup storage is now in effect
Managed instance backup storage billing went into effect November 1, 2019. Backup storage is free of charge up to sizes equal to the size of the provisioned storage, while any additional GB is charged at a fixed amount depending on region.
Transparent data encryption with customer-managed keys for Azure SQL Database managed instance is now generally available
Transparent data encryption (TDE) with customer-managed keys for Azure SQL Database managed instance is now generally available.
Azure Database for MySQL support for intelligent performance is now available
Target availability: Q4 2019
Azure Database for MySQL support for intelligent performance, which includes query store, query performance insight, and performance recommendations, is now generally available. This set of features provides the ability for you to better understand your workloads, including the ability to visually inspect them, and to identify bottlenecks.
Azure Database for MariaDB support for intelligent performance is now available
Target availability: Q4 2019
Azure Database for MariaDB support for the intelligent performance set of features, which includes query store, query performance insight, and performance recommendations, is now generally available. This set of features provides the ability for you to better understand your workloads, including visually inspecting them, and to identify bottlenecks.
Azure Stream Analytics—Extensibility with C# custom code UDFs
Developers creating Stream Analytics modules in the cloud or on IoT Edge can now write or reuse custom C# functions and invoke them right in the query through user-defined functions.
Announcing enhancements to Azure Virtual WAN
Significant updates include the preview of hub-to-hub.
Azure HDInsight—Restrict outbound network traffic by using Firewall
Target availability: Q4 2019
The integration of Azure HDInsight and Azure Firewall, in order to restrict outbound traffic from the cluster to unauthorized destinations, is now generally available.
Azure Firewall Manager is now in preview
Azure Firewall Manager Preview is a security management service that provides central security policy and route management for cloud-based security perimeters. It works with Azure Virtual WAN Hub, a Microsoft-managed resource that lets you easily create hub and spoke architectures. When security and routing policies are associated with such a hub, it is referred to as a Secured Virtual Hub.
Python 3.7 support and remote build are now generally available
Announcing some enhancements to the development experience for Python workloads in Azure Functions, including support for Python 3.7 and remote build general availability.
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