Updates Archives
Monthly updates for September 2021
General availability: Azure IoT Central new and updated features—August 2021
August updates include support for multitenant applications, UI enhancements, REST API refresh, and regional deployments.
Zone redundant storage (ZRS) for Azure Disk Storage now generally available
Now generally available in West Europe, North Europe, West US 2, and France Central, Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) for Azure Disk Storage protects disks from zonal failures which may occur due to natural disasters or hardware issues.
Apache Spark 3.1 for Azure Synapse Analytics now generally available
The latest version of the open-source Apache Spark is now available in Azure Synapse Analytics Apache Spark pools.
General availability: Azure Sphere OS version 21.09 expected on Sept 22
Participate in the retail evaluation now to ensure full compatibility. The OS evaluation period provides 14 days for backward compatibility testing.
Screen Capture Protection for Azure Virtual Desktop is now generally available
This new Azure Virtual Desktop feature prevents sensitive information from being captured in screen captures and screen shares.
On-demand capacity reservations for Azure Virtual Machines now in public preview
On-demand capacity reservations, now in public preview, enable you to reserve compute capacity for one or more VM size(s) in an Azure region or Availability Zone for any length of time.
Public preview: Automatic scaling with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode
This release provides improved quality and simplified Azure customer experience, giving you the opportunity to combine the functionality of Availability Sets and Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
Azure App Service support for Availability Zones reaches general availability
This new feature provides high availability for web applications to enhance business continuity and support disaster recovery strategies.
General availability: Azure Files now supports SMB 3.1.1
Server Message Block (SMB) 3.1.1 is the most secure and highly performant version of SMB. With SMB 3.1.1 support for Azure Files, you now can require AES-256-GCM for Windows 10, version 21H1 and newer clients.
SMB Multichannel for Azure Files is generally available
Server Message Block (SMB) Multichannel enables you to improve the IO performance of your SMB client 2-4x, increasing performance and decreasing total cost of ownership.
General availability: Azure Files supports storage capacity reservations for premium, hot, and cool tiers
Storage capacity reservations for Azure Files enable you to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of storage by pre-committing to storage utilization. To achieve the lowest costs in Azure, you should consider reserving capacity for all production workloads.
Public preview of Private Link UDR Support
User Defined Routes support on Private Endpoint will make configuring custom routes to traffic destined to a Private Endpoint easier for your large workloads. Learn more about how to use this feature in select regions.
Public preview of Private Link Network Security Group Support
Network Security Group support on Private Endpoint (PE) will allow you to improve granular security requirements for traffic destined to a private endpoint. This will assist in meeting specific compliance and security requirements for managing your PE powered workloads.
General availability: Azure Route Server
Azure Route Server enables network appliances to exchange route information with Azure virtual networks dynamically.
General availability: Azure DevOps August 2021 updates
With August updates, we added support for environment variables in Linux scale set agents. Now you can change the working directory of a Linux agent to use a faster drive than the OS drive. In addition, you can set a proxy to be used by the agent.
Upgrade to the latest version of Azure AD Connect before 31 August 2022
Target retirement date: August 31, 2022
All 1.x versions of Azure AD Connect will be retired next year.
General availability: Azure API Management updates - August 2021
The availability zones feature in Azure API Management has been updated to provide better support in four new regions, in addition to other API Management updates.
General availability: Update in policy compliance for Azure Kubernetes Policies
Azure Kubernetes policies now surface error states to you, providing important information about potential errors in your environment.
Custom AKS policy support - now public preview
Azure Policy and AKS teams announce the public preview of custom policy support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. With this feature is enabled, you can create and assign custom policy definitions and constraint templates to their AKS clusters, see enhanced error state information for troubleshooting, use embedded constraint template inside policy definitions, and more.
Private preview: Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise
Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise (preview) is a new managed service for Spring Boot that is optimized for the needs of enterprise developers running applications at scale.
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