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RSS feedMarch 2021
General availability: Publishing VM Images from Shared Image Gallery to Azure Marketplace
ISVs can capture their images directly into Shared Image Gallery and select those images for publishing with an inline experience in Partner Center in just two steps.
HBv3-Series VMs now generally available in East US, South Central US, and West Europe
HBv3-series VMs for HPC now available in the East US, South Central US, and West Europe regions
Azure trusted launch for Virtual Machines now in public preview
Azure offers trusted launch as a seamless way to bolster the security of Generation 2 VMs. Designed to protect against boot kits, rootkits, and kernel-level malware, trusted launch is comprised of secure boot, virtual trusted platform module (vTPM), and boot integrity monitoring.
Automatic VM guest patching is now in public preview for Linux VMs
Automatic VM guest patching provides safe and automatic patching for virtual machines to simplify update management and maintain security compliance.
New orchestration mode for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets now in public preview
Increase the availability at scale of business-critical applications with new Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets features. Simplify workload deployment, management, and scalability with Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode, now in public preview.
Improve Azure Spot Virtual Machines runtime and simulate evictions with new features in public preview
New Azure Spot Virtual Machines capabilities – ‘try & restore’ and REST APIs to simulate VM evictions - are now in public preview.
On-demand capacity reservations in public preview
Reserve compute capacity and obtain a capacity SLA for Azure virtual machine deployments with on-demand capacity reservations.
Confidential computing nodes (DCSv2) on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is generally available
Confidential computing capability now available on AKS for your container workloads.
February 2021
The G5 and GS5 Azure VMs will no longer be hardware-isolated on 28 February 2022
Target retirement date: February 28, 2022
G5 and GS5 Azure Virtual Machines will no longer be isolated.
The GS5 Azure Virtual Machines will no longer be SAP HANA Certified on 28 February 2022
Target retirement date: February 28, 2022
Start using E64ds_v4 before 28 February 2022.
The E64i_v3 & E64is_v3 Azure VMs will not be hardware-isolated on 28 February 2022
Target retirement date: February 28, 2022
E64i_v3 & E64is_v3 Azure VMs will no longer be isolated.
Automatic Azure VM extension upgrade capabilities now in public preview
Automatic extension upgrade provides safe and automatic upgrades for extensions on Azure virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets, keeping your environments more secure and up to date.
Microsoft Azure Attestation is now generally available
Verify the identity and security posture of a platform before you interact with it.
January 2021
New Azure Cloud Services deployment model in public preview
Use Azure Cloud Services (extended support), now in public preview, to increase regional resiliency and gain access to new capabilities that the Azure Resource Manager-based deployment model provides.
The Azure Quota REST API to manage service limits (quotas) is now generally available
Use Azure REST Quota APIs to manage the service limits (quota) of Azure Virtual Machines (cores/vCPU) and Azure Machine Learning. Take advantage of this capability to query current usage and quotas for the supported resources and update these limits.
Backup for Azure Managed Disk is in limited preview
Target availability: Q1 2021
Azure Backup offers snapshot lifecycle management to Azure Managed Disk by automating periodic creation of snapshot and retain it for configured duration using Backup policy.
NCas_T4_v3-Series VMs are now generally available
These virtual machines are ideal to run ML and AI workloads utilizing Cuda, TensorFlow, Pytorch, Caffe, and other Frameworks or the graphics workloads using NVIDIA GRID technology.
December 2020
HBv2-series VMs for HPC are now available in UAE North
Azure’s most powerful and scalable HPC VMs, the HBv2-series, are now available in the UAE North region. Customers in this region can now run scale-out MPI workloads to tens of thousands of CPU cores.
Automatic VM placement and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets available on Dedicated Host
Azure can now select the dedicated host to which your VM is deployed. Additionally, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets can be deployed in conjunction with Dedicated Hosts.
Intel SGX based confidential computing VMs now available on Azure Dedicated Hosts
The new DCsv2_Type1 Dedicated Host SKUs add confidential computing capabilities to Azure Dedicated Hosts. The DCsv2-series Azure Virtual Machines can help protect the confidentiality and integrity of your data and code while it’s processed in the public cloud. Dedicated hosts will provide further isolation from other tenants, further enhancing the isolation aspect of secure applications within confidential computing.
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