Azure World Newsletter – Issue 5.04

March 6, 2024

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2024.

I missed last week’s newsletter since I was traveling, so I apologize for the delay in getting this to you. Let’s see what has been happening with Azure since we last looked.

The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

ONE.

Now, in public preview, there is a new feature called Azure Storage Actions.

As the name implies, Storage Actions allows administrators to automate data management operations in a serverless, no-code way.

This feature attaches to Azure Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage. You can perform various data management tasks against your storage accounts in minutes. You can scan “billions of” blobs across dozens of storage accounts at once, examine their properties, and determine how they should be processed. You can do all of this without having to provision any compute infrastructure.

You can reduce the overall cost of your storage accounts with these actions, enhance data protection, apply tagging, and even move objects out of archive storage if needed.

TWO.

Azure has recently introduced a new Level 7 load balancer for AKS called Application Gateway for Containers. This is an evolution of the Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC).

Application Gateway for Containers manages traffic in a balanced way to send to individual pods in a Kubernetes app. Like any load balancer, it examines the traffic inbound and determines where it needs to go.

You can set various rules to direct the traffic. So, if you need certain traffic to go to specific Kubernetes pods to process the traffic, then the Application Gateways for Containers will take care of that.

The gateway needs a private IP, a designated subnet, and a managed identity to perform its work. It’s designed explicitly for AKS, so this is a more efficient load balancer for that service than a regular Application Gateway would be.

This feature is in preview mode, so it’s worth testing if you require a service like that.

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

Here’s a summary of the highlights in the last two weeks.

NFS support is now available for App Service Linux code and container for Azure File Share
Zone Redundant Storage for Azure Disks is now available in Canada Central
AKS cluster control plane metrics in managed Prometheus, in public preview
Azure Elastic SAN is now generally available
Azure Firewall: Parallel IP Group update support is now in public preview
Customer-managed key encryption for Redis Cache Enterprise tier
Azure Blob Storage Cold Tier support on Change Feed and Object Replication
Support for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 in Azure Backup
Support for Azure VMs using Ultra disks in Azure Backup
Azure Storage Actions, in public preview
Configuration-as-code customizations in Microsoft Dev Box, in preview
Azure Application Gateway introduces support for TLS and TCP protocols, in preview
Application Gateway for Containers
AKS support for node soak duration for upgrades, in preview
Disable network policy in AKS for migration, in preview
Capacity Reservations support in AKS
Node Soak Duration for Upgrades
Cloud Services (classic) deployment model is still retiring on 31 August 2024

Be sure to check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/

COMING UP FOR ME.

I’ll keep you posted when I have news to report.

WHERE TO FIND ME.

And that’s it for issue 5.04 Thanks for reading this far. Talk to you again in two weeks.

What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.

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