September 6, 2023
Welcome to the seventeenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2023.
Hello again, my friends from around the world. I’m so happy you continue to subscribe and read this bi-weekly newsletter on Azure. I enjoy sitting down each week to research and write this, and hopefully, you will continue to find value in it. Feel free to invite your co-workers or others to subscribe if you think they would find it helpful.
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ONE.
If you’ve created virtual machines recently using the Azure Portal, you might have noticed a new change: trusted machines are now the default setting.
You can still choose the old security setting using a dropdown on the Portal. And other ways of launching VMs remain unchanged for now.
A trusted launch adds security features to launching virtual machines using verified and signed bootloaders, OS kernels, and a boot policy. This protects against boot kits, rootkits, and kernel-level malware.
The four security features enabled by Trusted Launch are:
- Secure Boot
- Virtual TPM (vTPM)
- Measured Boot
- Boot integrity monitoring
Modern physical machines (such as your laptop) have a security processor called a TPM. This provides cryptographic storage that can be used to confirm that the operating system and firmware on your device are what they’re supposed to be. In fact, with Windows 11, Microsoft requires TPM 2.0 to be available on the machine hardware, and many machines (even newer ones) don’t support that. This is why many machines, even powerful ones, can’t be updated to Windows 11.
With virtual machines, there is a virtual TPM (vTPM). This allows customers to protect keys, certificates, and secrets in the virtual machine.
You’ll need a trusted virtual machine to launch a Windows 11 VM.
TWO.
Azure App Services have a WebJobs feature that allows you to run a background job such as an executable or a script. These background tasks operate independently of the web app itself, and there is no extra cost to run a WebJob.
Now, Azure Container Apps also support WebJobs.
Jobs enable you to run serverless containers that perform background tasks that run to completion. These jobs can either be started manually, scheduled on a timer or can respond to some event.
You can use these background jobs for many different purposes. You can schedule a job to run every night at a specific time to perform an end-of-day task that your app might require.
You can also respond to an event, such as a new message arriving in a queue. That can trigger a job to run. In this way, it can be like Azure Functions.
Jobs can run multiple executions concurrently. So if there are multiple messages that arrive in queue in a short period of time, all of them can be processed at the same time.
Check the blog post for more information.
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
A few updates for you this week.
The following updates to the Azure platform were announced in the last two weeks:
- Cross Subscription Restore for Azure Virtual Machines
- Rate-limit rules for Application Gateway Web Application Firewall, in preview
- Quick create Azure Front Door endpoints for Azure Storage accounts
- Improve VM resiliency with Azure Advisor’s Availability Zone recommendation
- Azure Portal experience for Azure Database Migration Service, in preview
- Auto-upgrade scheduled maintenance for AKS, in GA
- Azure Container Apps dedicated plan, in GA
- Azure Container Apps supports additional TCP ports
- Azure Container Apps jobs
- Azure Container Apps supports environment level mTLS encryption, in preview
- Azure Functions .NET 8 support in Linux plans, in preview
- Trusted launch as default for VMs deployed through the Azure portal
- Azure Firewall: Auto-Learn SNAT routes feature is now in public preview, in preview
- Azure Firewall: Explicit Proxy is now in public preview
- Azure Firewall Single-Click Upgrade and Downgrade is now in general availability
- Azure Monitor VM Insights using Azure Monitor Agent, in GA
Be sure and check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
COMING UP FOR ME.
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WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 4.18 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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