Azure World Newsletter – Issue 5.02

January 31, 2024

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

Time sure flies. I can’t believe it’s already been two weeks since the last newsletter. Hopefully, you had a good January!

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.

As you may know, Microsoft encrypts the traffic between its datacenters. This is designed for situations when traffic has to travel across a boundary not entirely controlled by Microsoft. For instance, if Microsoft has to use a third-party to provide inter-connection services between their facilities.

They are now introducing a new feature where you (the customer!) can optionally encrypt the data sent between two virtual machines (or virtual machine scale sets) within the same virtual network, or peered between regional or global virtual networks.

This is an additional enhancement to other encryption options available in Azure.

This feature is currently generally available in only three regions of the world: UK South, Swiss North, and US Central. It’s in public preview in a few other regions.

You’ll need to be using a VM that is one of the standard general purpose or memory optimized sets, such as the D-series, D-series V5, E-series, E-series V5, LSv3, or M-series.

You’ll also need to have accelerated networking enabled on the network interface.

With virtual network encryption enabled, traffic is encrypted between private IP and private IP of virtual machines on that network. You’ll need to reboot (stop/start) the VM in order to enable this.

TWO.

There are a couple of interesting new features in API Management, in Public Preview.

The first is a feature called circuit breaker. Just like a real life fusebox in a house protects your electric appliances and devices from being fried by too much power coming into the house, this feature of API Management can give your backend API time to recover from too many requests.

The circuit breaker property enables protection of your backend APIs by detecting an increase in errors being returned and implementing a temporary stop to incoming requests.

Instead of allowing your API to take minutes to respond to incoming requests, or return random unrelated error codes, the circuit breaker will detect when your service has become unreliable and return “502 service unavailable” codes to clients, allowing them to more appropriately respond to the backend API not functioning as expected.

Another interesting new feature of API Management is having a load balancer feature right within APIM.

Of course, you could put your APIs behind a load balancer or application gateway, and make that device the backend to your API Management frontend, but having a load balancer tool built in to APIM will make things easier and more intuitive.

And you can stack those features, such that the load balancer sends traffic to one of multiple backends, and those backends can have circuit breakers which distributes the next traffic to the other backends that are not having problems.

And
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/backends?tabs=bicep#circuit-breaker-preview

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

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

Azure Virtual Network Encryption, now in GA
Cosmos DB Partition merge now supports shared throughput databases, in Preview
Upgrade existing Azure Gen1 VMs to Gen2-Trusted launch, in Private Preview
Support for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 in Azure Site Recovery, in Private Preview
Load Balancer in Azure API Management, in Preview
Circuit Breaker in Azure API Management, in Preview
Azure Advisor integration with Azure Monitor Log Analytics Workspace
Automatic Image Creation using Azure VM Image Builder, now in GA
ExpressRoute guided portal experience for multi-site resiliency, in Preview

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

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