Week of June 27, 2024: Azure Updates
Public Preview: Continuous Performance Diagnostics for Windows VMs to enhance VM troubleshooting
Status: In Preview
Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution for collecting, analyzing and responding to monitoring data, and maximizing the availability and performance of your applications and services. By leveraging existing on-demand Performance Diagnostics for an Azure VM, Azure Monitor enables you to get actionable insights, recommendations, and diagnostics data to address performance issues. The insights help identify the root cause of these issues.
We are excited to announce Continuous Performance Diagnostics. This new feature enhances the existing on-demand Performance Diagnostics for an Azure VM, offering continuous, actionable insights into high resource usage. Data is collected every 5 seconds and updates are uploaded every 5 minutes to your preferred storage account, whose retention policies you can customize according to your needs. This proactive approach to performance management empowers you to promptly diagnose performance issues as they arise due to high resource usage in your Azure VM, mitigating downtime and maximizing efficiency. The feature can be disabled at any time.
Now available in Public Preview for Windows VMs, Continuous Performance Diagnostics represents a significant advancement in Azure VM performance troubleshooting and management.
By delivering actionable insights, recommendations, and diagnostics data, Azure Monitor equips you with the tools necessary to optimize resource utilization, streamline operations, and ultimately drive greater business success in the dynamic digital landscape.
For more information, please visit the documentation.
Products:
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Public Preview: ED25519 SSH key support for Linux virtual machines
Status: In Preview
With Ed25519 SSH key support for Linux virtual machines (VMs), customers get better security and performance with a smaller key size. Previously, customers only had the option of using RSA encryption for SSH connections to their Linux VMs on Azure. Now customers can choose between RSA and ED25519 based SSH keys.
Azure now allows the creation of ED25519 SSH key pairs directly within the Azure Portal for a simplified key management process. Additionally, Azure CLI and PowerShell support this feature. While RSA remains the default key type, users can also apply ED25519 SSH keys to their Linux VMs, enhancing security and deployment efficiency on Azure.
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Public Preview: JavaScript (JS) challenge on Azure WAF integrated with Azure Application Gateway
Status: In Preview
Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) integrated with Azure Application Gateway now supports JavaScript (JS) challenge. Azure WAF JS challenge is available as a new mitigation action as part of the Bot Manager rule set and custom rules.
The JavaScript challenge is an invisible web challenge used to distinguish between legitimate users and bots. Malicious bots fail the challenge, which protects web applications. In addition, the JavaScript challenge is beneficial as it reduces friction for legitimate users since it does not require human intervention.
For more information on what’s included in this release, visit Azure WAF JS Challenge.
Products:
Web Application Firewall
Application Gateway
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Generally Available: Azure Machine Learning – June 2024 announcement
Status: Now Available
Secure AI deployment with Microsoft Entra ID and managed online endpoint Microsoft: Entra ID and Azure Machine Learning Managed Online Endpoints provide a secure and efficient way to deploy and consume AI/ML models.
Guided experience for submitting training jobs: This feature will improve the getting started experience, provide consistency, and enable settings that were not previously supported in the UI. It also establishes an infrastructure that will reduce repetitive overhead when making updates to the submission experiences in the future, allowing us to move more quickly.
Create and manage prompt flow compute sessions: The Prompt Flow offers an interactive authoring experience for developing LLM applications, while the compute Session provides a managed computing environment that can reduce costs and enhance the authoring process.
Learn more:
Secure AI deployment with Microsoft Entra ID and managed online endpoint
Guided experience for submitting training jobs
Create and manage prompt flow compute sessions
Products:
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Public Preview: Azure Machine Learning – June 2024 announcement
Status: In Preview
Azure AI Model Inference API: Foundational models, such as language models, have indeed made remarkable strides in recent years. These advancements have revolutionized various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision, and they have enabled applications like chatbots, virtual assistants, and language translation services.
While foundational models excel in specific domains, they lack a uniform set of capabilities. Some models are better at specific task and even across the same task, some models may approach the problem in one way while others in another. Developers can benefit from this diversity by using the right model for the right job.
Learn more:
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Retirement: Onco-Phenotype model within Azure AI Health Insights
Status: Retirement
The Onco-Phenotype model is being retired July 31, 2024, please note that all other models within Azure AI Health Insights will remain available. The container image for Onco-Phenotype will also be removed from the Microsoft Artifact Registry. If you’ve downloaded the image and have it deployed in your own hosting environment, the Onco-phenotype model will cease to function.
If you have Azure AI Health Insights deployed via the Azure Portal, it will continue to work as usual, but the Onco-Phenotype endpoint will no longer be available. As per the standard operating procedure for the Onco-Phenotype model, API results are available for 24 hours from the time the request was created, after which the results are purged. We will honor this commitment up until the model is retired.
We understand that you may have questions regarding this retirement. Please reach out to our Customer Service and Support (CSS) team for assistance. If you don’t currently have CSS support, you can purchase support here: Azure Support Plans Comparison | Microsoft Azure.
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Private Preview: Azure Backup for Elastic SAN
Status: In Preview
Azure Elastic SAN is a cloud-native service that offers a scalable, cost-effective, high-performance, and comprehensive storage solution for a range of compute options. Azure Backup now supports crash-consistent backup and restore of Azure Elastic SAN Volumes to guard against data loss.
Using this feature, you can:
Take a crash-consistent backup of your Elastic SAN Volume to an independent, ZRS resilient Managed Disk Incremental Snapshot.
Perform backup orchestration & utilize management capabilities of Azure Backup along with the single pane of glass view of Backup Centre.
Fill out this form to sign-up for private preview.
Products:
Azure Backup
Azure Elastic SAN
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Public Preview: Azure cross-subscription Load Balancer
Status: In Preview
Today, we are announcing the public preview of Azure cross-subscription Load Balancer. Cross-subscription load balancing enables the load balancers components to be located in different subscriptions. For example, the frontend IP address or the backend instances could be located in a different subscription from the one that the load balancer belongs to.
Cross-subscription load balancing is available in all Azure public regions, China cloud regions, and Government cloud regions.
Learn more about cross-subscription load balancer via our public documentation or our recent blog.
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Public Preview: ExpressRoute resiliency enhancements
Status: In Preview
ExpressRoute provides private connectivity between on-premises networks and Azure, ensuring low latency and high throughput. Customers can create an ExpressRoute circuit at a peering location through redundant Microsoft Enterprise Edge devices. For high availability and disaster recovery, setting up ExpressRoute circuits in multiple peering locations is highly recommended.
Resiliency architectures: There are three resiliency architectures: maximum, high, and standard. Maximum resiliency eliminates single points of failure and is ideal for mission-critical workloads. High resiliency, also known as ExpressRoute Metro, offers resilience within the same metropolitan area. Standard resiliency provides built-in redundancy but lacks site resiliency, making it less suitable for mission-critical workloads. Microsoft has developed a guided portal experience to make it easy for you to configure high and maximum resiliency architectures.
Zonal resiliency: Availability zones protect applications and data from data center failures and offer higher availability for mission-critical services on Azure. Existing non-zone redundant ExpressRoute gateways can now migrate to availability zone-enabled gateways.
Resiliency validation: This upcoming feature will allow customers to test site-failover during maintenance or interruptions, ensuring connectivity and validating failover success.
Resiliency insights: This upcoming feature will give customers visibility into the resilience of their deployments. Customers can monitor their circuit and gateway deployments for actionable insights on resiliency. A resiliency index is generated based on the setup, with the highest score awarded to deployments that have undergone recent testing and validation.
SLA Updates: The SLA model for ExpressRoute will be updated to align with differentiated levels of network availability, effective from Oct 1, 2024. Revised SLA levels include 99% for a single-site circuit, 99.9% for a Metro multi-site circuit, and 99.95% for multi-homed maximum resiliency. Details on the updated ExpressRoute SLA will be published on the official website here.
Products:
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Public Preview: Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic) zero-downtime migration to Azure Front Door
Status: In Preview
We are announcing the public preview of the zero-downtime migration from Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic) to Azure Front Door.
Azure Front Door is a modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) and global load balancer service that delivers high performance, scalability, and secure user experiences for your content, websites, API and applications. Compared with Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic), it has enhancements in security with Web Application Firewall and Bot protection, secures the origin with Private Link, supports more flexible routing logic via rules engine server variables, eliminates subdomain takeover with Deterministic Name Library integration, offers improved log & metrics and built-in report, and many more to come.
The migration capability enables you to perform a zero-downtime migration from Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic) to Azure Front Door Standard or Premium in just three simple steps or five simple steps if your Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic) profile has custom domains with your own certificates. The migration will take a few minutes to complete depending on the complexity of your CDN profile, such as number of endpoints, domains, origins, and other configurations.
To learn more about the tier migration capabilities, please refer to:
About Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) to Standard or Premium tier migration | Microsoft Learn
Migrate Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) to Azure Front Door Standard or Premium tier | Microsoft Learn
Products:
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Public Preview: Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) integration with Virtual WAN
Status: In Preview
Customers can now deploy Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) directly into a Virtual WAN hub. This solution is jointly managed by Microsoft Azure and Cisco. Customers can deploy Cisco FTD into a Virtual WAN hub that performs Next-Generation Firewall capabilities. The Cisco FTD in the hub can be used to inspect all North-South, East-West, and Internet-bound traffic.
Read the announcement blog
Read the documentation
Products:
Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More
