Didn’t get to Microsoft Ignite? fear not, this is a summary of the biggest announcements from Microsoft Ignite.so far, and will be updated during the week with the new services.
- Microsoft Spring Cloud in Public Preview
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/spring-cloud/
- Microsoft Azure Arc – Hybrid Azure Management
Where Microsoft is extended the management capabilities of ARM into any enviroment. This allows us to reuse Policies (Guest OS) Monitoring, RBAC and other Control mechanisms within Azure to other enviroments. Right now Arc will support Linux, Windows and Kubernetes as well will be in Preview. I have an new blog post on the topic here –> https://msandbu.org/what-is-azure-arc/
It should be noted that this does not provide any in-depth management capabilities of underlying platforms those resources are running in such as VMware, or other cloud platforms.
- Azure Data Services Preview to delivered on on-premises enviroments
With this Microsoft has now taken the step as well such as Google and Amazon to be able to provide data services on customer’s on datacenter. In the initial release the focus is on Azure Database for Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale on Kubernetes clusteres and using Microsoft Azure Arc as the management tier on top.
- Azure Bastion now GA
This is a feature which provides remote management capabilities within the Management Portal using a reverse TCP WebSocket access and leveraging Azure RBAC to provide access to any virtual machines in Microosft Azure without exposing out any virtual machines with any public IP addresses.
Should still be noted that regardless of the GA, the logging capablitiies of the services is still not available.
- Azure Internet Analyzer
Is a service which will allow developers to embed telemetry data into their applications to see latency between the application and the end-users and will come with recommendation in which type of Azure based services that can be used to enhance the performance of the application.
- Azure Peering Service
This is essentially a partnership with ISP to provide highly reliable and optimized internet connectivity to Microsoft Service. Which is more of a way for customers to find rights partners who have optimized their network using direct peering with Microsoft to provide optimized access to Microsoft Services.
- Better disk performance and burstable SSD’s
Microsoft will also release new SSD disks with a smaller volume (4, 8 and 16 GB) storage capacity for premium and standard SSD and also for some SSD will provide can now burst up to 30x of the provisioned perfor
mance target, providing better tolerance for spiky workloads.
- Incremental snapshots and direct upload of Azure Disks
Microsoft will now probivide the ability to do incremental based disk snapshots on Managed Disks. Also will provide a simpler way to do direct upload of VHD directly into a managed disk.
- Many new Instance types coming
Microsoft is also coming with many more instance types as well.To name of few of the announced instance types.
* Ea v4 —> Which is the first AMD EPYC. These new Azure VMs feature the latest AMD EPYC™ 7452 processor and provide up to 96 vCPUs, 384 GBs of RAM, and 2,400 GBs of SSD-based temporary storage. The Das-series VMs support Azure Premium SSDs and Ultra Disks.
Azure HBv2 virtual machines are designed to deliver leadership-class performance, message passing interface scalability, and cost efficiency for a variety of real-world high-performance compute workloads. Across a single virtual machine scale set, customers can run a single MPI job on HBv2 virtual machines at up to 36,000 cores
Azure NVv4 virtual machine public preview – GPU virtualization solution built on top of AMD MxGPU and SR-IOV technology,
Azure NDv2 virtual machines public preview – VMs feature 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 NVLINK interconnected GPUs with 32 GB of memory each, 40 nonhyperthreaded Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, and 672 GB of system memory
- Better performance with bursting enhancement and smaller size offerings on Azure Disks
Smaller sizes and burstable disks provide a lower cost of entry for customers migrating to the cloud by enabling workloads with less predictable traffic patterns to fine-tune disk performance. Azure Disks now support new 4, 8, and 16 GB sizes on Premium SSD and Standard SSD. Applicable Premium SSD disks can now burst up to 30x of the provisioned performance target, providing better tolerance for spiky workloads.
- Azure Stack Hub
Azure Stack Hub is the new name for Azure Stack which is the private edition of Microosft Azure where there are now a lot of new announcements with new features such as
Azure Arc on Azure Stack
Event Hub on Azure Stack
Availability of BC/DR foundational pattern for Azure Stack Hub to Azure Stack Hub
Public Preview of Azure Stream Analytics support on Azure Stack Hub
General availability of Kubernetes on Azure Stack Hub
Preview of Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack Hub (This is just templates for running VDI servers on the hub, management plane still resides in Azure)
- Azure AD
Microsoft Authenticator—Microsoft is making Microsoft Authenticator available to customers as part of the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) free plan. Deploying Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) reduces the risk of phishing and other identity-based attacks by 99.9 percent.
Azure AD Conect Cloud Provisioning – Previewing at the end of November, Azure AD Connect cloud provisioning is a new lightweight agent to move identities from disconnected Active Directory (AD) forests to the cloud. Additionally, announcing secure hybrid access partnerships with F5 Networks, Zscaler, Citrix, and Akamai to simplify access to legacy-auth based applications. Lastly, they are introducing a re-imagined MyApps portal to help make apps more discoverable for end-users.
Azure Firewall Manager—Now in public preview, customers can manage multiple firewall instances from a single pane of glass with Azure Firewall Manager. We’re also creating support for new firewall deployment topologies. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/firewall-manager/
Microsoft Intune – With Threat defence for mobile devices — https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Enterprise-Mobility-Security/Microsoft-Intune-brings-mobile-threat-defense-to-unenrolled-BYO/ba-p/966734
Microsoft Endpoint Manager — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/11/04/use-the-power-of-cloud-intelligence-to-simplify-and-accelerate-it-and-the-move-to-a-modern-workplace/
- Azure Security Center
- Microsoft Defender ATP coming to Linux – https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-defender-atp-is-coming-to-linux-in-2020/
You can also view the all different news in the same Azure Release Book here –> https://t.co/uK9Wxqaqjk?amp=1