Microsoft Ignite
Andrew Posted on 9:41 am

Azure Updates – Number 77 – November 18, 2023 – Ignite Edition

A summary update on Azure News that includes updates released from Microsoft Azure related to Azure, Architecture, Compute, and Sentinel topics. Every update is linked to it’s original Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Sentinel or other blog source. Hopefully this will save you some time digging around to find recent releases and changes.

Updates include preview and general availability announcements, news, and technical articles published in the listed topic areas for the previous 2 week snapshot. Presented is a subset of news that is highlighted here, visit Azure Blog or Azure Updates Blog to see all the updates.

This week’s edition is the post Microsoft Ignite 2023 Edition. If I saw you there, it was great to meet you! I met so many wonderful, knowledgeable, and just great people this year. This was definitely the ‘Ignite is back’ year! Check out the official book of news right here.

I’ll have more updates throughout the next week with some highlights and recaps of my personal favourites from Ignite, but I’d like to highlight the following key items as some of my top topics that had HUGE impact with their updates and focus this year: Security integrations between Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel, employee training and education for social engineering, Microsoft Fabric, and of course Copilot for Azure & Security Copilot. I’m very excited to bring you this great update from Seattle this year again, what a wonderful community we have with Microsoft Ignite!

Azure Updates

General availability: Reservations for Microsoft Fabric
Generally Available: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3 now supported on Azure Virtual Machines
General availability: Integration of Azure Monitor Agent support with Connection Monitor
Public preview: Private subnet
Public Preview: Attach and VMs to and from Existing Virtual Machine Scale Sets
General Availability of Azure Logic Apps’ New Data Mapper for Visual Studio Code
Generally Available: Azure Mv3 Medium Memory (MM) Virtual Machines
Azure Logic Apps Standard VS Code Extension Installation Enhancements in public preview
General Availability of Application Insights Enhancements for Azure Logic Apps (standard)
Announcing general availability of .NET Framework Custom Code for Azure Logic Apps (standard)
Announcing Azure Integration Environment in public preview
Azure Logic Apps workflow assistant in public preview
Public preview: Azure Backup supports long term retention for backup of Azure Database for PostgreSQL? Flexible Server
GA: Ultra Disk performance updates
GA: Stateful entities in Durable Functions on the isolated worker model for .NET
Azure Container Storage is now available with Azure Linux container host
Azure Functions brings new flexibility with unlimited execution time
Public Preview: Azure IoT Operations
Generally available: Partitioned namespaces for Azure Service Bus Premium
Public preview: Cost analysis add-on for AKS
Public preview: Vector database add-ons for Azure Container Apps
Public preview: Azure Container Apps adds native support for CNCF Buildpacks to automatically containerize your code
Generally available: Azure Container Apps Landing Zone Accelerator
Public preview: Policy-driven resiliency in Azure Container Apps
Public preview: Dedicated GPU workload profiles
Kubernetes AI toolchain operator
GA: Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager
Preview: New Basic SKU functionality for Azure confidential ledger
Azure Chaos Studio is now generally available
Generally available: AMD confidential VM option for Azure Databricks
Announcing Azure API Management Credential Manager: Azure API Management Authorizations Renamed
Public Preview: Announcing the preview of Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework
Preview: Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs
Public preview: Confidential containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Public preview: Confidential temp disk encryption for confidential VMs
Public Preview: New Marketplace app for Storage customers and feature enhancements to portal for Azure confidential ledger
Preview: Disk Integrity Tool for confidential VMs in Azure
Generally Available: Trusted launch as default for VMs deployed through PowerShell and CLI
Public Preview: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.3 support for AMD-based confidential VMs
Azure Machine Learning – Public Preview for November
Generally Available: AMD confidential VMs in new regions for November 2023
Azure Machine Learning – General Availability for November
General availability: Azure AI Advantage for Azure Cosmos DB
Announcing the public preview of Azure confidential VMs with Intel TDX
Public preview: Online Disaster recovery between SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Managed Instance
General Availability: November 2022 Feature Wave for Azure SQL Managed Instance
General availability: Azure SQL Database Always Encrypted with virtualization-based security (VBS) enclaves
Public Preview: Azure SQL updates for mid-November 2023
General availability: Azure SQL updates for mid-November 2023
New user interface experience for Azure SQL migration extension
Public Preview: Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra Feature Updates
Public Preview: Long Term Retention for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
Public preview: Azure Database for PostgreSQL extension for Azure AI
Public Preview: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Networking with private endpoints
Public Preview: Enhanced performance and scalability in Azure Database for PostgreSQL
General availability: Free tier on Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore
General availability: Vector search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore
General Availability: Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore
Public preview: Priority-based execution in Azure Cosmos DB
Public preview: Cross-account container copy for Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL API
Public Preview: Azure Open AI ?Use your data? integration with Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore
Public preview: Dynamic scaling per partition and per region
Public preview: Microsoft Copilot for Azure capability now available in Azure Cosmos DB
Public preview: Bring enhanced manageability to your SQL Server anywhere with Azure Arc
Azure Virtual Network Manager Security Admin Rule generally available in select regions
Public preview: Enabling Rate Limiting on ExpressRoute Direct Circuits
Public preview: Customer-controlled maintenance
General Availability: Lower pricing for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale expected in December 2023
Public Preview: Azure Cosmos DB Migration for MongoDB extension – Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore migration capability
Public preview: ExpressRoute Seamless Gateway Migration
Public preview: ExpressRoute Scalable Gateway
General availability: ExpressRoute Direct and Circuit in different subscriptions
General availability: ExpressRoute as a Trusted Service
Public preview: Microsoft Copilot for Azure
MQTT broker feature, PubSub capabilities now available for Azure Event Grid
Introducing New Capabilities in Microsoft Dev Box
Public preview: 3rd party support for Arm solutions in Azure Marketplace
Introducing New Capabilities in Azure Deployment Environments
Public preview: VM Hibernation
Public preview: Azure VMSS Zonal Expansion
GA: Azure Boost
Public preview: New Generation AMD VMs – Dasv6/Easv6/Fasv6
Experiment templates now available in Azure Chaos Studio
General availability: Start and stop load (Azure Load Testing) faults in Azure Chaos Studio
GA: Azure Functions supports .NET 8 in the isolated worker model
General Availability: Ubuntu Server to Ubuntu Pro in-place upgrade now available
Public Preview: Support for GraphQL APIs in Azure API Management Self-hosted Gateway
Public Preview: Azure Monitor Agent JSON log collection
Public Preview: Support for gRPC APIs in Azure API Management Self-Hosted Gateway
Public Preview: Azure Monitor Alerts integration with Event Grid for Azure Key Vault system events
Export cost details using the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS)
Azure support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will end by 31 October 2024
Public Preview: App Service End-to-end (E2E) Encryption for Linux Multi-tenant Resources
General availability: Introducing NGads V620 Series VMs optimized for gaming scenarios
Azure Monitor Logs archive provides up to 12 years of retention
General availability: Using a common port for public and private listeners
General availability: Rate-limit rules for Application Gateway Web Application Firewall
Public Preview: Azure SQL updates for early-November 2023
Customer-Managed Keys (preview) integration with Azure Chaos Studio
Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution is available in US Government regions.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift November 2023 updates
Provider for running Karpenter on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
GA: Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) Add-on for AKS
GA: Kubernetes 1.28 support in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
GA: Application routing add-on for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
GA: Kube-reserved resource optimization in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Public preview: Dual-stack networking in Azure CNI Overlay for AKS
Public preview: Artifact streaming support in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Public preview: Image integrity support in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Preview: Azure Container Storage in AKS
Latency metrics for disks and performance metrics for temporary disks on Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Elastic SAN updates: Snapshots, Security, and Usability
General Availability: Azure Advisor recommendation improves the reliability of Azure Disks with Zone Redundant Storage
Ability to add dynamic values in Alert?s custom fields
Public preview: Application Gateway IPv6 support
Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus is available in 7 additional Azure regions

Azure Sentinel Blog

Microsoft Sentinel Partner Solution Contributions update – Ignite 2023
Introducing a Unified Security Operations Platform with Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR
Architecture Guidance: How to ingest GCP Firewall\VPC logs into Microsoft Sentinel
What?s New: Introducing Microsoft Sentinel Web Session Essentials Solution.
Fortifying Your Defenses: How Microsoft Sentinel Safeguards Your Organization from BEC Attacks