white duck team was monitoring the updates in the Azure Cloud world during December 2020, so in this blog post we inform about some of the most interesting news on Azure, Private Link Support for Azure Automation, Azure Functions and similar. Stay with us and keep reading this illustrative summary.

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Azure Automation in Germany West Central now generally available

Azure Automation is now available in Germany West Central. With Azure Automation you can create a consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments.

Learn more.

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Azure Container Registry across Availability Zones now in public preview

To increase the resiliency and availability of your Azure Container Registry, you can now enable zone redundancy to replicate the resources within an Azure region.
Zone redundancy is a preview feature of the Premium container registry service tier. Currently, it is only supported in the following regions: East US, East US 2, and West US 2.

Learn more.

Container Monitoring support for private clusters now in public preview

You can now use Azure Monitor for Containers for your private cluster to get direct access to your Azure Kubernetes Service container logs, pod metrics and events.

Learn more.

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Azure Digital Twins now generally available

After more than two years of a public preview phase, Azure Digital Twins is now generally available. Azure Digital Twins is a platform that allows you to virtually model the physical world to get a deeper understanding of your assets and the interactions across environments.

Learn more.

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Private Link support for Azure Automation now generally available

With Azure Private Link, you can now securley connect virtual networks to your Azure Automation account using private endpoints. This will allow you to access Automation account resources using the private IP address without exposing the service to the public internet.

Learn more.

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Azure Stack Edge Kubernetes system now generally available

You can now deploy your containerized workloads to a managed Kubernetes environment in the edge using Azure Stack Edge. Use the Azure Portal to provision an on-premise Kubernetes environment and deploy your applications from the cloud using IoT Edge or Arch enabled Kubernetes.

Learn more.

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Azure Functions for Java support on Linux now generally available

You can now build your Azure Functions with Java 8 and Java 11 on all available App Service Plans (Consumption, Premium and Dedicated). It also enables you to bring Java container workload to Kubernetes with Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling.

Learn more.

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Azure Functions custom handlers now generally available

With Custom Handlers, you can develop serverless, event-driven Azure Functions in any language or runtime like Go, PHP, or Rust. It enables you to take advantage of all available triggers and bindings in your favorite language.

Writing a custom handler is simple. You build an HTTP server with your favorite language and when the Azure Functions instance starts up, it will also start an instance of your server as a custom handler. Now, whenever a function is triggered, it will send a request to your handler.

Learn more.

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Azure Kubernetes Service resources view now generally available

.With the new Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) resources view, you can now access Kubernetes resources directly from the Azure portal including deployments, pods, and replica sets. It supports the following key capabilities:

• See health/readiness status of running applications
• See the associated image of a pod
• Execute changes on the fly using YAML

Learn more.

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Private link for Azure SQL Data Sync now in public preview

SQL Data Sync is a service built on top of Azure SQL Database that lets you synchronize data across multiple databases. Private link for SQL Data Sync allows you to use a secure connection over a private endpoint to connect the SQL Data Sync service to the hub and the member databases.

Learn more.

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App Service Environment v3 now in public preview

Microsoft announced the public preview of the App Service Environment v3 (ASEv3). ASE is an isolated, single-tenant instance of the Azure App Service offering. ASEv3 features several key changes to the system architecture that are designed to remove all internet hosted dependencies in the customer network. ASEv3 also has a simplified deployment experience as well as lower pricing since you only pay for the isolated V2 SKU rates for your App Service plan.