In the following summary learn about some of the most interesting Cloud Native topics that were announced in February. We hope you will enjoy reading the blogpost and hope you will find it helpful for you and your team.

.

RBAC for Azure Key Vault data plane authorization has now general availability

Azure role-based access control (RBAC) permission model for key vault provides an alternative to the vault access policy permissions model.

This enables you to manage RBAC for Key Vault keys, certificates, and secrets by using built-in roles such as Key Vault Administrator or Key Vault Secrets Officer. With this feature enabled, validation of Azure AD users and services will be performed exclusively by Azure role-based access control.

Learn more.

.

Application Insights integration for Azure DevOps work items & GitHub issues in public preview

Identifying and capturing failures or performance issues occurring in your applications can be crucial for remediation. The work item integration feature enables you to create meaningful work items in Github or Azure DevOps, passing Application Insights data directly into issues or bugs.

Work Item Integration will help you create work items with proper context and packs some additional features like:

• Support for multiple configurations (no limit on the number of repositories and work items)
• ARM deployments
• KQL queries to add App Insights data
• Custom workbook templates

Learn more.

.

General availability for Application Insights synthetic monitoring SLA report template

Monitoring the availability and responsiveness of your applications or endpoints can be crucial to ensure that customers have reliable access to your services. With Application Insights, you have the possibility to test the availability of your site or REST API from around the world. These tests are performed by Application Insights sending web requests at regular intervals. The new SLA report template comes with powerful out-of-the-box queries for many common scenarios. It allows you to report easily through a single pane of glass across Azure resources and offers several features such as excluding data that occurs during maintenance.

Learn more.

.

Application Insights: Troubleshooting report for URL web tests

Finding the root cause of a failed availability test can be very frustrating. An availability test could fail even while the application is functioning perfectly and developers would have to find out if the failure was caused by the application or the network.

The new troubleshooting report for URL tests can be accessed through the portal and has 9 steps to detect the network problem that caused the web test to fail. Failed steps will appear in the availability result and give the developer or site reliability engineer an instant insight into where the problem might reside.

Learn more.

.

Application Insights: Auto-instrumentation for .NET5 App Services in public preview

.NET5 based App Services are now supported by Azure Monitor application insights natively.

App Services customers will have out-of-the-box access to all the familiar application insights capabilities including observability for new web apps hosted on App Services as well as the possibility to enable it on existing ones.

Learn more.

.

Public preview: Azure API Management Diagnostics

The public preview release of the API Management Diagnostics feature provides customers with a quick and easy experience to help:

• Troubleshooting without configuration
• Analyzing API resources supported by graphs, charts and status data
• Provide relevant and contextual resources and solutions by leveraging intelligent document searches

This allows customers to identify and address key issues. It reduces the need to engage in managing support cases. The tool can resolve potential problems including:

• APIs returning a status code of 200, but with no response body
• APIs returning status code 4xx or 5xx errors
• Slow performance of APIs

Learn more.

.

Using composite indexes in Azure Cosmos DB in new ways

Composite indexes can now be used to optimize even more types of queries in Azure Cosmos DB. Optimizing queries with aggregates and filter expressions with system functions has now general availability. Microsoft also announced that query filter expressions can utilize multiple composite indexes. With these updates, users will be able to improve the efficiency of more queries.

For more detailed information visit this blog.

.

Azure IoT Edge 1.1.0 LTS release

Microsoft released their first long-term servicing version of Azure IoT Edge (1.1.0). This release will receive only fixes to critical security issues and regressions until December 3, 2022. This will support its stability and make this release a good choice for production use. New features and other bug fixes will be included in future releases such as 1.2.0 and greater. Incremental bug fixes were included based on 1.0.10.4.

Anyone planing to upgrade to 1.1.0 should be aware of two changes:

• A small breaking change. To connect a leaf device to the Edge Hub, users must establish a parent/child relationship between the edge device and the leaf device. In previous versions, this was required only for offline scenarios or when using certificate-based authentication. For online scenarios, Edge Hub could fall back to cloud-based authentication for leaf devices that were using SAS key-based authentication. With this change, leaf devices with SAS key-based authentication need to be children of the edge device. You can configure Edge Hub to go back to the previous behavior by setting the environment variable “AuthenticationMode” to the value “CloudAndScope”.
• Ubuntu 16.04 is no longer supported starting with 1.1.0 and was replaced with Ubuntu 18.04. Ubuntu 16.04 has reached its servicing lifetime and will no longer receive updates or fixes for it. Microsoft expects that Azure IoT Edge will continue to run on Ubuntu 16.04 without issues; however, it was not included in the Azure IoT Edge support matrix to prevent customers from assuming that Microsoft will provide fixes for it.
• IoT Edge is no longer supporting Windows IoT Core

To check out the full release note follow this link.

.

Private preview: New APIs for managing PAT lifecycle in Azure DevOps

Microsoft has released new APIs for managing the lifecycle of PATs (Personal Access Tokens) on Azure DevOps. Currently, the process of managing PATs involves the UI or requires the Project Collection Administrator role. The new APIs will enable development teams to include PATs in automated processes such as build pipelines, and allow operations such as creating/revoking Personal Access Tokens and listing or updating their metadata.

Learn more.

.

Services announced to retire on 29 February 2024

• AzureRM PowerShell modules. Microsoft is encouraging you to start using Az PowerShell modules. Az PowerShell modules have more capabilities than their predecessor, support all Azure services and are available in Azure Cloud Shell as well as on Linux and macOS. Existing scripts using AzureRM PowerShell modules can be migrated automatically.
• Classic Application Insights. Microsoft is encouraging you to start using the workspace-based Applications Insights since it offers an enhanced monitoring experience. Advantages for migrating to workspace-based Applications Insights include: Data encryption at rest with Customer Managed Keys, Continuous Export of App Logs to Azure Storage/Event Hub via Diagnostic Settings.
• AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) legacy Azure AD integration. Microsoft will retire the legacy AD integration because AKS now uses Managed Azure Active Directory to simplify the process. Azure Kubernetes Service clusters using the legacy Azure Active Directory integration will not be supported anymore. For more information on upgrading to AKS-managed Azure AD, Integration follow this link.