Monthly Azure news November 2020

You’re interested in the Azure Cloud world and want to find out what happened or what was released during November 2020? In this blog post we are bringing you some of the most interesting news from the Azure world. Also, we included a link to the KubeCon that took place from 17 – 20th of November, so in case you want to enjoy some useful content continue reading/ listening.

Managed Service Fabric clusters are now in public preview with the release 7.2

With the new Service Fabric 7.2 release, Microsoft announced several new key features:

Service Fabric managed clusters are now in public preview.
Supporting multiple stateless instances on a single node.
Extended resource governance allows you to add further specifications for memory and CPU resources.

The release also includes multiple bug fixes and some breaking changes, see the Release notes.

.NET 5 is available in App Service

During the .NET Conf that took place from 10 to 12th November, the Azure and .NET teams announced that App Service will provide support for .NET 5 on the same day because it reached general availability. In the future, every new preview release of .NET will be available on App Service from the day one of its release.

The App Service can now deliver faster and more frequent updates for all supported languages thanks to the new Early Access feature that was developed in partnership with the .NET team. While .NET 5 represents the first runtime to be delivered, App Service will also use the feature to provide immediate access to the latest releases for other languages, which will include Node and Python.

To learn more, visit the ASP.NET blog.

The Serverless offer for Azure Cosmos DB is extended and supports all APIs now

The Azure Cosmos DB serverless offer is now in preview for all APIs, including Core (SQL), MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin and Table.

Developers can use this new option for applications with small or medium-sized workloads without any capacity planning or additional management requirements.

Learn more about Azure Cosmos DB serverless.

Azure Functions now supports Node.js 14 in public preview

Microsoft announced the preview support for Node.js 14 based Azure Functions. You can develop a Node.js 14 functions app locally (requires Azure Functions Core Tools 3.0.2996 or above) and deploy them to your Azure Function App.

Learn more about Azure Functions Node.js 14 preview.

At the KubeCon, Microsoft announced several new general availability features for Azure Kubernetes Service:

General availability of containerd support in AKS
Containerd is now the default container runtime in AKS
Faster upgrades using the maxSurge feature to define how many concurrent replacements occur.
General availability of the Kubernetes 1.19 release which includes support for TLS 1.3 and more.
Faster re-imaging and boot times with Ephemeral OS disk for the AKS Agent Nodes which are now GA.

Learn more.

Our Senior Cloud & DevOps consultant Nico took part in KubeCon too

The Azure Cloud Shell image is now based on Debian and compiled from Source by Microsoft

Microsoft is currently updating the cloud shell base image from Ubuntu 16.04 to a Debian 10 based one. This means that almost every single tool / package inside the image will have a newer version (e. g. Python 3.7 and PowerShell 7.1).

For further information, see the pull request on the Cloud Shell GitHub repository.

You can now configure file share backups directly with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

Azure portal update brings a better move resource experience

With the November 2020 Azure portal update, you can now start the journey to move resources to a different region. You will also be able to track the progress and add missing dependencies.

Learn more.

Container Conference – “Efficient CI/CD Pipelines with the right tools, does it work?”

In this talk Nico spoke about the usage of the containerized pipelines and how you can use them to eliminate dependencies in your CI/CD environment, so that you don’t have to deal with different versions of your toolchain and dependencies. He also talked about Tekton, which is an open source project that will help you build a cloud-native toolchain. There you can implement your entire CI/CD (workload as well as configuration) in Kubernetes.