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Monthly Azure news May 2021<\/p>\n
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Some fresh Azure updates are online – continue reading and feel free to share with all those interested in Azure and Cloud Native exciting world! This time we also included some awesome news from Microsoft Build 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Azure Static Web Apps<\/a> is a turn-key solution for modern full-stack web apps with pre-built and pre-rendered static frontends and serverless backend interfaces. Design and develop your application using common front-end frameworks or static site generators. Rapidly build and test your apps locally and deploy them with a simple check-in. Focus on developing your app and let Azure take care of the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read all details in the announcement blog post <\/a>and get started with the quickstarts, guides and tutorials<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We started a regular Azure API Management service update <\/a>on May 5, 2021. It includes the following new features, bug fixes, and other improvements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New Features:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Details on all new features, bug fixes, and other changes can be found here on Github.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Resilience and availability of Azure Key Vault service is now being offered at a 99.99% availability SLA. This is an improvement to the previous 99.9% SLA. Key Vault requests will now have guaranteed availability of 99.99%. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n With Azure Arc, now Azure App Service can run against Kubernetes clusters in Azure (AKS) or anywhere else. This preview feature combines the productivity of App Service and the control of Kubernetes. Choose if you want to run your Web Apps against fully managed App Service plans, or deploy against your AKS or another Kubernetes cluster connected via Azure Arc. Regardless of the cluster running on-premises, at the edge, or in a cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During Web App creation, customers have the possibility to configure and select clusters as a deployment target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n App Service on Kubernetes will be available for free in a limited set of regions. Starting with West Europe and US East. Get started with the MS docs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Event Hub Premium<\/a> brings you multi-tenancy with resource isolation as well as a more predictable high-throughput and low latency workloads, with higher limits and extending support to more Apache Kafka workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn <\/a>more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting in June 2021, Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server will be available for free with an Azure Free Account. Getting started with your development with Azure Database for MySQL will be easier than ever. Develop and test your applications and run small workloads for free. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Features (free for the first 12 months, after that standard pay-as-you-go):<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With App Service Managed Certificate, one of the most requested features of Azure App Services is now generally available. We already wrote a blog post about the feature in November 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Managed Certificates allows you to secure your custom domains with a free TLS \/ SSL certificate<\/strong>. Since this is a managed offering, you don’t have to deal with certificate renewal because the lifecycle and rollover is completely managed by Microsoft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Log Analytics Workspace Insights, you get a unified monitoring view for your Log Analytics workspaces. This includes workspace usage, health, performance, and more. The “at scale” perspective shows you how your workspaces are distributed across the globe and allows you to drill through to gain further insights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Azure Blob Operational Protection is a managed solution that helps you protect your data from various data loss threats such as blob corruption, blob deletion, and accidental deletion of storage accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The data is stored locally in the source storage account itself and can be restored at any selected time (Point-in-time restore<\/strong>). The solution also integrates well with Azure Backup, including Backup Center, to provide scalable data protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right now, Operational backup supports block blobs in standard general-purpose v2 storage accounts only. Refer to the support matrix<\/a> to learn more about the current limitations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Azure IoT Central API service is now generally available and can be accessed through the production v1.0 endpoint<\/a>. Use these APIs to develop production-ready solutions. With the help of customer feedback, Microsoft has updated the API with new capabilities. With the updated API, you can:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Zone redundant storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks is now available in public preview for Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs in following regions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Synchronous replication of data across zones in a region enables disks to tolerate outages due to natural disaster or hardware failures. You can maximize the availability of your virtual machines without the replication of application-level data, which in some cases might not even be supported, e.g for legacy applications and old industry-specific proprietary software. If a VM becomes unavailable, you can mount the disk to a VM in a different zone. The ZRS option can also be used to share disks to improve the availability of clustered distributed applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frontend mutual authentication is now supported by Azure Application Gateway. Additional to the client authenticating Application Gateway, Application Gateway can now also authenticate the client. Multiple client Certificate Authority (CA) certificate chains for Application Gateway can be uploaded and used for client authentication. Learn more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Azure Arc, it is now possible to run Azure Event Grid on AKS or anywhere else. This preview feature combines a fully managed Event Grid on Azure and the control of Kubernetes. Choose if you want to run Event Grid, or deploy on your AKS or another Kubernetes cluster connected via Azure Arc. Regardless of the cluster running on-premises, at the edge or in a cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Event Grid provides customers with a single service for managing routing of all events from any source to any destination. This vastly simplifies event-based application development. During preview, Event Grid on Kubernetes (using Azure Arc) will be available in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n More regions will be added in time. Learn more. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n By default, Durable Functions use Azure Storage as its storage provider. With this public preview, Durable Functions will now support two additional storage providers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Durable Functions <\/a>now supports PowerShell. Using familiar language constructs in PowerShell 7, it is now possible to orchestrate complex automation workflows in Azure Functions. This includes common scenarios such as complex Azure Resource deployments involving sequential and\/or parallel steps. Durable Functions provide built-in HTTP endpoints for monitoring the progress of long-running workflows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For getting started check out this quickstart<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The integration of Azure Security Center with GitHub Actions enables you to integrate security and compliance into the early stages of your software development lifecycle. This integration offers visibility in CI\/CD pipeline and registry container security scans with Azure Security Center. Improve remediation time and strengthen your cloud security posture by identifying issues faster with the help of end-to-end traceability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Additionally, Microsoft is introducing a new container scanning action. This action scans container images for vulnerabilities before images are pushed into Azure container registries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Learn <\/a>more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were also a ton of news around Azure Kubernetes Service:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scheduled weekly maintenance windows for updates allow minimizing workload impact. Planned maintenance windows in Azure Kubernetes Service can now be used in combination with cluster auto-upgrade. Automatic upgrades can be scheduled during a specific time slot that was allocated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n AKS support for Secrets Store CSI is now in public preview<\/a>. The Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for secret storage allows you to mount multiple secrets, keys, and certificates stored in your secret storage into your Pod as a CSI volume. By attaching a volume in this way, secure access to secrets is significantly simplified because the data can be accessed through the container’s file system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Containerd is the industry-standard container runtime.<\/a> Utilizing containerd increases both the speed of pod creation and stability. Containerd is available on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Kubernetes version 1.20 and higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Windows containerd support on AKS is available in East US, UK Southwest, and Central US. Other regions will join within the next weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kubernetes release 1.21 is now supported with AKS<\/a> in public preview. Kubernetes 1.21 offers a total of 50 enhancements at various levels of maturity, including 19 entirely new features. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Azure’s role-based access control (RBAC) for Kubernetes authorization,<\/a> you can gain consistent governance and access control across Azure and AKS resources. When this integration is enabled, you can use Azure Active Directory (AAD) users, groups, or service principals natively as entities in Kubernetes RBAC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with AKS, there were also quite a few updates around Azure Cosmos DB:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Partial document update for Azure Cosmos DB now allows you to perform path-level updates for specific fields\/properties within a single document without having to perform a full read-replace operation on the document. With this update, there are significant productivity benefits for developers by removing the need to perform explicit document reads, OCC checks, and document replacement operations on the client-side. This provides programming flexibility by allowing conditional partial document updates based on a predicate filter as well as supporting modes such as bulk, transactional batch, and multiple patch operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sign up<\/a> today to access this feature in private preview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Azure Cosmos DB’s role-based access control, now available for the Core (SQL) API, lets you enable fine-grained access control by assembling allowed actions into role definitions and associating such roles to Azure Active Directory (AAD) identities. This access control method is ideal when different data access permissions for different users or applications need to be strictly enforced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more about Azure Cosmos DB role-based access control<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Azure Cosmos DB Linux <\/a>provides a local environment on Linux and macOS that emulates the Azure Cosmos DB service for development purposes. During the preview, the emulator supports only the Core (SQL) API.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more about Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Azure Cosmos DB’s built-in cache, you can now optimize read costs and latency. Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache is an in-memory cache that is integrated with a dedicated Azure Cosmos DB gateway used for caching data and queries. The integrated cache is currently only supporting the Core (SQL) API.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more about Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Azure Cosmos DB serverless is now available for all APIs. It is a cost-effective pricing model that charges only for the resources consumed by your database operations. It is ideal for apps with moderate performance requirements and little traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Learn more about Azure Cosmo DB serverless<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Use the free Azure Cosmos DB tier to develop and test your applications, run small workloads in production for free. With this update to the Azure Cosmos DB free tier<\/a>, you will now get the first 1000 Request Units per second of provisioned throughput and 25 GB storage each month with no costs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Also don’t miss to replay all the great sessions and highlights from Microsoft Build 2021<\/a>. We would like to specially highlight the session with our Founder and CEO Markus S\u00fcmmchen<\/a>. He participated in a session on “The future of the developer workplace” (German only):<\/p>\n\n\n\nAz<\/a><\/mark>ure Static Web Apps<\/a> is now generally available<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Azure API Management updates from May, 2021<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Azure Key Vault SLA raised to 99.99% is now generally available<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Azure Arc: Run App Service on Kubernetes or anywhere (public preview)<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Public preview – Event Hubs Premium is now available<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Free offer coming soon: Azure Database for MySQL \u2013 Flexible Server<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
General Availability: Managed Certificates for Azure App Service<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Public Preview: Log Analytics Workspace Insights<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/en-us\/azure\/azure-monitor\/logs\/media\/log-analytics-workspace-insights-overview\/at-scale.png\")
General Availability: Operational backup for Azure Blobs<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Azure IoT Central API is now generally available<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Public preview – Zone redundant storage for Azure managed disks<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Application Gateway Mutual Authentication is now in public preview<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Enable mutual authentication at a per listener level on your gateway or choose to use server variables, for passing client authentication information to the backends. This enables scenarios where the client needs to authenticate Application Gateway and vice versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPublic preview – Azure Arc: Run Event Grid on Kubernetes in Azure or anywhere<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
New Durable Functions storage provider options (public preview)<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
General availability: PowerShell support in Durable Functions<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Public preview: Azure Security Center integration with GitHub Actions<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Azure Kubernetes Service News<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Cluster auto-upgrade now respects planned maintenance windows (public preview)<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Public preview: AKS support for Secrets Store Container Storage Interface<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Public preview: AKS support for containerd for Windows server containers<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Public preview: Kubernetes 1.21 support in AKS<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
General availability: Azure RBAC for Kubernetes Authorization in AKS<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Azure Cosmos DB updates<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Partial document update for Azure Cosmos DB in private preview<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Azure Cosmos DB role-based access control (RBAC) now in general availability<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"RBAC](\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/en-us\/azure\/cosmos-db\/media\/how-to-setup-rbac\/concepts.png\")
Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator in public preview<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache now in public preview<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Azure Cosmos DB serverless now in general availability<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Expanded Azure Cosmos DB free tier now in general availability<\/mark><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Microsoft Build 2021<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/whiteduck.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-31-1024x490.png\")
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