Monthly Azure news January 2021
Our team summarized the most relevant and interesting updates from the Azure Cloud world that were announced in January 2021. Some topics, as you will see, are not directly related to Azure, however our team finds them important and relevant for all those who are eager to learn more and also appreciate some valuable insights into software engineering. So you will read about the future of Identity Server, Azure Key Vault, some Kubernetes-related topics and much more. Furthermore, we want to announce our next Azure Rosenheim meetup and inform you what to expect on March 8th. We will be more than happy in case you join us and learn with us!
The Azure Quota REST API is now generally available
The Azure Quota API is now generally available. The API allows you to manage service limits (quotas) programmatically and to integrate it within your applications.
With the Azure Quota REST API, you can look up the current usage, quota limits, and request quota increases of your services, and manage them accordingly. Today, you can use the quota API to programmatically manage Azure virtual machines and Azure Machine Learning services.
.
Kubernetes Event Grid Bridge – A simple event bridge for Kubernetes native events forwarding CloudEvents v1.0 compliant events to Azure Event Grid into Microsoft Azure
Kubernetes Event Grid Bridge is a single-purpose tool that is only in charge of accepting & forwarding events to Microsoft Azure. Even though it does not automatically subscribe to cluster events, the Kubernetes community provides many tools that can be used to trigger the bridge.
Check it out here.
.
The future of Identity Server
The current version of IdentityServer (version v4.x) is the last version that will continue to be developed as a free open source. They will continue to support IdentityServer4 until the end of life of .NET Core 3.1 in November 2022.
IdentityServer4 will be renamed to Duende IdentityServer and will target .NET 5 and versions beyond. This new product will remain open source, but it will be offered with a dual license (RPL and commercial).
- The RPL (reciprocal public license) keeps Duende IdentityServer free if you also do free open source work.
- If you are using Duende IdentityServer in a commercial scenario, a commercial license will be necessary.
.
Public preview: Prevent Shared Key authorization on Azure Storage accounts
Requests to Azure Storage accounts can be authorized using either a shared key or Azure Active Directory credentials. Microsoft recommends using the latter because it provides greater security and ease of use than Shared Key authentication. With the new announcement, you are able to disable Shared Key authentication and force clients to authenticate and authorize with Azure Active Directory.
.
General availability: Azure Log Analytics in Germany West Central, UAE North, & Switzerland West
Azure Log Analytics is now generally available in Germany West Central, UAE North, & Switzerland West regions. Collect telemetry from a variety of sources and use the query language from Azure Data Explorer to retrieve and analyze data.
Learn more about Log Analytics and explore additional regional availability.
.
App Service Authentication portal experience is now in public preview
Microsoft has announced a new public preview version of the App Service Authentication / Authorization Settings page. The new page will appear as “Authentication (preview)” and is located next to the existing page.
Microsoft recommends not migrating to the new version for apps that already use the previous authentication / authorization feature, as the two experiences cannot be used simultaneously.
The new version is continuously updated to add new features and simplify the user experience. Currently, only the Azure Active Directory provider is supported.
.
Automatic tracking of click events with Application Insights is now available
Azure Application Insights now features a new JavaScript Click Analytics Auto-Collection Plugin which allows you to monitor your users click events to analyze how they use your application and collect user retention data.
.
Public preview: Azure Key Vault CSI driver support in Azure Kubernetes Service
Azure Key Vault provider for Secrets Store CSI driver allows you to mount secret contents stored in an Azure Key Vault instance to Kubernetes pods. Azure Key Vault simplifies access to secrets, keys, and certificates while you benefit from the increased security and control.
.
General availability: Optional Uptime SLA for Azure Kubernetes Service private clusters
Microsoft is extending the optional SLA for non-private Azure Kubernetes service clusters to private AKS clusters in all supported regions.
The availability SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the Kubernetes API server endpoint for clusters that use Availability Zones and 99.9% availability for clusters that do not.
Pricing information for the uptime SLA feature can be found here, details to the SLA contract can be found here.
.
Multiple region Availability Zones support with single-region write for Azure CosmosDB is now generally available
Availability zone support can provide cost savings if you previously used write operations for multiple regions. It also includes an increased availability SLA of 99.995 percent – with even a single region.
.
Azure Cosmos DB Management with PowerShell cmdlets is now generally available
It is now possible to manage your Azure Cosmos DB resources with the new Az.CosmosDB PowerShell module. It supports all features in general availability for Azure Cosmos DB. This new module comes as a part of Microsofts Azure PowerShell Az module or can be installed seperately via the PowerShell Gallery. It supports Windows PowerShell 5.1 in addition to PowerShell Core 6 and 7.
.
99.99% uptime for Azure Active Directory Premium customers is coming April 1st, 2021
Microsoft announced that starting from April 1st 2021 the Azure Active Directory public service level agreement will promise 99.99% uptime for Azure AD user authentication for Azure AD Premium customers. This improves the current SLA of 99.9%.
This comes after an increased demand in 2020. Azure AD now serves more than 400 million users per month and processess tens of billions authentications per day.
Read the blog post for more information.
.
Germany West Central Availability Zones now generally available
Availability Zones in the Azure Region Germany West Central have reached general availability. The Azure Region now features 3 physically seperated locations to enable higher availability and asynchronous replication.
.
Nico feat. Robin-Manuel Thiel’s Techwiese Blogpost Recap
In this blog post, Nico and Robin-Manual shared details on the new Docker Hub rate-limits and the impact on your environment. They will provide deep-dive insights including best practices in regards to a developer inner-loop, CI/CD, and operations on Azure. You will find the blog post (German only) on the Techwiese {Cloud Native Community Blog} blog by Microsoft.
.
An announcement of the next Azure Rosenheim meetup
Our team will share some news regarding Azure Service Operator and Bicep Project on March 8th. In this meetup Nico and Dario will speak about ARM Templates and Terraform and the two possibilities for you to manage your Azure resources and to map them in your Infrastructure-as-code. Expect some demos and best practices that will show you how to handle the tools.
More information here.