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In Cloud Computing This Week [Nov 5th 2021]

Written by Team Hava | November 5, 2021

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

 

Here's a cloud round up of all things GCP, Azure and AWS for the week ending Friday 5th November 2021 

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AWS Updates and Releases

Source: aws.amazon.com

AWS Lambda now supports cross-account container image pulling from Amazon Elastic Container Registry

AWS Lambda now allows you to create or update your functions with container images stored in an Amazon ECR repository  in a different AWS account than that of your AWS Lambda function. Previously, you could only access container images stored in an Amazon ECR repository in the same AWS account as your AWS Lambda functions. If you used a centralized account for your Amazon ECR repositories, you needed to copy your container images into an Amazon ECR repository in the same account as your Lambda function. You can now simplify this workflow by accessing the container image stored in an Amazon ECR repository in a different account. 

Simplify CI/CD Configuration for AWS Serverless Applications and your favorite CI/CD system – General Availability

You can now create secure continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines that follow your organization’s best practices with a new pipeline configuration capability for serverless applications. AWS Serverless Application Model Pipelines (AWS SAM Pipelines) is a new feature of AWS SAM CLI that gives you access to benefits of CI/CD in minutes, such as accelerating deployment frequency, shortening lead time for changes, and reducing deployment errors. AWS SAM Pipelines comes with a set of default pipeline templates for popular CI/CD systems such as CloudBees CI/Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, and AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline that follow AWS’ deployment best practices. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

AWS DataSync can now copy data between Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS) and AWS Storage services

AWS DataSync now supports transferring data between Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS) and Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), or Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. Using DataSync, you can quickly, easily, and securely migrate files and folders from HDFS on your Hadoop cluster to AWS Storage. You can also use DataSync to replicate data on your Hadoop cluster to AWS for business continuity, copy data to AWS to populate your data lakes, or transfer data between your cluster and AWS for analysis and processing.

AWS Amplify launches further data management capabilities in the Admin UI

AWS Amplify Admin UI now allows generating seed data with Faker , and downloading data to a CSV file. This simplifies creating and managing your data in Amplify, and allows for more realistic demo data that is quickly shareable. 

AWS Snowcone SSD is now available in the US East (Ohio), US West (San Francisco), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and regions

The AWS Snowcone solid state drive (SSD) is now available in the US East (Ohio), US West (San Francisco), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions adding to our growing list of regions already offering Snowcone SSD including, EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon). AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is available in both hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD). Both device models are portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and are able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcones to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline by shipping the device to AWS, or online by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network.

Amazon SageMaker now supports inference testing with custom domains and headers from SageMaker Studio

Amazon SageMaker Studio now enables customers to make test inference requests to endpoints with a custom URL and endpoints that require specific headers. Amazon SageMaker helps data scientists and developers to prepare, build, train, and deploy high-quality machine learning (ML) models quickly by bringing together a broad set of capabilities purpose-built for ML. Amazon SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps.

AWS Backup Vault Lock is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region and AWS China (Ningxia) Region

AWS Backup Vault Lock is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. AWS Backup enables customers to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services through a fully managed and cost-effective solution.

Amazon Aurora Global Database Expands Availability to AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Amazon Aurora Global Database is a feature of Amazon Aurora. It is designed for applications with a global footprint. It allows a single Aurora database to span multiple AWS Regions, with fast replication to enable low-latency global reads and disaster recovery from Region-wide outages. With today’s launch, Amazon Aurora Global Database is available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) Regions. Amazon Aurora Global Database customers will now be able to replicate across AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions.

AWS Lake Formation now supports AWS PrivateLink

AWS Lake Formation now support managed VPC endpoints (powered by AWS PrivateLink) to access a data lake in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).  With AWS Lake Formation-managed endpoints, you can now authorize access to the data lake for client applications and services inside of your VPC and on-premises using private IP connectivity. You can also configure VPC endpoint policies  to have finer grained control over how services access AWS Lake Formation.

AWS Security Hub adds support for AWS PrivateLink for private access to Security Hub APIs

AWS Security Hub now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink so that you can securely initiate API calls to Security Hub from within your VPC without requiring those calls to traverse across the Internet. AWS PrivateLink support for Security Hub is now available in all AWS Regions where Security Hub is available. To try the new feature, you can go to the VPC console, API, or SDK to create a VPC endpoint for Security Hub in your VPC. This creates an elastic network interface in your specified subnets. The interface has a private IP address that serves as an entry point for traffic that is destined for Security Hub. You can read more about Security Hub’s integration with PrivateLink here .

Amazon SageMaker launches fully-managed RStudio Workbench

This week AWS  were excited to announce the launch of RStudio on Amazon SageMaker, the industry’s first fully managed RStudio integrated development environment (IDE). You can easily bring your current RStudio license and migrate self-managed RStudio environment to Amazon SageMaker in a few simple steps.

Amazon RDS now supports cross account KMS keys for exporting RDS Snapshots

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now offers the ability to specify an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) customer master key (CMK) from a different account when exporting an Amazon RDS Snapshot to Amazon S3. This option helps customers organize and consolidate their KMS keys by eliminating the need to create keys in each account that has snapshots.

Introducing ability to connect to EMR clusters in different subnets in EMR Studio

Amazon EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug  big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. Today, we are excited to announce that EMR Studio Workspaces now support connecting to EMR clusters in different subnets that are associated with EMR Studio.

Database Activity Streams now supports Graviton2-based instances

Database Activity Streams now supports Graviton2-based instances for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. Database Activity Streams  for Amazon Aurora provides a near real-time stream of database activities in your relational database for auditing and compliance purposes. When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database and help you meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

Amazon EC2 now supports access to Red Hat Knowledgebase

Starting this week, AWS customers running subscription included Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 can seamlessly access Red Hat Knowledgebase at no additional cost. The Knowledgebase is a library of articles, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and best-practice guides to help customers solve technical issues.


Amazon CloudFront now supports configurable CORS, security, and custom HTTP response headers

This week, Amazon CloudFront is launching support for response headers policies. You can now add cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), security, and custom headers to HTTP responses returned by your CloudFront distributions. You no longer need to configure your origins or use custom Lambda@Edge or CloudFront functions to insert these headers. 

Amazon Pinpoint launches in-app messaging as a new communications channel

In-app messaging enables customers to display targeted messages in mobile or web applications, and provide a personalized user experience. When an end user is engaged with a mobile or web application, customers can use in-app messaging to show relevant content to drive high-value user actions such as: repeat purchases, key content promotion, and user onboarding. After initial implementation these messages can be created and launched through the Pinpoint console, without the need to make code changes. 

Amazon Redshift announces native support for SQLAlchemy and Apache Airflow open-source frameworks

Native support for open source SQLAlchemy  (sqlalchemy-redshift) and Apache Airflow  frameworks are now available for Amazon Redshift. The updated Amazon Redshift dialect for SQLAlchemy supports the Amazon Redshift open source Python driver . With this release you can use single sign-on with your Identity Provider (IdP) to connect to Redshift clusters and avoid credential management pains. You can also use new Amazon Redshift features such as using TIMESTAMPTZ and TIMETZ datatypes when you migrate to the latest Redshift dialect for SQL Alchemy and Apache Airflow. These features are available in sqlalchemy-redshift version 0.8.6 and later.

Amazon Corretto 17 Support Roadmap Announced

On September 16th AWS announced GA of Corretto 17. This week, they are pleased to announce that AWS will be providing Long-Term Support (LTS) for Corretto 17 until September 2028. AWS will also be moving to a new 2-year cadence for Corretto LTS releases, along with the rest of the OpenJDK community, as of this release. Please read the Corretto 17 Announcement post on the AWS Open Source blog for more details. Corretto 17 is available from the downloads page .

Amazon DevOps Guru increases coverage of Amazon EKS metrics and adds metric view by cluster

Amazon DevOps Guru now supports additional metrics at the node and pod-level for clusters managed by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Amazon Time Sync Service now makes it easier to generate and compare timestamps

Amazon Time Sync Service now allows you to easily generate and compare timestamps from Amazon EC2 instances with ClockBound, an open source daemon and library. This information is valuable to determine order and consistency for events and transactions across EC2 instances, independent from the instances’ respective geographic locations. ClockBound calculates your Amazon EC2 instance’s clock error bound to measure its clock accuracy and allows you to check if a given timestamp is in the past or future with respect to your instance’s current clock. On every call, ClockBound simultaneously returns two pieces of information: the current time and the associated absolute error range. This means that the actual time of a ClockBound timestamp is within a set range.

AWS Secrets Manager increases secrets limit to 500K per account

AWS Secrets Manager now supports a limit of up to 500,000 secrets per account per region, up from 40,000 secrets in the past. This simplifies secrets management for software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) applications that rely on unique secrets for large numbers of end customers.

AWS Graviton2 based T4g instances are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region

Starting this week, Amazon EC2 T4g instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. T4g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. These instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at  any time for as long as required. They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, including large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, and business-critical  applications.

Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts now supports exporting database logs to Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts can now export database logs to Amazon CloudWatch. You can now monitor all of your Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts database instances from the same single pane of glass as your Amazon RDS database instances in our AWS Regions.

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS CloudFormation

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling you to manage MemoryDB resources using CloudFormation templates. Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is a Redis-compatible, durable, in-memory database service that delivers ultra-fast performance. AWS CloudFormation lets you model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources by treating infrastructure as code. CloudFormation makes it easier for you to create and manage MemoryDB resources without having to configure MemoryDB separately through the console. For example, you can create MemoryDB clusters, subnet groups, parameter groups, and users using CloudFormation templates. 

AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager launches new APIs to simplify network and route analysis in your global network

This week, AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager launched new APIs that enable you to perform automated analysis of your global network and allow you to build your own topological views for visualization purposes. You can get an aggregated view of your global network resources, analyze routes, and retrieve telemetry data across AWS regions using the following APIs:


Amazon Simple Email Service now offers a new console experience

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is pleased to announce the launch of the newly redesigned service console. With its streamlined look and feel, the new console makes it even easier for customers to leverage the speed, reliability, and flexibility that Amazon SES has to offer.

 
Google Cloud Releases and Updates
Source: cloud.google.com

 

AI Platform Training

 

Using interactive shells to inspect training jobs is generally available (GA).

You can use these interactive shells with VPC Service Controls.

Anthos Service Mesh

Version 1.11 is now available for managed Anthos Service Mesh and is rolling out into the Rapid Release Channel. See Select a managed Anthos Service Mesh release channel for more information.

Managed Anthos Service Mesh now supports Multi-project with shared VPC in the Rapid Release Channel. For more information, see Configure managed Anthos Service Mesh.

Managed Anthos Service Mesh now supports private GKE clusters with private control plane. This means that all types of private GKE clusters are supported. For more information, see Environments on the Supported features page.

App Engine standard environment - go / java / node.js / php / python / ruby

Egress settings for Serverless VPC Access are now generally available. Egress settings allow you to specify whether or not to send traffic with external destinations through your Serverless VPC Access connector, which is necessary if you want to set up a static outbound IP address for your App Engine service.

BigQuery

BigQuery now supports parameterized types. The following parameterized types are supported:

This feature is generally available GA.

Cloud Asset Inventory

Cloud Asset Inventory Console is now generally available.

This release enables you to view the following information for your Cloud deployment, using powerful search capabilities and easy filtering.

    • Details and history of resources and IAM policies
    • Machine type statistics
    • Policy statistics
    • Insights of your Cloud footprint
    • IAM policies as a whole, or scoped to individual IAM policies' details

Learn more about searching resources and searching policies in the console.

Cloud Composer

Cloud Composer is now available in Singapore (asia-southeast1).

Cloud Load Balancing

Cloud Load Balancing announces a significant increase in the URL map limits for External and Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing. The new limits let you scale to a much higher number of services behind a single load balancer.

For example, URL maps for external HTTP(S) load balancers can now support up to 1000 host rules. The total size of the URL map is constrained to 64KB for External HTTP(S) Load Balancing and 128KB for Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing

For the updated list of limits see, URL map limits

Cloud Monitoring

Data from closed incidents is now retained for 13 months instead of 90 days, so you can see patterns over longer periods of time and investigate them. For information about investigating incidents, see Incidents.

You can now create an alerting policy from the alert chart dialog on a custom dashboard, and you can create an alerting policy by converting a chart on custom dashboard to an alert chart. For more information, see Alert charts.

You can now collect Cassandra metrics from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.6.0. For more information, see Monitoring third-party applications: Cassandra.

Cloud Run

General availability: Installing Cloud Run for Anthos as an Anthos fleet component with Anthos Service Mesh is now publicly available. Learn about what's new and changed in the latest release.

You can now allocate up to 16GiB of memory to your Cloud Run services.

Committed use discount recommender now automatically generates recommendations to purchase Cloud Run committed use discounts based on historical usage.

Cloud Spanner

Time to live (TTL) reduces storage costs, improves query performance, and simplifies data retention by automatically removing unneeded data based on user-defined policies.

 

Cloud Storage

List Object V2 is generally available (GA).

Config Connector

 

Config Connector 1.65.0 is now available.

Added support for the ComputeServiceAttachment resource.

config-connector command cli print-resources now includes a column listing whether it supports of related IAM resources.

All config-connector containers now emit logging to stdout rather than stderr.

config-connector command cli now correctly labels supported bulk-export resources.

Dataproc

Added the following new Apache Spark properties to control Cloud Storage flush behavior for event logs for 1.4 and later images:

    • spark.history.fs.gs.outputstream.type (default: BASIC)
    • spark.history.fs.gs.outputstream.sync.min.interval.ms (default: 5000ms).

Note: The default configuration of these properties enables the display of running jobs in the Spark History Server UI for clusters using Cloud Storage to store spark event logs.

Added support in 1.5 and 2.0 images to filter Spark Applications on the Spark History Server Web UI based on Cloud Storage path. Filtering is accomplished using the eventLogDirFilter parameter, which accepts any Cloud Storage path substring and will return applications that match the Cloud Storage path.

New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images:

1.4.75-debian10, 1.4.75-ubuntu18,

1.5.50-centos8, 1.5.50-debian10, 1.5.50-ubuntu18,

2.0.24-centos8, 2.0.24-debian10, 2.0.24-ubuntu18

Removed Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake libraries in 2.0 images because they are not compatible with Spark 3.1.

Upgraded Cloud Storage connector to version 2.2.3 on 2.0 Images.

The previous Dataproc on GKE beta documentation has been replaced with a Dataproc on GKE private preview sign up form. Existing beta customers can continue using the beta release, but note that the beta release is planned to be deprecated and removed.

Datastore

 

DATA_READ and DATA_WRITE Data Access audit logs are now supported at the General Availability release level. See Datastore audit logging information.

Dialogflow

Preview launch of the following languages in Dialogflow CX:

Afrikaans, Amharic, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Czech, Welsh, Greek, Esperanto, Estonian, Basque, Persian, Frisian, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Galician, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hmong, Croatian, Haitian Creole, Hungarian, Armenian, Igbo, Icelandic, Javanese, Georgian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kannada, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Latin, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malagasy, Maori, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mongolian, Maltese, Nepali, Chichewa, Odia, Punjabi, Pashto, Kinyarwanda, Sindhi, Slovak, Slovenian, Samoan, Shona, Somali, Albanian, Serbian, Sesotho, Sundanese, Swahili, Tajik, Turkmen, Tatar, Uyghur, Urdu, Uzbek, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zulu

GKE

You can now use image streaming in GKE to reduce image pull time and improve overall application startup and autoscaling performance. For more information, see Use image streaming to pull container images. 

Storage Transfer Service

Storage Transfer Service now offers Preview support for agent pools. You can use agent pools to create isolated groups of agents as a source or sink entity in a transfer job. This enables you to transfer data from multiple data centers and filesystems concurrently, without creating multiple projects for a large transfer spanning multiple filesystems and data centers.

Storage Transfer Service now offers Preview support for exporting data from Cloud Storage to a POSIX file system. You can use this bidirectional data movement capability to move data in and out of Cloud Storage, on-premises clusters, and edge locations including Google Distributed Cloud. For more information, see Download data from Cloud Storage.

 




Microsoft Azure Releases And Updates
Source: azure.microsoft.com
 

Azure VMware Solution now generally available in the Germany West Central Azure region

Azure VMware Solution has now expanded availability to Germany West Central, this update is in addition to the existing availability multiple Azure regions in US, Europe, Australia, Japan, UK, Canada, Brazil and Southeast Asia (Singapore).

 

General availability: New Azure Data Explorer output plugin for Telegraf

This new output plugin allows you to write telemetry collected by any of the input plugins of Telegraf directly into Azure Data Explorer e.g. it makes SQL monitoring at scale better and affordable.

Private preview: Azure OpenAI Service combines access to powerful GPT-3 language models with Azure’s enterprise capabilities

Apply advanced language models to a variety of use cases with Azure OpenAI Service.

PowerShell 7.1 runbook support in Azure Automation available in public preview

 

Use PowerShell 7.1 for infrastructure automation & orchestration scenarios across Azure & non-Azure environment through Azure Automation runbooks.

Azure Automation support for Managed Identities is now generally available

Use Managed Identities to authenticate runbooks to any Azure service that supports Azure AD authentication.

Public preview: Azure Virtual Network Manager

Azure Virtual Network Manager (AVNM) is a one-stop shop solution for centralized network management across regions and subscriptions. AVNM allows you to easily create network topologies and high-priority security rules at scale in the public preview.

General availability: Run IBM WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on ARO and AKS

Automated solution templates to run IBM WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), jointly developed with IBM, are now available in the Azure Marketplace.

General availability: Run Oracle WebLogic Server on Azure Kubernetes Service

An automated solution template to run Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), jointly developed with Oracle, is now available in the Azure Marketplace.

General availability: API Management and Event Grid Integration

General availability of Azure API Management to publish events in Event Grid.

Azure trusted launch for Virtual Machines now generally available

Azure offers trusted launch as a seamless way to bolster the security of Generation 2 VMs. Designed to protect against boot kits, rootkits, and kernel-level malware, trusted launch is comprised of secure boot, virtual trusted platform module (vTPM), and boot integrity monitoring.

Azure Machine Learning - Ignite, November 2021 public preview announcements

New feature Azure Arc-enabled machine learning inference and data labeling with text classification using ML Assist capabilities are now available in preview in Azure Machine Learning

General availability: Bastion Standard SKU

Azure Bastion Standard SKU offers key capabilities for enterprises, unblocking critical customer scenarios.

Public preview: ExpressRoute private peering support for BGP communities

This support for BGP community tags on traffic sent from Azure to on-premises over ExpressRoute enables customers to set routing preferences and pursue a greater variety of hybrid network designs.

Public preview: ExpressRoute FastPath improvements

ExpressRoute FastPath now supports more network scenarios, enabling customers with more complex Azure environments to unlock the benefits of FastPath

Automatic VM guest patching is now generally available

Automatic VM guest patching provides safe and automatic patching for virtual machines to simplify update management and maintain security compliance

Logic Apps Standard Plan updates in general availability

Logic Apps Standard was released at Ignite 2020 and since then we have added a lot of features to enable better enterprise integration between mission critical systems on cloud, on premises, and in a hybrid way with runtime available on Azure, Azure Arc and locally. This post includes capabilities that are now generally available.

General availability: Native support for WebSocket APIs

Native support for WebSocket APIs is now available across all pricing plans of Azure API Management except Consumption. This will help you manage WebSocket APIs along with REST APIs in Azure API Management.

Public preview: GraphQL passthrough support in Azure API Management

GraphQL is increasingly seen as more efficient, flexible, and powerful way of working with APIs, as they have tremendous benefits such as faster performance, longer API call limit threshold, and lesser time retrieving data.

Public preview: Azure Virtual Machines DCsv3 and DCdsv3-series now available

New DCsv3 and DCdsv3-series Azure Virtual Machines transform the state-of-the-art for confidential workloads

Public preview: New Azure Arc capabilities in November 2021

Azure Arc is announcing new functionality, which includes improved machine learning capabilities, and new features for Azure Arc-enabled data services.

General availability: Azure Monitor container insights for Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes

Azure Monitor container insights for Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes is now generally available. You can now monitor all Kubernetes, AKS or non-AKS through container insights.

Azure SQL—general availability updates for early November 2021

General availability enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL Managed Instance in early November 2021.

Private preview: New Azure Arc capabilities in November 2021

 

Azure Arc is announcing new functionality, which includes enhanced lifecycle management on VMware and Azure Stack HCI virtual machines.

Azure Applied AI Services | Azure Cognitive Search updates now generally available

Azure Cognitive Search has expanded language and regional availability.

Azure Applied AI Services | Azure Video Analyzer updates in public preview

Azure Video Analyzer now has new cloud-based capabilities that deliver low-latency available in preview.

Public preview: Near real-time analytics for telemetry, time series, and log data on Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse data explorer is optimized for efficient log analytics, using powerful indexing technology to automatically index structured, semi-structured, and free-text data commonly found in telemetry data.

Additional ML options for Spark on Azure Synapse now in public preview

Save time and reduce risk when batch scoring in Azure Synapse Analytics with the new PREDICT keyword.

Public preview: Azure Chaos Studio - Systematically improve resilience with controlled chaos

Improve the resilience of your applications by deliberately introducing faults that simulate real-world outages. See how your Azure apps respond to different failures through controlled chaos engineering experimentation – in testing or production – to understand and ultimately mitigate resilience gaps.

General availability: IoT Central - Organizations

IoT solution builders can now build an IoT solution once and onboard multiple tenants into it – keeping cost down and reducing management overhead.  

Public preview: OpenID Connect integration between Azure AD and GitHub Actions

Developers can secure their deployments to Azure through OpenID Connect integration between Azure AD and GitHub Actions

Autoscale public preview is now available for Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Virtual Desktop now supports autoscale for pooled host pools to help you optimize costs.

Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI public preview is now available

With Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI, you can maintain full control over your infrastructure and enjoy the advantages of Azure Virtual Desktop in your own datacenter, including a full Windows 10 and 11 desktop experience for users with multi-session or single session support to optimize cost and performance.

Public preview: Azure Purview’s Integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Prioritize sensitive data in cloud workloads using Azure Purview’s Integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

New orchestration mode for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets now generally available

Increase the availability at scale of business-critical applications with new Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets features. Simplify workload deployment, management, and scalability with Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode, now generally available.

Limited preview: New Azure Virtual Machines deliver increased storage throughput for data-intensive workloads

Microsoft is announcing the upcoming preview of Ebs v5 and Ebds v5 Azure VMs, a new memory optimized VM series that delivers up to 300% increase in remote storage performance compared to prior generation VMs. The increased storage throughput is ideal for data-intensive workloads, such as large relational databases, high-performance OLTP scenarios, and data analytics applications.

General availability: New Azure Virtual Machines deliver increased performance for a broad range of workloads

The new Dv5 and Ev5 Azure Virtual Machines feature 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processors and deliver better price-performance compared to prior VM generations. The latest Dasv5 and Easv5 VMs - based on the 3rd Generation AMD EPYCTM 7763v (Milan) processor - now include options without local disk storage for lower-cost entry points. All these new VMs are now generally available and target general-purpose and memory-intensive workloads.

Azure App Service Environment v3 support for Windows Containers is now generally available

Migrate on-premise apps that require custom configuration to App Service Environment v3.

Azure App Service - Diagnostic settings feature reaches general availability

Send web app and platform logs on App Service to Azure Monitor, enabling new observability scenarios.

General availability: Version updates for Azure App Configuration libraries

Push refresh and feature management among new capabilities for Java Spring Boot applications.

Azure Service Bus large message support reaches general availability

This new capability removes need for workarounds and enables migration of legacy payloads to Azure

General availability: Provisioned throughput increase for Azure Ultra Disk Storage

The provisioned throughput for Azure Ultra Disk Storage has been increased to 4,000 MB/s per disk.

General availability: Centralized management of keys for encrypting Azure disks

Centralized management of keys for encrypting Azure disks is now generally available, allowing you to manage encryption keys centrally in a subscription and encrypt disks and snapshots in other subscriptions in your organization.

New capabilities introduced for disk pool (public preview) for Azure VMware Solution

 

Disk pool enables you to access Azure Disk Storage for high-performance, durable block storage for your Azure VMware Solution workloads. We are introducing new enhancements to disk pool to improve availability, cost-efficiency, and management.

Public preview: Cross-region snapshot copy for Azure Disk Storage

Cross-region snapshot copy is now in preview, allowing you to copy disk snapshots to any region for disaster recovery scenarios.

Live resize of Azure Disk Storage in public preview

With live resize of Azure Disk Storage in preview, you can dynamically increase your disk size without any downtime to your application.

Open Service Mesh add-on for AKS is now generally available

Use the service mesh capabilities from Open Service Mesh (OSM) integrated natively with the AKS managed service offering.

Azure SQL: Public preview updates for early November 2021

Public preview enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL Managed Instance in mid-September 2021.

General availability: AKS support for Secrets Store CSI driver

Easily integrate secrets stores into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) so you can securely access your secrets via the container’s file system.

Public preview: Industry-aware analytics with database templates in Azure Synapse

Database templates in Azure Synapse enable you to integrate and shape data from across multiple internal and external sources. This helps you eliminate data silos and accelerate building analytics-infused applications for your specific industry.

Azure Service Operator v2 release is now generally available

Use Azure Service Operator to provision resources within Kubernetes and implement self-service resource provisioning for your application developers.

Public preview: Self-service Access Management in Azure Purview

Azure Purview will enable data consumers to initiate access requests to data stored in Azure Storage or Azure SQL DB.

Public preview: Azure Container Registry connected registry for IoT Edge

You can now synchronize container images from your cloud registry and serve them on-premises for use by IoT devices and use the connected registry in an disconnected setting up to 90 days.

Public preview: Explore your Amazon RDS data in Azure Purview

Azure Purview, the unified data governance solution, expands its multi-cloud coverage with support for Amazon RDS.

Public preview: Azure Container Apps

This week Azure announced the public preview of Azure Container Apps. Run and scale modern apps using a fully managed serverless container service built for microservices.

 

Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB: Custom partitioning support in public preview

Partition your data in analytical store using keys that are critical for your business logic to achieve better query and data load performance.


Public preview: gMSAv2 security policy support for Kubernetes workloads on Windows

AKS will now take care of GMSA configuration, as well as maintaining trust during scale operations in the Windows nodepool.

Azure Machine Learning public preview announcement Ignite, November 2021

New feature Azure Arc-enabled machine learning inference and data labeling with text classification using ML Assist capabilities are now available in preview in Azure Machine Learning.

Public preview updates to Azure SQL Managed Instance boosts performance, scale, and flexibility

New investments in Azure SQL Managed Instance bring more performance, scale, and flexibility to your SQL workloads in this latest significant update to the service.

Azure Cognitive Service for Language now generally available

Azure Cognitive Service for Language provides high-quality natural language capabilities, from sentiment analysis and entity extraction to automated question answering.

General availability: New troubleshooting experiences in Network Insights for VPN Gateway & Azure Firewall

 

Rich insights for additional networking resources in Azure Monitor.

General availability: Event Hubs Premium

Event Hubs Premium comes with reserved compute, memory, and storage resources, which increases the performance and minimizes cross-tenant interference in a managed multi-tenant PaaS environment.

General availability: Log Analytics Workspace Insights in Azure Monitor

Log Analytics Workspace Insights provides rich insights on usage, performance, health, agents, queries, and a change log.

Public preview: Manage your Log Analytics data export rules in Azure portal

Data export rules in Azure Monitor log analytics can now be configured and managed directly via Azure Portal with ease.

Cost saving recommendations in Azure Advisor for Azure Cosmos DB now generally available

Refer to the Azure Advisor recommendations for possible cost savings in Azure Cosmos DB, which are calculated based on historical usage patterns.

Azure Cosmos DB: Server side retries for Cassandra API in public preview

Enable server-side retries for the Cassandra API with Azure Cosmos DB to enjoy a better experience when ingesting data.

General availability: EventHub action in Azure Monitor action groups

The new EventHub action enhances your alert configuration capabilities.

Public preview: Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Exporters

Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Exporters provide a vendor-neutral way to instrument your application and send telemetry to Application Insights.

Azure Cosmos DB Logic Apps Standard Connector in public preview

Use the new built-in Azure Cosmos DB Logic Apps Standard Connector with a trigger for the change feed and several actions to enable high throughput data processing with low latency.

Azure Cosmos DB: Partial document update now in general availability

Send update requests and only pass the data that has changed for an item with partial document update in Azure Cosmos DB.

Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra service now generally available

With Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, scale on-premises Cassandra data to the cloud with automated deployment, scaling, and management operations for open-source Apache Cassandra datacenters.

Provisioned throughput spending limit for Azure Cosmos DB in general availability

You can now set a hard limit on the total throughput provisioned across a single account in Azure Cosmos DB.

Link feature in Azure SQL Managed Instance now in limited public preview

The link feature in SQL Managed Instance reimagines SQL Server database replication to enable application migration with minimal downtime and offloading read-only workloads to secondaries in the cloud.

On-demand disk bursting for Azure Premium SSDs now generally available

On-demand disk bursting is now generally available for Premium SSDs, allowing you to scale performance to meet demand whenever needed and optimize costs.

Public preview: Dapr extension for AKS

You can now easily provision Dapr on AKS clusters. No need to download Dapr tooling and manually installing and managing the runtime on AKS clusters.

Azure Cache for Redis: Redis 6.0 supported in general availability

Azure Cache for Redis now supports Redis 6.0, which includes several new features and commands that enhance developer productivity and ease of use.

Public preview: AKS node pool user start/stop feature

Easily stop node pools and restart with a single command.

Install Azure Service Operator via Visual Studio Code extension for AKS

You can now quickly install Azure Service Operator for your AKS clusters using Visual Studio Code extension for AKS by passing on Service Principal credentials.

New indexing metrics for Azure Cosmos DB in general availability

Identify which indexes your queries utilized and then view the recommended new indexes in Azure Cosmos DB.

Public preview: NAT gateway integration with AKS

Provision a NAT gateway is now easier with AKS clusters.

Azure Backup: Multi-user authorization for Backup is now in public preview

Multi-user authorization for Backup provides enhanced protection for your Recovery Services vaults against unauthorized critical operations.

General availability: Stream Analytics now offers support for Availability Zones with Dedicated Cluster

Azure Availability Zones enabled Stream Analytics allows you to run mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures. 

Public preview: Metrics and Metric alerts for Azure Backup

Azure Backup now provides built-in metrics to enable you to monitor the health of your backups and write custom alert rules on these metrics.

Gateway Load Balancer now in public preview

Gateway Load Balancer enables you to deploy, scale, and enhance the availability of third party network virtual appliances (NVAs) in Azure with ease 


 

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