Cloud Platform Release Announcements for September 24, 2018

Azure Governance | Governance Announce

Azure is the only cloud that enables speed while maintaining control through Azure Governance capabilities.

To learn more, read the full blog post and visit the Azure Governance page.

Azure IoT Central | GA

Please read the full blog.

Azure Sphere | Public Preview

Learn more here and read the blog

AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) | Public Preview: ACS-Engine on Azure Stack

The ACS Engine provides users two ways to deploy Kubernetes to Azure Stack, recently certified as a Kubernetes Cloud Provider:

• Marketplace: Users simply fill out a few parameters to deploy a Kubernetes cluster to the Azure Stack
• Command Line: Users download the ACS-Engine tool from GitHub, specify a few parameters for a custom Kubernetes cluster definition that generates an ARM template and deploy it to Azure Stack

For more information about deploying Kubernetes on Azure Stack, visit:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-stack/user/azure-stack-solution-template-kubernetes-deploy

To download the ACS Engine tool and to learn about its capabilities, visit https://aka.ms/azsacseng.

Application Gateway/WAF | Azure App Gateway autoscaling Public Preview

Application Gateway is pleased to announce public preview of autoscaling functionality as part of the new zone redundant SKU, in all public Azure regions. With this support, customers no longer need to choose an instance count or size when deploying Application Gateways. Customers can now deploy an autoscaling Application Gateway which can scale up or down automatically based on application traffic load requirements. Autoscaling also takes into account zonal resiliency and spreads its instances across Azure Zones to provide higher resiliency, availability and scale. In addition, application gateway natively integrates with autoscaling backend like VMSS, thus providing end to end elastic experience to the customer.

Azure DNS | Azure DNS Alias Records – GA

Azure Firewall | GA

Azure Firewall Product Page

Azure Firewall Documentation

Azure Frontdoor Service | Public Preview

Perched at the edge of Microsoft’s global network, Azure Frontdoor service’s global anycast based network of “battle-tested” POPs located close to end users hosts your domain and offloads SSL, protects against DDoS, reduces latency and increases throughput for dynamic global web applications.

You can also easily scale-out and join your distributed microservice backends into a single, global application using HTTP load balancing and path-based routing rules.  Automate turning up new regions and scale-out with API-driven global actions and independent fault-tolerance to your back end microservices in Azure—or anywhere.

To help keep your service safe, Azure Frontdoor service stops network and application layer attacks at the edge with global application firewall and built-in DDoS protection.

Azure Frontdoor is your one secure entry point for delivering globally performant highly scalable apps.

For more information please visit the Azure Frontdoor service overview page.

Azure security and operations management | Protect data in use with Confidential Computing

Large Disks | Large Disks - Public Preview

We are announcing the Public Preview of new Azure Managed Disks SKUs with greater storage capacity and increased performance. We are increasing the sizes and throughput associated with our Azure Managed Disks offerings. Specifically:

• All existing Azure Managed Disk offerings (Premium SSD, Standard SSD and Standard HDD) will now feature 8, 16 and 32 TiB disk sizes
• Premium SSD performance will now reach up to 20,000 IOPS and 750MBps
• Standard SSD and Standard HDD performance will now reach up to 2,000 IOPS and 500MBps

These capabilities will allow our customers to significantly expand storage capacity while simplifying management and achieving better performance. We are now in public Preview in the West Central US region and we plan to include additional regions in the near future.

For more information please refer to our blog , or the Azure Disks FAQ. Pricing details can be found on our website.

Azure Policy | Azure Policy CI/CD features public preview

For more information you can check the blog post or the Azure Policy page

Azure security and operations management | Azure to Azure Site Recovery

We're extending Azure Site Recovery to support the failover of applications running within Azure. The features you’ve used for replication and disaster recovery from on-premises to Azure are now available from one Azure region to another. You can create recovery plans and test failovers, between Azure regions, and replicate your applications to any other region. Set up Azure-to-Azure site recovery in a few minutes and have full confidence that it meets your compliance needs.

Learn more about Azure Site Recovery between Azure regions.

Azure security and operations management | New monitoring capabilities in Azure Monitor

• One metric, One log and One alert – A consistent, consolidated experience for metrics, logs and alerts across all tools
• Insights for resource groups - Shows the state of all resources in a resource group in a single view. It is the full stack view that you always wanted! If your application has any issues – whether it be in the code, or a container or a VM or anything else, you should see it immediately in the resource group view.
• Insights for virtual machines - Provides an in-depth view of all your VM’s.  You can get the performance and a map of the dependencies and interactions between VMs and other services (if you liked the Service Map feature, you will love this new Map view!). Plus, we are introducing a new notion of health for VM’s.

In addition to these features, we are announcing several more exciting new capabilities. Read our blog post to learn more.

Azure security and operations management | Security Center updates for workload protection

Azure Ultra SSD | Ultra SSD - Public Preview

Ultra SSDs can deliver unprecedented and extremely scalable performance with sub-millisecond latency for business-critical workloads:

• Choose a disk size from 4GiB up to 64 TiB
• Achieve the optimal performance you need per disk even at low storage capacities
• Scale performance up to 160,000 IOPS and throughput up to 2 GB/s per disk without restarting your virtual machines using our flexible and innovative architecture

Please note that while in Public Preview the offering may not be available in all regions.

For more information please refer to the engineering blog, and our Azure Disks webpage.

Azure CDN Standard Microsoft Tier | GA

We are happy to announce that the Azure CDN Standard Microsoft tier is now GA within the Azure CDN ecosystem of CDNs.

Azure CDN Standard Microsoft makes Microsoft’s own global Edge and CDN network available to you.  Now with 62 locations in 57 countries with 16 regional caches strategically placed on Microsoft’s global network, Azure CDN Standard Microsoft enables more consistent, more predictable cache fill performance by providing direct access to your content in Azure from each CDN edge location.  With new features such as on-by-default Regional Caching and Bring-your-own-SSL Certificate you have more options to better tailor your services, improve performance and reduce load on your origins.

Azure Virtual Machines | NVv2 - Public Preview

Pricing |  Azure Virtual Machines

We are announcing the Public Preview of NVv2 Azure Virtual Machines, which have been architected to support remote visualization workloads and other graphics intensive applications.

The new NVv2 will feature up to 448GiB of RAM - twice the amount of memory present in the prior NVv1 generation - and are backed by the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU. The NVv2 VMs also support Premium SSDs.

The NVv2 VM is in Preview now. For more information including regional availability refer to our blog and sign up to request access to this new VM during the Preview period.

Azure Digital Twins | Public Preview disclosure

As detailed in the announcement blog post, the Public Preview of Azure Digital Twins is another step taken in the direction of addressing our customers’ needs and helping them navigate their digital transformation through IoT.

To learn more, read the full blog post and visit the Azure Digital Twins webpage.

Virtual WAN | GA

Additionally, a feature available only in the Virtual WAN will enable the ability for branches to access resources connected to the ExpressRoute circuit and vice-versa. This enables a new class of capabilities between branches connected over VPN and sites, VNets, and customer premises connected over ExpressRoute.

Windows Server | Windows Server 2019 Launch

• Unique hybrid capabilities with Azure: Extend your datacenter to Azure to maximize existing investments and gain new hybrid capabilities.
• Advanced multi-layer security: Elevate your security posture by protecting the datacenter starting with the Operating System
• Faster innovation for applications: Enable Developers and IT Pros to create cloud native, modernize their traditional apps using containers and micro-services
• Unprecedented Hyper-converged Infrastructure: Evolve your datacenter infrastructure to achieve greater efficiency and security.

Find more information.

Azure VNet | Azure Virtual Network Tap

Network packet brokers or aggregators: Gigamon, Bigswitch, Ixia,

Security tools: ExtraHop, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Nubeva

Application and Network Performance management tools: Netscout

ExpressRoute | ExpressRoute Direct - Public Preview

ExpressRoute Direct will allow you to find the best location or locations where you require 100Gbps of capacity, generate a letter of authorization to physical connect in our peering location, complete physical testing of ports, and create many circuits on the physical ports.

ExpressRoute provides customers with the ability to privately connect utilizing a service provider in our over 50 peering locations to a either a virtual network or a Microsoft public service, like Azure SQL or Storage. This provides customers with increased reliability and speed, lower latency, and private connectivity bypassing the Internet and connecting to Microsoft’s global network.

ExpressRoute Direct changes the way that customers access public cloud at hyperscale with the fastest private edge connectivity in the world.

ExpressRoute | ExpressRoute Global Reach

Virtual WAN | Point-to-site VPN connectivity in Virtual WAN

Application Gateway/WAF | Azure AppGW Zone Redundancy

Application Gateway is pleased to announce Public Preview of a new zone redundant SKU in all public Azure regions. Customers can now deploy a single Application Gateway whose instances are spread across multiple Azure Zones, offering customers increased zone failure resiliency and high availability. Customers can choose to deploy into single or multiple zones during provisioning time in Azure regions where Zones are available.

This SKU also offers customers better provisioning and update time as well as up to 6 times increase in SSL termination performance! Support for Static VIP is also available by default in this SKU. Customers can avail benefits of above features by choosing this SKU in all public Azure regions. In regions where Azure Zones is not available they will not be able to use zone redundancy, but still be able to avail benefits of other features of this SKU.

The new SKU is available with portal, PowerShell, CLI, and ARM templates support. This platform would also support autoscaling, which is currently in preview form. All customers would benefit from moving to the newer platform which will offer many more enhancements in future.

Azure Advisor | New recommendations and tighter integrations

As detailed in the blog post announcing the release, the new recommendations will advise you when you could boost performance for Azure SQL Data Warehouse by creating or updating table statistics and correcting data skew in your tables, better protect your data from accidental deletion by enabling soft delete on Azure Storage blobs, take advantage of the latest security features and more by migrating to Azure Resource Manager from Azure Storage accounts, and avoid single points of failure with Azure ExpressRoute circuits when using Microsoft Peering for Office 365. We have also enabled a tighter integration between the Azure Virtual Machines experience in the Azure portal and Advisor and started surfacing Advisor cost recommendations in Azure Cost Management.

To learn more, read the full announcement and visit the Azure Advisor webpage.

Azure Service Health | Immediate alerting on resource health events

As detailed in the blog post announcing the release, you will now be able to configure alerts to notify you via email, SMS, push notification, webhook, and more when changes in the health status for individual resources occur, so you can stay better informed about the availability of your resources minute by minute and whether an issue is due to a problem on the Azure side or your own.

To learn more and get started, read the full announcement blog and visit the Azure Service Health webpage.

Azure IoT Edge | Public Preview - Extended offline feature

To learn more, please read the announcement blog.

Azure DDOS Protection | Azure DDoS Protection new features

The Mitigation Report will provide a summary of the details at the end of the DDoS attack. This will contain the details of the traffic that was mitigated. Customers can turn on mitigation reporting for the specific VIPs they want to receive the report by enabling the diagnostic settings on the VIP. We will provide an incremental report every 5 minutes, summarizing the mitigation in that 5 minutes; and provide a post-mitigation report when the attack and mitigation stops.

Existing Azure DDoS Protection customers can use the features at no additional cost.

For more information, including pricing details, please visit the Azure DDoS Protection documentation page and Pricing page.

Azure Network Watcher | Network Watcher - Application Gateway support

You can now enable Connection Monitor and Connection Troubleshoot with Application Gateway as the source and monitor your connectivity from your Application Gateway to any Destination (Virtual Machine, URI, FQDN, IPv4 Address)

Connection Monitor and Troubleshoot can either be initiated from Portal or through REST API, PowerShell, CLI and SDK.

Azure Traffic Manager | A/AAAA Records Support in Azure Traffic Manager GA

Customers can use this capability to route traffic to endpoints that do not have a DNS name associated with them. Furthermore, this also decreases the overall DNS lookup latency by removing the need to do a second DNS query to get an IP address of a DNS name returned.

This feature is now generally available and there are no additional costs to use it.

Azure Traffic Manager | Custom Header Support in Azure Traffic Manager GA

One of the ways in which this new capability benefits customers is by having health checks to endpoints in a multi-tenant environment be routed correctly to their destination. Another way this helps customers is by adding unique headers that can be used to identify Traffic Manager originated HTTP(S) requests and processes them differently.

This feature is now generally available and there are no additional costs to use it.

ACR (Azure Container Registry) | ACR Ignite 2018 Disclosure

Specifically, we are announcing:

• General availability of the ACR build feature: ACR Build enables inner-loop development in the cloud with on-demand container image builds, and automated builds on source code commit and base image update. You can trigger container image builds automatically when code is committed to a Git repository, or when a container's base image is updated. With base image update triggers, you can automate your OS and application framework patching workflow, only available with Azure, to maintain secure environments while adhering to the principals of immutable containers.
• Public preview of the ACR Tasks feature: As customers build and patch their containers, testing before deployment is key to managing a secure and stable environment. With tasks, customers can define a series of steps to build, validate and deploy their applications and services.
• Public preview of ACR support for Docker’s content trust model: Consumers of the container images need to be able to verify both the publisher (source) of the data, as well as ensure it's not been modified after it was published (integrity). Today, Azure Container Registry supports both by implementing Docker's content trust model, only available with Azure. As an image publisher, content trust allows you to sign the images you push to your registry. Consumers of your images (people or systems pulling images from your registry) can configure their clients to pull only signed images. When an image consumer pulls a signed image, their Docker client then verifies the integrity of the image. In this model, consumers of the container images are assured that the signed images in your registry were indeed published by you, and that they've not been modified since being published.
• Public preview of Helm repositories – As customers deploy multi-container applications, Helm has evolved as the defacto standard to describe Kubernetes-based applications. With Helm repositories, customers can push their Helm Charts to ACR, providing a single source of truth for their images and deployment definitions running in Kubernetes.
• Public preview of Open Container Initiative (OCI) Support– ACR now supports OCI image format. Using projects like BuildKit, customers can build and push OCI formatted container images.

You can learn more from Azure Container Registry blog.

Azure IoT Hub | Device Provisioning Service additional capabilities

The latest major wave of functionality to automate device provisioning is now available in preview. We've taken your feedback on Device Provisioning Service, made changes, built features, and are happy to make the following features available in preview:

• Increased limit on number of CA certificates stored
• Increased limit on number of enrollments
• Symmetric key attestation support
• Re-provisioning support
• Enrollment-level allocation rules
• Custom allocation logic

Learn more.

Azure VPN | Zone Redundant VPN and ExpressRoute gateways

You can now deploy VPN and ExpressRoute gateways in Azure Availability Zones. This physically and logically separates them across different Availability Zones protecting your on-premises network connectivity to Azure from zone-level failures. Additionally, we have made fundamental performance improvements including reducing the deployment time to create a virtual network gateway.

ExpressRoute | NPM support for ExpressRoute

Enhancements to ExpressRoute monitoring capabilities in NPM, enables discovery and monitoring of multiple ExpressRoute circuits that may be distributed across several subscriptions belonging to an enterprise.

Enterprises with multiple branches connecting to their workloads in Azure via ExpressRoute, can now onboard all ExpressRoute circuits into
NPM, with a single click.  Bandwidth utilization data is available for each peered VNet, without the need for agents, in each of the VNet.

NPM is now available in East Japan region.  The complete list of regions is available online.

Load Balancer Standard | Outbound Rules

This new ability allows you to declare which public IP or public IP prefix should be used for outbound connectivity from your virtual network.  You can modify the default SNAT port allocations to fine tune your scenario.  New configurable outbound idle timeouts and bidirectional TCP Resets on outbound idle timeout provide more control and real time release of idle connections for more predictable application behavior.

Outbound Rules can be managed through Resource Manager templates, CLI, and PowerShell.

For more information, including pricing details, please visit the Azure Load Balancer Outbound Rules page.

Outbound rules charges as part of load balancing rules.

Load Balancer Standard | TCP Resets

This new ability allows you to visibility into when Standard Load Balancer terminates connections due to idle timeout.  When enabled, Standard Load Balancer will generate a TCP Reset packet to the client and server side of a TCP connection on idle timeout.  This allows applications more predictable behavior and detect the termination of a connection, remove expired connections, and initiate new connections.

TCP Resets can be enabled on Standard Load Balancers using Resource Manager templates, CLI, and PowerShell.

For more information, including pricing details, please visit the Azure Load Balancer TCP Reset page.

Azure Traffic Manager | Traffic Manager Custom Health Check Status Codes

These headers can be specified at a profile level to be applicable for all endpoints in that profile and / or at an endpoint level applicable only to that endpoint.

This will help customers load balance across endpoints that may respond with response codes other than the default value while being healthy.

This feature is now generally available and there are no additional costs to use it.

Azure Traffic Manager | Traffic Manager Multi value Routing Method GA

This will help customers with increased reliability in their client applications since multiple healthy endpoints are returned and if any endpoint is not responding, the client can retry another endpoint without having to do a new DNS lookup or timeout.

This feature is now generally available and queries against a profile marked with this routing method is charged at the same rate as other routing methods.

Azure VNet | Public IP Prefix

• Reduced management overhead: A Public IP Prefix enables you to associate your Azure resources with public IP addresses from a fixed range. Having knowledge of the range ahead of time eliminates the need to change firewall rules as you assign IP addresses to new Azure resources. This significantly reduces management overhead when scaling out.
• Simplified IP address management: When using public IP addresses from a prefix, the static public IP address comes from a pre-determined range. This enables ease of management when building a network in Azure. Instead of having to keep track of individual IPs, customers now merely need to know the size of their Public IP Prefix

A feature overview and getting started examples will be available at http://aka.ms/publicipprefix

Azure VNet | VNet Service Endpoint Policies

Combined with NSG service tags, this capability provides additional layer of security for VNets, allowing you to connect your VNets securely to access only specific service resources (say, Azure storage accounts)

The feature is available in preview for Azure Storage, in WestCentralUS and USWest2.

For more information, please visit the Azure Service Endpoint Policies overview page 

SQL Server 2019 | SQL Server 2019 - Preview

Azure SQL Database | SQL DB Managed Instance general purpose - GA

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | SQL Vulnerability Assessment

Azure Databricks | Azure Key Vault support with Azure Databricks

Azure Redis Cache | Larger cache size available - Public Preview

Azure Databricks | Azure SQL DW Streaming Support in Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks | Japan, India, Canada and Australia GA

Azure Databricks | Azure Databricks Delta Public Preview

With explosive growth in the volume of data being analyzed, the proliferation of different data types, and the need for real-time analytics, data pipelines have become extremely complex. Most customers build multi-stage pipelines that require resiliency at each step to handle issues like schema irregularities and conflicting writes. This complexity of solution leads to performance issues at scale. With Delta in Azure Databricks, customers can significantly simplify their pipelines. Delta is a transactional storage layer in Azure Databricks. Customers can interact with Delta by reading and writing data to Delta table, which is an optimized version of a Spark table. It stores your data in Parquet format and adds metadata that provides additional functionality over a Spark table. With this, customers get better reliability and higher performance on Spark jobs and queries in Azure Databricks. Delta also simplifies data pipelines by allowing both batch and streaming jobs to leverage the same table while providing data consistency. With Delta we are enabling customers to simplify building high performance analytics solution at scale using Azure Databricks.

With minimal code changes, customers can start taking advantage of Delta on Azure Databricks. It works with all existing APIs in Spark that customers use for Spark Tables. To get started with Delta on Azure Databricks, visit the Databricks Delta QuickStart notebook, and read more about Azure Databricks Delta and its capabilities in the Delta documentation.

Azure Cosmos DB | Cassandra API - GA

Azure Cosmos DB | Multi-Master - GA

Azure Cosmos DB | Reserved capacity - GA

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Smaller SKU for Compute Optimized Gen2 Tier

Azure Bot Service | GA

Bot Framework V4 SDK launches at Ignite.  It illustrates Microsoft’s commitment to providing the most comprehensive, end-to-end developer experience for building bots, as developers look to build enterprise grade bots and their own branded intelligent personal assistants.   It was first announced at Build in May 2018.

Read blog post here, and learn more here.

Azure HDInsight | GA of Enterprise Security Package for HDI 3.6

• Multi-user authentication using Active Directory or Azure Active Directory.
• Multi-user Zeppelin notebook with collaborative data science experience.
• Role based access control for Ambari operations.
• Fine grained role-based access control for Hive SQL and Spark SQL using Apache Ranger.
• Data masking of sensitive data using Apache Ranger.
• Seamless integration with file and folder level ACLs in Azure Data Lake Store Gen1.
• Audit all access to sensitive data as well as changes to access policies.
• Transparent server-side encryption at rest as well as encryption in transit.

Learn more about this feature here. To learn more about this service, please visit the Azure HDInsight webpage.

Azure HDInsight | Public Preview of HDInsight 4.0

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Flexible restore points

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Intelligent insights

SQL Data warehouse now provides built-in intelligence delivering recommendations to help ensure your data warehouse is consistently optimized for performance. The service analyzes the current state of your data warehouse, collects telemetry, and surfaces recommendations for your active workload on a daily cadence. These intelligent insights come at no additional cost, are tightly integrated with Azure Advisor, and are automatically available through the Azure portal.

Azure Databricks | AAD conditional access Public Preview

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | User defined maintenance scheduling

Azure Database for MariaDB | Azure Database for MariaDB - Preview

Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL | Performance recommendations for PostgreSQL - Preview

Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL | Query Performance Insights for PostgreSQL -Preview

Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL | Query Store for PostgreSQL - Preview

Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL | Threat Protection for MySQL and PostgreSQL - Preview

Azure SQL Database | Hyperscale - Public Preview

Azure HDInsight | BYOK Encryption for Kafka

We are announcing the public preview of Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK) for Apache Kafka on Azure HDInsight. With BYOK on HDInsight Kafka, encryption is a one-step process handled during cluster creation. This feature unlocks Kafka for customers for whom BYOK is a prerequisite for data at rest and allows customers to be confident in the security of their clusters. There is no additional charge for enabling this feature.

Azure HDInsight | Developer Tools enhancements for Spark

We are bringing several exciting new enhancements to developer tools for Apache Spark on Azure HDInsight. For the HDInsight Spark debugging toolset, we are adding new capabilities to visualize Spark job executions; access and manage data input, output, and table operations; and visualize execution utilization, among others. The HDInsight Development Toolkit features a cross-platform lightweight editor, Azure integration, support for PySpark, Apache Hive Integration, built-in templates for native authoring support for Scala and Java Spark apps, support for Apache Maven and Simple Build Tool (SBT) projects, and more. To learn more, please visit the Azure HDInsight webpage.

Azure Cosmos DB | JavaScript SDK 2.0 - GA

Azure SQL Database | Intelligent QP updates - public preview

Visual Studio App Center | Disclosure: Intune wrapper support

Power BI Desktop | GA

For more information, see the Power BI blog.

Power BI service | GA

• General availability of dashboard comments in Power BI service and mobile. Directly add comments to dashboards and specific visuals to discuss your data. Pull people into your conversation by @mentioning others within your organization. Commenting is tightly integrated with mobile, so those you’ve @mentioned will quickly receive a notification and email with your message.
• Preview launch of the Premium Capacity Monitoring App. This app supports capacity in monitoring the health of premium capacities and making sound decisions about the best use of them and when to scale them so that your users get the best possible experience.

For more information, see the Power BI blog.

Azure Files AAD Integration Public Preview | Public Preview

You can read more about the benefits of Azure Files AAD Integration and follow this step by step guidance to get started. We support Azure Files AAD Integration Public Preview in selected Azure production regions.

Azure Traffic Manager | Custom subnet routing GA

This will help customers vary the responses Traffic Manager returns based on the subnet from which the query originates. For example, using custom subnet routing a customer can make all requests from their corporate office be routed to a different endpoint where they might be testing an internal only version of their app.

This feature is now generally available and queries against a profile marked with this routing method is charged at the same rate as other routing methods.

Azure IoT Hub | Message routing additional capabilities

Azure IoT Hub message routing simplifies IoT solution development and enables you to send messages from your devices to cloud services in an automated, scalable, and reliable manner. Use routing queries to apply customized filters and send only the most relevant data to the service facing endpoints.

A new capability is now available in message routing that allows you to query on the device twin tags and properties, in addition to previously available queries on message properties and message body. Moreover, the new Azure portal experience for message routing delivers simpler navigation between routes and endpoints, making it an even better experience.

Try this tutorial to get started.

See how it works

Azure Database Migration Service: SQL to Azure SQL Database offline migration support

Azure Database Migration Service: Support for SQL to Azure SQL DB Managed Instance online migrations

Azure Search | Complex Types - GA

Microsoft R Server is now Microsoft Machine Learning Server

Azure Stream Analytics | Public Preview- C Sharp UDF for ASA on IoT Edge

We are announcing the public preview of C# user-defined functions (UDF) support for Azure Stream Analytics (ASA) on IoT Edge. C# UDF allow you to extend ASA’s SQL language with your own functions, enabling you to reuse existing code, implement custom logic to manipulate complex strings, or run mathematical or complex logic. With the Visual Studio tool for ASA, you can define and test your jobs locally—even when you’re offline, and then publish the ASA jobs to Azure. Easily deploy the ASA jobs to thousands of IoT devices using IoT Hub with just a few clicks.

Data Migration Assistant | GA

Now in preview, Data Migration Assistant (DMA) provides support to help you to migrate on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance. DMA detects compatibility and feature parity issues that can impact database functionality in target Azure SQL Database Managed Instance databases. More details: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53595

Azure DevOps Tool Integrations | Azure ACR Build plugin for Jenkins

The Azure ACR Build plugin provides the ability for secure Docker builds, even for customers using Azure Container Instances (ACI) agents in their Jenkins build pipeline.

To get started using Jenkins on Azure, visit the Jenkins on Azure developer hub, or visit our blog.

Azure Data Studio | GA

Today we’re pleased to announce Azure Data Studio, a new open source, cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the Azure Data family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Previously released under the name of SQL Operations Studio, Azure Data Studio offers a modern editor experience for managing data across multiple sources with fast intellisense, code snippets, source control integration, and an integrated terminal. Azure Data Studio is engineered with the data platform user in mind, with built-in charting of query result-sets and customizable dashboards.

Azure Data Studio is complementary to SQL Server Management Studio with experiences around query editing and data development while SQL Server Management Studio still offers the broadest range of administrative functions and remains the flagship tool for platform management tasks.

Azure Data Studio will continue to be updated on a monthly bases and currently offers built-in support for SQL Server on-premises and Azure SQL Database, along with preview support for Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Data Warehouse and SQL Server 2019 Big Data. Learn more:

Documentation

Product Page

Announcing Windows Virtual Desktop, the best virtual desktop experience, delivered on Azure

Windows Virtual Desktop enables customers to get the best virtual desktop with the richest Windows 10 and Office 365 experience. It enables you to remote the full desktop or specific apps to any device.
This service hosts the virtualization management and desktop and application images on Azure. We are also introducing a highly scalable, special multi-user edition of Windows 10, in addition to Windows 7 Enterprise with free Extended Security Updates, Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows Server 2012 R2+, and compatibility with Win32 applications.

For more information on Windows Virtual Desktop, please read the announcement blog and visit the Windows Virtual Desktop page.

Quickstart Center | Public Preview

Azure Quickstart Center updates

Earlier this year at our Build conference, we previewed Microsoft Azure Quickstart Center designed to help customers quickly start their projects in Azure with step-by-step guidance. During Ignite on September 24, we’ve shared enhancements to the Azure Quickstart Center experience helping customers set up their Azure environment with best practices and guidance from Azure.

As detailed in the Azure team’s blog post, Quickstart Center offers customers two options to get started:

• Create an Azure Service: learn as they build new workloads in Azure and quickly identify which service is best for their projects.
• Set up your environment: configure their cloud services with recommended best practices to secure, monitor and control their Azure environment.

To learn more, read the full blog post. Azure Quickstart Center is currently in preview.

Azure Logic Apps | Preview Logic Apps extension for Visual Studio Code

A new Logic Apps extension for Visual Studio Code is now available in preview that enables developers to do more with a first-party development experience. The extension is designed for developers who prefer to do their application integration work in the context of familiar development tools, and provides the support to:

Create, edit, and manage logic apps and integration accounts from any development platform that Visual Studio Code runs on (Linux, Windows, Mac).
Take advantage of the Visual Studio Code development experience, including IntelliSense and advanced debugging.
Encompass application integration code into existing DevOps practices using Azure DevOps.
To top it off, we’ve open-sourced the Logic Apps extension for Visual Studio on GitHub as well.

Learn more.

Azure Premium Blob Storage | Public Preview

Azure Premium Blob Storage introduces a new performance tier in Azure Blob Storage, complimenting the existing Hot, Cool and Archive tiers. Data in Premium Blob Storage is stored on solid-state drives, which are known for lower latency and higher transactional rates compared to traditional hard drives.

Premium Blob Storage is ideal for workloads that require very fast access times.  This includes most scenarios with a human in the loop, such as interactive video editing, static web content, online transactions etc. It also works well for workloads that perform many relatively small transactions, such as capturing telemetry data, message passing and data transformation.

Azure Premium Files is now available in preview

Azure Premium Files provides fully managed file services, optimized to deliver consistent performance at 100 times improvement from the existing Azure Files. It's designed for IO intensive enterprise workloads that require high throughput and a single digit millisecond latency. With the introduction of Premium Files, Azure now offers you a choice for two types of shared files storage to fit your workload needs—premium and standard.

New Premium Files stores data on the latest solid-state drives (SSDs), which makes it suitable for wide variety of workloads like file services, databases, web infrastructure, content and collaboration repositories, analytics, home directories, high variable, and batch workloads, among many others.

Currently, Premium Files storage preview is available in the following regions, and we will be gradually expanding the region coverage:

• Central US
• East US 2
• West US

To sign up for the limited preview of premium file shares, complete the Premium Preview sign-up survey, and then submit a request to enroll your subscription for Azure Premium Files preview by running the following PowerShell.

Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowPremiumFiles -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage

It may take up to 5 business days to receive an approval. Depending on the demand and scenario fit, we may not be able to accommodate every request.

To verify successful registration approval, run the following command:

Get-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowPremiumFiles -ProviderNamespace  Microsoft.Storage

For the limited period in the preview, Azure Premium Files storage will be free. Refer to the pricing page for further details.

Learn more about Premium Files.