Hello Cloud Gurus! Wondering what’s changed with Azure over the last month, but haven’t had the time to check the headlines? We’ve written an article with everything you need to know to keep in the loop.
Microsoft Ignite!
The biggest thing to happen over the last month with Microsoft Ignite 2022. We were gifted with multiple announcements, previews, GAs and much more. We covered initial impressions on the ground, as well as a round up post-event. So let’s jump into the most important things below.
P.s. if you’re more interested in the infrastructure announcements, Wayne Hoggett already has a great blog roundup you can find here.
Kubernetes news
Azure was not short on Kubernetes news! One of the biggest announcements in this space was the announcement of the hybrid deployment options for the Azure Kubernetes Service using Azure Arc. Now, organizations embracing a hybrid strategy can deploy both into the cloud but also into their own Azure-Arc-enabled datacenters while maintaining a single point of management with all of the Azure tools you currently use to manage your AKS clusters.
On the node limit front, if you are using the Uptime-SLA SKU for AKS, you will now be able to multiply the old limit of 1,000 nodes by a factor of 5. For those of you quick with the math, that does indeed mean that you can have up to 5,000 nodes in your AKS cluster.
Managing multiple AKS clusters across multiple regions also just became easier with the new service, Kubernetes Fleet Manager, which is currently in preview. With this new tool set, you can now centralize aspects of management and configuration for multiple clusters while also adding in the ability to do load balancing for some workloads across clusters.
Azure storage news
We have not one but two exciting storage announcements from Ignite. First up, we have a new storage service in preview! According to Microsoft, Azure Elastic SAN is the “industry’s first fully managed storage area network offering in the cloud”.
This service promises that it will bring together the SAN capabilities we love from our own data center and make that a reality with a truly cloud-native service. You get all of this along with being able to leverage either a locally redundant or zone redundant configuration for high availability.
Next, if you have enjoyed the goodness of Premium SSD v2’s with your virtual machines during the preview phase which launched back in July, you’ll be thrilled to learn that it is now generally available. This offering provides a large degree of flexibility when it comes to defining your exact storage needs including size, IOPS, and throughput.
Azure database news
The database world was not without its announcements at Ignite as well. First up, Cosmos DB has now gained PostgreSQL support. This one launched being generally available. This release comes with support for distributed tables utilizing the Citrus open source extension for Postgres. It even has a capability built-in to give you access to Azure Storage through a PostgreSQL extension.
We’ll stay with Cosmos DB for another set of announcements. While Cosmos DB already had MongoDB support, that support has improved greatly since Ignite. There were two key updates that you need to know about. First up, Microsoft increased the previous limit for document size from 2MB to 16MB. That means you can drop in eight times the data in each document you manage. In addition, you can now leverage role-based access control for accessing the data in your documents. If you want to take advantage of these updates on your existing databases, you’ll need to add these capabilities for your account.
Azure OpenAI
And finally, while we realize that Microsoft’s OpenAI service is still in limited preview and most of us don’t have access, we can all rejoice that it will now include the DALL-E 2 model. According to Microsoft, “Select customers can generate content, images and code to help users be more productive executing business-critical tasks.”
That’s all the big October Ignite headlines for Azure wrapped up!
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