Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 9th March 2026, grouped by Azure service. Seems to be a slow period for Azure updates at the moment, but I’ve gathered a few useful-looking items for this week.

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 2nd February 2026, grouped by Azure service.

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

• Azure Backup
• Azure Kubernetes Services
• Azure Storage
• Compute
• Infrastructure as Code
• Virtual Networks

Azure Backup

• Vaulted Backups for Azure Disk (Private Preview) : Disk backup finally gets a Vaulted tier along with the current Operational tier. The private preview introduces this along with regional disaster recovery to allow disk backups to be restored to a paired region.

Azure Kubernetes Services

• Deployment safeguards – pod security standard support in AKS (GA) : Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now supports Kubernetes Pod Security Standards within Deployment Safeguards, enabling centralized management of Baseline, Restricted, and Privileged standards at scale. This capability allows teams to ensure that deployment manifests comply with selected security standards, help technical practitioners strengthen workload security, reduce configuration drift, and simplify the rollout of cluster-wide security controls.

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 12th January 2026, grouped by Azure service.

Welcome to the first post of 2026! Bit of an unplanned hiatus due to busyness, then Christmas and New Year happened. Belated Happy New Year to my reader :-)

With it being the post-Christmas and New Year period, there hasn’t been too much happening in the Azure space lately, but I have spotted a couple of interesting developments in the latest AKS release and with the Power Platform. Also, Ignite took place last November - here’s links to the Book of News and a summary of updates in Azure since I didn’t get a chance to post them earlier on.

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 6th October 2025, grouped by Azure service. Smaller update this time around, but some significant retirements to check (especially if you use Cache for Redis), along with some exciting new features for Terraform IaC on Azure.

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 8th September 2025, grouped by Azure service. Back to more normal posting after a bit of time off!

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

• API Management
• App Service
• Application Gateway
• Azure Functions
• Azure Kubernetes Services
• Azure Service Groups
• Azure Storage
• Compute
• Logic Apps
• Virtual Networks

API Management

• Gateway level metrics and native autoscaling for Azure API Management v2 tiers (GA) : Available for Azure API Management v2 tiers: Basic v2, Standard v2, and Premium v2. These updates give you deeper visibility into gateway performance and enable automatic scaling based on real-time usage. Gateway-level metrics include CPU and memory usage per gateway instance, providing the insights needed for monitoring, diagnostics, and intelligent scaling. With these metrics, you can define autoscale rules in Azure Monitor to automatically increase or decrease gateway instances, ensuring consistent performance without manual intervention. Autoscaling helps maintain reliability during traffic spikes, improves operational efficiency, and optimizes costs by scaling in when demand drops.

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 11th August 2025, grouped by Azure service. Lots of AKS announcements this time, but there are a few other service updates as well (including one that I’ve personally been waiting a while for!).

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 28th July 2025, grouped by Azure service. No major announcements since my last post, but there have been a number of smaller ones of interest to users of specific services.

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 30th June 2025, grouped by Azure service. After the huge flurry of announcements around Build, things have been a bit quieter on the Azure front, so a short and sweet post this time!

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 16th June 2025, grouped by Azure service. After the flurry of announcements from and around Build, it’s a little quieter this week :-)

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated
RET = Service retirement

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

• API Management
• Azure Backup
• Azure Command Launcher
• Azure DB for PostgreSQL
• Azure Functions
• Azure Kubernetes Services
• Azure SQL

API Management

• Import from Azure AI Foundry to Azure API Management’s AI Gateway (GA) : This capability simplifies onboarding of large language model (LLM) APIs by enabling seamless integration through the Azure portal.

Azure Backup

• Increased Disk Capacity for Azure VM Backup (GA) : VMs can now be protected with individual disks up to 64 TB and a total of 512 TB per VM. This enables large disk support for business continuity and recovery from disasters or ransomware attacks. Reduces the need to exclude disks from a backup set to get a VM backup if you’re still running VMs with lots of disks.

Azure Command Launcher

• Azure Command Launcher for Java (Private Preview) : Announcing the private preview of jaz, a new JVM launcher optimized specifically for Azure. By setting JVM parameters tailored for cloud deployments, jaz reduces wasted memory and CPU cycles, improves first-deploy performance, and enhances cost efficiency. This is ideal for developers who want better JVM defaults without diving deep into JVM tuning guides, and  develop and deploy cloud-native microservices. Works with cloud-native and container workloads.

Azure DB for PostgreSQL

• In-place major version upgrade to PostgreSQL 17 on Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server (Public Preview) : You can now upgrade your Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server instance to PostgreSQL 17 using a simple, in-place upgrade — now available in public preview. This release allows you to move from previous PostgreSQL versions (14, 15, or 16) to PostgreSQL 17 without changing your server endpoint, reconfiguring your application, or performing manual data migration.

Azure Functions

• OpenTelemetry support (Public Preview) : Expanding on the limited preview announced last year, these enhancements deliver better observability, improved performance, and more detailed insights into your function executions, helping you diagnose issues faster and optimize your applications more effectively. For those already using OTEL with tools like Prometheus and Grafana, this makes it easier to integrate Azure Functions into your monitoring.

Azure Kubernetes Services

• AKS Release 2025-06-17 now available (GA) : Among other new features, Kubernetes 1.27 LTS version and 1.30 community version are going out of support by July 30th; Kubernetes 1.33 community version is going to be released before the end of June; AKS patch versions 1.32.5, 1.31.9 are now available; and API Server VNet integration has been rolled out to more regions (includes UK West, but unusually not UK South!).

Azure SQL

• Azure SQL Managed Instance faster management operations (GA) : You can now create and update your Azure SQL Managed Instance with improved speed and precision. The new faster management operations experience enhances elasticity by enabling you to provision any configuration of your instance in under 30 minutes — whether it uses default or custom settings. Update and scaling operations are similarly accelerated, completing in less than 60 minutes compared to the previous four-hour process. Applies to all service tiers, but not to zone-redundant instances.

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 26th May 2025, grouped by Azure service.

With Build taking place last week, a lot of announcements have dropped as usual, so this is a fairly big post. The Build 2025 Book of News has all the details of announcements from there. Plenty of AI focus as usual - I’ll cover some of the stuff that isn’t AI-related here :-)

For all the updates on Azure platform resources and products - Azure updates from Microsoft