Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 19th May 2025, 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 Bastion
• Azure DB for PostgreSQL
• Azure Functions
• Azure Site Recovery
• Azure Storage
• Cloud Services
• Compute
• Copilot
• FinOps
• Governance
• Infrastructure as Code

Azure Backup

• Vaulted backup for Azure Data Lake Storage (Public Preview) : Azure Backup now supports transferring your Azure Data Lake Storage backups to a vault. In this limited public preview, you can configure vaulted backups for block blobs in a HNS-enabled standard general-purpose v2 ADLS Gen2 storage account in specific regions (a very limited set at present).

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 2nd December 2024, grouped by Azure service.

It’s been a little while since I posted, and this one is a bit of a bumper one with MS Ignite having finished recently - a lot of Azure updates have dropped, along with other products. AI is unsurprisingly a big theme once again :-) Check out the Ignite 2024 Book of News for all the details.

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 3rd June 2024, grouped by Azure service.

GA = Generally Available
Public/Private Preview = as stated :-)

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

• API Management
• Azure Bastion
• Azure Load Balancer
• Azure Monitor
• Compute

API Management

• Audit logging in Developer portal (GA) : Audits user actions in the developer portal. Logs can be sent to a storage account, event hub or Log Analytics workspace (common pattern with diagnostic logs in Azure).

Azure Bastion

• Premium SKU (Public Preview) : Adds session recording and private-only deployment to the Standard SKU feature set. Private-only deployment is probably the major new feature here at the moment, though more features are apparently planned for Premium.

Azure Load Balancer

• Health Event Logs (Public Preview) : I can think of several instances when this would have been useful :-) Health event logging through Azure Monitor to help troubleshoot ALB issues. Supported for Standard (regional and global) and Gateway load balancers. A good augmentation to the availability metrics to get more detail - can be queried through Log Analytics and stored/parsed for historical data. UK South only for the preview.
• Admin State (Public Preview) : Override a Load Balancer’s health probe behaviour for each individual backend pool instance without making changes to network security rules or closing ports on a VM. ‘Maintenance mode’ for ALBs (or for the backends) essentially - no need now to modify NSGs or VM config to block connections when maintaining the backends. Only works when a health probe is configured. Documentation and blog post give more details on how it works. Preview available in all regions.

Azure Monitor

• Log Analytics Simple Mode (Public Preview) : Point-and-click analysis of logs without having to know KQL - very useful! KQL mode still available for full-featured querying and analysis. Part of the ’new’ Log Analytics experience.
• Kubernetes Metadata and Logs Filtering in Azure Monitor - Container Insights (Public Preview) : Enhances the ContainerLogsV2 schema with additional Kubernetes metadata. The Logs Filtering feature provides filtering capabilities for both workload and platform (i.e. system namespaces) logs coming out of containers. Visualise results with a Grafana dashboard.
  • Blog post
  • Documentation

Compute

• VM Hibernation (GA) : Hibernation allows saving on compute costs, but persists the VM’s in-memory state so apps etc. resume where they were left off (just like a physical machine hibernating). Available in all public regions.
  • Documentation
  • Blog post