2025

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

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).

Posts

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 27th May 2024, grouped by Azure service.

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

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

Advanced Container Networking Services for AKS (Public Preview) : A new suite of services bringing advanced network monitoring and diagnostics to AKS clusters. Currently includes only Advanced Network Observability as its inaugural and foundational feature - more are planned.
- Advanced Network Observability is based on Hubble (itself based on Cilium, but both Cilium (with Kubernetes 1.29) and non-Cilium AKS data planes are supported). It uses Grafana and Prometheus for visualisation (Azure-managed or bring your own), and Retina on non-Cilium nodes (presumably as the eBPF ‘bridge’). It also supports all Azure CNI variants including kubenet.
Open Service Mesh deprecation : I noticed when looking through the AKS LTS docs that Open Service Mesh was noted as being deprecated. Looks like the CNCF are retiring it and Istio is currently the only option for an AKS-supported service mesh.

Deployment Stacks (GA) : Deployment stacks are an Azure resource type which provide a means of managing a collection of Azure resources as a single unit. They are designed to work primarily with Bicep, and are essentially a replacement for Blueprints (which never made it out of preview).

Reporting Capabilities for Azure Site Recovery (Preview) : Full-featured and customisable reports based on Azure Monitor logs. Available via Business Continuity Center, Recovery Services Vault and Backup Center
- Blog post
- Documentation
Monitoring improvements for ASR : An improved alerting solution for Azure Site Recovery, including default alerts via Azure Monitor. Brings ASR alerting into the Azure Monitor alerts space for a more consistent experience.
- Blog post
- Documentation

Availability portal metric (Public Preview) : Monitor SLA-compliant availability of Azure SQL databases in the Azure portal. Supported for DTU and vCore-based DBs at all service tiers, and for single DBs and elastic pools.
Update policy for Managed Instances (GA) : Choose the speed of updates for new SQL engine features for your managed instance:
- Always up to date (engine features deployed as soon as they are released in Azure, without waiting for the next major release of SQL Server) or SQL Server 2022 (follows the mainstream servicing lifecycle of SQL Server 2022, with no new SQL engine features deployed until SQL Server vNext is released).
- The former brings new functionality faster but keeps the database format changing (so e.g. restores or replication to other (‘on-premises’) SQL Server instances might break); latter keeps the SQL engine at 2022 (you still get Azure SQL platform updates) and maintains the database compatibility level, but no new features until SQL vNext.
- Can change from SQL 2022 policy to Always up to date, but cannot go the other way as DB format can’t be downgraded.

Posts

Summary of Azure snippets for the week commencing 13th May 2024, grouped by Azure service.

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

Azure services with highlighted updates this week:

Application Gateway v2 Basic SKU (Public Preview) : AG v2 gets a Basic SKU. Same base functionality and Capacity Units as Standard, with a slightly lower SLA (99.9% vs 99.95%), lower scaling maximums, and none of the advanced stuff (e.g. Private Link, URL rewrites). SKU comparison here. Presumably the fixed cost will be cheaper (once it’s out of preview and being charged for :-)

New version of AKS extension in Visual Studio Code : The AKS extension in Visual Studio Code has been updated to version 1.4.3. This new release includes general enhancements as well as a new command “Retina capture” (which uses the Retina tool Microsoft recently open-sourced).
AKS automatic use of Zone-Redundant storage to create managed disks when AKS cluster is deployed across availability zones : With Kubernetes 1.29 and built-in storage classes. As ZRS is more expensive than LRS, this can be overridden with a custom storage class.