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Welcome to our August Edition of
Azure Insights: Monthly Round Up!

Authored by Anthony Norwood

Welcome to the second edition of Azure Insights: Monthly Round-up! We’re excited to bring you the latest updates and news from Microsoft Azure, designed to keep IT leaders like you informed and ahead of the curve.

In this edition, we cover a range of important updates, including the upcoming retirement of App Service Environment (ASE) v1 and v2 on August 31, 2024. If you’re using these versions, it’s crucial to have a migration plan to ASE v3 in place to avoid any disruptions.

We also highlight the new capability to centrally manage your App Service configurations, simplifying administration and reducing the risk of misconfigured applications.

See below for more detailed insights and updates in this edition. 

 

Retirement

App Service Environment v1/v2 Will Be Retired on August 31, 2024

App Service Environment (ASE) v1 and v2 will be retired on the 31st August 2024, and any remaining instances will be deleted.

What does this mean for you?

Customers using ASE v1/2 should urgently review and confirm that there is an active migration plan to ASE v3, as any remaining applications in ASE v1/2 will be deleted by Microsoft on or around the 31st August 2024.

Read full announcement here

 

General Availability (GA) Releases

Vaulted Backup For Azure Blob Storage

You can now backup Azure Blob Storage data to an Azure Backup vault for offsite data backup, allowing for quick data recovery and business continuity.

What that means for you?

Up until this announcement, data recovery for objects stored in Blob Storage was limited to the Soft Delete protections and Versioning capabilities of Azure Blob Storage. Now, like Azure Files, you’re able to back up blob storage containers and objects to a separate backup vault for better recoverability, security, and backup management.

Find out more here

 

App Configuration References On App Service

Centrally manage your App Service configurations, so that you can apply across multiple apps from a single configuration source.

What does this mean for you?

If you have common configurations between applications, for example connection strings or environment variables, you can now create a central configuration profile and apply against multiple App Services for ease of administration and reduce the risk of misconfigured applications.

Find more information here.

 

Backup And Restore Of Virtual Machines With Private Endpoint Enabled Disks

New capability to backup and restore Managed Disks with Private Endpoint/Disk Access enabled.

What does this mean for you?

If you protect your Managed Disks with a Disk Access policy to prevent public internet access, you’re now able to leverage Azure Backup for Virtual Machine disaster recovery strategies – giving you the ability to enhance your recoverability posture with cloud-native DR tooling.

Read more here

 

Encryption Using Customer Managed Keys For Backup Vaults

Customers can now bring their own encryption keys to encrypt the data in an Azure Backup Vault, as opposed to using a platform-managed key.

What does this mean for you?

Customers with regulatory, compliance or business justifications that require them to use Customer Managed Keys for encryption can now utilise Azure Backup for a cloud-native backup solution while maintaining control of the encryption keys used to secure the backup media.

Find more information here

 

Azure Virtual Network Manager Mesh and Direct Connectivity

Virtual Networks deployed and managed using Virtual Network Manager now support the ability to combine mesh and hub and spoke topologies where low latency is required between spoke vNETs.

What does this mean for you?

Convention tells us that you should deploy either a mesh or hub and spoke network topology to simplify deployment and ongoing management. Azure Virtual Network Manager has helped to deploy these topologies in the past, but now it supports a mix of them where it’s necessary to create low-latency connectivity between spoke networks with a minimum of hops.

Read full update here

 

Support For Azure Key Vault Certificates in Azure Container Apps

You can now store TLS/SSL certificates in Azure Key Vault for use with Azure Container Apps.

What does this mean for you?

Ease up management of your TLS/SSL certificates in use with Azure Container Apps by now storing them in Azure Key Vault. Take advantage of auto-rotation and the ability for your applications to retrieve the certificate using Azure Managed Identity, improving security while reducing complexity.

Find our more here

 

Azure Container Storage For Ephemeral (Local NVMe/Temp SSD) and Azure Disk

Azure can now manage the placement and lifecycle of persistent volumes (PVs) attached to Kubernetes workloads, offering both the local ephemeral storage of a node and the ability to use Azure Managed Disks.

What does this mean for you?

Simplify the management of your persistent volumes by offloading the heavy lifting to Azure – you can now manage your PVs directly in the Azure Portal and attach to your Azure Kubernetes Services clusters. Additionally you can leverage both Azure Managed Disks, for ultimate persistence, and Ephemeral Disks, for low-latency, local SSD performance.

Read more here

 

Azure Blob Storage Lifecycle Management Now Supports Improved Control on Archiving

Further improvements in lifecycle management for objects stored in the Archive tier, allowing you to control how long an object is kept rehydrated before archiving again.

What does this mean for you?

Previous lifecycle capabilities could potentially have dehydrated files into Archive storage before they should have been, necessitating additional rehydrates, or moving the file to a non-lifecycle managed container, adding complexity to your data lifecycle. This new capability now allows you to dehydrate files only after a certain amount of time has passed since it’s last rehydration – allowing you to simplify management, reduce costs, and ensure data has the correct tiering at the correct times.

Read full announcement here

 

ExpressRoute FastPath Support for Vnet Peering & UDR

FastPath enhances performance between on-premises and Azure Virtual Networks, unlocking up to 100Gbps connectivity to VMs deployed in a hub and spoke configuration.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re already using ExpressRoute or planning to in the future, FastPath will allow traffic from your on-premises endpoints to reach Azure-based endpoints directly, bypassing the gateway and removing hops from the route to improve network performance in both throughput and latency.

Read full announcement here

 

Azure Container Apps Support For Peer-to-Peer Encryption

Environment-level peer-to-peer TLS encryption is now available, enabling encrypted traffic between apps in a given Container Apps environment

What does this mean for you?

Where you have multiple applications in the same Azure Container Apps environment, you can now encrypt the internal traffic between them with an Azure-managed TLS/SSL certificate.

Read full announcement here

 

Delete or Reset Azure Site Recovery Replication Appliance

Recovery Services Appliances deployed in on-premises and non-Azure environments can now be reset or deleted from the Azure portal.

What does this mean for you?

Where you need to reset a Recovery Services appliance for use with a new set of workloads, you can now do this directly from the Azure portal. Where an appliance is no longer reporting as healthy, you can now delete it from the Azure Portal as well.

Read full announcement here

 

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Get in touch

If you have any questions about the updates in this post or if you would like to know more about our Microsoft Azure services please contact us. You can also subscribe to our monthly Azure Round Ups below so that you never miss an update.

 

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