Microsoft Cloud Updates (week of 10th Feb 2020)

#CloudSecurity

Native Azure Active Directory authentication support and Azure VPN Client now available.

Native Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication support for OpenVPN protocol and Azure VPN Client for Windows are now generally available for Azure point-to-site (P2S) VPN.

Azure Resource Manager template support for NSG flow logs.

Azure Resource Manager is a native and powerful way to manage your infrastructure as code. Now, Azure Resource Manager supports the deployment of network security group (NSG) flow logs through Azure Resource Manager templates. NSG flow logs are now an Azure Resource Manager resource so you have the ability to deploy flow logs programmatically and set up Azure Governance policies to verify that flow logs are enabled.

Introducing the new Azure Monitor Log Analytics table pane (Schema).

Azure Monitor Log Analytics schema allows you to easily understand our data structure and navigate Log Analytics to reach the content you need.

#IaaS

Azure Backup now supports Windows Server 2008 Virtual Machine backup.

You can now migrate your on-premises Windows Server 2008 to Azure, where you can continue to run and back them up on Azure virtual machines using Azure Backup. In Azure you will stay compliant, become more secure and add cloud innovation to your work.

#AI-ML-IoT

Azure Cognitive Services—New types added to Named Entity Recognition v3

The Named Entity Recognition (NER) v3 service (in preview) of Cognitive Services Text Analytics now has new entity types available, expanding the detection of general and personal information entities found in text.

Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics sentiment analysis v3 now supports Korean

The sentiment analysis v3 feature of Cognitive Services Text Analytics now supports Korean in addition to English, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German and Dutch.

#Serverless

Update servers and applications to TLS 1.2 by 13th March 2020

Update your servers and applications that communicate with Azure Container Registry to use transport layer security (TLS) 1.2 by 13th March 2020, to improve secure communication and to avoid any service

Kubernetes on Azure Stack in GA

We now support Kubernetes cluster deployment on Azure Stack, a certified Kubernetes Cloud Provider. Install Kubernetes using Azure Resource Manager templates generated by ACS-Engine on Azure Stack.

#DevOps

New Azure DevOps features include improved Azure Pipelines security with read-only variables

An update to Azure DevOps includes improved Azure Pipelines security with read-only variables and support for output variables in deployment jobs.

#Identity

Azure Active Directory Domain Services meter name changes

The meter names of Azure Active Directory Domain Services directory objects will change between 10th December 2019 and 1st February 2020. The name changes will be in effect to accommodate upcoming enhancements. This will not impact existing service behaviour, only the name you see on your bill.