Microsoft Cloud Updates (week of 24th Feb 2020)

#IaaS

Azure Virtual Network service endpoint policies feature is now available.

Azure Virtual Network service endpoint policies enable you to prevent unauthorised access to Azure Storage accounts from your virtual network.

Azure Load Balancer TCP resets on idle timeout is now available

Azure Load Balancer now supports sending bidirectional TCP resets on idle timeout for load balancing rules, inbound NAT rules and outbound rules. This is available in all regions.

Public IP prefix static IP addresses meter ID changes

Effective 1st April 2020, the resource GUIDs (also known as meter IDs) of public IP prefix standard static IP addresses in the US Gov region will change. There are no price changes.

Azure StorSimple 8000/1200 series will no longer be supported starting 31st December 2022

Microsoft has been expanding the portfolio of Azure Hybrid storage capabilities with new services for data tiering and cloud ingestion, providing more options to customers for storing data in Azure in native formats.

Virtual machines NVv4 series meter name changes

Effective 1stApril 2020, the meter names of Virtual Machines NVv4 series will change in West Europe and US South Central and US East regions when the service becomes generally available.

A8 – A11 Azure Virtual Machine sizes will be retired on 1st March 2021

As we continue to bring more modern and optimised virtual machine instances to Azure, on the latest innovations in datacentre hardware, so to must we thoughtfully plan how we retire aging hardware. With this in mind, we are retiring our A8 – A11 Azure Virtual Machine sizes on 1st March 2021.

We are retiring some Azure Site Recovery support options on 1st March 2023

As we continue to invest in Azure Site Recovery (ASR) capabilities, we are going to focus our engineering efforts on disaster recovery to Azure scenarios. As a result, we will be retiring the following Azure Site Recovery protection scenarios on 1st March 2023:

Between customer-owned sites managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
From sites managed by SCVMM to Azure

Azure Site Recovery data encryption feature will be retired April 30, 2022

The Azure Site Recovery data encryption feature will be retired on April 30, 2022. This will be replaced by the more advanced Encryption at Rest with Azure Site Recovery, which uses Storage Service Encryption (SSE).

#CloudSecurity

We are retiring Azure AD Domain Services classic VNET support on March 1, 2023

In 2017, Azure AD Domain Services became available to host in an Azure Resource Manager network. Since then, we have been able to build a more secure service using the Azure Resource Manager‘s modern capabilities. Because Azure Resource Manager deployments fully replace classic deployments, Azure AD DS classic virtual network deployments will be retired on March 1, 2023

Fileless attack detection for Linux is now in preview

As attackers increasing employ stealthier methods to avoid detection, Azure Security Center is extending fileless attack detection for Linux, in addition to Windows.

#AI-ML-IoT

Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision Read API v3.0 now in preview

Cognitive Services Computer Vision Read API of is now available in v3.0 (in preview). Read features the newest models for optical character recognition (OCR), allowing you to extract text from printed and handwritten documents.

Cognitive Services Bing Speech API is being retired 1st November 2021

To continue providing speech recognition and translation capabilities in your current Bing Speech applications, you will need to migrate them to Speech Services and the Speech SDK

Azure Security Center for IoT real-time operating system support

Azure Security Center for IoT now extends support for Azure real-time operating system (RTOS) in addition to Linux (Ubuntu, Debian) and Windows 10 IoT core operating systems.

A secure foundation for IoT, Azure Sphere now generally available

Azure Sphere, the end-to-end solution for securing IoT devices, is now generally available with integrated hardware, software and cloud services that work seamlessly to deliver active security by default.

#DevOps

Preview a fully parsed YAML document without running the pipeline

With this update, we have added a preview-but-do not-run mode for YAML pipelines so you can try a YAML pipeline without running it or committing it to a repo. This will let you see a fully parsed YAML document without running the pipeline.