Over the past three months, I have been leading a delivery engagement which has meant that I’m not as up to speed as I perhaps should have been on the latest enhancements to Microsoft Azure.
With this in mind, I thought I would share with you , the feature enhancements over the past few months that have had the biggest impact to the customers I work with.
Azure Service Health (Preview)
Planned and unplanned maintenance events are always a hot topic when educating customers on the use of cloud for IaaS as it’s a paradigm shift from the on-premises operating model.
Rather than having an email letting you know that West Europe is going to be patched in the future or checking the Azure Status URL, Microsoft have rolled this up into Service Health.
In a nutshell this lets you know what ongoing issues in Azure services are impacting your resources, provides you with a PDF summary of the issue for problem management.
Read more here.
Azure VM Configuration Changes (Private Preview)
Let’s face it a significant proportion of operational outages are caused by people making changes without following the correct internal procedures. To circumvent this, Microsoft have introduced Azure VM Configuration Changes which can track all Windows Services, Linus Daemons, Software by default.
Azure VM Configuration Changes also allows you to view changes in the last 30 minutes, hour, six hours, 7 days or 30 days so you can pinpoint when changes occurred to the VM.
See more here.
Azure Large Disks
One of the challenges around IaaS VMs was trying to fit existing file structures into or across multiple 1TB hard drives. This caused a few challenges for customers who had to rework GPO’s or migrate data to enable the use of file services within Azure.
Another significant challenge was using Azure Site Recovery to protect a VM with a hard drive larger than 1TB. To address both of these issues Microsoft have launchged 4TB for Azure IaaS VM’s,
Azure Application Gateway
Security is always a hot topic when it comes to cloud and Microsoft has fixed the gap it had between DNS based Global Site Load Balancing using Traffic Manager and Azure Load Balancer which worked at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP).
Azure Application Gateway acts as a Web Application Firewall to protect from common web attacks such as SQL injection, cross site scripting and session hijacks.
Read more here.
Faster Azure VPN Gateway
When customers embark on their cloud journey, it normally starts with a Site to Site VPN whilst ExpressRoute is put in place. A previous limiting factor with Site to Site VPN’s was the bandwidth limit and SLA.
Microsoft have resolved this by introducing a new series of VPN gateways appropriately titled VpnGw1, VpnGw2 and VpnGw3 which will provide an SLA of 99.95% with up to 1.25Gbsp throughput at the same cost as the previous gateways.
Read more here.
VMFocus 