MICROSOFT AZURE

INTERCONNECTING MICROSOFT AZURE AND ORACLE CLOUD

Microsoft and Oracle have partnered up to deliver a highly-optimised, best-of-both-clouds experience. In a press release in June Microsoft announced a ‘cloud interoperability partnership enabling customers to migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads’ across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

Some of the new capabilities you can look forward to are:

Connect Azure and Oracle Cloud seamlessly , allowing customers to extend their on-premises datacentres to both clouds.

, allowing customers to extend their on-premises datacentres to both clouds. Unified identity and access management , via a unified single sign-on experience and automated user provisioning, to manage resources across Azure and Oracle Cloud.

, via a unified single sign-on experience and automated user provisioning, to manage resources across Azure and Oracle Cloud. Supported deployment of custom applications and packaged Oracle applications on Azure with Oracle databases deployed in Oracle Cloud.

on Azure with Oracle databases deployed in Oracle Cloud. A collaborative support model to help IT organisations deploy these new capabilities while enabling them to leverage existing customer support relationships and processes.

AZURE BACKUP FOR SQL SERVER 2008 IN PREVIEW

SQL Server 2008 might be reaching end of life this month but for those customers who are choosing to migrate their workloads to Azure there’s another surprise from Microsoft. Azure Backup is an enterprise-scale, zero-infrastructure solution that protects SQL Server on Virtual Machines (VM) in Azure without the need to deploy and manage any backup infrastructure. This offering is already generally available for more recent SQL Server versions, but last month Microsoft announced Azure Backup support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 end of support is now in public preview.

Benefits of Azure Backup. Source: Microsoft

INTELLIGENT PERFORMANCE FOR AZURE DATABASE FOR MYSQL NOW IN PREVIEW

Azure Database for MySQL now provides preview support for Intelligent Performance, which includes three distinct features: query store, query performance insights, and performance recommendations. These features work together to provide you with the ability to better understand your workloads, identify bottlenecks, and visually inspect your workloads. Use this functionality to view a list of recommendations that will help improve the performance of your workloads.

ANNOUNCING THE PREVIEW OF AZURE BASTION

‘We need an easy and integrated way to deploy, run, and scale jump-servers or bastion hosts within our Azure infrastructure’

Microsoft certainly listened to our requests leading up to the preview of Azure Bastion! For many of us, securely connecting from the outside to workloads and VMs on private networks can be challenging. Exposing VMs to the public Internet to enable connectivity through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH), increases the perimeter, rendering your critical networks and attached VMs more open and harder to manage.

Azure Bastion is a new managed PaaS service that provides seamless RDP and SSH connectivity to your VMs over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This is completed without any exposure of the public IPs on your VMs. Azure Bastion provisions directly in your Azure Virtual Network, providing bastion host or jump server as-a-service and integrated connectivity to all VMs in your virtual networking using RDP/SSH directly from and through your browser and the Azure portal experience. This can be executed with just two clicks and without the need to worry about managing network security policies.

Limit public exposure of VM IPs with Azure Bastion. Source: Microsoft

NEW ZONE-REDUNDANT VPN AND EXPRESSROUTE GATEWAYS NOW IN PUBLIC PREVIEW

You can now deploy VPN and ExpressRoute gateways in Azure Availability Zones. This physically and logically separates them into different Availability Zones protecting your on-premises network connectivity to Azure from zone-level failures. Additionally, Microsoft have made fundamental performance improvements including reducing the deployment time to create a virtual network gateway.

By adding support for Azure Availability Zones Microsoft is bringing increased resiliency, scalability, and higher availability to virtual network gateways.

STORAGE AUTO-GROW FOR AZURE DATABASE FOR MYSQL NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

In June, Microsoft announced that Azure Database for MySQL users can opt-in to storage auto-grow, which is now generally available. With auto-grow enabled, Azure Database for MySQL will automatically increase the size of the provisioned storage of users’ database servers. As a result, there’s no longer a need to worry about rightsizing when beginning to use these services or about running out of storage.

AUDITING FOR AZURE DEVOPS NOW IN PUBLIC PREVIEW

Auditing for Azure DevOps gives you the ability to monitor activities and changes throughout your organisation. When an auditable event occurs, a log entry is recorded. These events may occur in any portion of Azure DevOps and include information such as who caused the event to be logged and their IP, what happened, and other useful details that can help you answer the who, what, when, and where questions.

Auditing for Azure DevOps. Source: Microsoft

FASTTRACK FOR AZURE NOW AVAILABLE

Bringing proven practices, design principles and tools from engineering and real customer experiences, FastTrack for Azure guides customers from design, configuration, and development to production. As of right now FastTrack is only available to customers who are:

Located in the US, Canada, New Zealand, UK, France, Latin America or Western Europe

Have an identified FTA-supported Azure project with expected consumption per project of > incremental USD 5,000/month or equivalent in local currency once fully ramped (within 12 months) and intent to deploy in the near term

Have an active paid Azure subscription.

Benefits of FastTrack for Azure. Source: Microsoft

NEW MANAGED INSTANCE CONTRIBUTOR ROLE ENHANCES SECURITY OF AZURE SQL DATABASE MANAGED INSTANCE

Introducing the new Azure RBAC role Managed Instance Contributor designed with a minimum set of managed instance and networking permissions required to provision and operate managed instance. This enhances security and enterprise compliance, as only individuals authorised to manage Azure SQL Database managed instance assets can be granted RBAC permissions through the new role.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Announcing the general availability of Azure premium files

Microsoft warns Azure customers of Exim worm

Azure SQL Database managed instance now supports larger regional resource limitations

Microsoft encourages hacking its cloud services with Safe Harbor

Enhanced management capabilities to release unused subnets and create databases available for Azure SQL Database managed instance