Improving agility, performance, and resilience with new Azure infrastructure capabilities

As our customers move beyond immediate crisis needs, such as enabling remote work, many are accelerating cloud adoption to increase competitive advantage and stay more digitally resilient. Enabling an agile, scalable, high-performing, and reliable infrastructure is critical to long-term success. Microsoft is committed to continuous innovation in Azure IaaS capabilities to help customers achieve these goals.

Today, we are announcing new updates to our Azure infrastructure portfolio that help address a wide range of customer needs.

Increase agility with access to more choices and flexibility

Being responsive to rapidly changing business requirements is more important than it has ever been. Organizations need choices and flexibility in their cloud investments to stay agile. New innovations in Azure provide our customers with even more options, and these updates give customers the ultimate flexibility they need.

More options to run memory-intensive workloads. New Msv2 medium memory virtual machines (VMs), available in preview, enable customers to achieve up to a 20 percent increase in central processing units (CPU) performance and access up to 192 vCPU and 4TiB of memory. New Azure Dedicated Host stock keeping unit (SKUs), available soon in preview, let customers run a broader range of memory-intensive workloads in a single-tenant, hardware-isolated environment.

Simplified acquisition of compute capacity at deep discounts. New Azure Spot Virtual Machines (Spot VMs) features, in preview, help customers drastically improve the overall runtime of scale-out apps by letting Azure try and redeploy previously evicted Spot VMs as part of a scale set. Customers can also simulate evictions to test app behavior to ensure tolerance to interruptions.

More options to scale hybrid and edge deployments. The integration of VMware SD-WAN and the Azure Virtual WAN hub, available in preview, allows customers to easily connect branch offices and remote locations to Azure through VMware SD-WAN and take advantage of a complete Secure Access Service Edge solution. Azure Route Server—now in preview, helps customers streamline operations between any networking appliance and Azure’s virtual network by facilitating dynamic routing.

New capabilities to manage Linux environments. Last fall, we launched Azure Automanage to help customers greatly simplify Windows virtual machine management in Azure. We are now extending Azure Automanage capabilities to Linux Virtual Machines, giving customers the convenience to manage Windows and Linux VMs through one control plane. Additionally, the preview of Azure native integration with Elastic allows customers using Elastic services on Azure to access integrated billing, full technical support, and Azure portal integration.

Scale business-critical apps and improve performance

Many customers are migrating to the cloud to scale their most demanding workloads to achieve efficiency and performance gains. Azure offers one of the fastest networks with the broadest global footprint, enabling customers to build and deploy apps anywhere. We continue to innovate and make it easier for customers to increase workload scale and performance.

Simplified network resource distribution with new Azure Load Balancing capabilities. The new Azure Load Balancing selection tool, now in preview, offers customers guidance to choose the right services based on their workloads and requirements. We’re also increasing flexibility to load balance across IP addresses with Azure Load Balancer, now generally available.

More options to scale deployments with new Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets features. Customers can simplify application deployment, management, and scalability while improving uptime with the recently introduced flexible orchestration mode. Customers can also gain greater operational agility by changing virtual machine sizes without redeploying the scale set and optimize costs by mixing Spot VMs and pay-as-you-go virtual machines within the same scale set.

Scaling disk performance with new performance tiers on premium SSDs. With the new capability in preview, customers can sustain a higher level of performance for planned events, such as a seasonal promotion, and change performance tiers without disruption to their workloads.

Strengthen business continuity with new reliability and security enhancements

Azure provides built-in high-availability and disaster recovery options to ensure maximum resilience for all workloads. We continue our infrastructure investments, including expanding our already leading number of regions and availability zones and are launching new services to keep apps and data resilient and secure on Azure.

Improving high availability with new on-demand capacity reservations. On-demand capacity reservations, now in preview, enable customers to reserve compute capacity for one or more virtual machine size in an Azure region or Availability Zone for any length of time. Customers can also combine capacity reservations with Reserved Virtual Machine Instances to greatly reduce costs.   

Increasing workload portability and availability. Azure Resource Mover, now generally available, lets customers seamlessly move resources between public Azure regions. Customers can also increase workload availability with protection in the event of a zone failure with Zone Redundant Storage support for Premium and Standard SSDs, available in preview.

Built-in backup management at scale with Azure Backup Center. Azure Backup Center, now generally available, supports all Azure-based workloads supported by Azure Backup and offers new Azure policies to deploy backups at scale based on resource groups and tags.

Protection for data-in-use with Azure Confidential Computing. Customers can harden workloads and protect against malicious attacks with Trusted Launch for all Azure Virtual Machines, available in preview. We’re also safeguarding sensitive data in Azure with the preview of SQL Always Encrypted secure enclaves and enabling secure orchestration of confidential containers on Azure Kubernetes Service, now generally available.

Protection for apps and data with auto-key rotation. With the preview of the new feature, customers can automatically update all disks, snapshots, and images, and ensure their data is always secured with the latest encryption key.

Accelerate cloud migration with confidence

We help customers accelerate cloud migration with first-class migration tooling, support, skilling, and resources. We are adding new capabilities to Azure Migrate and Azure Migration Program based on customer feedback.

Centralized migration across all infrastructure, apps, and data. With new features in Azure Migrate, customers can now assess their SQL Server estates with the preview of discovery and assessment for SQL Server migration to Azure SQL. Additional new features include the general availability of PowerShell support for migration of VMware virtual machines and the preview of a new app containerization tool allowing customers to migrate .NET and web apps to Azure Kubernetes Service. Plus, customers have access to more migration options with the addition of our newest partner, Zerto.

Application modernization for all source application frameworks. Customers can now take advantage of proactive guidance and expert help with expanded support for all major source frameworks, such as Java and LAMP, and PostgreSQL scenarios through the Azure Migration Program.

Source: microsoft.com