Cloud Platform Release Announcements for July 25, 2018

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Azure App Service support for Java SE 8 on Linux now in preview

Azure App Service now supports Java SE 8 on Linux (in preview). Java web apps can now be built and deployed on a highly scalable, self-patching web hosting service where bug fixes and security updates will be maintained by Microsoft. Performance features include:

  • Fully managed enterprise platform: log aggregation, email notifications, Azure portal alerts. Version updates will soon include auto-patching.
  • Performance monitoring: Integrate with any application performance management (APM) product of choice to monitor and manage applications.
  • Global scale with high availability: 99.95 percent uptime with low latency, auto-scaling, or manual-scaling (up or out), anywhere in Microsoft’s global datacenters.
  • Security and compliance: App Service is ISO, SOC, PCI, and GDPR compliant.
  • Authentication and Authorization: Built-in authentication with Azure Active Directory, governance with Roll-Based Access Control (RBAC) to manage IP address restrictions.
  • Build automation and CI/CD support: Maven, Jenkins, and Visual Studio Team Services support will be available in the GA release.

There are three ways of deploying Java Web Apps on Azure: you can create them from the Azure portal; use a template; or create and deploy from Maven.

The Maven plugin for Azure App Service provides seamless integration into Maven projects and makes it easier for developers to deploy different kinds of Azure app services, including Java web apps on Linux. Prerequisites for this Java runtime is JRE 8. Learn more about Azure App Service.

Azure Event Grid | Availability in all public regions

Event Grid is now available in all public regions

Event Grid, which has been available to the public for several months now, is now available on all Azure public regions. Now customers all over the world can use this fully-managed intelligent event routing service to react to relevant events across both Azure and non-Azure services in near-real time from their preferred region in Azure.

Learn more about this announcement from this blog post.

Azure Event Grid | Development experience enhancements

Development experience enhancements for Event Grid

We recently made some enhancements to Event Grid. We've added retry policies and dead lettering support, as well as some portal UX improvements and SDK updates to support these capabilities. These improvements, plus the addition of Azure Container Registry as an event publisher, make for a better development experience.

Learn more about this announcement from this blog post.

Azure API Management | Integration with Application Insights—GA

The Azure API Management integration with Azure Application Insights is now available.

This integration enables you to troubleshoot and debug APIs more effectively by adding API Management telemetry to Application Insights.

In addition to a host of stability fixes identified during the preview, the following new features are now available:

  • Diagnostic settings at the global level (for example, for all APIs) and individual API level.
  • Fixed rate sampling to help reduce the volume of telemetry sent from API Management to Application Insights.
  • The option to always send telemetry when there is an error or exception, regardless of sampling settings.
  • Log headers and payload.

To learn more about this integration, check out this how-to guide.

Availability Zones support for Service Bus Preview

With Azure Availability Zones support for Service Bus, customers can build mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance using cloud messaging between applications and services.

Azure Availability support for Service Bus provides an industry-leading, financially-backed SLA with fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. The preview begins with Central US, East US 2, and France Central, and is available at no additional costs for all Service Bus Premium customers.

Learn how to explore Azure Availability Zones support for Service Bus.

User behavior analytics tools in Azure Application Insights—GA

At Microsoft Build 2017, we introduced the preview of a set of user behavior analytics tools for Application Insights. These tools help you track business metrics, investigate trends in usage, and design pages better. We've recently added more capabilities and are happy to announce that these tools are now generally available.

To learn more read the blog post.

System Center 1807 now available

Early in 2018, we added semi-annual release cadence to System Center so we can bring new capabilities to customers at a faster pace. We made the first semi-annual release, System Center 1801, available on February 8, 2018. The second semi-annual release—System Center 1807—is now available. The new release provides updates to the following products:

  • Operations Manager 1807.
  • Virtual Machine Manager 1807.
  • Data Protection Manager 1807.
  • Orchestrator/SMA 1807.
  • Service Manager 1807.

System Center 1807 is an update release and not a full build of the product. As a result, you need to apply it over System Center 1801.

Find more details about System Center 1807 here.

Azure security and operations management | The Security Center Adaptive Application Controls—GA

The Azure Security Center Adaptive Application Controls has two new improvements that are now generally available. First, get recommendations for new file types such as MSIs and scripts. Second, group virtual machines based on the similarity of applications running on them. Both enhancements are to improve the accuracy of the whitelisting policy that Security Center recommends for the virtual machines in a specific workload, and to make it even easier for you to block unwanted applications and malware.

To learn more about this feature, visit our blog.

Azure Cloud Shell—Browser-based text editor | Preview

Azure Cloud Shell now supports a browser-based text editor built on the same open-source Monaco Editor that powers Visual Studio Code. Launch it right from Cloud Shell by simply typing “code”. Your configurations and scripts will also sync to your CloudDrive storage for later. By combining a lightweight text editor with Cloud Shell’s environment, you can now write, deploy, and store files straight from your browser without any installs or additional authentication flows.

Learn more.

Azure IoT Hub | Manual failover in preview

IoT Hub manual failover is now available in preview. This feature allows you to failover an IoT hub instance from its primary Azure region to its corresponding geo-paired region.

Failures are possible in any software system, especially a distributed system, and it's important to plan for failures. The IoT Hub service implements redundancies at various layers of its implementation to safeguard its customers against transient failures and failures scoped within a datacenter. The service offers a high level of SLA using these redundancies. However, region-wide failures or extended outages, although remote, are still possible. The IoT Hub service provides cross regional automatic disaster recovery as a default mitigation for such failures. The recovery time objective (RTO) for this recovery process is from 2 to 26 hours. IoT solutions which can't afford to be down for so long can now use the manual failover feature to failover their IoT hubs from one region to another in a self-serve manner. The RTO for manual failover is from 10 minutes to 2 hours.

More details about this feature can be found in the article that outlines the HA/DR features of the IoT Hub service.

Use the how-to guide for manual failover as a step-by-step guide to perform manual failover for your hub, and check out the Internet of Things Show on Channel 9 to learn more about this feature.

Azure DNS | Increased SLA—GA

Azure DNS is now being offered at 100 percent availability SLA, guaranteeing that valid DNS requests will receive a response from at least one Azure DNS name server 100 percent of the time. With this announcement, Azure DNS becomes the first service in Azure to offer 100 percent SLA, backed by our diversity and geo redundant DNS serving infrastructure.

For details please refer to the SLA definition here.

Network Performance Monitor (NPM) now available in UK South region

Network Performance Monitor—a cloud-based network monitoring solution for cloud-only, on-premises, and hybrid networking environments—is now generally available in the UK South region. Monitor networks, ExpressRoute circuits, or URLs in any location using an NPM workspace, located in UK South region.

To learn more about Network Performance Monitor, visit our documentation page.

Azure Advisor | New recommendations now available

Additional recommendations are now available in Azure Advisor, your personalized guide to Azure best practices. Advisor is a free service in Azure portal that helps you optimize your Azure resources to reduce costs, boost performance, strengthen security, and improve reliability.

As detailed in the blog post announcing the release, the new recommendations will advise you when to switch to Azure Reserved Instances to save money, set up Azure Service Health alerts for personalized guidance on service issues, identify subscriptions that would benefit from technical support plans, and configure Traffic Manager for optimal performance and availability.

To learn more, read the full announcement and visit the Azure Advisor webpage.

Kubernetes made easy with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

In the short time period of just three years, Kubernetes has become the industry leading orchestrator for containerized workloads. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) not only takes care of infrastructure complexities, it also delivers a great Kubernetes experience in the cloud taking advantage of Microsoft's unique knowledge of enterprise requirements, and our heritage of empowering developers. During our engagements with customers spanning a multitude of domains and industries, we learned about the challenges they face when adopting containers and Kubernetes, what works and what doesn't. AKS and Kubernetes offer powerful use cases for migration of existing applications, building cloud-native microservices applications, IoT, Machine Learning, and more.

Visit this page to learn more about AKS use cases.

Get started easily with this sample code.

Azure Database for MySQL | MySQL 4-TB server storage—GA

Azure Database for MySQL: 4 TB server storage now available

If you're currently using Azure Database for MySQL, you can now create 4-TB servers, or update existing MySQL server storage to 4 TB, when using the general purpose or memory optimized pricing tier. With this increase in server storage, the service now supports even larger workloads and provides you with the peace of mind of knowing that you can easily accommodate future growth. Learn more.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL 4-TB server storage—GA

Azure Database for PostgreSQL: 4 TB server storage now available

If you're currently using Azure Database for PostgreSQL, you now have the ability to create 4-TB servers or update existing PostgreSQL server storage to 4 TB when using the general purpose or memory optimized pricing tier. With this increase in server storage, the service now supports even larger workloads and provides you with the peace of mind of knowing that you can easily accommodate future growth. Learn more.

Azure Cosmos DB | Change Feed support in preview

Change feed support in Azure Cosmos DB

Now available in preview, the change feed support in Azure Cosmos DB allows you to build efficient and scalable solutions. Change feed is enabled by default for all accounts. It outputs the sorted list of documents that were changed in the order in which they were modified. The changes are persisted, can be processed asynchronously and incrementally, and the output can be distributed across one or more consumers for parallel processing.

Learn more.

Azure Cosmos DB | Java Async SDK 2.0—GA

Azure Cosmos DB Java Async SDK 2.0.0 now generally available

The Azure Cosmos DB Java Async SDK uses the popular RxJava library to add a new async API surface area for composing event-based programs with observable sequences. Version 2.0.0 changes the JSON serializer used by the SDK from org.json to Jackson.

Learn more.

Azure DevOps Tool Integrations | Updated Azure support in Ansible 2.6

The Azure engineering team is bringing increased native support to Azure for customers using Ansible. Ansible 2.6 was just released and it includes updates to network and virtual machine support as well as four new Azure modules, enabling management of Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure resources via the Azure REST API. Updates include:

  • Azure Kubernetes Service—Create, update, and delete an Azure Kubernetes Service.
  • Resource—Create, update, delete or get facts for any Azure resource using the Azure REST API.

We published three new tutorials to the Ansible Developer Hub with this release:

  • Create and configure AKS clusters. This article shows you how to use Ansible to create and configure an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster.
  • Create and configure virtual machine scale sets. This article shows you how to use Ansible to create and scale out a virtual machine scale set.
  • Deploy app to virtual machine scale sets. This article shows you how to deploy a Java application to avirtual machine scale set.

For more information about the capabilities available, please visit the Ansible on Azure developer hub.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) | Combined password reset and Multi-Factor Authentication registration

We're releasing a preview of a new experience that will allow you to register security info for Multi-Factor Authentication and password reset in a single experience. Now when a user registers security info such as their phone number to receive verification codes, that number can also be used to reset a password. Likewise, you can change or delete your security info from a single page, making it easier to keep information up to date.