New year, new Azure things to digest! Here are our key take-aways of the January batch of Azure-related information pieces:

Highlights ⭐️

• Key auto-rotation in Azure Key Vault (Preview)  
  • Many Azure services let you manage your own encryption keys in Key Vault for data at rest. Now it’s going to super easy to rotate customer-managed keys with new auto-rotation feature.

• Managed Certificate support for Azure API Management (Preview)  
  • Managed certificate support for Azure API Management is now in public preview. This enables customers to easily and quickly secure their custom domains with a free certificate provisioned, managed, and automatically renewed by Azure API Management. 

Governance

• Azure policy support for Azure Site Recovery (GA)  
  • You can now use Azure Policy to enable Azure Site Recovery for your virtual machines (VMs) at scale and ensure organisational standards. Once you have a Disaster Recovery policy created for a given subscription or resource group(s), all new VMs that are added to that subscription or resource group(s) will have Azure Site Recovery enabled automatically. You can do the same for existing VMs in your resource group(s) through Policy Remediation.

Monitoring

• One-minute frequence log alerts (GA)  
  • Log alerts with one-minute frequency, the alert query will be evaluated every minute to check the condition, reducing the overall time to fire of a log alert.

Automation

• Powershell & CLI have now support for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery (GA)  
  • You can protect your workloads and enable backup for your data sources from command line.

Certifications

• Exam Sandbox
  • Are you new to Microsoft Certification exams? Not sure what to expect? We have just the thing to help you become familiar with the question types that you may see on the exam, how to navigate the user interface, and much more.

Databases

• Auto-failover groups for Azure SQL Hyperscale (Preview)  
  • Azure SQL Hyperscale service tier is a highly scalable storage and compute performance tier.  Auto-failover group feature is built on top of active geo-replication. Auto-failover group feature allows you to group databases and failover into replicated region without making application configuration changes.

Compute

•  Containerd support for Windows in AKS (GA)
  • Containerd container runtime has been the default runtime for Linux node pools since Kubernetes version 1.19 in AKS. Now Containerd has Windows node pool support.

Search

• Azure Semantic Search in Cognitive Search (Preview)  
  • Semantic search is a collection of query-related capabilities that bring semantic relevance and language understanding to search results

Content delivery

•  Accelerate your websites with Azure Static Web Apps enterprise-edge (Preview)  
  • Azure Static Web Apps combine web hosting of static content and integrated API support provided by Azure Functions. It also has free SSL certificates for your custom domain and simple deployment from GitHub & Azure DevOps. Now with a flick of a switch you can enable caching of your assets at 118+ edge locations.

Blogs articles

• How I Got Pwned by My Cloud Costs (Troy Hunt)  
  • Creator of Have I been Pwned service Troy Hunt writes about his caching struggles and costly Azure storage egress bandwidth charges.