Welcome back to monthly digest of latest highlights, blogs and tips from the Azure world. Here’s our collection of the month’s most relevant things to read and learn!

⭐️Highlights⭐️

• Configure cross-tenant access settings for B2B collaboration (preview)
  • Use External Identities cross-tenant access settings to manage how you collaborate with other Azure AD organizations through B2B collaboration. These settings determine both the level of inbound access users in external Azure AD organizations have to your resources, as well as the level of outbound access your users have to external organizations
  • Check out John Savill’s awesome video on the subject here.
• Introducing new and improved updates to SQL tools on Azure
  • Azure Data Studio gets new features: Table Designer (preview) & Query Plan Viewer (preview)

Databases

• User-Assigned Managed Identity support for TDE BYOK for Azure SQL
  • One of the benefits: Pre-authorize key vault access for Azure SQL logical servers or managed instances prior to server creation.

Monitoring

• Test action groups in Azure Monitor (preview)
  • Test if notifications are working as expected when creating or updating an action group.
• Azure Monitor predictive autoscale for Azure virtual machine scale sets (preview)
  • Predictive autoscale uses machine learning to help manage and scale Azure virtual machine scale sets with cyclical workload patterns. It forecasts overall CPU load to your virtual machine scale set, based on your historical CPU usage patterns. By observing and learning from historical usage, it predicts the overall CPU load ensuring scale-out occurs in time to meet demand.

• Alert processing rules in Azure Monitor (GA)
  • Alert processing rules allow you to apply processing on fired alerts. You can use alert processing rules to add action groups or remove (suppress) action groups from your fired alerts.

Storage

• Azure Monitor Diagnostic settings for Azure Storage (GA)
  • Azure Storage logs provide detailed information about successful and failed requests to the storage service and can be used to monitor individual requests and diagnose issues with the storage service.

Networking

• Azure Bastion now supports file transfer via the native client (preview)
  • Use either SSH or RDP to upload files to a VM from your local computer.
  • Use RDP to download files from a VM to your local computer.
• Application Gateway mutual authentication (GA)
  • Mutual authentication allows for two-way TLS certificate-based authentication, which allows both client and server to verify each other’s identity.

Virtual Machines

• Automatically delete a VM and its associated resources simultaneously (GA)
  • Automatically delete disks, NICs and Public IPs associated with a VM at the same time you delete the VM.

Functions

• Azure Tables extension for Azure Functions
  • “.NET customers can bind to types from Azure.Data.Tables”

Cost Management

• Cost Management anomaly detection for subscriptions (preview)

Blog articles

• Generate Bicep templates from existing Azure resources with VS Code (Tobias Zimmergren)
  • Use Visual Studio Code to conveniently generate Azure Bicep templates for your resources.
• Build a trusted authentication service for Azure Communication Services using Azure Active Directory (David de Matheu)
  • Azure Communication Services is designed with a bring-your-own-identity (BYOI) architecture.
    
    This new sample uses Azure App Service to authenticate users with Azure Active Directory (AAD), maps those users to ACS identities using Graph as storage, and finally generates ACS tokens when needed.