Welcome to Azure Digest! Here you can find the most important Azure updates and highlights for May 2022, hand-picked by our advisors & developers.

⭐️ Highlights⭐️

• Azure Container Apps (GA)
  • Azure Container Apps is a managed serverless container service which offers an ideal platform for application developers who want to run microservices in containers without managing infrastructure.
• Azure Synapse Link for SQL (Preview)
  • Azure Synapse Link for SQL automates the extraction and movement of data from your relational operational data stores in both Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2022 to Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pools. Once in Azure Synapse Analytics, the data can be used in advanced analytics and other downstream processing systems much faster than traditional batch-based ETL or ELT scenarios.

Web application firewall

• Manage Azure Web Application Firewall policies in Azure Firewall Manager (Preview)
  • You can centrally create and associate Web Application Firewall (WAF) policies for your application delivery platforms, including Azure Front Door and Azure Application Gateway.

• Regional WAF Updates
  • Advanced customization with per rule exclusions: Exclusions can be applied to a rule, set of rules, rule group, or globally for the entire ruleset, providing increased flexibility to help reduce false positives and meet application-specific requirements.

Databases

• Enhanced elasticity features for Azure Cosmos DB (Preview)
  • New features:
    • Increased serverless capacity to 1 TB.
    • Shared throughput across database partitions.
    • Support for hierarchical partition keys.
  • Shared throughput across database partitions:
    By default, Azure Cosmos DB distributes the provisioned throughput of a database or container equally across all physical partitions. However, scenarios may arise where due to a skew in the workload or choice of partition key, certain logical (and thus physical) partitions need more throughput than others. Redistributing throughput across partitions helps you achieve better performance without having to configure your overall throughput based on the hottest partition.

Storage

• Object replication on premium blob storage
  • Low latency premium block blob account type now supports object replication.

Networking

• Azure Arc-enabled servers support for private endpoints (GA)
  • Private endpoints for Azure Arc-enabled servers enable you to manage your Windows and Linux servers from Azure without sending network traffic over the public internet for enhanced security. Servers can be configured to use a private endpoint by associating them with an Azure Arc Private Link Scope and connecting your on-premises network to an Azure virtual network using a site-to-site VPN or Express Route.

• Azure DNS Private Resolver (Preview)
  • Azure DNS Private Resolver is a new service that enables you to query Azure DNS private zones from an on-premises environment and vice versa without deploying VM based DNS servers.

Functions

• Durable functions support for managed identity for Azure Storage (Preview)
  • You can connect to Azure storage with durable functions using the managed identity of the Function app instead of embedding secrets in the connection string.