Azure Digest - March / 2022

Welcome to our monthly Azure highlights! Here you can find the most important Azure updates, hand-picked by our Zure advisors & developers.

⭐️Highlights⭐️

Microsoft announces intent to build a new datacenter region in Finland
- Microsoft today announced it intends to build a new datacenter region in Southern Finland. To support customer needs for high availability and resilience, the new datacenter region will feature Azure Availability Zones, unique physical locations equipped with independent power, networking, and cooling for additional tolerance to datacenter failures.
The new Azure Front Door – a modern cloud CDN service (GA)
- The new Azure Front Door is a Microsoft native, unified, and modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) catering to dynamic and static content acceleration.
  
  There are two Azure Front Door tiers: standard and premium. They combine the capabilities of Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) and attach with Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF). This provides a unified and secure solution for delivering your applications, APIs, and content on Azure or anywhere at scale.

Update your Azure App Service .Net 3.1 apps to use Microsoft .NET 6 before 3 December 2022
- On 3 December 2022, extended support for Microsoft .NET Core 3.1 will end. After that date, your applications that are hosted on App Service will continue to run and your existing workloads will not be impacted. However, we'll no longer provide patches or customer service for .NET Core 3.1.

Bring your own IP ranges to Azure (GA)
- When planning a potential migration of on-premises infrastructure to Azure, you may want to retain your existing public IP addresses due to your customers' dependencies or established IP reputation. Public IP ranges can be onboarded to Azure as regional Custom IP Prefix resources, where they can be utilized in the same manner as Azure-owned public IP prefixes.

Inbound NAT rule now supports port management for backend pools (GA)
- Standard Load Balancer inbound NAT rule now supports specifying a range of ports for the backend instances. Previously, to enable port forwarding, an inbound NAT rule needed to be created for every instance in Load Balancer’s backend pool. This became complex to manage at scale and resulted in management overhead. Today, we are announcing the addition of port management for backend pool to inbound NAT rules. This allows you to specify a range of frontend ports pre-allocated for a specific backend pool to enable port forwarding.

Azure Private Link support in Azure API Management (Preview)
- Azure Private Link support in Azure API Management is now in preview. With this, incoming traffic to Azure API Management's gateway can be secured to clients running in a virtual network through Azure Private Link.

Azure Cosmos DB partition key advisor notebook (Preview)
- Use the Azure Cosmos DB partition key advisor notebook to choose the optimal partition key for your workload.

Always Encrypted for Azure Cosmos DB (GA)
- Encrypt sensitive data inside your client application before it gets stored in your database with Always Encrypted for Azure Cosmos DB. This means you can ensure that confidential parts of your data sets are only available to appropriate audiences and you can encrypt your data on-premises to comply with regulatory requirements.

Azure Bastion native client support (GA)
- Connect to your target Azure virtual machine via Azure Bastion using Azure CLI and a native client on your local machine. Log into Azure Active Directory-joined virtual machines using your Azure Active Directory credentials.

Azure AD recommendations (Preview)
- The Azure AD recommendations feature provides you personalized insights with actionable guidance to:
  - Help you identify opportunities to implement best practices for Azure AD-related features.
- Improve the state of your Azure AD tenant.