#Azure notable updates October 2023

The breaking news of October, at least for us in Italy, is the GA of the long awaited Italian region. Italy North is eventually available to deploy workloads into. Now to be honest I don’t expect a rush to the new region, based on customer provider and location we can probably get better latencies than west europe, but I think it’s nevertheless important to have a local region especially for Government and local administration.

The second notable news, is a new project form the Azure Incubation team lead by Mark Russinovich, project Radius. Radius is a cloud-native application platform that supports developers and platform engineers in collaborating on delivering and managing cloud-native applications that follow corporate best practices for cost, operations, and security by default. Radius is an open-source project that supports deploying applications across private cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, with more cloud providers to come. Radius enables developers to understand their applications and it knows your application is more than just Kubernetes. Radius helps developers see all the components that comprise their application, and when they add new components, Radius automatically connects those components to their application by taking care of permissions, connection strings, and more. Radius also ensures the cloud infrastructure used by applications meets cost, operations, and security requirements. These requirements are captured in recipes, which are defined by the IT operators, platform engineers, and/or security engineers that support cloud native developers. Radius binds an application to its dependent infrastructure, which enables Radius to provide an application graph that shows precisely how the application and infrastructure are interconnected. This graph enables team members to view and intuitively understand what makes up an application. Radius is open-source and multi-cloud from the start, and companies like Microsoft, BlackRock, Comcast, and Millennium BCP have worked together to ensure applications defined and managed with Radius can run on any cloud. Anyone in the open-source community can contribute to Radius, ensuring Radius evolves along with the broader cloud native community

Also important for us the is the General availability of Azure Update Manager, a SaaS solution to manage and govern software updates to Windows and Linux machines across Azure, on-premises, and multi cloud environments. We waited for the GA to finalize the integration with our own multi provider patching platform. The new Azure Update Manager offers:

• Assessment and deployment of software updates on a single machine or on multiple machines at scale, with consistent experience and security features.
• Scheduled patching with recurring time windows, automatic VM guest patching, and hotpatching options.
• Compliance monitoring and enforcement for update status, out of compliance machines, and periodic assessments.
• Custom reports for deeper understanding of the update data.
• Granular access management with Azure roles and identity to control update operations and schedules.
• Zero-step onboarding and simplified operations with native design on Azure Compute and Azure Arc for Servers platform.

Azure Update Manager is available at no additional charge for managing Azure VMs, and costs $5 per server per month for Arc-enabled Servers. To get started, search for Azure Update Manager in the portal.

Private preview of AKS Backup – Regional Disaster Recovery Capability:

• A feature to recover AKS cluster from backups in a secondary region in case of a regional disaster.
• Allows storing backup copy offsite, retaining data for long duration and restoring in case of tenant compromise.
• Node OS auto-upgrade channel: A feature that allows you to control the timing and frequency of node-level OS security updates on AKS clusters². You can choose from different channels, such as SecurityPatch, NodeImage, or None.
• Cluster auto-upgrade channel: A feature that allows you to control the timing and frequency of cluster-level Kubernetes version upgrades on AKS clusters. You can choose from different channels, such as node-image, rapid, stable, or none.
• Maintenance windows: A way to specify when you want the node OS auto-upgrades and cluster auto-upgrades to happen. You can use two separate sets of maintenance windows for each type of upgrade. You need to use a maintenance window of four hours or more for proper functionality³.

Azure Static web app traffic splitting allows you to divert a percentage of traffic to different branch environments. Traffic splitting is only available on the Standard hosting plan. With snippets for Azure Static Web Apps, you can specify code that will be injected into each page of your website without having to change your source code. Snippets are pieces of code that you can inject into the head or body elements of your web pages at runtime. You can use snippets to add functionality, analytics, tracking, or anything else that you need. Snippets are easy to use and manage. You just need to create a JSON file with the snippet code and upload it to your app’s configuration folder. You can also specify the scope and order of your snippets. However, snippets are not compatible with all front-end frameworks. Some frameworks may overwrite or ignore your snippet code. Therefore, you should always test your snippets before applying them to a production environment.

Microsoft Playwright Testing is a new service that allows you to run Playwright tests at scale in the cloud. Playwright is an open-source framework for end-to-end testing and automation of web apps. Playwright testing enables you to test your web apps across different operating system-browser combinations with high parallelization. This results in faster testing, quicker troubleshooting, and better quality.