This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: ITOps Talk Blog articles.
All is not quiet on the Azure news front one week prior to Microsoft Build. Many Azure services have been introduced or have become generally available this week. Here are the stories covered in this week's Az Update episode:
Azure Spot Virtual Machines is now generally available
Azure Spot VMs provide access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts. Spot pricing is available on single VMs in addition to VM scale sets (VMSS). This enables you to deploy a broader variety of workloads on Azure while enjoying access to discounted pricing compared to pay-as-you-go rates. Spot VMs offer the same characteristics as a pay-as-you-go virtual machine, the differences being pricing and evictions. Spot VMs can be evicted at any time if Azure needs capacity.
Azure Front Door Rules Engine now in preview
Azure Front Door (AFD) can now take advantage of new rules to further customize AFD behavior to best meet the needs of their customers. These rules bring the specific routing needs of your customers to the forefront of application delivery on Azure Front Door, giving you more control in how you define and enforce what content gets served from where.
Rules Engine for Azure Front Door covers several key scenarios, including:
- Enforce HTTPS - ensure all your end users interact with your content over a secure connection.
- Implement security headers to prevent browser-based vulnerabilities - like HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS), X-XSS-Protection, Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, as well as Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers for CORS scenarios. Security based attributes can also be defined with cookies.
- Route requests to mobile or desktop version of your application based on the patterns in the contents of request headers, cookies, or query strings.
- Use redirect capabilities to return 301/302/307/308 redirects to the client to redirect to new hostnames, paths, or protocols.
- Dynamically modify the caching configuration of your route based on the incoming requests.
Rewrite the request URL path and forward the request to the appropriate backend in your configured backend pool.
IT administrators can now control how often the users in your organization get new Microsoft 365 Apps features by specifying the update channel. Before today, some organizations have opted for less frequent updates due to the unpredictable nature and network stress of a faster cadence. The new Monthly Enterprise Channel is designed to alleviate many of those concerns and reduce the burden on IT. Choosing this update channel will allow you to offer your company the latest productivity features, like real-time collaboration, the latest reliability and performance improvements, and security updates on a predictable, once-a-month cadence.
MS Learn Module of the Week
Microsoft 365 Fundamentals
Microsoft 365 is a productivity cloud that delivers innovative and intelligent experiences, rich organizational insights, and a trusted platform to help people and organizations get more done. This learning path details how Microsoft 365 supports an organization’s digital transformation. Basic understanding of cloud computing is required to complete this learning path and its recommended to complete the Cloud Concepts - Principles of cloud computing prior to completing this course.
Next week will be both exciting and busy with all the Azure news set to be announce at Microsoft Build. Be sure to visit the Azure announcements blog to keep up to date on all new announcements.