Azure Update - BUILD 2025 SPECIAL - 23rd May 2025

Key Concepts

App Service Premium V4, Availability Zones, Azure Container Apps (ACA), Durable Task Scheduler, ACA Aspire Dashboard, OpenTelemetry Agent, Azure Functions on ACA, Planned Maintenance, Workload Profiles, Private Endpoints, Dedicated GPU, Serverless GPU, Azure AI Foundry Models, Arc Enabled ACA, Durable Azure Functions V3, Python HTTP Stream Support, SDK Type Bindings, Flex Consumption Plan, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Network Optimized VMs, Azure AI Foundry Agent Integration, Defender for Cloud, AKS Core Kubernetes Extensions, Custom Certificate Authority, HTTP Proxy, AKS Automated Deployments, Fleet Manager, AKS Tracker, Long-Term Servicing (LTS), AKS Recommended Services, Managed Namespaces, Smart VM Defaults, DNS-based Public Load Balancing, Drift Detection, Takeover Capabilities, Connected Registry, VM Network Troubleshooter, Traffic Manager, Azure NetApp Files, CZRR (Cross Zone Region Replication), Premium SSD v2, Availability Set Support, Ultra Disk, Azure Files, NFS Encryption in Transit, GRS, Cross Regional Restore, Cosmos DB, Microsoft Fabric, VS Code Extension, Global Secondary Index, Fleets, Throughput Buckets, Vector Search, DiskANN, Entra ID, RU to VCore Migration, Serverless to Provisioned, Azure AI Agent Service Integration, Phrase and Hybrid Search, Filtered Vector Search, Multi-Language Text Searches, Fuzzy Search, At-Scale Dashboard, Document Indexing via Logic Apps, Per Partition Automatic Failover, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Semantic Operators, Azure AI Extension, VS Code Extension, Confidential Compute, Apache AGE, DiskANN, Vaulted Backups, Azure SQL Database, JSON Index, SQL Server Management Studio 21, GitHub Copilot, SQL Managed Instance, Azure Managed Redis, Azure Carbon Optimization, Azure Load Testing, GitHub Copilot Coding Agent, GitHub Copilot for Azure, Azure AI Foundry, Model Router, Foundry Local, Microsoft Entra Agent ID, Microsoft Dev Box, Microsoft SRE Agent, Azure Monitor, Grafana, Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), Prometheus, NL Web (Natural Language Web).

Compute Updates

• App Service Premium V4 (Preview): Offers faster processors, NVME local storage for low latency, and memory-optimized versions. Ranges from 1 vCPU with 4GB RAM to 32 vCPU with 256GB RAM.
• App Service Availability Zone Updates (GA): Allows specifying two availability zones instead of all three while maintaining a four 9's SLA. Useful for smaller deployments with two instances for cost optimization. Can be changed throughout the instance's lifetime.
• Azure Container Apps (ACA) Updates:
  • Premium Ingress (Preview): Enables scaling the ingress proxy at the environment level to handle higher demands, including performance tests. Uses workload profiles to control vCPU cores and memory. Idle timeouts can be configured.
  • Durable Task Scheduler (Preview): A managed workflow engine with persistent state for stateful chaining across ACA instances.
  • ACA Aspire Dashboard (GA): Provides live data about the project and containers running within the Azure portal.
  • OpenTelemetry Agent (GA): Automatically sends telemetry data to specified targets supporting the OpenTelemetry standard.
  • Azure Functions Experience (Preview): Allows hosting functions directly on ACA by setting the resource kind as "function app." Requires a functions-compatible image and automatically scales based on incoming events.
  • Planned Maintenance for ACA: Allows controlling when non-critical updates (minor security patches, bug fixes, new releases) are applied. Requires specifying a weekly maintenance window (day, time, duration of at least 8 hours). Critical and urgent updates are still applied as needed.
  • Workload Profile Private Endpoint Support (GA): Enables private communication using an IP address within the VNET for both consumption and dedicated plans.
  • Dedicated GPU (GA): NCA100 v4 series GPUs are now available to ACA as part of a workload profile. Requires the latest version of CUDA.
  • Serverless GPU with Azure AI Foundry Model Support (Preview): Allows deploying Azure AI Foundry models on ACA serverless GPU environments, scaling to zero when not in use, and paying only for the GPU used.
  • Arc Enabled ACA (GA): Extends Azure control plane capabilities to any CNCF-compatible Kubernetes cluster, enabling microservices and containerized applications with consistency between Azure and on-premises environments.
• Durable Azure Functions V3 (GA): Uses the latest V2 Azure storage account, Azure storage SDKs, and is based on .NET 6. Requires code modifications for C# apps using the in-process model.
• Azure Functions Python HTTP Stream Support: Enables streaming HTTP requests and responses using Fast API, allowing for larger amounts of data to be processed in chunks.
• Azure Functions SDK Type Bindings (Preview): Exposes additional capabilities beyond traditional triggers and bindings for storage, service bus, Cosmos DB, and event hubs. Storage benefits include working with large blob sizes, partial reads, and parallel uploads.
• Azure Functions Flex Consumption Plan: Supports availability zones for increased resilience and a new smaller 512MB instance size for better cost-effectiveness. Available in a large number of regions.
• Azure Functions MCP Support: Expands capabilities to support functions written in Java and returns improved instructions and metadata to customize how large language models interact with Azure function-based tools exposed via MCP.
• Network Optimized Virtual Machine SKUs (Preview): "N" variant available for D and E v6 SKUs (Intel-based) and "L" variant of D. Offers three times the network bandwidth per vCPU and double the number of virtual nics for smaller CPU sizes, enabling up to 200 Gbits per second of VM network bandwidth.
• Azure AI Foundry Agent Integration (GA): Azure AI Foundry agents can easily hook into Azure functions to execute serverless tools as required.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Updates:
  • Defender for Cloud Integration (Preview):
    • Automatic vulnerability scanning for AKS-owned images without agents.
    • Deployment gating to block vulnerable deployments until a safe version is available.
    • Vulnerability assessment and malware detection for AKS nodes.
    • Registry-agnostic vulnerability assessment at runtime.
    • Onboarding individual AKS clusters instead of all clusters in a subscription.
  • Defender for Cloud AKS Security Dashboard: Provides a single pane of glass for information about vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, compliance status, and threat detection alerts.
  • AKS Core Kubernetes Extensions (GA): Enables adding capabilities via ARM-based extensions (e.g., virtual nodes, Azure Key Vault sequence provider).
  • Custom Certificate Authority Support (GA): Allows configuring AKS clusters to trust internal certificate authorities by configuring a Kubernetes secret with CA information.
  • HTTP Proxy (GA): Allows setting an HTTP proxy as part of the AKS cluster-level configuration, automatically applying it to nodes and pods for outbound communication.
  • Automated Deployments (GA): Enhancements to AKS automated deployments using DevOps, now working with Azure DevOps in addition to GitHub.
  • Fleet Manager Support for GitHub Automated Deployments (Preview): Enables automated deployments for at-scale AKS clusters managed by Fleet Manager.
  • AKS Tracker Enhancements: Shows supported Kubernetes versions for each region, including long-term servicing versions.
  • Long-Term Servicing (LTS) Update: All Kubernetes versions from 1.28 and above will be available for long-term support, providing extended security updates.
  • AKS Recommended Services (Preview): Provides a customized list of recommended services in the AKS overview menu.
  • Managed Namespaces (Preview): Allows configuring namespaces via the Azure control plane using portal templates and Azure CLI.
  • Smart Virtual Machine Defaults (GA): Uses a smart default VM SKU based on capacity and quotas in the region.
  • Fleet Manager Updates:
    • DNS-based Public Load Balancing (Preview): Automatically adds Kubernetes services deployed across different clusters in different regions as backends to a traffic manager profile.
    • Drift Detection (Preview): Detects differences between the Fleet Manager configuration and the actual state of the cluster.
    • Takeover Capabilities (Preview): Manages differences between the Fleet Manager configuration and existing workloads when onboarding an AKS environment.
  • Azure Container Registry Connected Registry (GA): Synchronizes images and OCI artifacts from Azure ACR to Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters via an Azure Arc extension.

Networking Updates

• VM Network Troubleshooter (Preview): Part of the VM overview blade in the portal, it runs diagnostics to look for blocked ports.
• Traffic Manager 100% Financially Backed SLA: Provides a 100% SLA for DNS lookups, ensuring a response from the traffic manager service.

Storage Updates

• Azure NetApp Files CZRR (Cross Zone Region Replication) (Preview): Combines cross-region replication and cross-zone replication, providing both high availability within a region and disaster recovery to another region. Supports replication across subscriptions within the same Entra tenant.
• Premium SSD v2 Availability Set Support: Aligns disks for VMs in an availability set to different storage stamps, improving resiliency in regions without availability zones.
• Azure Files NFS Encryption in Transit (Preview): Uses the AZ NFS mount helper to implement TLS encryption (S tunnel) for NFS4.1 shares, encrypting data in transit between Linux hosts and Azure Files.
• Premium SSD v2 GRS and Cross Regional Restore Backup Capabilities: Enables GRS for backup vaults storing premium SSD v2 disks, replicating backups to the paired region and allowing on-demand restoration.

Database Updates

• Cosmos DB in Microsoft Fabric: Cosmos DB is now available in Microsoft Fabric, enabling work with semi-structured data as a document database.
• Cosmos DB Document DB VS Code Extension (Preview): Allows connecting and executing queries against Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore from within VS Code.
• Cosmos DB Global Secondary Index (Preview): Uses its own container, synchronous copy of the data, and independent partition key for fast lookups when the primary partition key is not used.
• Cosmos DB Fleets (Preview): Creates a pool of request units shared by multiple Cosmos DB accounts, useful for multi-tenant applications. Supports up to 100 database accounts per fleet space and 1 million request units per second assigned to the pool.
• Cosmos DB Throughput Buckets (Preview): Assigns a percentage of the request units of an account to an application, throttling it if it exceeds that percentage, minimizing the chance of a noisy neighbor.
• Cosmos DB for MongoDB Vector Search (GA): Provides native vector search capabilities for semantic data interactions, common for natural language and retrieve augmented generation (RAG).
• Cosmos DB MongoDB DiskANN (GA): Microsoft research-created high-performance index for vector searches, supporting over 4,000 dimensions.
• Cosmos DB for MongoDB Entra ID (GA): Enables authentication using Entra ID, allowing Azure resources to be given permission to the MongoDB cluster without secrets.
• Cosmos DB for MongoDB RU to VCore Migration (GA): Allows seamless migration from RU-based to vCore-based solutions, with both online and offline migration options.
• Cosmos DB Serverless to Provisioned (GA): Allows in-place switching from the serverless model to the provisioned request unit model.
• Cosmos DB Azure AI Agent Service Integration (GA): Enables easy integration and use of data stored in Cosmos DB by agent solutions created in the Azure AI Foundry Agent Service.
• Cosmos DB NoSQL Phrase and Hybrid Search (GA):
  • Phrase Search: Matches the exact sequence of words in the data.
  • Hybrid Search: Combines full-text search (lexical search using BM25) with vector search, using reciprocal rank fusion (RRF).
• Cosmos DB NoSQL Filtered Vector Search (GA): Allows applying a filter to the vector search to restrict the comparison to a subset of the vector space.
• Cosmos DB NoSQL Multi-Language Text Searches (Preview): Supports full-text searches in English, German, Spanish, and French.
• Cosmos DB NoSQL Fuzzy Search (Preview): Enables matching when there are typos, specifying a distance (number of edits) to make it match.
• Cosmos DB At-Scale Dashboard (Preview): Provides a central view of all insights about Cosmos DB instances.
• Cosmos DB Aggregated Diagnostic Logs (Preview): Aggregates diagnostic logs into five and 15-minute intervals, reducing the amount of data ingested and the cost by approximately 90%.
• Cosmos DB Document Indexing via Logic App Workflows (Preview): Pre-built workflows in Azure Logic Apps that take PDF documents, office documents, and images, use OCR to extract data, chunk it up, get the vector embedding by calling an Azure OpenAI embedding model, and put the text chunk and embedding into Cosmos DB.
• Cosmos DB Per Partition Automatic Failover: Automatically routes incoming requests to a healthy partition if there's an unhealthy partition.
• PostgreSQL Flexible Server Semantic Operators (Preview): Leverage large language models to understand operational data, enabling chat GPT-style responses, extracting hidden semantic relationships, and semantic ranking of documents.
• PostgreSQL Azure AI Extension for Managed Identity (Preview): Uses the identity of the PostgreSQL database to be given permission on the Azure AI instance, eliminating the need for secrets.
• PostgreSQL VS Code Extension (Preview): Allows connecting to PostgreSQL instances, running queries, managing connection profiles, and using GitHub Copilot from within VS Code.
• PostgreSQL Flexible Confidential Compute (Preview): Runs on confidential compute instances, providing encryption in use.
• PostgreSQL Apache AGE (GA): A cost-effective managed graph database service powered by the PostgreSQL engine.
• PostgreSQL Flexible DiskANN (GA): Microsoft research-created high-performing vector indexing algorithm, supporting up to 16,000 dimensions.
• PostgreSQL Vaulted Backups (GA): Stores backup data separately from the primary storage, enabling long-term retention and splitting roles to enhance security.
• Azure SQL Database JSON Index (Preview): Allows using JSON functions and relational operators to effectively search JSON documents stored in a column of JSON type.
• SQL Server Management Studio 21: Includes 64-bit support, an updated installer, automatic updates, Git integration, and dark theme support.
• SQL Server Management Studio 21 Copilot: Natural language to T-SQL help.
• MSSQL Extension in VS Code: Works with GitHub Copilot and has a schema designer.
• SQL Managed Instance Free Offer: Free for 12 months, 720 vcore hours per month, 64 GB of data storage, supports up to 500 databases, includes a 7-day retained backup, and includes SQL licensing.
• Azure Managed Redis (GA): An in-memory, high-performance store used as a caching layer, session storage, and job queues.

Miscellaneous Updates

• Azure Carbon Optimization (GA): Helps understand the environmental impact of Azure resources and track carbon emissions.
• Azure Load Testing AIdriven Actionable Insights (Preview): Provides AIdriven insights from load tests, helping identify and resolve performance issues.
• GitHub Copilot Coding Agent (Preview): Allows assigning tasks to GitHub Copilot, which will autonomously work on them, create a pull request, and allow for review and merging.
• GitHub Copilot for Azure (GA): Provides extensions for GitHub Copilot, giving it specific knowledge about the Azure ecosystem.
• Azure AI Foundry Updates:
  • Agent Service (GA): Creates agents, including multi-agent solutions, with MCP support and easy integration with knowledge sources.
  • Fine-tuning: Available for a number of models.
  • Foundry Observability: Provides end-to-end monitoring and diagnostics of models, including a detailed trace log.
  • Model Catalog: X AI Gro 3 and Gro 3 Mini are now available.
  • Model Router: Picks the most optimized model for a request.
  • Provisioned Throughput Units: Can be leveraged over multiple models.
  • Foundry Local (Preview): Runs AI models locally on Windows 11 or Mac OS, using the Onyx runtime and MCP support.
• Microsoft Entra Agent ID: Any agent created with Azure AI Foundry or Co-pilot Studio will get its own unique identity.
• Microsoft Dev Box Updates:
  • On-demand GPU resources in a serverless way.
  • AI resources come pre-configured.
  • MCP server runs as part of Dev Box.
  • Customizations and images for teams.
  • GitHub Copilot helps create customizations.
• Microsoft SRE Agent (Preview): An agentic AI that responds and troubleshoots issues, looks for security vulnerabilities, and learns about the environment.
• Azure Monitor Updates:
  • Grafana Enhancements (Preview): Allows creating and editing Grafana dashboards directly in the Azure portal.
  • Email-Based Alerts: Allows customizing the subject with dynamic values.
  • Simple Log Alerts: More intuitive experience with lower latency.
  • AI-Powered Investigation: Identifies anomalies and provides insights.
  • Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC): Applies additional constraints on top of the RBAC for log analytics workspaces.
  • Cross-Region Log Analytics Workspace Replication (GA): Allows replicating log analytics workspaces to any target region.
  • Log Analytics UI Query Limit Increase: Increased to 100,000.
  • Prometheus Enhancements:
    • Container insights can be powered by managed Prometheus.
    • Managed Prometheus visualizations in Azure Monitor.
    • Community-recommended alerts based on Prometheus metrics.
    • Same abilities for ARC-enabled Kubernetes (Preview).
• NL Web (Natural Language Web): Enables natural language search on websites by creating a vector database based on RSS feeds, schema.org, and the data in the site.

Conclusion

The Build 2024 Azure updates encompass a wide range of enhancements across compute, networking, storage, databases, and miscellaneous services. Key themes include AI integration, enhanced security, improved developer experiences, and cost optimization. Notable updates include the general availability of Azure AI Foundry agent service, the introduction of new virtual machine SKUs optimized for networking, and the expansion of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) capabilities with Defender for Cloud integration and Fleet Manager enhancements. These updates provide developers and IT professionals with new tools and capabilities to build, deploy, and manage applications more efficiently and securely in the Azure cloud.