Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. It has taken place in several locations around the world. Here are the news that I consider the most relevant for Azure Professionals :
Azure AI
- Azure Cognitive Search, Private Endpoint Indexers can now connect to data sources behind a VNET.
- Azure Cognitive Services is introducing a series of new capabilities — spanning Decision, Vision and Speech.
- Azure Machine Learning now offers new capabilities, the Designer capability provides drag-and-drop modules for numerous tasks
- Bot Framework Composer— Now makes it easier to build skills for use within the Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator with a visual bot development tool.
Azure Data
- Azure Cosmos DB now offers a serverless option for database operations
- Flexible Server, a new deployment option now in preview for Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL.
- Azure SQL Edge, which brings the most secure Microsoft SQL data engine to Internet of Things (IoT) gateways and edge devices, is now available
- Access-based time lifecycle management, a frequently requested customer feature, is now available in Azure Blob Storage
Azure Datacenters
- New Availability zones (Canada Central and Australia East)
- Azure Orbital is a new managed service that provides access to physical satellite communication capabilities to process and analyze data in Microsoft Azure
- Zone to Zone disaster recovery allows customers to replicate, failover and failback their business-critical virtual machines within the same region with zones.
Azure Dev Ecosystem
- New enhancements to .NET 5
- The .NET 5 Release Candidate is now feature-complete and will be generally available Nov. 10.
- Updates to the Azure App Service managed platform for building, deploying and scaling web apps: Reserved Instance, App Service Premium V3 Plan, Windows Containers, Isolated v2 plan, Java Tomcat Support
- Datadog and Microsoft Azure have worked together to create an integrated Datadog SaaS solution
- AKS will have a feature to easily stop and start clusters (at long last!) and the ability to use Azure Policy for governance of AKS clusters and resources
- Organizations will soon be able to create a private marketplace of preapproved solutions for employees with a new service called Azure Private Marketplace
Azure Infra
- Backup Center, in public preview, provides a single, unified experience designed for backup management at scale.
- Azure Backup will now extend Cross Region Restore of Azure VMs to support SQL and SAP HANA backups.
- Azure Resource Mover is a new product that allows customers to easily move their resources such as managed disks, networking components and SQL Azure resources across regions.
- Azure Advisor Score is now in preview.
- Azure Image Builder, generally available by the end of this year, is a free image-building service that streamlines the creation, update, patch, management and operation of Linux and Windows images.
- Azure Automanage is a new Azure service in preview that helps customers significantly reduce day-to-day management tasks with automated operations across the entire lifecycle of Windows Server virtual machines (VMs) on Azure.
- Windows Admin Center, IT admins’ favorite server management tool, is now available in preview in the Azure Portal.
Security
- Protecting every major OS: Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and is extending protection for the rapidly evolving world of mobile threats.
- Protecting priority email accounts: Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
- In addition, Azure Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Identity and continues to provide customers with hybrid identity threat protection
- Microsoft is announcing new features that extend its threat protection portfolio, and is unifying solutions across Microsoft 365 security and Azure security to deliver the most comprehensive extended detection and response (XDR) on the market. Microsoft Defender, now inclusive of Microsoft 365 Defender and Azure Defender, prevents, detects and responds to threats across identities, endpoints, applications, email, infrastructure and cloud platforms and self-heals affected assets.
- Microsoft Threat Protection is now Microsoft 365 Defender, the XDR for end-user environments.
- Protecting every major OS: Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and is extending protection for the rapidly evolving world of mobile threats. For Android, it provides protection against phishing, offers proactive scanning of malicious applications and files, blocks access to corporate resources to mitigate the impact of breaches, and gives security teams visibility into mobile threats and alerts via the security center. For iOS, customers will also get phishing and web protection and the same unified SecOps experience. Support for macOS has been expanded with the public preview of threat and vulnerability management.
- Protecting priority email accounts: Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Office 365. Now in public preview, security teams can prioritize protection for the most visible and most targeted individuals in the organization, tagging and tracking them in the portal as Priority accounts.
- In addition, Azure Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Identity and continues to provide customers with hybrid identity threat protection
- Azure Security Center’s cloud workload protection features are now Azure Defender
- Azure Defender now includes protection for Azure Key Vault, now in general availability. Azure Defender also now supports protecting on-premises and multicloud protection for SQL Server
Conclusions
So far I’m really excited with the new features such as AKS STOP/START, Backup Center, resource mover and the new security features.
For more information refer to: https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news