Microsoft Azure Updates: Project Flash; Bastion Developer; AI capabilities

Microsoft CTO Mark Russinovich shared updates on Project Flash. The initiative supports Microsoft’s efforts to monitor VM health. He encouraged customers to explore products that receive VM health data such as activity logs, resource health, Azure resource graph, Monitor metrics, and Azure event grid. In recent developments, Microsoft has added a feature to track degradation of VM availability, a public preview of HealthResources event grid, and added visibility into app freezes. The degraded VM availability state capability leverages ML-based anomaly detection models, that spot underlying issues such as CPU, memory problems, and underlying host server problems. This new metric will be incorporated into Azure Monitor in 2024.

In a similar vein, product manager Isabelle Morris shared Azure Bastion Developer. The new zero configuration SKU provides secure-by-default Remote Desktop Protocol and SSH access to VMs, so that users can securely access a single VM at a time. Developers often don’t think to use Bastion when they set up a single VM. Bastion Developer works to mitigate these concerns by offering direct access to a VM blade. Additionally, Microsoft is providing the offering at a lower price point and fewer configuration steps. Users will have the option of portal-based access or native client-based access for SSH.