The Latest Azure Updates: Portal, Sphere, VM updates; AKS update; Firewall; NIIT and NXP Semiconductors

Microsoft sought to improve user experiences with changes to Azure portal, including faster load time for global search, new filtering and display options, and querying across Azure Research Graph. Users will be able to sign in from their GitHub account and take advantage of full-screen creation in Azure Application Gateway, change tracking in the Activity Log and changes to the Quickstart Center.

On May 16, Azure Sphere update 19.05 entered public preview in the Retail Evaluation feed. Users need to set up an OTA configuration to receive the update and are advised to upgrade if they are running a release of 18.11 or older, which are no longer supported.

Among geographic updates, High Performance Computing VMs are available in Western Europe and South Central Europe. The HB-series VMs run at two to three times the speed of most current on-prem servers with 100 Gb EDR InfiniBand interconnects. For VMs, an API update means that users can rapidly power off, preventing data loss or corruption stemming from an emergency power off command. Starting July 1, the meter names for Azure VMs NVv2 will change, potentially prompting some customers to need to change their resource names or billing routines.

Microsoft is adding reserved instance pricing in its Dev/Test offer. When running developer or test workloads, users pay a reduced amount for Azure SQL Database and VMs.

Public IP Prefix became generally available in China, Azure government and public regions. It helps to cut down on the need to change firewall rules and issues when scaling.