Azure Updates: Skytap; 4K encoding; Fileless attacks; Azure Sphere

Away from the headlines about the global coronavirus outbreak, Microsoft engineers pushed a broad slate of updates into production, notifying users of tweaks and new best practices. Announcements touched on new app offerings, 4K encoding tools, security options and more.

In a blog, corporate vice president Eric Lockard took a look at the addition of Skytap to Azure's current line-up of application platforms, such as Cray, NetApp and SAP. Skytap is particularly optimized for helping customers to migrate IBM Power workloads to the cloud. For now, it is available only in the East US region but is set to expand quickly into Europe, other parts of the US and East Asia.

Developers will notice a variety of new options, such as a way to preview a fully parsed YAML document without running a pipeline or committing it to a repo or billing updates for Cost Management. An update to API Management started on February 20. It allows hiding client IP addresses in logs, disabling API traffic in regional API gateways and no longer assigns client latency as API Management latency.

Newly announced burst 4K encoding for Azure Kubernetes Service was explained in a blog by cloud solution architect Fardau van Neerden. 4K encoding is intended to help ingest 4K code into Azure and share it with Media Services. Partner Media Excel has taken the lead in this area. A combination of Container Instances and DevOps pipelines can help with scaling.