Azure Updates: Project Narya; Cloud Adoption Framework; Availability Zones; National security

CTO Mark Russinovich shared details on Project Narya, a prediction and mitigation offering named after the "ring of fire" from Lord of the Rings. Aimed at spotting Azure host failures, it uses Resource Central  for machine learning and predictions. Narya provides a multi-part approach with failure prediction, mitigation actions, A/B testing, a reinforcement learning framework, and ways to retrain models.

Senior content engineer Sarah Lean discussed the Cloud Adoption Framework in context of Azure landing zones. Users can start small and scale up, after deploying a landing zone with an ARM template and Azure Policy. This creates CI/CD pipelines for Azure DevOps and GitHub across subscriptions with Azure Blueprints. Cloud Adoption Framework offers different guidance for enterprises with more complicated questions of scale.

In geographic updates, Microsoft launched Availability Zones in Brazil South, Application Insights is available in Australia Central 2 along with Log Analytics, and HDInsight expanded to Norway East. Announcements include ways to make AMD-backed VM workloads confidential without recompiling code, general availability of Storage Explorer v1.18.0, and forecasted cost alerts for Cost Management and Billing. PCI DSS certification is set to expand. At the same time, Data Explorer performance updates are GA together with Media Services security features and StandBy mode for Live Events. The Azure team also highlighted networking for H-series VMs and IoT Central feature updates in February such as API, dashboard and documentation updates.