Azure Updates: Cross-region Load Balancer; Responsible AI; Murex; Migrate

Microsoft product manager Irene Huang commented on the ways that Azure Cross-region Load Balancer reduces latency and improves redundancy. The offering, also known as the Global tier of Standard Load Balancer, was recently used by a Microsoft customer to improve operations. In an earlier setup, all of the customer’s traffic was forwarded to the load balancer’s region, with each additional hop adding to latency. Compared with Standard Load Balancer’s regional zone redundancy, Cross-region Load Balancer allows for greater redundancy. To achieve the most substantial scalability, Huang recommended that customers add or remove a regional Load Balancer behind the Cross-region Load Balancer or use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets with a pre-configured autoscaling policy. “Cross-region load balancer is a Layer-4 pass-through network load balancer, which ensures that the Load Balancer preserves the original IP address of the network packet. IP preservation allows you to apply logic in the backend server that is specific to the original client IP address,” she wrote.

Microsoft followed up with more details about the recent ethical restrictions it has imposed around its Responsible AI investments. Customers will need to register for Limited Access services and gain approval to use the Face API, Computer Vision, Azure Video Indexer, Custom Neural Voice, and Speaker Recognition. The Snapshot API that transfers biometric data from one Face subscription to another will be retired along with emotional prediction capabilities. Additionally, the Face API will be retired in the North Central US Azure region.

Senior product manager Astha Malik discussed opportunities for capital markets ...