Azure Updates: Azure Lighthouse; Hyperledger Fabric; Zero trust; Certificate management

Microsoft closed out the busy month of January and launched into February with a continued focus on zero trust architectures and blockchain, together with features for Azure Lighthouse.

A variety of new Azure Lighthouse features are generally available as of January 30. Managed service providers will be able to opt out of managing delegated scopes, with new options to use Resource Graph "ManagedByTenant" context or deploy and validate policies spanning multiple customer tenants. A slate of recent small announcements have also changed aspects of Cost Management.

Cognitive Services Translator Text added support for five new languages, including European Portuguese, Irish, Malayalam, Punjabi and Kannada. The Azure team expanded Site Recovery to support customer-managed keys, focusing on VMs with encrypted managed disks.  At the same time, Backup grew to support selective disk backup and restoration by leveraging the Azure VM backup solution.

Program manager Ramya Vastrad announced the release of the new Hyperledger Fabric on Azure Kubernetes Service, in-preview. The new offering gives users with minimal knowledge of Azure and Hyperledger Fabric a chance to create blockchain consortiums and rapidly deploy Hyperledger Fabric networks. The template helps to expose public IP for individual AKS clusters, supports LevelDb and CouchDb as well as Fabric Certificate Authority.

In the second installment of his six-part series on