Azure Updates: Immersive Reader; Blob versioning; IoT Plug and Play; Cost Management

Microsoft closed out August and launched into the month of September with changes to Immersive Reader, Blob versioning, IoT Plug and Play, and more.

In geographic updates, Container Registry is available in Switzerland West and UAE Central, with Virtual Desktop in-preview for Government cloud. Among general updates, Data Explorer provides a 1-click table creation experience, Azure Certified for Plug and Play is now available, and Immersive Reader is GA together with Log Analytics REST APIs. Users are advised that to update their Cosmos DB SDK by August 31, 2022, prep for the retirement of Version 2 of Translator in May, 2021 and update Traffic Analytics queries by August 31.

The Azure team touted changes to Standard Public IPs and Standard Load Balancers. Going forward, when no zone is specified, non-zonal resources are created. With a single zone, a zonal resource will be generated but when multiple zones are specified in an Availability Zones region, a zone-redundant resource is created. Billing changes are coming to Azure Bastion, while Stream Analytics can now run on Stack Hub.