Microsoft Cloud Updates: DDoS attack; Emissions Impact Dashboard; 5G

Azure Networking senior program manager Amir Dahan shared that shortly after Microsoft published 2021 DDoS attack data in August, an Azure customer in Europe was hit with a 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack. Coming from 70,000 sources in East Asia, the attack came in three peaks over 10 minutes. However, Azure DDoS protection prevented the attack from overwhelming systems. “Because of Azure's global absorption scale and advanced mitigation logic, the customer did not suffer any impact or downtime. If the customer had been running in their own datacenter, they would most probably have incurred extensive financial damage, alongside any intangible costs,” Dahan wrote.

General manager Kees Hertogh promoted the Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard, a tool that allows customers to understand carbon emissions associated with cloud usage.

The Emissions Impact Dashboard provides transparency into greenhouse gas emissions associated with using Microsoft cloud services and enables a better understanding of the root causes of emissions changes. Organizations can measure the impact of Microsoft cloud usage on their carbon footprint, and they can drill down into emissions by month, service, and datacenter region. The tool also enables customers to enter un-migrated workloads and get an estimate of emissions savings from migrating to the Microsoft cloud. Newly added data protection allows Emissions Impact Dashboard administrators within an organization to control who can see their company data in the tool.

Microsoft technical fellow and CTO, Victor Bahl, touted 5G capabilities. Ultra-reliable low-latency communications, or URLLC, is an emerging technology that supports remote control for robots, augmented reality headsets, and multi-player gaming. In addition to catering to this technology, Microsoft bills Azure as a global WAN with machine learning and optimization algorithms, advanced VMs, VNets, private endpoints, and Virtual Network Peering that can handle on-air 5G latencies.

Among geographic updates, Firewall Premium is generally available in five new regions including USGov Texas, USGov Arizona, USGov Virginia, China North 2 and China East 2. Microsoft has expanded Azure Translator to encompass a total of 100 languages and dialects and continues to boost ML options. General availability announcements include Monitor container insights portal changes, IP-based website protection for Static Web Apps, Service Tag Discovery API, and Monitor application insights for Spring Cloud. Public previews include Maps iOS SDK, , HTTPS proxy configuration support, AKS support for Kubernetes 1.22, dynamic concurrency in Functions, and IPv6 for Kubenet. Not to be overlooked are ways to customize Static Web Apps authentication with serverless functions, AKS support for WebAssembly System Interface workloads, and AKS out of tree cloud provider controller manager.

A number of updates have touched on database offerings, including Database for MySQL-Flexible Server geo-redundant backup and restore and Database for PostgreSQL-Hyperscale Citus Private Link support.