What’s new in Azure?

Check out the latest features and tricks that we think are worth knowing 👇

NEW TIERS FOR AKS

There’s something interesting for those who’re dabbling with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – two new pricing tiers, Free and Standard. Although the name says ‘Free’, it is like the famous lunch, no such thing as free without a catch exists. On the ‘Free’ tier you’ll be paying for the virtual machines and associated resources but the managed Kubernetes control plane you’ll get free. I would use it for playground scenarios, as you can deploy as many free test clusters as you want. The interesting small note is that it is marketed as for clusters with fewer than 10 nodes, but in documentation it says it can support up to 1000 nodes, although not recommended for less than 10.

Another new tier for AKS is the Standard tier, for running production or mission-critical workloads and need high availability and reliability. Current customers with uptime SLA support will automatically be moved to the Standard tier. Standard tier also includes additional features such as support for up to 5000 nodes per cluster and API server autoscaling. These changes also result to API changes, so beware when going to 2023-02-01 API or newer, SKU names and tiers have changed.

AZURE CONTAINER STORAGE

Love containers and stateful apps? Then this should be down your alley – storage that’s scalable, cost-efficient, and specifically designed for containers? Yes, there is such a thing and it’s called Azure Container Storage.

But why Azure Container Storage, you ask? Well, as many of you have started using our dear friend Kubernetes, you have often end up either using VM-centric cloud storage options, which are like square pegs in round container holes, or going with open-source container storage solutions that require more effort than untangling headphone wires.

ACS runs microservices-based storage controllers in Kubernetes to abstract the storage management layer from pods and backing storage. This enables portability across Kubernetes nodes and ability to mount different storage options like Azure Disk, Azure Elastic SAN or Ephemeral Disk.

Some of the noteworthy features of ACS are the ability scale IOPS on smaller volume sizes to avoid overprovisioning and unified management interface for the different storage options mentioned above. Pricing for ACS is quite straight forward, there’s a fee per provisioned GiB for the storage orchestration service, and billing will kick in only after 5 TiB as there’s a free tier for deployments with storage pool capacity under 5 TiB.

Read more at techcommunity.microsoft.com

TAG LIMIT SNEAKILY UPPED TO 50

There was a small info hidden on the announcement for managing EA departments and policies now in the Azure Portal, which is nice by itself. On the same announcement there was a long blurt about breaking down cost by organization, application, environment, or some other construct, and how resource tags are a great way to do this and how the 15 tag limit will make it difficult for larger enterprises to do this effectively. Due to this, the 15 limit was upped to 50 tags to each resource, a change we have been waiting for a very long time.

BONUS TIDBIT

Now there is a new function in KQL, geo_info_from_ip_address() which enables you to query the geolocation of a IP IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, such as country, state, city, and coordinates.

Having this information in your Kusto queries will help you to identify the origin of network traffic or get the location of users or devices. Nice to check for example where all those failed logins came from.