1. Azure Container Apps [Preview] - service allows you to spin up containers or the Microservice architecture from your containers.

It seems like this service is a SaaS wrapper around the following components and frameworks:

  • Kubernetes or AKS is used as the central orchestrator
  • Docker ;)
  • DAPR is Distributed Application Runtime. It is used to provide a communication/event-based layer between services.
  • KEDA is the event-based Autoscaler for Kubernetes.
Azure Container Apps documentation Tutorial

Azure Container Apps

Notice: I’m writing a detailed article about this service.

2. Open Service Mesh AKS Add-on

The Service Mesh AKS Add-on allows you to enable/deploy Service Mesh for your AKS cluster just with one step:

az aks enable-addons --addons open-service-mesh -g <my-osm-aks-cluster-rg> -n <my-osm-aks-cluster-name>

A service mesh, like the open-source project Istio, is a way to control how different parts of an application share data with one another. Unlike other systems for managing this communication, a service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer built right into an app. More about the Service Mesh here.

You can setup this addon with a new AKS cluster or enable it for existing one.

Documentation

3. Gateway Load Balancer [Preview] is a load balancer with gateway SKU.

What does this mean? When you create the load balancer, you can choose the option that includes a gateway with the following options:

  • Firewalls (with inline DDoS)
  • Advanced packet analytics
  • Intrusion detection and prevention systems
  • Traffic mirroring
  • Custom appliances

This service looks pretty much similar to Application Gateway and Azure Front Door ;) Azure Container Apps

From the first glance, the difference between these services is Load Balancer operates in OSI layer 4, and App Gateway operates OSI layer 7.

4. Azure Virtual Network Manager [Preview]

The fundamental concept of this service is managing networks across subscriptions. You can assign the Scope of the Azure Virtual Network Manger on Azure Management Group or Subscription level.

Key benefits

  • Centrally manage connectivity and security policies globally across regions and subscriptions.
  • Enable transitive communication between spokes in a hub-and-spoke configuration without the complexity of managing a mesh network.
  • Highly scalable and highly available service with redundancy and replication across the globe.
  • Ability to create global network security rules that override network security group rules.
  • Low latency and high bandwidth between resources in different virtual networks using virtual network peering.
  • Roll out network changes through a specific region sequence and frequency of your choosing.

Documentation

4 Azure Virtual Network Manager

5. Azure Chaos Studio [Preview]

Azure Chaos Studio is a service that allows you to simulate an outage for your environment. You can apply scenarios to

  • Virtual Machine. For example, you can simulate VM shutdown.
  • Kubernetes. You can kill PODs.
  • Force excessive CPU usage of your VMs.

Here is the fault list (or Test Cases;)) that you can apply against your resources.

In the image below, you can see the main structure of the Azure Chaos Studio.

Azure Chaos Studio

Azure Chaos Studio Documentation

[Updated 22/11/2021] Complete list of Azure updates.

  • Support for Amazon EKS Threat Intelligence with Defender for Cloud.
  • Azure Cognitive Services new preview based upon OpenAI
  • Azure SQL Managed Instance Link – a new service which allows disaster recovery and bi-directional migration between SQL Server and SQL Managed Instance
  • Azure Logic Apps Disconnected mode running locally and on Azure Arc.
  • Updates to Azure API Management with support for GraphQL and native support for WebSockets API
  • Azure Arc with support for Azure Stack HCI, Integrations with vSphere allowing self-service capabilities.
  • Azure Virtual Desktop with support for Azure Stack HCI
  • Release of Dv5/Ev5 and Dasv5/Easv5 based upon AMD EPYC (Milan) CPU, without local disk storage and a much cheaper cost
  • Azure Monitor comes with enhanced troubleshooting for Azure Firewall, VPN Gateway and OpenTelemetry with Application Insight.
  • On-demand disk bursting is now available for Azure Disk Storage.
  • Azure Chaos Studio is a new service in preview like Chaos Monkey which is a service that disrupts applications intentionally.
  • Microsoft Defender for Cloud (the new name for Azure Defender and Azure Security Center) now provides security best practices for AWS (including recommendations and now part of Secure Score)
  • Near real-time analytics rules for Azure Sentinel
  • Integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse for Azure Sentinel