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Azure portal September 2019 update

This month, Azure portal has updates to Azure Data Explorer and to Azure SQL.

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Here’s the list of updates to the Azure portal this month:

Databases

Analytics

Intune 

Let’s look at each of these updates in greater detail

 

Databases

Azure SQL unified creation and management experience

With the new Azure SQL unified experience, it is easier than ever to discover, create, and manage your SQL databases, instances, pools, and virtual machines in one convenient location. The unified create experience provides an overview of our Azure SQL offerings and guidance on which resource is right for you, based on your application’s requirements.

The centralized management experience helps you quickly navigate to and manage any of your Azure SQL resources by searching and filtering on any available resource characteristic. From this unified experience you can also easily access the suite of manageability features offered for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

 

 

To try out the new experience:

  1. In the Azure portal, click All services

  2. Search “Azure SQL”

  3. Click Azure SQL (optional: first pin to Favorites)

  4. Click +Add

  5. Explore options, and click create to get started on your preferred deployment option

You can learn more about the unified Azure SQL experience on this blog.

 

Analytics

Updates to Azure Data Explorer

We have four exciting updates for Azure Data Explorer this month:

  • Support for Availability Zones

  • Optimized autoscale as the recommended auto scale method

  • Encryption at rest

  • Streaming Ingestion (preview)

Let’s look at these updates in detail.

Support for Availability Zones

For zones redundancy supported regions, you can select in which zones your instances will reside. The cluster nodes are created, by default, in the same data center. You can now use Azure Availability Zones to place the cluster instances in various availability zones in the same region. By selecting several availability zones, you can eliminate a single point of failure and ensure high availability.

Support for Availability Zones

 

To try this new experience:

  1. In the Azure portal, click All services

  2. Search “Azure Data Explorer Clusters”

  3. Click Azure Data Explorer Clusters

  4. Click +Add

  5. Provide values for the required fields, and select a supported region

 

Optimized autoscale as the recommended auto scale method

Optimized autoscale is the recommended autoscale method. This method optimizes cluster performance and costs, so If the cluster approaches a state of under-utilization, it will be scaled in. This action lowers costs but keeps performance level. If the cluster approaches a state of over-utilization, it will be scaled out to maintain optimal performance.

Optimized autoscale is now the default option

To try this new experience:

  1. Select an Azure Data Explorer Cluster (or create a new one)

  2. Click Scale out

  3. Make your selection and click Save

Encryption at rest

Azure Disk Encryption helps protect and safeguard your data to meet your security and compliance requirements. It provides volume encryption for the OS and data disks of your cluster virtual machines. It also integrates with Azure Key Vault to help you control and manage the disk encryption keys and secrets and ensures all data on the VM disks are encrypted at rest while in Azure Storage. Your cluster security settings allow you to enable disk encryption on your cluster.

Enabling disk encryption on your cluster provides data protection for data stored at rest.

To enable disk encryption on your cluster:

  1. Select an Azure Data Explorer Cluster (or create a new one)

  2. Click Security

  3. Select On next to “Disk encryption”

  4. Click Save

For more information, please refer to our documentation page.

Streaming ingestion available in preview

Streaming ingestion is targeted for scenarios that require low latency with an ingestion time of less than 10 seconds for varied volume data. It’s used for optimization of operational processing of many tables, in one or more databases where the stream of data into each table is relatively small (few records per second) but overall data ingestion volume is high (thousands of records per second).

Enabling streaming ingestion in your cluster

To enable streaming ingestion in your cluster:

  1. Select an Azure Data Explorer Cluster (or create a new one)

  2. Click Configurations

  3. Select On next to “Streaming ingestion”

  4. Click Save

For more information, please refer to our documentation page.

 

Intune

Updates to Microsoft Intune

The Microsoft Intune team has been hard at work on updates as well. You can find the full list of updates to Intune on the What’s new in Microsoft Intune page, including changes that affect your experience using Intune.

New videos on Azure portal “how to” video series

The following new videos are available to help you make the most out of the Azure portal:

  • Explore self-help support options. Watch here

  • How to create a storage account and upload a blob (UPDATED). Watch here

Have you checked out our Azure portal “how to” video series yet? The videos highlight specific aspects of the portal so you can be more efficient and productive while deploying your cloud workloads from the portal.  Keep checking our playlist on YouTube for new videos