Monat: März 2022

Introducing the new Azure Front Door: Reimagined for modern apps and content

This blog has been co-authored by Jessie Jia, Senior Program Manager, Azure Networking and Gunjan Jain, Principal Program Manager, Azure Networking.

In 2019, we launched Azure Front Door to bring enterprise-grade content delivery network (CDN) capabilities to our customers. This was a result of our own cloud journey over the past 13 years, which led us to develop unique infrastructure and services hardened by support for Microsoft’s largest applications like Bing, Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, Skype, and Azure. Read about LinkedIn’s experience1 migrating their own infrastructure to Azure Front Door.

Since then, a lot has changed for you and your customers. The acceleration of digital transformation to adapt to new ways of doing business, hybrid working models, and increasing security costs has driven the demand for a new type of cloud CDN that can address these modern challenges and simplify internet-first architectures in the cloud.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the new Azure Front Door, our native, modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) catering to both dynamic and static content acceleration with built-in turnkey security, and a simple and predictable pricing model. There are two Azure Front Door tiers—Azure Front Door Standard and Premium—that provide a unified, secure solution for delivering your applications, APIs, and content on Azure or anywhere.

Azure Front Door: The modern enterprise CDN

Every company is now a technology company challenged with managing a rapidly growing digital footprint, dispersed workforce, and evolving security threats. As a result, enterprises are looking for solutions that help meet the rising demands for better scalability, more security, higher performance, greater automation, and easier manageability—with reduced costs.

Whether you’re delivering content and files or building global apps and APIs, Azure Front Door can help you deliver higher availability, lower latency, better scale, and more secure experiences to your users wherever they are. Azure Front Door also enables you to define, manage, and monitor the global routing for your app.

Dynamic and static content acceleration with intelligent security

With the addition of Azure Front Door Standard and Premium, two new tiers that combine the capabilities of Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) and attach with Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF), Azure Front Door is now a unified, modern cloud CDN platform with intelligent threat protection and simple to understand pricing model, built on Microsoft’s massive-scale private global network.

Azure Front Door now also provides a rich set of advanced capabilities that enhance the DevOps experience, security posture, and cost-effectiveness for enterprise customers migrating and/or deploying high-performance, scalable, and secure applications on Azure or anywhere.

The key benefits you can get from Azure Front Door include:

Modern architecture

Build and operate dynamic, high-quality digital experiences with highly automated, secure, and reliable platforms.

Deeply integrated experiences with other Azure applications and services such as domain name system (DNS) and Web Apps to improve manageability and speed up deployment. We now offer DNS TXT record-based validation to simplify and reduce delays around custom domain validation.
Improved automation and simplified provisioning with cloud-native and DevOps friendly command line tools. For example, you can now provision custom domains along with other resources in one deployment and validate the domain ownership afterward or use the new Quick Create option in the portal to dramatically reduce deployment and configuration steps.
Enhanced analytics capabilities such as access logs, health probe logs, additional metrics, and pre-built traffic and security reports for more effective monitoring, troubleshooting, and debugging.
Expanded rules at the edge with enhanced rules engine capabilities adding regular expressions and server variables that let you move more of your business logic to the edge and create more complex and dynamic routing between your users and backends.

Fast global delivery

Deploy your apps and content at scale to your users wherever they are—creating opportunities for you to compete, weather change, and quickly adapt to new demand and markets. 

A truly global network built by Microsoft with hundreds of edge locations connected to Azure via a private WAN that can improve latency for apps by up to three times and provides enterprise-grade reliability and massive scalability to deliver low latency and high throughput for consistent application experiences.
Unified static and dynamic delivery is offered in a single service to accelerate and scale your application and with real-time routing to develop high-availability experiences for applications hosted in Azure or anywhere.
A simplified cost model that reduces billing complexity by having fewer meters customers need to plan for and integrated egress (data transfer outbound) pricing that removes the separate egress charge from Azure regions to Azure Front Door. Please refer to the Azure Front Door pricing page for more details.

Intelligent security

Protect your digital estate against known and new threats with intelligent security that embrace a Zero Trust framework.

Best-of-breed security services seamlessly attached such as built-in layer 3-4 DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall, Azure DNS to protect your domains, and Azure Private Link.
WAF enhancements offer a powerful, yet cost-effective protection from common attacks and bots and are customizable to application-specific detections. Azure Front Door Premium includes Azure Web Application Firewall at no additional cost and provides enhanced capabilities. Azure WAF is also releasing a new DRS 2.0 RuleSet, offering reduced false positives and anomaly scoring-based detection. Bot manager—now generally available, provides an additional layer of Bot detection based on Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
Azure Private Link support on Azure Front Door Premium with availability in all Azure regions with availability zones, enabling your application to extend all the way out to the edge with private access from Azure Front Door to your backends in Azure.

Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic)

The existing Azure Front Door and Azure CDN from Microsoft will now be known as Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) moving forward. Azure Front Door (classic), as well as Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic), will continue to be fully supported and you can continue to use them. However, we encourage you to take advantage of Azure Front Door Standard and Premium as the latest capabilities and future enhancements will not be available on Azure Front Door (classic).

Over the coming months, we will be launching zero downtime migrations from Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) to Azure Front Door Standard and Premium. Please stay tuned for more updates. If you are new to Azure Front Door, you can easily launch Azure Front Door Standard and Premium in the Azure portal or using our API.

Get started

Get started with the new Azure Front Door today! To learn more about the service and various features, refer to the Azure Front Door documentation. If you are interested in exploring capabilities beyond the standard offering, simply file a feature request on our Networking Community Page or feel free to contact us at afdfeedback@microsoft.com.

1Accelerating the LinkedIn Experience with Azure Front Door.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – March 2022

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal
What's new in Cost Management Labs
New ways to save money with Azure
Documentation updates
Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Let's dig into the details.

 

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal

If you manage an Enterprise Agreement (EA) billing account, you’re familiar with the EA portal where you can manage the account hierarchy, view credit balance, and view cost for each department, account, and subscription. This has been a great foundation, but did you know there are even more tools that can help you better monitor, manage, and optimize costs within the Azure portal?

When it comes to managing your billing account (enrollment), you have all the same EA tools available from Cost Management and Billing in the Azure portal:

Seamlessly create and manage the enrollment hierarchy.
Manage access to departments, accounts, and subscriptions.
View properties and manage policies, like the ability to view charges and purchase reservations.
View notification contacts for enrollment emails.

Looking beyond account management, you’ll start to see new tools to help you monitor and manage costs:

View and track Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) balance.
View and download invoices.
View and download consolidated usage and charges, including options for amortized reservation charges.
Analyze and drill into your costs in the portal or schedule automated exports.
Split shared costs to drive more visibility and accountability throughout the organization with cost allocation.
Configure budgets to get alerted before costs exceed predefined thresholds.

With these updates, managing your EA billing account from the Azure portal is now generally available for direct EA enrollments. Learn more and let us know what you’d like to see next.

 

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

Update: Total cost in the cost analysis preview—now available in the public portal
See your total cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview or by using the cost analysis preview in Cost Management Labs.
New: Access preview views from classic cost analysis
Get one-click access to the new preview views from classic cost analysis in the View menu. You can see this in classic cost analysis in Cost Management Labs.
New: Anomaly detection alerts
Subscribe to automatic email alerts when a new anomaly has been detected. Anomaly detection is only available for subscriptions in the cost analysis preview. You can opt into this preview using Try Preview and then configure anomaly alerts from the Alerts page.
Grouping SQL databases and elastic pools
Get an at-a-glance view of your total SQL costs by grouping SQL databases and elastic pools under their parent server in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Average cost in the cost analysis preview
See your average daily cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Charts in the cost analysis preview
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Budgets in the cost analysis preview
Quickly create and edit budgets directly from the cost analysis preview. If you don’t have a budget yet, you’ll see a suggested budget based on your forecast. You can opt in using Try Preview.
View cost for your resources
The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that particular resource.
Change scope from the menu
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

 

New ways to save money with Azure

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the last month! Here are new and updated offers you might be interested in:

General availability: Automatically delete a VM and its associated resources simultaneously.
Generally available: Virtual Machine level disk bursting supports M-series, Msv2-series Medium Memory, and Mdsv2-series Medium Memory VM families.
General availability: Best practices assessment for SQL virtual machines.
General availability: Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server now available in US Gov Virginia and China East 2 and China North 2.
General availability: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server now available in US Gov Virginia and US Gov Arizona.
General availability: Azure NetApp Files is now available in Australia Central 2 with support for cross-region replication.
Preview: On-demand capacity reservations for Azure Site Recovery.
Preview: Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux Bring Your Own Subscription.
Preview: SKU recommendation in Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio.

 

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

Learn about built-in views available in cost analysis.
Documented common questions about the UsageDetails API.
Increased the subscription limit from 2000 to 5000 subscriptions per EA enrollment account.
Updated subscription transfer articles for newly supported transfer scenarios, including reservations getting automatically transferred.

Want to keep an eye on all of the documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

 

Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We're looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you'll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Azure Cost Management and Billing team:

Join our team.

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management and Billing updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Azure Cost Management and Billing.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management and Billing team. Stay safe and stay healthy.
Quelle: Azure