Attention Azure architects and operations teams! The clock is ticking for Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) on Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets. With a retirement date set for September 15, 2028, this episode is your urgent guide to avoiding a major service disruption. We break down why you must migrate now to alternative solutions like Encryption at Host.

In this episode, we dive into the latest enhancement for Azure's disaster recovery capabilities. Microsoft has announced general availability of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) support for Virtual Machines leveraging Premium SSD v2 disks. We'll explore what this means for your enterprise workloads, from SQL Server to SAP environments. Discover how this integration provides a robust, cost-effective, and low-latency solution for seamless replication and automated failover, ensuring your business remains resilient even in the face of a disaster.

In today's digital landscape, protecting your data is more critical than ever. This episode explores the newly released vaulted backup functionality for Azure Files shares premium, a feature designed to enhance your business continuity and compliance. We'll break down how this powerful tool creates a secure, off-site copy of your data that is completely isolated from your original source.

We’ll discuss how vaulted backup provides a robust defense against common threats like accidental deletion, ransomware, and malicious activity. Join us as we uncover its key benefits, including data independence, resilience through isolation, and the ability to schedule flexible backups for long-term archival. We'll also dive into the security-first design, highlighting features like immutability, encryption, and multi-user authorization that make your vaulted data virtually unassailable. Tune in to learn how to future-proof your data strategy and sleep easier at night.

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Microsoft has announced the wider release of their DCa/ECa v6 series confidential virtual machines (VMs), powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors. These new VMs are now available in multiple global regions and feature Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP), a security feature that uses hardware-based encryption to ensure that a VM's memory is only accessible to that specific VM. The core function of these confidential VMs is to create a trusted execution environment (TEE) that prevents host management code and the hypervisor from accessing the VM's memory and state. Furthermore, the memory encryption keys are securely generated by a dedicated secure processor inside the CPU, making them unreadable by software. These offerings, which include general-purpose (DCasv6) and memory-optimized (ECasv6) options, provide improved performance and cost efficiency for processing sensitive data, such as PII and PHI.

We're diving into the new High Scale mode for Container Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor. If you've ever dealt with massive AKS clusters generating a flood of logs, you know that keeping up can be a challenge. High Scale mode is the solution, dramatically increasing log collection throughput to ensure you don't miss a thing.

The best part? It's designed to be seamless. We'll explain how this new mode automatically reconfigures your log collection pipeline behind the scenes, so you can get the enhanced performance without any manual tweaks. Tune in to learn how this update simplifies monitoring for even your most demanding, high-traffic AKS environments.

Big data just got a big new migration tool. In this episode, we're diving into the expanded global availability of the Azure Data Box Next Gen devices! We'll explore what this means for data professionals in new markets like India, Qatar, South Africa, and Korea.

Join us as we break down the game-changing features of these compact, NVMe-based devices. We'll discuss the availability of both the massive 525TB and the 120TB models and highlight how customers are already reporting transfer speeds up to 10x faster than traditional methods.

But speed isn't the only benefit. We'll also unpack why Azure Data Box is considered the most cost-effective solution for petabyte-scale data migration, with the lowest cost per terabyte on the market. Whether you're in the US, Europe, Japan, or the newly added regions, we'll explain how to get your hands on these powerful devices directly through the Azure portal.

Debugging distributed applications can be a nightmare. But what if you could follow every single operation across your Durable Functions orchestrations, activities, and entities with ease? In this episode, we dive deep into the new Durable Functions Distributed Tracing V2. We'll break down how this major update revolutionizes monitoring and debugging by allowing you to seamlessly correlate operations across your entire application. Join us as we explore the key features of V2, including its support for all Durable Functions language SDKs and the brand-new tracing for durable entities. We also cover the essential steps to get started, from configuring your Application Insights resource to visualizing the rich tracing data that will make troubleshooting a breeze. Tune in to learn how V2 can transform your development workflow.

Kubernetes is complex. Azure's new AKS Automatic offers a simplified, managed approach, providing production-ready clusters in minutes. We dive into how this new service handles node management, security, and autoscaling, freeing up your team to focus on building apps instead of managing infrastructure.

Get ready to level up your Kubernetes deployments! In this episode, we're diving into the groundbreaking release of Azure Container Storage (ACStor) v2.0.0. This isn't just an update—it's a revolution in cloud-native storage performance.

Join us as we break down the key features of this significant release, including the jaw-dropping speed improvements: we're talking up to 7x higher IOPS and 4x lower latency, especially when you harness the power of local NVMe drives. Whether you're running a high-transaction PostgreSQL database or serving massive AI models, ACStor v2.0.0 is engineered to handle your most demanding workloads with ease.

But the good news doesn't stop there. We'll also explore the new zero service fee model that makes this a more cost-effective solution than ever before. Plus, we'll discuss the enhanced flexibility, scalable options, and the newly introduced open-source alternative that caters to a wide range of deployment strategies. Tune in to learn how ACStor v2.0.0 is poised to transform the way you manage stateful applications in the Azure cloud.

Join us for this deep dive into a powerful new feature for Azure Application Gateway V2: dedicated backend connections. In this episode, we'll break down how this feature fundamentally changes the default behavior of connection reuse, establishing a one-to-one mapping between your clients and backend servers.

We'll explore the specific use cases where this persistent connectivity is a game-changer, particularly for security functions that demand unique connections. We'll also provide a crucial heads-up on the trade-offs, discussing the increase in resource consumption on both the gateway and backend servers. Learn why you might need to scale up your gateway instances or enable auto-scale, and how to watch out for SNAT port exhaustion.

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