Generally Available: AMD v6 confidential VMs in new regions for January 2026

Generally Available: AMD v6 confidential VMs in new regions for January 2026

DCa/ECa v6 series AMD based confidential virtual machines are now generally available in 11 new regions: Canada Central, Canada East, Norway East, Norway West, Italy North, Germany North, France South, Australia East, West US, West US 3, Germany West Central.
This is in addition to the 6 regions announced during launch of these VMs: Korea Central, South Africa North, Switzerland North, UAE North, UK South, West Central US.

Public Preview: Azure virtual network routing appliance
Azure Virtual Network routing appliance offers private connectivity for workloads across virtual networks. Using specialized hardware, it delivers low latency and high throughput, and optimal performance compared to virtual machines.

Deployed into private subnet, where it acts as a managed forwarding router. Traffic can be routed using User Defined Routes (UDR) enabling spoke to spoke communication in traditional Hub & Spoke topologies.

Configured as Azure resource, integrates seamlessly with Azure’s management and governance model.

Public Preview: Claude Opus 4.6, Available on Microsoft Foundry
Claude Opus 4.6 is now available in Microsoft Foundry, bringing Anthropic’s most advanced reasoning model to a secure, enterprise-ready platform built on Azure. With support for complex coding, knowledge work, and agent-driven workflows, including long-context reasoning and governed computer use, customers can move faster from experimentation to production while maintaining trust, security, and operational rigor. This release enables organizations to deploy frontier AI for real-world, high‑stakes scenarios across development, analysis, and automation.

Public Preview: Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant service level
Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant storage (ANF Elastic ZRS) is an advanced high-availability service level for Azure NetApp Files that provides continuous data access with zero data loss, even if an entire Azure Availability Zone goes offline. Built on Azure’s Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) architecture and compute infrastructure, ANF Elastic ZRS synchronously replicates file data across availability zones within one region. By eliminating single points of failure, it ensures mission-critical workloads remain online and protected without requiring special configuration or manual intervention. This makes it ideal for applications that demand uncompromising resilience and in-region data protection.

Azure NetApp Files Elastic ZRS provides consistent performance for metadata-heavy workloads across VMs and containers, making it well suited for AI, analytics, and Kubernetes/OpenShift environments. Whether you’re running mission critical workloads, AKS and containerized apps, cloud‑native applications, or general file shares, Azure NetApp Files Elastic ZRS delivers continuity without compromise, cost‑effective scalability, and operational simplicity. You can create volumes as small as 1 GiB, giving you the flexibility to optimize storage for workloads of any size.

Public Preview: Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager namespace-scoped resource placement

Namespace-scoped resource placement, now in preview for Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager, delivers fine‑grained control over selection and propagation of individual namespace‑scoped resources across multiple clusters.

This new capability means it is now possible to use Fleet Manager’s intelligent placement where a single namespace hosts multiple applications with different lifecycles and distribution requirements, or where teams using managed fleet namespaces need per‑workload scheduling based on specific cluster properties or capacity.

Those that are using Fleet Manager’s existing cluster-scoped resource placement will find familiar constructs including placement policies and staged rollouts, making it a simple step to start using namespace-scoped resource placement.

Generally Available: Azure Container Storage v2.1.0 now with Elastic SAN integration and on demand installation
Azure Container Storage v2.1.0 is now generally available. This release adds native Elastic SAN support and introduces a lightweight, on-demand installation model to simplify deployment and operations for Kubernetes workloads on Azure.
Elastic SAN Storage Type Support

With full support for Elastic SAN as a native storage type, you can provision scalable volume groups and consolidate large number of Kubernetes volumes under a single SAN resource, enabling faster attach and detach operations, higher throughput, and reduced management overhead for stateful workloads. The release also includes streamlined setup, improved defaults, and enhanced automation for Elastic SAN creation and volume group configuration.
On demand, modular Installation

Azure Container Storage v2.1.0 now supports modular, on-demand installation, allowing you to deploy only the components required for your selected storage type. This reduces cluster footprint, accelerates deployment, and simplifies lifecycle management.

Node Selector Support for component placement

Additionally, node selectors support enables precise control over where Azure Container Storage components run, helping optimize performance and resource usage in clusters with dedicated storage node pools or mixed topologies.