Generally Available: Core Kubernetes extensions for AKS

Generally Available: Core Kubernetes extensions for AKS
Core Kubernetes extensions for AKS offers an ARM-driven experience for the installation and lifecycle management of essential components that can be integrated into your AKS cluster to enhance its functionality. Compared to the existing cluster extension experience, core Kubernetes extensions provide a native AKS feature-like experience, broader regional and cloud availability, updated version management, simplified network setup, reduced identity footprint, and potentially faster installation speeds.

Generally Available: Send a Custom Event from the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro
Custom Events offer developers a way to track user or system actions that matter to their business or observability objectives. For example, a developer may want to track an end-user action such as selecting a button, submitting a form, or completing a purchase. These events can be sliced and diced in Application Insights Experiences including the Usage Analysis Views. Custom Events have long been a staple of Azure Monitor Application Insights. Now that they're available in the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro, it removes an impediment to migrate to OpenTelemetry

Generally Available: Azure Monitor Log Analytics UI query limit increased to 100K records
Azure Monitor Log Analytics UI now supports up to 100,000 records per query, a significant increase from the previous 30,000-record limit. This enhancement enables deeper investigations and broader data analysis directly within the portal, allowing users to view and explore larger datasets without needing to rely on external tools.

This update balances expanded query capacity with browser performance and stability, ensuring a reliable experience in Log Analytics.

To take advantage of this improvement, select “Max. limit” in the “Show” pill within the Logs UI, or configure it as your default setting.
We are actively monitoring usage and performance with this change, and based on results, we will explore the possibility of increasing the limit further in the future.
For users who require additional scale, data exports using tools such as Excel or scripts continue to support up to 500,000 records via the Log Analytics API.

Generally Available: Log Analytics cross-regional Workspace Replication
We are pleased to announce the general availability of Log Analytics Workspace Replication. Cross-regional workspace replication enhances resilience to regional incidents by enabling workspace owners to switch over to another region as necessary. A copy of the workspace is established in another region (selected by the workspace administrator). When replication is enabled, logs are ingested in both regions, ensuring continued observability through dashboards, alerts, and advanced solutions such as Microsoft Sentinel.

Generally Available: Azure Monitor Prometheus community recommended alerts for AKS
Azure Monitor now offers one-click enablement of Prometheus recommended alerts directly in the Azure Portal for AKS clusters. These alerts, based on enhanced Prometheus community rules, provide comprehensive coverage across cluster, node, and pod levels. Previously, enabling these alerts required manual template downloads and CLI deployment.
To use these alerts, your cluster must have Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus enabled. They serve as the replacement for the legacy Container insights recommended alerts (custom metrics) (preview).

By enabling these alerts, customers will:

• Receive timely notifications on critical cluster issues.
• Accelerate triage and troubleshooting with preconfigured signal coverage.
• Improve cluster reliability and performance with minimal configuration.

Generally Available: Managed Prometheus visualizations and enhanced monitoring experience in Azure Monitor for AKS
Managed Prometheus visualizations in Azure Monitor are now generally available, along with an enhanced, unified monitoring experience for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

This release brings comprehensive monitoring capabilities into a single, streamlined view—designed to address common challenges customers face when managing AKS clusters. Previously, Container insights visualizations were powered by metric data from Log Analytics. Customers now have the option to power these visualizations using managed Prometheus data, offering a more cost-efficient and performant solution.

With this feature, customers can:

• Optimize costs by migrating from Log Analytics based metrics to managed Prometheus
• Improve performance with faster metric query response times
• Integrate with the new Prometheus based recommended alerts
• Gain visibility into control plane metrics for deeper troubleshooting
• Monitor at scale with the improved multi-cluster view

Generally Available: Dedicated GPU in Azure Container Apps
Dedicated GPU support in Azure Container Apps is now generally available. Dedicated GPUs provide additional compute options tailored for AI applications, making them ideal for AI scenarios which require continuous availability and don’t scale to zero.

This feature supports NC A100 v4 series GPUs that are optimized to support your AI workloads. GPU workload profiles are offered as part of the Dedicated Plan and only supported in the Workload Profiles type environment.

Generally Available: Azure Arc enabled Azure Container Apps
The capability to run Azure Container Apps on your own Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters (AKS and AKS-HCI) is now generally available. The cluster can be on-premises or hosted in a third-party cloud. This approach allows developers to take advantage of the features and developer productivity of Azure Container Apps. Meanwhile it allows IT Administrators to maintain corporate compliance by hosting the application in Hybrid environments.

Azure Container Apps allows developers to rapidly build and deploy microservices and containerized applications. Common uses of Azure Container Apps include, but are not limited to: API endpoints, background or event-driven processing, and running microservices. Applications can dynamically scale within the limits of the Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster.

By deploying an Arc extension on the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster, IT administrators gain control of the underlying hardware and environment, while still enabling the high productivity of Azure PaaS services from within a hybrid environment.

**Generally Available: Private endpoint support in Azure Container Apps for workload profiles environments
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Private endpoints are now supported in general availability for workload profile environments in Azure Container Apps. This enables customers to connect to their Container Apps environment using a private IP address in their Azure Virtual Network, eliminating exposure to the public internet and securing access to their applications. With private endpoints, customers can also connect directly from Azure Front Door to their workload profile environments over a private link instead of the public internet. Today, customers can enable Private Link to container apps origin for Azure Front Door through CLI and portal. TCP support is now available as well.

This feature is supported for both Consumption and Dedicated plans in workload profile environments. Private endpoints are supported for both new and existing environments, so that customers can leverage the new capabilities without re-provisioning their environment. This capability also introduces the public network access setting, enabling customers to configure Azure networking policies.

**Generally Available: Planned maintenance in Azure Container Apps
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Planned maintenance is now generally available in Azure Container Apps. This feature allows you to control when non-critical updates are applied to your Container Apps environment to minimize downtime and impact to applications. Non-critical updates include minor security patches, bug fixes, and new releases. Critical and urgent updates, however, are applied as needed to ensure security and reliability compliance, even outside of planned maintenance windows.
To configure a weekly maintenance window, you simply need to specify a day of week, a start time in the UTC time zone, and a duration. This can be done using Azure CLI as well as Azure portal.

Generally Available: Azure Functions integration with Azure AI Foundry Agent Service
Azure Functions integration with AI Foundry Agent service is now generally available.
Integrating Azure Functions with AI Foundry Agent service enables you to build intelligent, event-driven applications that are scalable, secure, and cost-efficient. Azure Functions act as custom tools that AI agents can call to execute business logic, access secure systems, or process data dynamically in response to events like HTTP requests or queue messages. This integration allows for modular AI workflows, where agents can reason through tasks and trigger specific functions as needed—ideal for scenarios like customer support, document processing, or automated insights—without the need to manage infrastructure.

Generally Available: Vaulted Backups by Azure Backup for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server in all region
Announcing the general availability (GA) of vaulted backups by Azure Backup for Azure Database for PostgreSQL - flexible server, a robust and scalable backup solution designed to meet the needs of enterprises and developers alike. Key features include policy-based scheduled backups that eliminate the need for manual intervention.

Key benefits:

• Enhanced Security and Cyber Resilience: Safeguard backups from ransomware and unauthorized access using immutable vaults and role-based controls.
• Compliance with Regulations: Secure Long-Term Retention (LTR) for up to 10 years in accordance with global standards.
• At scale management: Enterprise grade features and management via Azure Business Continuity Center, which offers a single pane of glass experience to manage, operate and govern all protected resources.

Generally Available: Azure Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk are now available in Indonesia Central
Azure Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk are now available in Indonesia Central region.
Azure Ultra Disks are the highest-performing storage option for Azure virtual machines (VMs), offering high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low sub-millisecond latency. Ultra Disks are ideal for data-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, top-tier databases, and transaction-heavy applications.
Azure Premium SSD v2, a next-generation general-purpose block storage solution, offers sub-millisecond latencies and exceptional price performance for IO-intensive workloads at a low cost. Premium SSD v2 is suited for a broad range of enterprise production scenarios, including SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, MongoDB, big data/analytics, and gaming on virtual machines or stateful containers.

Generally Available: Availability Set support for Premium SSD v2 Disk Storageage
Support for Availability Sets is now available with Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) disk storage in regions without Availability Zones: Australia Southeast, Canada East, North Central US, UK West, West Central US and West US.

Pv2 disk delivers low-latency, consistent performance with the flexibility to scale throughput and IOPS independently, making it ideal for a broad spectrum of enterprise production workloads including SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, and big data environments. It is particularly well suited for customers seeking to optimize performance and cost across diverse workloads, without over-provisioning.

By enabling Availability Set support, customers in these regions can now achieve higher availability and fault tolerance for their Pv2-backed workloads, even in the absence of Availability Zones.

Generally Available: SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21
For two decades, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has been the primary tool for SQL database administrators and database developers. SSMS provides a powerful and user-friendly interface for managing SQL databases, writing T-SQL, and troubleshooting problems. With the release of SSMS 21, built on Visual Studio 2022, the platform continues to advance with 64-bit support, a modern installer, and automatic updates. This latest version introduces Git integration, initial dark theme support, and enhancements to the query editor, results grid, and Azure authentication. Whether supporting on-premises or cloud-based SQL environments, SSMS remains the trusted solution for efficient and effective database management.

**Generally Available: Filtered vector search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB (vCore)
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Filtered vector search is now generally available in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB (vCore). With this release, you can narrow down your search space, filtering before running a vector search to make results more accurate and performance significantly faster—especially on large datasets.
This feature works with all supported vector indexes, including inverted file index (IVF), hierarchical navigable small world (HNSW), and DiskANN.

Generally Available: Full text and hybrid search in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL
Native full-text and hybrid search capabilities in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL are now generally available. You can now seamlessly build advanced search and GenAI scenarios without relying on external search services.
Key capabilities include:

• Full-text search. Efficiently perform powerful text searches directly within your Azure Cosmos DB accounts. Use advanced text analytics such as tokenization and stemming for precise, relevant results.
• BM25 text ranking. Enhance search accuracy with BM25 ranking, a proven algorithm that considers term frequency, document length, term significance, and other factors to surface the most relevant documents from text searches.
• Hybrid search. Achieve superior relevancy and accuracy by combining vector search with BM25-based text ranking. Utilizing Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF), hybrid search merges and ranks search results to deliver highly contextual and precise outcomes.

Generally Available: Azure SQL updates for mid-May 2025
In mid-May 2025, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL:

• Experience faster failovers with continuous priming and enhanced data ingestion with a 150 MiB/s log generation rate, now available in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale.
• Streamline your SQL workflows in Visual Studio Code with the enhanced UI in the MSSQL extension. Try the new Connection dialog, Object Explorer filtering, Table Designer, Query Results pane, and Query Plan Visualizer today.
• Try the native ANSI SQL-compatible JSON type that is optimized for efficient query processing and in-place modifications.
• Transform relational data into complex JSON documents using ANSI SQL-compatible JSON aggregates—JSON_OBJECTAGG and JSON_ARRAYAGG.