Generally Available: Customer Managed unplanned Failover for Azure Data Lake Storage and SSH File Transfer Protocol

January 2025 Update
Generally Available: Customer Managed unplanned Failover for Azure Data Lake Storage and SSH File Transfer Protocol

We are excited to announce the general availability of customer managed unplanned failover for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) and storage accounts with SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) enabled.
Customer managed unplanned failover enables you to failover your geo-redundant (GRS) or geo-zone-redundant (GZRS) storage account to your secondary region if the storage service endpoints in the primary region become unavailable. During failover, the original secondary region becomes the new primary region. All storage service endpoints are then redirected to the new primary region while restoring write access to the storage account. After the storage service endpoint outage is resolved, you can reconfigure geo-redundancy then perform another failover operation to fail back to the original primary region.

Unplanned failover is only supported with accounts that have GRS or GZRS enabled. Previously, unplanned failover was only supported for Blobs, Tables, Files, and Queue data. We are now extending support to include Azure Data Lake Storage and SSH File Transfer Protocol enabled accounts.

Generally Available: Open-Source feature update: KAITO Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) support
Advanced inference with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is now supported in open-source KAITO. RAG can be used on a base model in the KAITO registry to improve its accuracy and make your AI workload more context-aware to new data. This enables you to index and query new data efficiently with RAG and leverage low-cost GPU compute without retraining the entire LLM using KAITO in your AKS cluster.

Generally Available: User-managed plugin enablement in Azure Database for MySQL-Flexible Server
You can now directly manage Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server plugins, starting with the validate_password plugin. Now you can help enhance your server’s security by enabling the validate_password plugin to enforce strong password policies or by disabling it as needed—all without requiring a server restart. Previously, plugin management was limited to the platform, but now you can take control, tailoring your MySQL environment to meet your specific requirements.

This release simplifies security configuration, making it easier to enforce compliance and protect your data. Additionally, this is just the beginning; the plugin management framework is designed to expand, and we are actively gathering feedback to prioritize support for additional plugins in the future.

Generally Available: Accelerated logs now default along with support for customer managed keys (CMKs) in Azure Database for MySQL
The accelerated logs feature is now enabled by default for all new Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server deployments. This feature boosts server performance and maximizes database efficiency. You can also enable it on all existing Business-Critical servers—including those using customer-managed keys (CMKs) for data encryption—providing improved performance and reliability across a wide range of workloads.
The accelerated logs feature enhances a server's throughput, reduces commit latency for workloads, and supports high-concurrency applications seamlessly. With this feature enabled by default, new servers are automatically optimized for better performance without additional configuration. Furthermore, this enhancement is available at no additional cost in the Business-Critical service tier, ensuring maximum performance and reliability for mission-critical workloads.

Generally available: Azure SQL updates for mid-January 2025
In mid-January 2025, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL Managed Instance:
Filter egress traffic to Azure Storage accounts to help safeguard against data exfiltration. Learn more.

Generally Available: WebSocket support in Application Gateway for Containers
With WebSocket support, you can serve interactive and real-time applications, such as chat applications, live dashboards, and gaming platforms, with improved performance and reduced latency over Application Gateway for Containers.
Key benefits of WebSocket support in Application Gateway for Containers include:

• Bidirectional Communication: Enable bidirectional data exchange between clients and servers.
• Reduced Latency: Improve the performance of your applications with faster data transmission by utilizing full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection.
• Enhanced User Experience: Deliver more interactive and engaging applications to your users.