Generally Available: Deployment safeguards – pod security standard support in AKS

Generally Available: Deployment safeguards – pod security standard support in AKS

Organizations deploying workloads on Kubernetes often need a consistent way to enforce pod security configurations across clusters. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now supports Pod Security Standards within Deployment Safeguards, enabling centralized management of Baseline, Restricted, and Privileged standards at scale. This capability allows teams to ensure that deployment manifests comply with selected security standards, help technical practitioners strengthen workload security, reduce configuration drift, and simplify the rollout of cluster-wide security controls.

Generally Available: StandardV2 NAT Gateway with zone-redundancy and StandardV2 public IPs
StandardV2 SKU NAT Gateway is now generally available, delivering enhanced resiliency, greater performance, and dual-stack connectivity, all at the same price as the Standard SKU.

StandardV2 Public IP addresses and prefixes are also generally available.

StandardV2 NAT Gateway requires StandardV2 public IPs; Standard SKU public IPs are not supported.

What’s new with StandardV2 NAT Gateway:

• Zone-redundancy: Automatically maintains outbound connectivity during single zone failures in availability zone-enabled regions.
• Enhanced performance: Up to 100 Gbps of throughput and 10 million packets per second—double the Standard SKU capacity.
• Dual-stack support: Attach up to 16 IPv6 and 16 IPv4 public IP addresses for future ready connectivity.
• Traffic insights with flow logs: Gain detailed IP-level visibility of traffic for troubleshooting and compliance verification.

Pricing and availability

• StandardV2 NAT Gateway is the same price as the Standard SKU.
• Available in most public cloud regions, rollout planned for remaining regions in 2026. Learn more about remaining unsupported regions.
• Deploy through Portal, CLI, Powershell, Bicep, and ARM. Terraform support coming soon.

Generally Available: Reporting in Playwright Workspaces (part of Azure App Testing)

Reporting capabilities are now live in Playwright Workspaces. The latest update brings you an integrated, flexible and collaborative reporting experience designed to make debugging tests in Playwright Workspaces easier, faster and more efficient. Customers can bring their own Azure storage accounts to store and govern their test artifacts. Playwright Workspaces is a fully managed service for end-to-end web testing, built on top of Playwright. With Playwright Workspaces, you can significantly speed up test execution by running tests in parallel using managed cloud-based browsers.

Generally Available: Application volume group for Oracle create data protection volume group (API)

The functionality of application volume group for Oracle has been expanded with the ability to create data protection volumes in a volume group with the same anti-affinity layout as production volume groups.

Customers benefit from this ability for creating disaster recovery volume layouts that support production failover to a zone or region of their choice.

Generally Available: Azure Load Testing in Switzerland North
Azure Load Testing capability in Azure App Testing is now generally available in Switzerland North. Customers can now use Azure Load Testing, a fully managed load-testing service to generate high scale load and run simulations, easily identify performance bottlenecks through a rich dashboard of client-side and server-side metrics, get AI powered actionable insights, and integrate load tests into their CI/CD workflows. Customers can get started without any knowledge of load-testing tools, or use their existing Apache JMeter or Locust scripts.

Generally Available: Azure File Sync in Israel Central
Azure File Sync enables seamless tiering of data from on-premises Windows Servers to Azure Files for hybrid use cases and simplified migration. It also enables you to leverage the performance, flexibility and compatibility of your on-premises File Server while leveraging the scale and cost effectiveness of Azure Files.
The expansion into Israel Central brings the service closer to organizations in these regions, offering lower latency, better performance, and support for local data residency requirements.
If Azure File Sync is not yet available in your preferred region, please fill out this survey to express interest.

Public Preview: User delegation SAS for Azure Tables, Azure Files, and Azure Queues
Customers upgrading AKS clusters often need a clear and flexible path to adopt new OS versions without disrupting workloads. Ubuntu 24.04 is now generally available on AKS starting with Kubernetes version 1.32, with containerd 2.0 enabled by default.

It can be enabled using the new Ubuntu2404 OS SKU in Kubernetes 1.32 and above, or by using the standard Ubuntu OS SKU in Kubernetes 1.35 and above, where Ubuntu 24.04 becomes the default.

Existing clusters already using the Ubuntu OS SKU will automatically migrate to Ubuntu 24.04 when upgraded to Kubernetes 1.35 or later.

For rollback or testing scenarios, AKS also now supports the Ubuntu2204 OS SKU across Kubernetes versions 1.25 through 1.36, allowing practitioners to switch OS versions without requiring a Kubernetes version change. These options provide more control over OS lifecycle management and simplify migration planning for cluster operators.