Generally Available: Draft & Deploy on Azure Firewall

Generally Available: Draft & Deploy on Azure Firewall

The new Draft & Deploy feature for Azure Firewall Policy introduces a streamlined, two-phase approach to managing firewall policies, significantly reducing deployment time and disruption. Traditionally, any policy update would trigger a full deployment of both the policy and the attached firewall, taking 2–4 minutes per change.

With Draft & Deploy, users can collaboratively make multiple changes in a draft version cloned from the current policy without affecting the live environment. Once finalized, all changes can be deployed at once, replacing the existing policy.

Generally Available: Azure Databricks Lakebase
Today we’re announcing the General Availability of Azure Databricks Lakebase, a managed PostgreSQL environment with next generation separation of storage and compute for OLTP, providing instant availability, instant clones, and scale-to-zero. Lakebase lets you build intelligent, transactional applications and AI agents on the same governed data foundation you already use for analytics, BI, and machine learning in Azure Databricks.

With Lakebase, operational data is written directly to lakehouse storage instead of siloed OLTP systems and shadow databases. This eliminates brittle ETL pipelines, reduces data duplication, and enables real‑time insights and AI on fresh operational data without complex data movement.

Developers can use familiar Postgres tools and libraries while Azure handles security, identity, networking, and compliance. Lakebase offers autoscaling, scale‑to‑zero, point‑in‑time recovery, and instant database branching so teams can move faster from prototype to production while maintaining enterprise‑grade reliability.

Running on Azure Databricks, Lakebase unifies operational and analytical workloads on open data formats, making it easier to power AI‑driven customer experiences, real‑time operational analytics, and modern line‑of‑business applications—all with the global scale and enterprise trust of the Microsoft cloud.

Generally Available: Azure Databricks update workspace network configuration
Azure Databricks workspaces have two network configurations – Azure Databricks-managed VNet and VNet Injection. The ability to update the Network Configuration of your workspace is now generally available. This enhancement provides greater flexibility and control over your Azure Databricks Network Configuration, enabling you to meet evolving security, compliance requirements.

With this capability, you can transition an Azure Databricks-managed VNet to your own VNet via VNet injection. Additionally, you can modify the VNet configuration of an existing VNet-injected workspace.