Generally Available: FIPS compliant mode for Application Gateway V2 SKUs

Generally Available: FIPS compliant mode for Application Gateway V2 SKUs

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 is a US government standard that defines minimum security requirements for cryptographic modules in information technology products and systems.

Azure Application Gateway V2 now supports FIPS mode, which can be enabled during deployment or at any time afterward. When FIPS mode is turned on, the gateway uses only FIPS-compliant predefined and custom TLS policies, enhancing security and helping meet FedRAMP security requirements.

Generally Available: Zonal placement for Azure file shares Azure Files Premium LRS in select regions.
Zonal Placement for Azure Files Premium LRS is now GA in select regions! This capability gives you explicit control over zone locality by pinning storage accounts to a specific availability zone, enabling high availability, fault isolation, and predictable low-latency performance for mission-critical workloads. Why it matters: Align compute and storage in the same zone for 10–40% lower latency compared to cross-zone deployments. Design resilient architectures with zone-aware control for better fault isolation.

Public Preview: Mistral Large 3 in Foundry
Mistral Large 3, a frontier-class open-weight model with Apache 2.0 licensing, is now available in Microsoft Foundry on Azure. This model delivers enterprise-grade reliability, long-context comprehension, and multimodal reasoning—making it ideal for production assistants, retrieval-augmented applications, agentic systems, and multimodal workflows.

Key Capabilities:

• Highly reliable instruction following
• Extended context support for long documents and multi-turn conversations
• Strong multimodal reasoning (text, images, diagrams)
• Stable, predictable performance for enterprise workloads
• Fully open and exportable for hybrid or on-premises deployment

Why it matters:
Mistral Large 3 sets a new benchmark for open models, combining frontier-level capability, reproducible results, and worldwide availability without regional restrictions. Organizations can fine-tune, customize, and deploy the model across cloud, edge, or sovereign environments with no attribution requirements.

Pricing:

• Input: $0.50 per 1M tokens
• Output: $1.50 per 1M tokens
• Deployment: Global Standard (West US 3)

Generally Availaible: Azure MCP Server support for Azure confidential ledger
The Azure MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server provides a streamlined approach for managing Azure resources—including Azure confidential ledger—through natural language prompts. This feature allows users to interact with confidential ledger without the need to memorize complex command syntax. Customers can now create an immutable and integrity-protected Azure confidential ledger for logging purposes. Additionally, writing to and reading from the ledger using AI is now fully supported and ready for deployment.

You can connect to Azure MCP Server utilizing a range of tools, programming languages, and frameworks. The server facilitates resource management via natural language conversations, supports the development of automation scripts, and enables integration of Azure operations into various applications. This capability is accessible through Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot.

Public Preview: Serverless workspaces in Azure Databricks
Serverless workspaces in Azure Databricks are now available in Public Preview, offering a fully managed workspace type that comes preconfigured with serverless compute and default storage to deliver an enterprise-ready SaaS experience with minimal infrastructure setup. With this release, customers can create Azure Databricks “Serverless” workspaces directly from the Azure portal to run production workloads entirely on serverless compute, rapidly spin up short-lived environments for training and testing, and empower admins who lack direct cloud provisioning permissions to deploy and manage secure, governed Azure Databricks environments at scale.

Generally Available: Azure Blob Storage SFTP - Resumable Uploads
Announcing the general availability of resumable uploads for Azure Storage Blob SFTP. In the event of a failed partial transfer, this new feature enables users to open the partial file and continue writing the remaining content. This capability optimizes time and conserves network bandwidth, especially in situations where network interruptions occur during file transfers, such as in remote areas with low connectivity or when transferring large files like multimedia or seismic data etc.

Resume Upload

The resumable upload feature for Azure Blob Storage SFTP is now generally available. This feature allows users to resume file uploads from the point of failure in the event of partial transfer failures, thereby saving time and reducing network bandwidth usage.

Learn more.

The SFTP transfer modes that Azure Blob Storage SFTP supports are below:

• Write: This mode lets the client continue an upload by adding data to an existing file from a specific point without creating a new file.
• Write + Create: This mode allows the client to resume an upload by either adding to an existing file or creating a new one if it doesn't exist, providing flexibility when the file may not be present initially.
• Append: This mode adds data to the end of an existing file without overwriting its current contents.
  Resumable upload enhances efficiency by saving time and bandwidth during interrupted file transfers. Please reach out to blobsftp@microsoft.com for feedback about SFTP for Azure Blob Storage.

Generally Available: The credcheck extension in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
Now you can install the credcheck extension in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. The credcheck extension helps you to enforce password and credential validation policies directly within PostgreSQL.

Generally Available: The ip4r extension in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
Now you can install the ip4r extension in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. Ip4r provides efficient storage and indexing functionality for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and ranges.

Generally Available: Update pg_squeeze to version 1.9.1 in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
Now you can upgrade the pg_squeeze extension to version 1.9.1 in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server.

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server in Belgium Central
Now you can deploy Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server in the Belgium Central Azure region.

Generally Available: Azure Load Balancer bandwidth metrics now support Protocol dimension
Bandwidth metrics for Azure Load Balancer are now published with metric dimension Protocol. When retrieving or viewing Byte, Packet, and SYN Count metrics in the Azure portal, you will now see the dimension Protocol. TCP traffic is denoted by Protocol=6, while UDP traffic is represented by Protocol=17.

With the Protocol dimension, you gain more granular visibility into traffic patterns for alerting, monitoring, and troubleshooting requirements.

The Protocol dimension is available on Byte, Packet, and SYN Count metrics in all Azure public regions, China cloud regions, and Government cloud regions.

Generally Available: Perth - Azure Extended Zones
We are announcing the general availability of the Perth Azure Extended Zone.

Azure Extended Zones are small-footprint extensions of Azure placed in metro areas, industry centers, or specific jurisdictions, to serve low latency and data residency workloads. They support a selection of virtual machine (VMs), container, networking, storage, and other Azure services. Azure Extended Zones can run latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive applications close to end users, within data residency boundaries.

Learn more about onboarding and managing Azure Extended Zones on our learn page, and start unlocking low-latency performance for your Perth workloads.