Generally Available: Geo-Replication for Azure Event Hubs Premium and Dedicated

July 2025

Generally Available: Azure Firewall now supports ingestion-time transformation in Log Analytics for flexible, cost-efficient logging
Azure Firewall now supports ingestion-time transformation of logs in Log Analytics, enabling selective logging and advanced filtering.
Why it matters:
For customers using Log Analytics to analyse firewall logs, the cost of log ingestion and storage itself can be significant. This feature lets you filter and transform logs before ingestion, helping reduce costs while retaining critical data.
Customer benefits:

• Security monitoring: Log only suspicious traffic for better threat detection.
• Cost savings: Avoid ingesting and storing unnecessary logs.
• Compliance: Use DCRs to route logs for audit/reporting.
• Incident response: Faster access to relevant logs.
• Custom alerts: Build dashboards and alerts in Azure Monitor.

Generally Available: Geo-Replication for Azure Event Hubs Premium and Dedicated
The Geo-Replication feature for Azure Event Hubs in the premium and dedicated tier is now generally available. The Event Hubs Geo-Replication feature is one of the options to insulate Azure Event Hubs client applications against outages and disasters, providing replication of both metadata (entities, configuration, properties) and data (message data and message property / state changes).
The Geo-Replication feature ensures that the metadata and data of a namespace are continuously replicated from a primary region to one or more secondary regions. Moreover, it allows promoting any secondary region to primary, at any time.
Promoting a secondary repoints the endpoint for the namespace to the selected secondary region and switches the roles between the primary and secondary region. The promotion is nearly instantaneous once initiated and doesn’t require any changes on the client side.

Generally Available: GRS and CRR support for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 in Azure Backup availability in Norway and Japan
Premium SSD v2 delivers high-performance block storage with sub-millisecond latency, high IOPS, and throughput—at a low cost. With Geo Redundant Storage (GRS) and Cross-Region Restore (CRR) support, you can safeguard VMs against data loss and perform on-demand restores in a secondary region for audits or disaster recovery.
Enabling GRS vaults for VMs using Premium SSD v2 are available in Norway West, Norway East, Japan West, Japan East.

**Generally Available: Cluster Extension Manager move to AKS control plane
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)**
Extension Manager, the core component responsible for managing the lifecycle of AKS cluster extensions, has been moved from customer worker nodes to the AKS control plane. This transition enhances security, simplifies networking, and reduces operational overhead - delivering a more robust and streamlined experience for managing extensions like Azure Backup, Azure Container Storage, Flux (GitOps) as well as third-party solutions such as Cast AI and Cilium.

Public Preview: Max blocked nodes allowed support in AKS
The max blocked nodes allowed feature for AKS lets you specify how many nodes that fail to drain (blocked nodes) can be tolerated during upgrades or similar operations. This feature only works if the undrainable node behavior property is set; otherwise, the command will return an error.

Generally Available: Virtual Machines node pools support in AKS
Virtual Machines node pools support in AKS is now generally available. With Virtual Machines node pools, Azure Kubernetes Services directly manages the provisioning and bootstrapping of every single node.
When deploying a workload onto Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), each node pool typically can only contain one virtual machine (VM) type or SKU. Virtual Machines node pools allow the capability to add multiple VM SKUs of a similar family to a single node pool.
Virtual Machines node pools allow you to specify a family of SKUs for a node pool without the need to maintain one node pool per SKU type, reducing the node pool footprint.

Public Preview: CLI command for migration from Availability Sets and Basic load balancer on AKS
Availability Sets and the Basic load balancer are being deprecated on September 30 2025. AKS now supports, in public preview, a simple Azure CLI command that will automatically migrate your AKS cluster from Availability Sets to the new Virtual Machines node pool and upgrade your load balancer SKU from Basic to Standard in one operation.

Generally Available: Node auto-provisioning support in AKS
Managing dynamic workloads in Kubernetes can often lead to overprovisioning, idle resources, and additional operational overhead from maintaining pre-configured node pools.
To address this, Node Auto-Provisioning (NAP) support in AKS is now generally available. NAP automatically provisions single-instance nodes (VMs) in response to unscheduled pods, eliminating the need for pre-configured node pools.
This enables fine-grained, on-demand scaling that aligns compute resources precisely with workload needs, resulting in improved efficiency, simplified cluster management, and better cost control for dynamic workloads.

Public Preview: AZNFS (3.0) for BlobNFS with FUSE for superior performance
For customers requiring NFS 3.0 protocol support or POSIX compliance, Azure Blob Storage natively supports NFSv3 (aka BlobNFS). BlobNFS is accessed via the Linux NFS client with our AZNFS mount helper package, which streamlines mounting and reliably connecting to Blob Storage’s NFS endpoints.
We’re announcing an update to AZNFS (3.0) for BlobNFS, which now uses the same libfuse3 library that powers BlobFuse bringing significant improvements in performance and scale. The updated AZNFS for BlobNFS delivers significantly higher throughput, larger file support, better metadata performance, and removes user group limits, enhancing performance for demanding workloads.

Public Preview: Azure Functions Kafka trigger support in Consumption plan
Kafka Extension for Azure Functions in Consumption plan is now in public preview. This extension enables you to detect and respond to real time messages streaming into Kafka Topics, or write to a Kafka Topic through the output binding. You can now focus on your Azure Function’s logic without worrying about the event-sourcing pipeline or maintaining infra to host the extension. This extension is now supported when hosting functions in the Consumption plan, enabling it to elastically scale and trigger on Kafka messages.

Public Preview: Orchestration versioning for Durable Functions and durable task SDKs
When building Durable Functions apps, it’s inevitable that orchestrations need to be changed. You might need to modify or remove activity functions, or maybe even completely rewrite the orchestration logic. Without any functionality built around versioning, it’s difficult to introduce changes to orchestrations, especially when they’re in-flight.

The orchestration versioning feature allows you to set the version of orchestrations so that you can write conditional logic to control when a certain orchestration version is run. Furthermore, the feature allows you to version workers, so that orchestrations of a certain version can only be run on certain workers. This is useful when you need to make big or breaking changes to your orchestrations and want to have both new and existing inflight orchestrations run concurrently.

The orchestration versioning feature is now available for .NET isolated Durable Function apps using any of the supported storage providers, including the latest durable task scheduler.

In addition to Durable Functions, the durable task SDK for .NET also supports the orchestration versioning feature. This is a lightweight client SDK for users that don’t want to use Durable Functions to author orchestrations and are looking to run their apps outside of Azure Functions.

Generally Available: Durable Functions PowerShell SDK as a standalone module

• The Durable Functions PowerShell SDK is now available as a standalone module in the PowerShell Gallery: AzureFunctions.PowerShell.Durable.SDK. This SDK is now generally available and is the recommended approach for authoring Durable Functions apps with PowerShell. The SDK includes support for sub-orchestrations, as well as many highly requested improvements such as better exception and null-value handling, and serialization fixes.
  The previous Durable Functions PowerShell SDK was built into Azure Functions PowerShell language worker. This approach came with the benefit that Durable Functions apps could be authored out-of-the box for Azure Functions PowerShell users. However, it also came with various shortcomings, the biggest being that new features, bug fixes, and other changes were dependent on the PowerShell worker’s release cadence. This made it harder to quickly release improvements and changes requested by Durable Functions PowerShell users, thus motivating the building of the new standalone SDK.

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server: Indonesia Central

• Now you can deploy Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server in the Indonesia Central region.

Generally Available: Azure Backup standard policies support for Trusted Launch virtual Machines

• Trusted Launch support with standard backup policies enables seamless backup configuration for secure VMs, aligning with Trusted Launch becoming the default across VM creation interfaces. This enhancement ensures continuity for automation workflows using PowerShell, CLI, or REST APIs, eliminating the need for policy change in scripts and preventing failures.