Generally Available: Live Resize for Premium SSD v2 and Ultra NVMe Disks

Generally Available: Live Resize for Premium SSD v2 and Ultra NVMe Disks
Announcing the General Availability of Live Resize for Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra NVMe Disks. This feature allows you to dynamically expand the storage capacity of your disks without any disruption to your applications. To optimize costs, you can start with smaller disks and gradually increase their storage capacity as needed, all without experiencing any downtime.

Generally Available: Log or block shared access signature (SAS) tokens for Azure Storage based on expiration policy
Azure Storage’s SAS expiration policy (validity interval) allows you to set an upper limit for the period for validity of SAS tokens. Up until now, administrators could set how long a SAS should be valid through the SAS expiration policy, however, it was possible to extend this time period through the SAS signed expiry date. SAS expiration action allows you to configure actions for using a SAS token that doesn’t adhere to the defined SAS expiration policy: do you want to log the event, or block the request entirely?

Auditing with ‘Log’ action helps you detect trends and investigate access without disrupting workflows, while ‘Block’ action lets you enforce zero-tolerance for out-of-policy SAS tokens. You can choose to get started with ‘Log’ action to monitor your diagnostic logs and ensure your current access patterns are not disrupted. We strongly recommend using Block action to ensure that if a SAS token expiry interval has surpassed the validity of the expiration period set on the storage account, then access to storage must be blocked.

Public Preview: New tagging features in Azure confidential ledger
Tags in Azure confidential ledger serve as secondary keys that enhance data organization and retrieval within collections. By allowing users to assign up to five tags per transaction, these tags provide an additional layer of categorization, making it easier to manage and locate specific data entries. Tags are limited to 64-character strings and can be used to group transactions in a way that suits the specific needs of the client. This feature ensures efficient data retrieval without any performance degradation, thereby improving the overall data management experience.

Users can leverage tags to categorize and group transactions based on various criteria, such as project names, departments, or data types. This flexibility allows for more tailored data organization, which can be particularly useful in complex environments where data needs to be accessed and analyzed quickly. For example, a financial institution might use tags to differentiate between different types of transactions, such as deposits, withdrawals, and transfers, enabling more efficient auditing and reporting. Additionally, tags can be used in conjunction with other data organization features like collection IDs to further streamline data management and retrieval processes.

Generally Available: Azure Virtual Network Manager in Azure US Government Cloud
Azure Virtual Network Manager is now generally available in Azure US Government Cloud, providing unified control for connectivity, security, and routing across subscriptions, regions, and tenants. By automating configurations, it guarantees consistent policy and visibility as your network environment expands.
With Azure Virtual Network Manager, you can simplify network connectivity management using hub‑and‑spoke or mesh topologies in just a few clicks. The hub‑and‑spoke model creates a central hub with spokes for streamlined networking traffic, whereas mesh connectivity allows selected VNets to communicate directly without impacting latency. This is useful for performance‑sensitive workloads connected to either a hub virtual network or an Azure Virtual WAN.

Azure Virtual Network Manager also lets you apply your organization’s network policies through security admin rules that are processed before any NSG rules. This pre‑evaluation prevents misconfigurations and enforces compliance company‑wide. Additionally, virtual network flow logs are available to monitor and troubleshoot traffic governed by these policies.

The user‑defined route (UDR) management in Azure Virtual Network Manager enables you to define routes once and deploy them automatically across multiple subnets or virtual networks. This capability supports use cases such as directing spoke traffic through Azure Firewall or authorizing cross‑hub connections according to your approved architecture.

Generally Available: Configure backup interval for Azure Database for MySQL automated backups
Azure Database for MySQL now enables you to configure the backup interval for the automatic backups taken by the system to improve restore speed. This new feature optimizes the process by introducing more frequent snapshots, thereby reducing the number of binlogs that need to be replayed for point-in-time restore and minimizing overall restore time.

Generally Available: Accelerated logs now available for General Purpose tier in Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server
Now available for the General Purpose tier, accelerated logs in Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server give you the performance benefits previously available only in the Business Critical tier.
Accelerated logs boost performance for a broader range of workloads, enabling benefits such as reduced transaction latency and increased throughput.

Public Preview: Azure Database for PostgreSQL cascading read replica
You can now use cascading read replicas in Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server, available in Public Preview. With this new capability, you can create additional read replicas from an existing one. A read replica can act as the source for new replicas, helping you scale read workloads more efficiently across regions. You can create up to 5 read replicas per source, with support for up to 2 levels of replication. This feature is currently supported in the following Azure regions: West US, Spain Central, Australia East, South Central US, UK West, Poland Central, Italy North, West US 2, East US.

Generally Available: Azure SQL updates for late-July 2025
In late-July, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL:

• Use the UNISTR intrinsic function to define Unicode string literals using Unicode encoding values in a string.
• Use the ANSI SQL concatenation operator (||) to concatenate character or binary strings in a simple, intuitive way.

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Entra authentication for Power BI Desktop
You can now use Microsoft Entra ID authentication to connect to Azure Database for PostgreSQL from Power BI Desktop. This update simplifies access management, enhances security, and helps you support your organization’s broader Entra-based authentication strategy.

Public Preview: New SQL Server database migration in Azure Arc
You can now streamline the entire SQL Server migration journey—from assessment to provisioning to cutover—within a single Azure portal experience. The new Azure Arc migration experience powered by Azure Database Migration service gives you a centralized, automated path to Azure SQL Managed Instance migration. And the process takes mere days.

You get continuous migration assessments with cost visibility, simplified target provisioning, and support for near real-time database replication. You can also validate migration readiness through R/O database replicas and client connection summaries, ensuring a smooth migration with minimal downtime. Microsoft Copilot is seamlessly integrated to support informed decision-making at select points of your migration journey.