Generally Available: PgBouncer 1.25.1 support in Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server

Generally Available: PgBouncer 1.25.1 support in Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server

PgBouncer 1.25.1 is now generally available in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. As a built-in connection pooling feature, PgBouncer helps you scale to thousands of connections with low overhead by efficiently managing idle and short-lived connections.

With this update, you benefit from the latest cumulative improvements from recent community releases, including performance enhancements, protocol improvements, and important security and stability fixes. This update helps you run applications more efficiently, reduce connection overhead, and improve overall reliability of your database workloads.

Because PgBouncer is fully integrated into flexible server, you don’t need to install or manage it separately. You can simply enable it on port 6432 and start optimizing your application connectivity.

Generally Available: Enhancements to maintenance notifications in Azure Service Health
We’re introducing regional level consolidated maintenance notifications for Azure Database for PostgreSQL to simplify how you stay informed about upcoming maintenance. Instead of one notification per server, now you receive a single notification per region that consolidates maintenance details for all your PostgreSQL servers across subscriptions.

This enhancement reduces notification noise while giving you a clearer view of upcoming maintenance activities in your environment. You can more easily plan and coordinate across teams, ensuring minimal disruption to your workloads.

Public Preview: Azure Files assessments are now available using Azure Migrate
Azure Migrate now supports assessments for Azure Files, allowing customers and partners to efficiently plan migrations of on-premises SMB and NFS file shares (Windows and Linux) to Azure Files. This feature enables discovery of file shares, visibility into capacity and sources, and provides Azure Files SKU recommendations for informed migration decisions.

Key benefits include:

• Discover and review on-premises SMB/NFS shares
• Group, tag, and filter shares for better planning
• Generate business cases comparing Azure Files and on-premises costs
• Assess shares with Azure Files SKU recommendations based on region, redundancy, media type, and performance
  This enhancement streamlines migration planning, reduces guesswork, and speeds up transitions to Azure Files, especially for complex environments.

Azure Files is ideal for modernisation, backup, and lift-and-shift needs. Integrating assessments into Azure Migrate ensures a seamless migration journey using the trusted Azure platform.

Getting started:
To get started, use Azure Migrate to set up discovery and run Azure Files assessments directly from the Azure portal.

Generally Available: Observability in AKS Namespace and Workload Views
AKS now surfaces observability data powered by Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus directly within Namespace and Workload views, making it easier to:

• Monitor cluster and workload health
• Troubleshoot pending or failed pods
• Analyze resource utilization across Nodes, Namespaces, Workloads, and Pods
• Assess pod performance with event and utilization summaries

With these enhanced insights, you can diagnose issues faster and gain a clearer understanding of cluster performance and resource usage.

Generally Available: Azure Red Hat OpenShift adds NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPU support
Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) now supports NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPU-based Azure Virtual Machine SKUs, enabling customers to run large-scale AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads on a fully managed OpenShift service. This update allows organizations to deploy GPU-accelerated containers using enterprise Kubernetes with built-in security, lifecycle management, and Azure integration.

With H100 and H200 GPUs, customers can take advantage of next-generation performance for training and inferencing large language models, data analytics, and advanced simulation workloads. Running these GPUs on ARO provides a consistent OpenShift experience across on-premises and cloud environments while leveraging Azure infrastructure for scalability, availability, and governance.

This capability helps customers standardize AI and accelerated computing workloads on OpenShift while reducing operational overhead through a managed service, making it easier to move from experimentation to production on Azure.

Generally Available: Disable HTTP proxy in AKS
Organizations that use HTTP proxies to control outbound traffic often need to change or remove those settings as network requirements evolve, which can be disruptive in running clusters. Azure Kubernetes Service allows administrators to disable HTTP proxy variables for nodes and pods while retaining proxy configuration in the control plane, with changes triggering node pool reimaging to ensure a consistent cluster state. This gives operators clearer control over outbound networking behavior and simplifies ongoing maintenance without requiring full cluster rebuilds.

Generally Available: Network Security Perimeter for Azure Service Bus
Network Security Perimeter (NSP) support for Azure Service Bus is now generally available. Network Security Perimeter creates a logical network boundary around your Service Bus namespaces and other Azure PaaS resources, blocking unauthorized public access by default and enabling secure communication between services within the perimeter. This complements existing Service Bus network security options - IP firewall rules, VNet service endpoints, and private endpoints- by providing centralized, perimeter-level control.
Instead of configuring network rules on each resource individually, you create a perimeter and associate your PaaS resources with it. Resources inside the perimeter can communicate freely, while explicit inbound and outbound access rules control any traffic crossing the perimeter boundary. This is especially useful for scenarios like customer-managed key (CMK) encryption, where your Service Bus namespace needs to communicate with Azure Key Vault - both resources can be placed within the same perimeter, securing the communication without additional configuration.
Network Security Perimeter provides diagnostic access logs that record every allowed or denied connection attempt, supporting audit and compliance requirements.