Generally Available: User-Defined Functions for Azure Confidential Ledger

Generally Available: User-Defined Functions for Azure Confidential Ledger

Effective March 1, 2025, you can keep your records in Azure confidential ledger (ACL) at the reduced price of approximately $3 per day per instance. The reduced price is for the computation and the ledger use.

To protect your records, automatically create signatures of your blob storage data and keep those in Azure confidential ledger. For forensics, you can verify the tamper protection of the data by verifying against the signature in ACL. Imagine doing this as you are migrating data from one system to another, or when you need to protect data from insider or administrator risks and confidently report that to authorities.

If you keep your data in Azure SQL database, you can use their security ledger feature to auto generate record digests and store them in ACL for safeguarding. You can use the SQL stored procedure to verify that no tampering or administrator modifications occurred to your SQL data.

Generally Available: Vaulted Backups by Azure Backup for Azure Database for PostgreSQL- FLexible server in 5 Regions

Microsoft is excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Vaulted Backups by Azure Backup for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, a robust and scalable backup solution designed to meet the needs of enterprises and developers alike. Vaulted backup support from PostgreSQL flexible server adds to the broad coverage of workloads that Azure Backup supports including workloads like AKS, Blobs, AFS etc. that power cloud-native applications on Azure.

Key benefits:

• Regional Disaster Recovery: Cross-Region Restore ensures vital failover capabilities, maintaining business operations and adhering to disaster recovery protocols.
• Compliance with Regulations: Secure long-term data retention (LTR) for up to 10 years, aligning with global compliance standards.
• Enhanced Security and Cyber Resilience: Protect backup data from ransomware and unauthorized access with immutable vaults and role-based access control.
  Azure Backup for PostgreSQL Flexible Server is now generally available in selected Azure regions namely East Asia, Central India, Southeast Asia, UK South and UK West (In all other Azure regions, we are currently in public preview). Customers can start using the service immediately by visiting the Business Continuity Center in Azure portal and configuring their backups.

Generally Available: Configure Notifications in Azure Load Testing
Azure Load Testing now allows you to configure notifications to receive updates for key events, such as test completion or schedule changes. These notifications can help you automate follow-up actions and improve team collaboration.

Generally Available: Latest PostgreSQL Minor Versions Supported by Azure Database for PostgreSQL- Flexible Server
PostgreSQL minor versions 17.2, 16.6, 15.10, 14.15, 13.18, and 12.22 are now supported by Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server.
These minor version upgrades are automatically performed as part of the monthly planned maintenance in Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server. This upgrade automation ensures that your databases are always running the latest optimized versions without requiring manual intervention. This release fixes one security vulnerability and more than 55 bugs reported over the last several months.

In late-February 2025, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL:

• Monitor database availability for Azure SQL Database using the SLA-compliant Availability metric. Learn more.
• Use of native Windows principals for Azure SQL Managed Instance is now available. This capability simplifies the migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance and unblocks the migration of legacy applications that are tied to Windows logins.

Generally Available: Azure Load Balancer Health Event Logs
Azure Load Balancer health event logs are now generally available in all public, Azure China, and Government regions.

With health event logs, you can collect, store, and analyze information to help understand the health of your Azure Load Balancer resource. These built-in logs help you troubleshoot specific scenarios and allow you to identify and alert on availability issues affecting your load balancer. Examples of scenarios where Load Balancer health event logs can help are:

• Traffic distribution issues: When your load balancer may not be distributing traffic as intended, due to causes ranging from misconfiguration to Azure platform issues.
• Port exhaustion: When your load balancer may be experiencing outbound connectivity issues due to SNAT port exhaustion.
• No healthy backends: When your load balancer’s frontend has no healthy backend instances to distribute traffic to.

With Azure Load Balancer health event logs, you can monitor the health of your load balancer, without having to set up and manage complex metric-based alerts or build a custom data ingestion pipeline.