Public Preview: Azure Backup for Elastic SAN

Public Preview: Azure Backup for Elastic SAN
Azure Backup now supports Elastic SAN, offering a fully managed solution for backing up and restoring Elastic SAN volumes. This integration helps protect data against accidental deletions, ransomware attacks, and application updates by exporting Elastic SAN volumes to independent Managed Disk Incremental Snapshots. These snapshots are stored in locally redundant storage and are independent of the Elastic SAN volume lifecycle.

The solution supports up to 450 restore points with 24 hours backup frequency. It is currently available in select Azure regions and supports volumes up to 4 TiB. Long-term vaulted backups and hourly backups are not supported in this preview.

This public preview does not incur Azure Backup Protected Instance fees. However, standard charges apply for Managed Disk Incremental Snapshots.

To get started, visit the Azure Business Continuity Center and configure protection for your Elastic SAN volumes.

Generally Available: WireGuard In‑Transit Encryption for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
WireGuard in‑transit encryption is now generally available for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters using Azure CNI powered by Cilium and Advanced Container Networking Services (ACNS).

This capability enables transparent, node‑level encryption for inter‑node pod traffic using WireGuard’s modern cryptography, helping protect data in transit as it traverses the underlying network infrastructure without requiring application changes.

Key capabilities:
In‑transit encryption for inter‑node pod traffic within an AKS cluster
No application or workload changes required
Fully managed key generation and rotation, handled automatically by AKS
Minimal operational overhead, with no sidecars or additional control planes

Generally Available: Foundry Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (formerly AI Toolkit for VS Code)
Foundry Toolkit for VS Code is now generally available and provides VS Code tooling for Microsoft Agent Framework, including agent creation from templates or via GitHub Copilot, local test/debug with visualization and traces, and direct deployment to Foundry Agent Service from VS Code.

Public Preview: Hosted Agents in Foundry Agent Service
Hosted agents run in an isolated execution sandbox that provides a dedicated, secure runtime per agent session. Sessions start with a clean environment with no shared state between sessions, no cross-session data leakage, and strong compute boundaries between tenants.

Generally Available: CRC Protection
Azure Elastic SAN now supports CRC-32C checksum verification when enabled on the client side for connections to Elastic SAN volumes. You can enable CRC protection when creating an Elastic SAN or enable it on an existing Elastic SAN. Elastic SAN also offers the ability to enforce this error detection through a property that you can set at the volume group level. Any volume within that volume group inherits this property.

When you enable this property on a volume group, Elastic SAN rejects all client connections to any volumes in the volume group if CRC-32C isn't set for header or data digests on those connections. When the property is disabled, Elastic SAN volume checksum verification depends on whether CRC-32C is set for header or data digests on the client, but your Elastic SAN won't reject any connections.

Generally Available: Cascading read replicas in Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Cascading read replicas are now generally available in Azure Database for PostgreSQL, giving you greater flexibility to scale read‑intensive workloads. You can now create read replicas from existing ones, creating up to 30 across two levels of replication. Each source supports up to five read replicas. This capability enables you to design advanced, multi‑level replication topologies tailored for globally distributed applications. By placing replicas closer to your users, you can improve read response times, efficiently distribute read traffic, and reduce read pressure on the primary server.