Tag: Azure

Trusted Launch as Default for Azure VMs: Enhanced Security by Default

Microsoft has made Trusted Launch as Default generally available for new Azure Generation 2 virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets. It is a quiet change to the security baseline of the platform, but it is the kind of default that saves people from themselves. Trusted Launch as Default, usually shortened to TLaD, automatically turns […]

Claude Opus 5 Is Now Generally Available on Azure Databricks

Anthropic’s flagship model has landed in the enterprise data stack. Claude Opus 5 is now generally available on Azure Databricks through AI Model Serving, giving teams a managed path to Anthropic’s top-tier reasoning and agentic model without leaving the Databricks platform they already run their data workloads on. For organizations that have been building on […]

Azure Databricks Lakebase Branching Gets GitHub Copilot Agent Mode

Azure Databricks has quietly closed a gap that every data engineer hits at some point: how do you safely test change against a production database without risking the real thing? The answer, now in public preview, is Lakebase branching with GitHub Copilot agent mode. It lets developers spin up an isolated copy-on-write branch of a […]

Azure Firewall Now Supports HTTP Header Insertion at GA

Azure Firewall now supports HTTP header insertion in application rules, and this is one of those features that sounds small but opens up a lot of useful scenarios for network security teams. The feature went GA on July 27, 2026, and it lets you add or overwrite HTTP request headers directly from the firewall without […]

Azure Sphere OS 26.09 RC1 Brings Major Linux Kernel Upgrade

Microsoft released Azure Sphere OS version 26.09 RC1 for evaluation, and while the release notes say there are no customer-facing changes, the headline here is the major Linux kernel version bump under the hood. Kernel upgrades in the IoT security world are a bigger deal than they sound. Azure Sphere is Microsoft’s platform for securing […]

Microsoft Azure Launches India South Central Region

Microsoft opened a new Azure datacenter region in Hyderabad, Telangana, making it the company’s fourth cloud region in India. The India South Central region went live on July 28, 2026, and it brings Azure services closer to customers in the southern part of the country. The new region sits on a campus in Hyderabad with […]

Azure SQL Regex-Based Dynamic Data Masking Now in Preview

Azure SQL Database’s Dynamic Data Masking just got a significant upgrade: regex-based pattern matching. Instead of relying on a handful of built-in masking functions (default, email, random), you can now define custom regex patterns to match and mask sensitive data – emails, phone numbers, social security numbers, credit card fragments, or any pattern you can […]

Route-Maps for Azure Route Server Now in Public Preview

Microsoft has launched the public preview of Route-Maps for Azure Route Server, giving network engineers fine-grained control over BGP routing in hybrid cloud environments. Route maps let you manipulate how routes are advertised and received across VPN and ExpressRoute connections, moving beyond the static route tables that made complex topologies painful to manage. What route […]

PowerShell 7.6 Runbooks and Runtime Environment Reach GA in Azure Automation

Azure Automation catches up with the latest PowerShell Azure Automation now supports PowerShell 7.6 runbooks in general availability, alongside a new Runtime environment feature that simplifies how execution environments are configured and managed. The update brings Azure Automation in line with the current PowerShell release cycle, which Microsoft has been steadily accelerating. PowerShell 7.6 ships […]

MCP Toolkit for Azure DocumentDB Now in Public Preview

AI agents get database access through Model Context Protocol Microsoft has released a public preview of the MCP toolkit for Azure DocumentDB, giving AI agents direct access to DocumentDB databases through the Model Context Protocol. The announcement came out of the Azure Update pipeline, with deeper details from the Ignite 2025 sessions where the broader […]

Prepared Image Specification on AKS tackles the cold-start node problem

What is Prepared Image Specification? If you run AI training jobs, GPU inference, or large Windows workloads on AKS, you have probably noticed the startup lag. A new node joins the cluster, and then it spends minutes pulling container images before it can actually run anything. For autoscaling events, those minutes add up. Azure’s Prepared […]