10 Big Microsoft Azure Announcements At Ignite Fall 2021

Developer Tool Improvements

Among the updates to Azure tools and features aimed at developers is a preview later this month of the Azure Communication Services SMS short codes.

With the goal of improving the experience of multi-platform users, the new short code functionality aims to unlock high message volume delivery for businesses, helpful for two-factor authentication, promotional campaigns, appointment reminders and other use cases, according to Microsoft.

Azure Communication Services interoperability with Microsoft Teams will become available to all in December. Developers will have new abilities to streamline voice, video and chat between users on custom-built applications, websites and Teams.

Microsoft launched a preview of a fully managed, serverless container service for microservices that scales based on internet traffic, events and long-running background jobs. The service, called Azure Container Apps, aims to allow developers to build and deploy containerized applications without a complex infrastructure.

Now generally available for Azure Logic Apps Standard users is managed identity support for various built-in operations and connectors. New updates in preview for the tool include running Logic Apps on Azure Arc to avoid Azure storage dependencies, an ability to connect to enterprise-grade, vNET-enabled connectors and automation tasks for event replication at scale for business continuity and disaster recovery for Event Hub and Service Bus.

Azure Service Bus large message support is now generally available, giving users support for sending and receiving 100 MB payloads, an increase from the previous 1 MB limit for premium-tier namespaces.

Azure Web PubSub will become generally available in December to support real-time client and server connections at scale, according to Microsoft.

Azure Marketplace offers new solutions for running Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO).

AKS also gained a solution for Oracle WebLogic Server and IBM WebSphere Liberty and its open source version, Open Liberty. ARO also gained the same IBM WebSphere solution. An Open Service Mesh add-on for AKS is now generally available.

Updates to the Azure DevOps services suite include general availability of the free DevOps Workflow Generator tool to allow users to visualize the entire DevOps toolchain. A preview of an OpenID Connect integration between Azure Active Directory and GitHub Actions aims to eliminate management of long-lived cloud credentials in GitHub’s secret store and it aims to prevent downtime due to expired credentials, according to Microsoft.

Azure API Management updates include general availability of an integration with Azure Event Grid for uses including email notifications each time users are added plus general availability of WebSocket API native support. In preview is GraphQL passthrough support, according to Microsoft.