Upgrades To Networking Tools

Microsoft unveiled updates and new tools to improve Azure’s networking capabilities. Among the updates is a preview of Azure Gateway Load Balancer, a fully managed service meant to improve network virtual appliance access.

The tech giant has made Azure Network Function Manager generally available. This tool allows users to enable private LTE and 5G solutions through pre-validated mobile network functions.

A preview of Azure Virtual Network manager allows select users to manage virtual networks across subscriptions while scaling cloud workloads, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft has made new Azure ExpressRoute features generally available, including IPv6 support for private peering, more ciphers and functionalities in MACsec and new support for virtual network peering through the FastPath feature.

Azure Bastion Standard SKU is generally available as a fully managed “jumpbox-as-a-service” for remote VM connectivity, Microsoft said. Application Gateway WAF will soon have a new engine to improve performance, and Azure Front Door WAF will gain a new ruleset for anomaly scoring and first-party managed enhanced security rules.

Azure Chaos Studio

Microsoft has launched a preview of Azure Chaos Studio, an experimentation platform to help users improve application resilience.

Chaos Studio users can disrupt apps intentionally with network latency, unexpected storage outages, secrets expiration, full data center outage and other real-world events to find gaps and plan mitigations before issues affect app users.

The platform offers a library of faults due to agents or services plus continuous validation to monitor production quality.