A summary of Azure news for the past week that’s been making headlines over the internet.

Azure news can be heard in the the latest Need to Know podcast Episode 121.

Auto-shutdown for Azure VMs

Back in September Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft would no longer compete on price with AWS and focus on providing ‘real’ value to customers. In the theme of ‘value‘, Microsoft have announced the technology they have been using to enable auto shutdown for Azure DevTest labs, they are now using for all Azure Resource Manager based VMs.

OMS Service Map

The long awaited OMS Service Map solution has been finally released to public preview. It used to be called ‘Application Dependency Monitor’. Service Map basically maps out your entire infrastructure mapping out anything and everything, Windows or Linux, Java or .Net, if it talks TCP/IP, Service Map can discover and see the dependencies.

SLA on a single instance of an Azure Virtual Machine

Microsoft kept this news a little too quiet in my opinion. Azure is now the very first public cloud provider to offer an SLA of 99.9% on a single virtual machine. Any premium based VM which run solid state disks are included as part of this SLA.

Quick re-cap on pricing

General Purpose Instances: Dv2 series VMs reduced by up to 15%. A1 and A2 Basic VMs dropped by up to 50% and Compute Optimized Instances: F series VMs reduced up to 11%.

Token authentication with Azure CDN

Token-based authentication is released and is a great tool to handle authentication for multiple users. With token authentication on CDN, each request will be authenticated by CDN edge POPs before delivering the content, it prevents Azure CDN from serving assets to unauthorized users. This is to prevent hotlinking of content, where a different website like a message board, uses your assets without permission which impacts costs.