Welcome to the Azure Updates - August 2022 edition.

Azure updates is a summary of the azure updates that I personally find the most interesting or are innovation i’m looking into for customers.

All topics are General Availability updates so can be used by everybody with an Azure subscription.

The updates

Control access to Azure Storage using “Resource instance rules”

A new layer of security has been added to Azure storage accounts that secure and control access to your account, Resource instance rules. With this new layer you can configure your storage account to only allow access from specific resource instances of a Azure services.

For example, you can specify access to your storage account from a Purview account.

This can be done on different levels

1. On a grouped scope (Tenant, Subscription or resource group)
2. On a specific instance by name

Below image shows this new setting in detail.

Resources

Formal Azure Storage documentation

Grant access from Azure resource instances

Private Endpoints now support User-defined routes and Network security groups

Prior to this update, when you configure a private endpoint for you Azure service in a subnet, it does not use the network policies like Network Security Groups and User Defined Routes. This updates changes that behavious by enabling these policies for private endpoints setting the PrivateEndpointNetworkPolicies property and enabling it on your subnet.

Resources

Official announcement

General availability: Network security groups support for private endpoints

General availability: User-defined routes support for private endpoints

Other resources

Manage network policies for private endpoints

The following video shown the usage of this new feature and how Private Endpoints previously worked without this feature.

Preview of Private Link NSG and UDR Support

So the demo does not go as smooth as it should but it does show the use case of the feature and what you can achieve with it.

Azure API Management - expanded support for Azure Policy definitions

This small, but useful, update adds 11 built-in Azure Policy definitions for Azure API Management to the platform. As build-in policies are added to the platform the need to create, and maintain, custom policies is reduced.

Resources

Official announcement

Generally available: Azure API Management - expanded support for Azure Policy definitions

Other resources

Azure Policy built-in policy definitions for Azure API Management

Note: At the time of writing this article there where 11 policies defined on the page. This can differ when new policies have been added.

Azure Function Blob Storage trigger is now event based

When using earlier versions of the BlobTrigger() for Azure Functions, the implementation was based on a pull model. This implies that the events being received where not always near realtime. The new version of BlogTrigger() is based on event grid and thus can be consumed near-realtime.

The make use of this new feature is pretty easy. You need to update the package Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Extensions.Storage to 5.x and then update the function to use events. This can be done using the tutorial as shared below.

Resources

Official announcement

Generally available: Azure Functions extension for Event Grid blob trigger

Other resources

Tutorial: Trigger Azure Functions on blob containers using an event subscription