Azure Site Recovery now offers an enhanced disaster recovery experience for virtual machines in Virtual Machine Scale Sets with flexible orchestration. The update improves target configuration and end-to-end recovery workflows, including failover, reprotection, and failback.

Route maps for Azure Route Server are now generally available in the Azure public cloud. Route maps provide fine-grained control over inbound and outbound routing across hybrid connections.

WAF Insights for Azure Application Gateway Web Application Firewall (WAF) is now generally available. WAF Insights is a built-in experience in the WAF policy that brings WAF logs and metrics together in interactive dashboards, so you can investigate blocked requests, analyze attack patterns, and identify false positives without writing queries.

Azure Migrate now supports discovery and assessment for network-attached storage, allowing customers and partners to plan migrations of Dell PowerScale (OneFS) and NetApp ONTAP storage to Azure. The Azure Migrate appliance connects directly to your NAS clusters using read-only credentials, inventories every SMB, NFS, and S3 share, and evaluates each share against Azure Files, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure NetApp Files.

You can now restart or fail over databases directly from the Azure portal, including single databases, Hyperscale databases, and databases in elastic pools, without writing scripts against the Rest API or contacting support.

This is the formal notice that Microsoft plans to deprecate the operational technology (OT) security component of Microsoft Defender for IoT. The service will be fully deprecated in October 2029, following a three-year transition period.

Application Gateway for Containers now supports centralized JSON Web Token validation through the AuthPolicy custom resource. Teams can validate a token signature, issuer, lifetime, and configured audience by using signing keys retrieved from a trusted HTTPS JSON Web Key Set endpoint.

On February 2, 2027, Microsoft will retire Azure Fluid Relay. After this date, Azure Fluid Relay will reach end of availability, and workloads that continue to depend on the service may experience disruption.

Azure Firewall now supports application rules in IPv6 Public Preview, enabling layer 7 filtering for IPv6 HTTP and HTTPS traffic. The enhancement extends application-level controls to IPv6 and dual-stack deployments, helping customers maintain consistent policies across IPv4 and IPv6 environments.

Geo-Replication on partitioned namespaces for Azure Service Bus Premium is now generally available. You can now combine the throughput benefits of partitioning with the reliability of replicating your messages and metadata to a secondary Azure region.

Azure Front Door now supports configurable TLS key exchange policies, including hybrid post-quantum key exchange, to help you prepare for evolving cryptographic threats while meeting your security and client compatibility requirements. Choose a predefined Standard or Enhanced policy, or use a Custom policy to select supported classical and hybrid post-quantum key exchange groups, including the option to select X25519.

Application Gateway for Containers now supports Model Context Protocol routing through the new MCPRoute custom resource. Platform teams can publish MCP servers behind a stable hostname and path while centralizing TLS, JWT validation, Web Application Firewall protection, backend health monitoring, and routing policy at the gateway.

Advanced capacity insights are now available for preview in Azure Storage Discovery. Storage Discovery now provides greater visibility into storage usage through insights such as access patterns, data age, storage tiers, object size distribution, retention states, and versioning.

Application Gateway for Containers now supports private frontends that are reachable only through approved Azure Private Link private endpoints. This enables organizations to keep internal applications, shared services, and cross-cluster traffic on private connectivity while retaining Kubernetes-native Layer 7 routing, TLS, health probing, and Web Application Firewall capabilities.

Azure Site Recovery support for Azure Local is now generally available, making enterprise-grade disaster recovery simpler, accessible, easier to setup and secure than ever before. Customers can protect supported Windows and Linux virtual machines by replicating workloads to Azure, extending their disaster recovery capabilities to the cloud.

With this enhancement, you have the ability to lock your retention to the configured PITR retention, beyond the default 7 days of immutable backups that are already available. This is especially useful for financial customers who typically have 35 days of PITR retention.

The Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server REST API version 2026-10-01 is now generally available. This stable API release introduces expanded capabilities for maintenance management, immutable backups, multi-tenant encryption (cross-tenant customer-managed keys (**CMKs**), Federal Information Processing Standards (**FIPS**) configuration, network migration, Premium SSD v2 storage, and major version upgrade prechecks.

You now have greater flexibility in network design for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server workloads. Now you can change existing VNet-integrated servers from delegated-subnet networking to a private endpoint-capable configuration, enabling secure access over a private IP address through Azure Private Link.

Multi-disk crash-consistent restore points for Azure virtual machines with Premium SSD v2 and Ultra data disks are now available in public preview on VMs with SCSI disk controllers. You can use this to capture the agent-less crash consistent restore point of a VM.

Azure Storage Actions is introducing three enhancements to simplify task management and give you more control over automated data operations across Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage: Automatic propagation of task definition updates: When you update a storage task definition the changes now automatically apply to its existing assignments. Scheduled assignment runs use the updated definition on their next run, keeping your data management logic consistent without updating each assignment individually.

Azure MCP Server 3.0 is now generally available, expanding how AI agents and developer tools interact with Azure through the open Model Context Protocol (MCP). This release introduces new and expanded capabilities: Infrastructure as code: Azure Terraform tools for provider documentation, Azure Verified Modules, resource export, and policy validation.

Higher Azure Storage account resource quotas are now generally available, supporting up to 1,000 storage accounts with standard endpoints per region, per subscription, up from the default of 250. Manage more accounts in a single subscription, reducing the need to distribute resources across multiple subscriptions.

The Log Analytics logging destination for Azure Container Apps is now a legacy logging option. Existing environments configured with the Log Analytics logging destination will continue to function normally.

Cross-Tenant Restore (CTR) helps organizations establish an independent recovery path by enabling Azure VM backups to be restored into a separate Azure tenant. It strengthens cyber resilience while using the existing backup copy, without requiring customers to maintain and manage duplicate backup data.

Private offers through Microsoft Marketplace help you optimize your spending power with pricing and terms aligned to your organization's needs, including flexible billing, custom contract lengths, and more. For eligible private offers, Microsoft is simplifying the private offer purchase experience for customers.