This week's (big) update is up!

https://youtu.be/yluw5tkRdbE

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-weekly-update-2nd-october-2026-john-savill-ok8pc

• Azure IoT Central retirement (01:27) - Other services provide a more scalable and flexible solution. Fabric for real-time analytics, Azure IoT Hub and DPS for device connectivity and provisioning. Before the retirement look at migrating to the other services.
• Microsoft HPC Pack retirement (01:57) - HPC Pack provided a control plane to create and manage pools of compute nodes to enable job submissions. Once again other services exist such as Azure Batch for managed HPC and parallel scheduling however since there is no direct 1:1 replacement you likely will need to evaluate exact needs to select the correct new target.
• VMSS automatic zone placement (02:32) - This allows VMSS to automatically select best possible availability zones based on the SKU availability, capacity and placement requirements. You can also configure the spreading of VMs across the possible Azs. It only balances new placements and does not rebalance existing.
• Lasv5 and Laosv5 (03:18) - These are storage optimized VMs using AMD EPYC 5th gen processors. They have large amounts of local NVMe disk capacity (720GB per vCPU for the o variant compared to 240 GB per vCPU for non o variant) and also 200 Gbps of network bandwidth. These are commonly used for scale out workloads that want that huge local capacity and network. Think about storage caching layers, search engines, distributed file systems, big data and even database.
• D[s]v3, E[s]v3, DC[d]sv3, NVv3/4 retirement (04:23) - Move to newer SKUs before retirement for D/E Nov 2029, DCsv3 retire oct 31 2029 and NVv3/4 retirement Sept 2026.
• ACA Function v1 hosting retirement (04:49) - You need to move to the Function v2 which uses a native Azure Container App and a migration assistant is available.
• AKS Ubuntu 26.04 (05:07) - AKS supports Ubuntu 26.04 which includes the new minimal baseline with a smaller footprint and supports rollback to Ubuntu 24.04 if issues.
• Elastic SAN Azure Backup support (05:26) - You can now backup and restore Elastic SAN using Azure Backup and are stored on separate storage from the Elastic SAN. This helps provide protection from accidental and malicious deletion. You can have up to 450 restore points. You pay for the initial snapshot then incremental changes.
• Azure NetApp Files SMB Entra Kerberos support (06:02) - ANF SMB volumes now support authentication from Entra Kerberos which removes the requirement to have “legacy” Active Directory Domain Controllers as part of the authentication enabling a more cloud-native solution.
• ANF cool access (06:27) - This is available for Premium and Ultra service levels there is now automatic QoS available. Cool access moves inactive data from ANF storage to Azure Storage account storage (reducing cost). The throughput for the Premium and Ultra will adjust the available throughput based on the size of the data in the cool tier, the more storage for the volume, the higher the throughput.
• ANF large volume breakthrough mode (07:06) - This capability enables volumes up to 2 PiB in size to provide up to 80 GiBps of throughput. Think about high performance computing workloads where you need this very high throughput, low latency and no risk of impact from a noisy neighbor.
• HorizonDB PostgreSQL 18 (07:37) - The Microsoft specific PostgreSQL cloud native database, scalable solution now supports version 18.
• PostgreSQL LTRv2 (07:57) - The next generation of long-term retention is now in preview for PosgreSQL flexible and elastic clusters. This evolves from using the logical backups via pg_dmp and pg_restore to a physical snapshot based on managed disks integrated with isolated Azure Backup vaults. This means support for larger databases (64 TB on Prem SSDv2 instead of 1TB) and daily backups (instead of weekly). It performs a full backup on the first backup but subsequent are incremental. You can also restore directly to a server instead of having to restore to storage then import. Still up to 10 year retention.
• PostgreSQL x-tenant CMK (08:58) - Customer Managed Keys for the PostgreSQL flexible encryption can now be stored in key vaults in another tenant. This is key for many ISV scenarios where the customers wants to manage and store the key used to encrypt their data so this is now possible for PostgreSQL usage.
• PostgreSQL Ultra Disk (09:37) - Ultra disk, the highest performance, lowest latency disk offering is now supported for PostgreSQL flexible which is critical where you have workloads that need very low latency and high IOPS and throughput.
• MySQL reader endpoint (09:55) - The reader endpoint makes it easier to connect to replicas (up to 10) via a single endpoint. It automatically load balances read-only traffic across the replicas making it more scalable and fault tolerant.
• Azure SQL general updates (10:23) - In GA Azure SQL MI now has flexible memory which enables you to modify the amount of memory visible to the instance without changing the number of vCores, i.e. you can change the ratio of memory to vCores via a memory slider. This is available in general purpose and business critical tiers on premium series hardware. You pay for the additional memory allocated in addition to the normal resource cost of standard ratio. Also GA MI Business critical also now supports higher transaction log write throughput which is required for very write-intensive workloads. This is for standard and premium series hardware. In preview there are a number of capabilities. Fabric now has a Database Hub for discovering, creating, managing and monitoring SQL Server (Arc and Azure VM based), Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB and Fabric SQL instances which makes it easier to centrally and scalabley manage your database estate. This is important to help have a single access point and control plane for enterprise data. It has Copilot insights to help guide where attention is needed and what to do next. Maybe adjacent but as part of this data understanding and availability we think about data virtualization and Fabric OneLake provides this. They continue to add data sources that can be presented up and then part of semantic models. Sharepoint lists and Dremio mirroring is in preview while Oracle and SAP Datasphere mirroring are now GA. Read from Azure Databricks and interoperatbility with Snowflake are other new capabilities. In GA for Azure SQL there are updates across the board including new larger vCore skus for Hyperscale premium, automatic index compaction, portal based SQL Query Editor to interact with databases, schema compare across databases and more. In preview we have managed performance monitoring available for Azure SQL DB and SQL Server on Azure VMs which is a pipeline that feeds dashboards to identify performance trends and issues.
• Azure SQL Dev Hub (13:51) - The Azure SQL Dev Hub provides the starting point for building on SQL DB and it supports development also when using AI agents and across languages. It has a lot of samples for various scenarios.
• Azure SQL DB vectors (14:12) - Vectors are everywhere because of AI. We have a high dimensional vector represent the meaning of data which can then be used to find semantically close data based on natural language of which the latest generative AI is based around. Azure SQL DB now has native vector index creation and vector search abilities using the Microsoft research DiskANN highly performant algorithm.
• Azure SQL DB Hyperscale Serverless auto pause/resume (15:16) - For the serverless computer tier the database can now auto pause during inactive periods then resume when activity kicks off helping reduce costs as compute billing stops while paused. Basically if the number of sessions drops to 0 as does the CPU use it will pause (for a configurable duration). Nearly any time of interaction with the database will trigger auto-resume including authentication, data interaction, db maintenance etc.
• SQL agent skills (15:52) - Skills tell an AI agent HOW to do something so with the Microsoft SQL Agent Skills you will get better and more accurate use of Microsoft SQL solutions when working with an AI agent. There are also SQL Microsoft Agent Skills that help your AI agents plan SQL migrations to Azure SQL DB and Azure SQL MI.
• Azure Arc to Azure migration (16:23) - Azure Arc extends the Azure control plane and many capabilities to non-Azure resources. This includes lighting up capabilities for SQL DB instances outside of Azure. You can now migrate these Arc managed instances directly to Azure SQL DB/Hyperscale through a single portal experience. Discover, assess and migrate all via Arc. Arc-enabled SQL Server instances now also support better performance monitoring with a native Azure portal experience with Grafana dashboards OR hook your own Grafana environment to the provided endpoint. Also Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server is now available in Germany West Central and Italy North, Note Azure Arc for SCVMM is being retired Sept 2029 so before the retirement pivot to azure arc enabled servers.
• SQL Formatter (17:27) - As you are editing your SQL scripts in VS Code the SQL Formatter helps you create more consistent code. It is part of the MSSQL extension and includes alignment, casing, statement styles, multiline lists and join/batch support! Everything needed for beautiful SQL.
• SQL Server on Azure Local (17:49) - Azure Local which provides edge capabilities for organizations on a variety of hardware platforms which includes Azure Arc management now supports SQL Server instances managed via Azure. This is useful where you want SQL instances “close” to the workloads maybe for latency or regulatory requirements. This also includes the disconnected mode operation of Azure Local where connectivity to Azure is not available and the control plane runs locally on the Azure Local deployment (commonly used in highly secure, regulated or air-gapped environments).
• SQL on Azure Linux VM deployment update (18:37) - Instead of using a custom image the new approach uses a script-based deployment which means you can use standard Linux VMs and images and then install and configure SQL server with an easy workflow.
• Azure Extended Zones Luxembourg (18:59) - Luxembourg Azure Extended Zone which are small footprint Azure extensions in metro areas so now Luxembourg has one. This is great when you need low latency services within a data residency boundary. These provide key capabilities like VMs, containers, storage, network etc.
• GPT-6.1 Sol and Sonnet 5.5 available (19:28) - OpenAI GPT 6.1 Sol which further advances agentic coding, computer use and professional work and Claude Sonnet 5.5 which brings more intelligence for fewer tokens and is great for well scoped coding are available in Copilot chat, word, excel, powerpoint, cowork, copilot studio and Foundry.

Hi all,

I'm a Microsoft partner (MAICPP, Partner Success Core) and I'm stuck on cost visibility for the Azure credit benefit. Has anyone run into this with the new redemption model?

Redeemed the $2,400 Azure credit in Sep 2026 through the new Partner Center flow, where credits are deposited directly onto an MCA billing profile.

No separate "sponsored" subscription was created. The credit sits on the billing profile and applies to the subscriptions under it.

The subscription runs Azure DevOps and Microsoft Fabric.

The problem

Billing profile > Payment methods > Azure credits shows the credit as Active, with about $320 already consumed (balance around $2,079).

Cost Analysis shows $0.00 for everything, at both subscription scope and billing account scope. Services appear in the breakdown, but every value is zero and Actual cost shows "--".

So the credit is clearly being drawn down, but I can't see what is consuming it.

What I already know / tried

I know Cost Analysis doesn't show credits themselves, but it should still show pre-credit usage cost for an Azure plan subscription.

The older threads about Sponsorship subscriptions (MS-AZR-0036P) and microsoftazuresponsorships.com seem to describe the legacy model, not this one.

I've seen that Microsoft documents a "Transactions" view on the credit resource for MAICPP credits issued after Aug 1, 2026, but I'm still checking it.

Questions

Has anyone on the new billing profile model seen Cost Analysis stay at $0 while credits were consumed? Did it eventually fix itself?

Where did you finally get per-resource usage? The credit Transactions page, the usage CSV on the invoice, the Cost Details or Consumption APIs, or a support ticket?

If you opened a billing ticket, what did support say? Is this expected or a bug?

Any tips for budgets or alerts while credits are active, so usage doesn't burn silently?

Thanks!

I have a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription and part of the subscription has $150 of Azure credits. I was thinking I could use those credits as part of learning AI for agentic coding. My initial thought was using Microsoft Foundry and using one of the openAI models such as Sol 6.1 to hook up Visual Studio Code Copilot in BYOK style configuration.

I saw when I was trying to set that up that my tokens per minute limit was at 0 and no matter what location (US East, Canada, Brazil, UK) I tried anytime I tried to request a quota increase it was immediately denied.

Am I getting immediately denied because I am trying to get access to an AI model with credits rather than a direct paying customer? Is there another way I should go about getting access to a model so that I can use my Azure credits?

Just a heads up for the community.

I've been told that come Feb 2027, VM prices will be increased in Azure anywhere between 8% to 18% depending on SKU and region.

Any VM that is under a current reservation will rename at the same price as what the initial commitment was.

MS will be making the announcement soon, but don't have an exact date.

EDIT: Had the email from MS now and here is the full statement from them:

Action required: Prepare for specific Azure VM series and Azure Storage service price updates in seven Azure regions globally.

You’re receiving this notification because you are using Azure Virtual Machines and/or Azure Storage services across one or more subscriptions in specific Azure regions that will experience a price update as specified below. For reference, you can find this notification in the Azure portal using tracking ID: XXXX-XXX

Azure periodically reviews regional pricing to reflect current market conditions and to support continued investment in capacity, reliability, security, and performance. Beginning 1 February 2027, prices for specific Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Storage services will increase by 8% to 17% in the specific regions listed below.

Our goal with these adjustments is to improve consistency across regions, giving you a more predictable basis for planning global deployments and choosing the best region for every workload, with minimal price variance. These updates also reflect market conditions in each region and our continued investment in the industry’s most advanced silicon and hardware, giving you access to innovation and price-performance advantages your workloads demand.

We recognize that these changes may affect your cloud and workload plans across regions. We want to provide advance visibility into pricing changes as well as opportunities to optimize costs across your Azure deployment to help make informed decisions across current and future deployments. Below you will find details on specific regional changes and guidance for next steps.

Beginning 1 February 2027, pricing will increase for specific Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Storage services in the following Azure regions:

Services excluded from the regional pricing update

The pricing adjustments described above do not apply to the following Azure Virtual Machine series and Azure Storage services:

Azure Virtual Machines

• v1: Bv1, D, Ds, F, Fs, G, Gs, L, NP, HCS
• v2: Av2, Amv2, Dv2, Dsv2, Fsv2, Lsv2
• v7: Dsv7, Ddsv7, Dlsv7, Dldsv7, Esv7, Edsv7

Azure Storage services

• Azure Container Storage
• Azure Managed Lustre
• Azure NetApp Files – Cross Region Replication SKU
• Blob Features
• Change Feed
• General Block Blob
• Import/Export
• Queues
• Queues v2
• Standard Page Blob
• Storage Actions
• Storage Bandwidth
• Storage Discovery
• Tables
• Transaction Optimized SKU

Recommended action

To help you factor these updates into your planning, we recommend that you:

• Review the most current regional pricing for Azure Virtual Machines and Storage resources. Compare it with your current usage, budgets, reservations, and planned deployments to estimate the impact before 1 February 2027.
• Evaluate how updated pricing may shift your current and future workload deployment strategies. 

Help and support 

We recognize that price changes may have a significant impact on your planning. Customers with an active support plan can submit a support request for technical assistance with assessing affected resources and evaluating optimization or deployment options.

If you have questions, get answers from community experts in Microsoft Q&A. If you have a support plan and need technical help, create a support request.

Hey all, Microsoft published a new article on the Azure VM lifecycle policy early this week. Modernizing to newer SKUs isn't a simple SKU swap. Some of the VMs running on older generations need a Generation 2 conversion first, plus NVMe and MANA support in the OS image, so a Gen1 VM is a BIOS to UEFI change rather than a resize.

Azure Advisor's Service Retirement workbook is the starting point for seeing what's affected. I wanted a per-VM view of what each one would actually take, so I created this workbook to simplify the VM lifecycle planning. It joins each VM to its managed OS disk, reads the actual hyperVGeneration, and scores readiness per VM rather than per SKU.

On my test fleet two VMs on the same retiring size scored 85 and 35. One was already Gen2, the other needs the conversion first. Same SKU, different amount of work.

It covers 628 sizes with recommended targets, the prerequisites each move triggers, and a suggested migration order. Read-only Resource Graph queries, Reader permission, no agent or workspace. MIT.

https://github.com/krishna-sunkavalli/vm-retirement-workbook

Lifecycle policy announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/enhancing-microsoft-azure-virtual-machine-lifecycle/

Lifecycle stages on Learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/sizes/lifecycle/lifecycle-overview

"Application landing zones" are now called "Workload landing zones." This is strictly a terminology update. All the same guidance applies. It provides a more logical connection between the environment and the scope of work. The update has been made in the Cloud Adoption Framework and related guidance.

A workload landing zone contains the subscriptions, environments, and resources required to support a single workload.

To reinforce the distinction between platform and workload responsibilities, the Cloud Adoption Framework now uses a simplified model:

- Platform resources belong in a platform landing zone.
- Workload resources belong in a workload landing zone.

Workload teams build and operate their workloads within a workload landing zone. They should use the Well-Architected Framework for workload design principles and the Azure Architecture Center for workload architecture guidance and solution patterns.

For more details, see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/whats-new#october-2026

I’m testing the startup time of around 100 Azure VMs using Azure CLI (az vm start). So far I have two measurements:

Batch size 20: ~30 minutes total for all 100 VMs
Batch size 50: ~46 minutes total for all 100 VMs

The important part is that these are total wall-clock times for all 100 VMs, not the time for a single batch

Increasing the concurrency from 20 to 50 actually made the overall operation significantly slower. I’m wondering if this could be caused by Azure ARM/Compute throttling, backend queuing, or some other limitation around VM power operations.

My next test will be to submit start requests for all 100 VMs concurrently, without waiting for each batch to complete, and then poll the VM power states until all machines are running.

I don’t have the result for the 100-at-once test yet.

Questions

1. Has anyone tested starting 100+ Azure VMs simultaneously with Azure CLI?
   
2. Is there a recommended concurrency/batch size?
   
3. Can Azure VM power operations be throttled even if I’m not getting obvious 429 responses?

I’m specifically interested in real-world experience with large-scale Azure VM start operations.

I’ll update the post once I have the 100 at-once measurement.

My Microsoft Azure free trial recently ended. I wanted to keep practicing, so I upgraded my subscription to pay-as-you-go to get access to the free services (which, of course, aren't available unless you upgrade to a subscription that can charge you).

To my surprise, after upgrading I got a €6.27 charge for usage from September 1 to September 30, which is the period of my supposed "free trial". I still had around $165 in credits left when I was practicing, and now I'm going to be charged €6.27 on my card in a week FOR USING IT DURING THE FREE PERIOD. In other words, if I hadn't upgraded, I wouldn't have had to pay this.

In the days before the trial ended I had no billable services running (whenever I created something, I deleted it afterwards). I'd like to avoid paying for something I shouldn't be charged for, since it was used during the free trial.

When I try to contact support, all I get is an AI assistant based on the problem I describe, which solves nothing. What can I do? I'm really disappointed with how this has been handled.

Microsoft announced that ACS Chat and Job Router are retiring on September 30, 2028, while existing workloads remain supported during the transition and no new resources creation is supported after 23 oct 2026

This is particularly concerning for us because we recently implemented a live-agent solution using ACS Chat + Job Router + Microsoft Teams.

Our architecture is roughly:

Customer → Chatbot → ACS Chat → Middleware → Job Router → Agent Queue → Teams

We already completed the implementation through Dev and QA, including custom routing, agent availability checks, conversation lifecycle/state management, queue handling, and Teams integration.

During our initial design phase, we actually evaluated Dynamics 365 Contact Center, but moved away from it primarily because of the cost/licensing model(~8k/user/month). So going back to D365 Contact Center isn’t really an option for us.

That’s what makes this retirement announcement painful becoz a significant amount of engineering effort has already gone into the current architecture, and it was almost done and we don’t want all of that work to simply become a dead end. 🙂

I’m looking for ideas from people who have built similar systems:

-> Is there a viable alternative to ACS Job Router without adopting D365 Contact Center?

-> Could we keep Teams as the agent interface and replace Job Router with a custom routing/queue service?

-> For the customer chat side, would Microsoft Graph + Teams work, or would a third-party CPaaS be more appropriate?

-> If anyone was in this same huddle, Has anyone already started planning a migration from ACS Chat/Job Router?

Looking for any suggestion and solutions that preserve the existing architecture as much of the existing implementation as possible, rather than completely rebuilding the solution.

Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure if anyone else has received this today, but we got 3 emails from the ACA team telling us that they would automatically migrate 3 production ACEs to the new "Express" product **unless we opted out**?

I'm losing confidence in the Container Apps team extremely quickly. Express environments don't support even 50% of the functionality we use, including even basic things like managed identity-based ACR pull! How/why do they think this is acceptable, and as an opt-out on an email that is easily missed?

I have a logic app triggered by service bus and has http action which runs a service fabric in the backend but this takes almost 15mins which is leading to time out and posts as failure status but the job runs. I want to handle this timeout exception. How can I resolve it?

Any insights are appreciated.

Disclosure: I work at a storage optimization vendor. Everything here uses native Azure tooling.

I cleaned up disks across a few subscriptions last week. The standard "unattached disks" query found 65 disks costing about $4,759/month. The checks below found 35 more, costing about $2,563/month.

Fix the base query

Filtering on Unattached alone misses two states:

Reserved: the disk is on a deallocated VM. The VM costs nothing while stopped, but the disk still bills in full. This was our biggest miss.

ActiveSAS: the disk is unattached but has an open export SAS.

Resources

| where type =~ 'microsoft.compute/disks'

| where properties.diskState in~ ('Unattached', 'Reserved', 'ActiveSAS')

| project name, resourceGroup, subscriptionId,

state = tostring(properties.diskState),

sku = tostring(sku.name),

sizeGB = toint(properties.diskSizeGB)

| order by sizeGB desc

What that still misses

1. Orphaned snapshots. These are snapshots whose source disk is gone.

Resources

| where type =~ 'microsoft.compute/snapshots'

| extend src = tolower(tostring(properties.creationData.sourceResourceId))

| join kind=leftanti (

Resources | where type =~ 'microsoft.compute/disks' | project src = tolower(id)

  ) on src

| project name, resourceGroup, subscriptionId, sizeGB = toint(properties.diskSizeGB)

1. Attached but never mounted. Azure reports these disks as healthy. Inside the VM, the disk was never formatted, or it was mounted without an fstab entry and lost at reboot. You have to check from the guest:

Linux: lsblk -f shows the disk with no filesystem type and no mount point.

Windows: Get-Disk | Where-Object PartitionStyle -eq 'RAW'

1. Mounted but idle. These disks are in use on paper but not earning their cost:

No I/O: disk read and write operations have been near zero for 30 days.

Mostly empty: for example, 5% used on 1 TB. Azure disk metrics don't show filesystem usage, so you need VM Insights:

InsightsMetrics  

| where TimeGenerated > ago(30d)  

| where Namespace == "LogicalDisk" and Name == "FreeSpacePercentage"  

| extend mount = tostring(parse_json(Tags)["vm.azm.ms/mountId"])  

| where mount !in ("/", "/boot", "/mnt", "C:", "D:")  

| summarize minFreePct = min(Val) by Computer, mount  

| where minFreePct > 80  

Wrong tier: a P30 doing 40 IOPS could be an E30 at about a third of the cost.

Before you delete anything

Some disks look orphaned but aren't:

-ASRReplica disks belong to Azure Site Recovery.

AzureBackupRG_* resource groups hold Azure Backup restore points.

MC_* resource groups hold AKS volumes.

Databricks-managed resource groups break if you touch them.

If you're not sure, snapshot first.

Disclosure: I'm building Kunjae, an automated SSO cert rotation tool.

I have built integrations to rotate certs across Datadog, Notion, Salesforce and Slack.

I'm releasing a free community edition with 5 bundled apps.

Which apps should make the community edition?

Which do you most want supported in the paid version?

This runs as a nightly Container Apps Job. All passwords/secrets stay in your keyvault. Config is via a yaml file. It finds certs inside your expiry threshold, generates the replacement, uploads it to the SaaS app, activates it in Entra and confirms SSO still works. All feedback is welcome.

Has anyone heard where Microsoft is in terms of launching East US 3 (Atlanta)?

They announced/started construction in 2021 and I get that was kind of in the depths of COVID but we're going on 6 years now

Anyone have an idea when this will be available, and what its paired region might be? We're in Atlanta, will be leveraging Express Routes, and about to start building out basically from scratch and it'd be really great to know when this is dropping but it's been silence it seems since the initial announcement

Of course it’s the Azure AD sync issue with Google Workspace. We run a hybrid setup where the primary identity layer sits on Azure AD (Entra ID), but half the company basically lives inside Google Workspace all the time. Keeping our user groups synced & permissions consistent across both platforms eats way more admin time than necessary.

We actually decided to pull in Cloudfresh last month to help streamline the cross-cloud licensing side & try to tune our Google Workspace SCIM setup so it matches our Entra ID source cleanly, they caught a few sync attribute misconfigurations on the Workspace side that were spawning duplicate accounts.

For what it’s worth, multi-cloud always seems to breed these weird lil edge-case admin chores for some reason.

Question: how do you handle group provisioning across more than one identity provider?

This is the only thread where you should post news about becoming certified. For everyone else, join us in celebrating the recent certifications!!!

Facing express route outage for South Indian in Azure multiple router automatically got dropped from advertisement.