In Case You Missed It: New Azure Features Announced

Yeah, I nearly missed it. With Halloween and the SF Giants winning the World Series for the 3rd time, I almost let this slip by... but some really great new features were announced this week in Azure.

A few of my favorites are:

• Network Security Groups - Now you will be able to control access to subnets and individual VMs over the internal IP addresses using security groups, not just via ACLs on the external endpoints.  Right now you can only do it using PowerShell, so look for more details and those commands here. 
• Virtual Machines with Multiple NICs - The possibilities really opened up here with this new addition.  However, there are some caveats to keep in mind - You need to set this feature up when creating new VMs and those VMs must live in a VNET. Also the size of the VM matters.  Those little A1 and A2 VMs don't get to play.  For A3s, you can have 2 NICs, for A4s you can have 2.  And if you can't have extra NICs in the machines with Infinband (A8 and A9).  This is also only available via PowerShell, so look here for the commands.
• New Validated VPN devices - devices from Barracuda and Palo Alto Networks specifically.

Also, one of my new favorite resource pages for Azure right now is this one: Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure. Lots of information and links that lead you to all sorts of handy tips.