How NOT to get DDoS'ed with Azure
What's up in the world of Microsoft Azure this week? New features to help you avoid DDoS attacks, Azure Purview is in GA, and Azure Functions 4.0. Let's go!
Jun 08, 2023 • 5 Minute Read
What's up in the world of Azure this week? This week I have some excellent Azure updates for you, including new DDoS features to help you avoid DDos Attacks, Azure Purview is in GA, and Azure Functions 4.0. No time to waste. Let's get started!
Streamline your DDoS management with new Azure Firewall Manager capabilities
Distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks are one of the most crude and most common ways to take down a site on the internet. You get thousands and thousands of machines to hit the same site at the same time, the server behind it runs out of resources and everyone is “denied service.”
It is simple to do if you are so inclined, and it can be very effective. In February 2018, GitHub was the target of a DDoS attack with packets sent at a rate of 126.9 million per second! That is equivalent to 1.3 TBps. Due to DDoS protection measures, the attack only lasted 20 minutes though.
And speaking of protecting against DDoS, this week Azure Firewall Manager got new DDoS management capabilities in the form of Azure DDoS Protection Standard for virtual networks.
This feature provides enhanced mitigation features to defend against DDoS attacks and will automatically protect all public IP addresses in virtual networks out of the box.
This also plays into the enhanced network security monitoring screen, which has been updated for Azure Firewall Manager.
These features are now out in preview, and you can try them out today. Be a cool sys admin. Stop getting DDoS’ed.
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Govern your data wherever it resides with Azure Purview
If you haven’t heard of Azure Purview, it is the multi-cloud data management and data governance service on Azure.
The idea is that Purview takes your data regardless of if it’s housed on-premises in services like SQL Server and Oracle, in different clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, or in SaaS applications like Salesforce. Purview then looks at all your data ingredients, comes up with a delicious recipe and bakes a beautiful governance and compliance cake.
You get automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, insights into the location and movement of sensitive data across your hybrid landscape, and then find valuable data through a data catalog.
Azure Purview’s automated data classification uses more than 200 prebuilt and custom classifiers to detect sensitive data types such as business terms, government IDs, names, location data, and more. These could both be of value to business processes, but also to implement adequate governance to protect user data and more.
Purview is out in general availability now. Delicious compliance cake...
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Announcing Azure Functions 4.0 public preview with .NET 6 support
Something that kinda slipped through the Azure news net a couple of weeks ago was the preview release of Azure Functions 4.0. The serverless darling of the Azure world, Azure Functions are immensely popular and continue to power tons of cloud applications.
The main feature that might spur you to upgrade your existing functions or try out version 4, is the support for .NET 6.0, but also node.js 14, Python 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9, Java 8 and 11, PowerShell 7.0, and your favorite custom handlers. Go here for quick-start guides to get you started with 4.0. There’s also a list of planned breaking changes, which you’d want to watch out for.
Go on. Give it a try. What is the worst that could happen…
Keep up with all things Azure
Before I wrap up, I wanted to mention that the Introduction to Azure Security course is free all this month on A Cloud Guru. This course is a great way to get the right start to Azure security. To check it out, just create a free account and start learning now.
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Well, as we say on the A Cloud Guru team when it’s that time of year where we have to evaluate our internal data governance, but we are out of ingredients: “Seek and you shall cloud”. Keep being awesome, cloud gurus!
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