# The A-Z Weekly Wrap: 16th October 2026 Welcome to this week’s atozazure weekly wrap for the 16th October 2026. Below are all the key platform changes, additions and retirements for the past week. ## Compute & Containers * **Managed StandardV2 NAT Gateway for AKS** *(Generally Available)* Azure Kubernetes Service now provisions and manages the StandardV2 NAT Gateway SKU by default for clusters using managed virtual networks, delivering out-of-the-box zone redundancy, higher throughput, and native IPv6 egress support within **Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)**. * **Multi-NIC Support on AKS Powered by DRANET** *(In Preview)* Platform engineers can now assign secondary network interfaces directly to pods via Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) APIs without requiring Multus or complex CNI chaining, establishing dedicated data planes and native multi-homing in **Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)**. * **Anyscale on Azure** *(Generally Available)* A fully managed orchestration platform for Ray and distributed Python architectures is now generally available, enabling teams to scale native distributed AI training and batch inference pipelines on **Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)**. * **AKS on Bare Metal Powered by Ubuntu** *(In Preview)* Enables running Kubernetes clusters directly on non-virtualised physical hardware powered by Ubuntu, eliminating hypervisor overhead and delivering direct hardware acceleration access for latency-critical compute in **Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)**. * **Retirement Notice: Azure Key Vault Secrets Provider Extension for Arc-Enabled Kubernetes** *(Retiring)* Microsoft has formally slated the Key Vault Secrets Provider Extension on Arc clusters for retirement on 9th October 2027, requiring platform engineers to transition secrets synchronisation pipelines to the native Azure Key Vault Secret Store Extension in **Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes**. * **Retirement Notice: DCsv3 and DCdsv3 Virtual Machine Series** *(Retiring)* Hardware-enforced confidential computing instances based on older-generation Intel SGX hardware will formally retire on 31st October 2029, requiring platform architects to map workload migration paths to modern confidential SKUs in **Azure Virtual Machines**. * **Retirement Notice: Pod Name Dimension in AKS Platform Metrics** *(Retiring)* Support for granular per-pod dimensions on Azure Monitor platform metrics will retire on 30th September 2027, transitioning telemetry to aggregated container counters to curb ingestion volume and optimise observability costs within **Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)**. ## AI & Tooling * **Microsoft Agent 365 Integration with Azure API Management** *(In Preview)* Introduces native connectivity between Agent 365 and the API gateway runtime, establishing centralised governance, discoverability, and runtime enforcement for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and AI tooling inside **Azure API Management**. * **Retirement Notice: Microsoft Dev Box** *(Retiring)* Microsoft Dev Box will formally retire on 18th September 2028, with the service entering a structured maintenance wind-down on 14th September 2026 as developer cloud desktop strategies pivot across **Microsoft Dev Box**. * **Retirement Notice: Azure Deployment Environments** *(Retiring)* The managed environment orchestration service will formally retire on 22nd February 2027, requiring DevOps teams to migrate infrastructure-as-code deployment blueprints towards native developer CLI and enterprise CI/CD tooling in **Azure Deployment Environments**. ## Networking & Security * **Exceptions in WAF for Application Gateway and Front Door** *(Generally Available)* Security administrators can now configure granular rule exclusions and bypass exceptions directly within managed WAF policies, significantly lowering false positives and administrative overhead across **Azure Front Door** and **Azure Application Gateway**. * **HTTP/3 over QUIC Support in Azure Application Gateway** *(In Preview)* Introduces UDP-based transport multiplexing to eliminate head-of-line blocking and accelerate TLS handshakes, substantially improving client edge connection latency and resilience in **Azure Application Gateway**. ## Databases & Storage * **Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server in East US 3** *(Generally Available)* Managed PostgreSQL flexible server infrastructure has expanded into the East US 3 region, providing enhanced regional failover topology, low-latency client placement, and enterprise high availability on **Azure Database for PostgreSQL**. * **Bulk Admin Role Support for SQL Server on Linux** *(Generally Available)* Enables the native `bulkadmin` server role and `ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS` permissions on containerised and Linux hosts, removing the requirement to grant sysadmin privileges for high-throughput ETL data loading in **SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines**. * **Physical Backup and Long-Term Retention (v2) for PostgreSQL** *(In Preview)* Introduces high-throughput snapshot-based physical backups with up to 10-year retention and direct "Restore as Server" capability, dramatically reducing recovery time objectives (RTO) for mission-critical databases in **Azure Database for PostgreSQL**. * **Major Version Upgrades for PostgreSQL Elastic Clusters** *(In Preview)* Delivers automated, in-place database engine version upgrades without provisioning parallel compute or executing manual data export/import workflows across **Azure Database for PostgreSQL**. * **Retirement Notice: Always Encrypted with Intel SGX Enclaves in Azure SQL Database** *(Retiring)* Hardware-dependent Intel SGX enclaves for confidential database computing will formally retire on 31st October 2027, requiring migrations towards hardware-independent Virtualisation-Based Security (VBS) enclaves in **Azure SQL Database**. That’s a wrap on this weeks Azure updates, if you found this helpful make sure to follow blog.atozazure.com for future updates, guides, and technical insights.