Azure Update - 9th January 2026
John Savill’s Technical Training delivers an Azure update for January 2026, covering AKS pricing, geo-replication, hardware announcements, deprecations, and ecosystem developments for cloud professionals.
Azure Update – 9th January 2026
Author: John Savill's Technical Training
Welcome to the first Azure Update of 2026! This week's episode brings succinct insights into new features, improvements, and important changes across Azure services.
Key Topics Covered
- AKS Cloud-Native Pricing Calculator: Overview of a new tool for estimating costs in Azure Kubernetes Service deployments.
- Premium SSDv2 in Additional Regions: Announcement of Premium SSDv2 disk availability expanding to new Azure regions, enabling broader global deployment of high-performance storage.
- Service Bus Premium Geo-Replication: Introduction of enhanced geo-replication capabilities for Azure Service Bus Premium, increasing resilience and disaster recovery readiness.
- Osmos Acquisition: Brief mention of Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Osmos, potentially impacting future Azure data integration functionality.
- Custom Resource Provider Deprecation: Notification regarding upcoming deprecation of certain custom resource providers—review your resource deployments to stay compliant.
- Dragon HD Omni TTS Update: Announcement of Dragon HD Omni’s new text-to-speech (TTS) features, indicating continued investment in speech technology within Azure.
- GPT-4o Version Retirements: Information on retirement schedules for older versions of GPT-4o models within Azure OpenAI offerings—users should prepare to migrate workloads if impacted.
Helpful Resources
- Recommended Learning Path for Azure
- Certification Content Repository
- Weekly Azure Update Playlist
- DevOps Master Class
- PowerShell Master Class
Other Announcements
- Community Interaction: Due to channel growth, direct question responses are no longer possible. For support, use official forums like Microsoft Community Hub, Reddit, or search existing channel content.
- Accessibility: Subtitles are available, and YouTube’s auto-translate enables content accessibility in multiple languages.
Closing
Stay tuned for more updates and deep dives into Azure technologies every week. Subscribe to remain informed on platform changes, best practices, and technical insights.