Inside Azure innovations with Mark Russinovich | BRK226
Mark Russinovich tours recent Azure platform innovations, focusing on performance, networking resilience, container live migration, and confidential computing. The session highlights how these building blocks support modern applications across cloud, on‑premises, and edge environments, with demos of Azure Container Instances and Azure Integrated HSM.
Overview
This Build 2026 breakout (BRK226) covers a set of Azure architecture and infrastructure updates, with an emphasis on scaling modern applications and improving performance and resilience across different deployment environments.
Topics covered (from the session outline)
Performance improvements and Azure Boost
- Performance improvements and deployment details for Azure Boost.
Resilient networking
- Demonstration of MRC Resilient Multi-Path Networking.
Direct virtualization and container migration
- Introduction to Direct Virtualization.
- Plans for container fleet migration.
- Live demo of container live migration on Azure Container Instances (ACI).
- Explanation of memory snapshotting to enable faster container startup.
Confidential computing and data protection in use
- Introduction to confidential computing and data protection in use.
- Demo setup describing two servers and a confidential VM prepared for migration.
Secure key management with Azure Integrated HSM
- Presentation of Azure Integrated HSM (Manacor) for secure, hardware-backed key management.
- Demo showing performance improvements using Azure Integrated HSM for key signing.