In today’s Azure Nugget I wanted to share the announcements made at Microsoft’s virtual event called AzureCon. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, below is a summary of all the feature announcements. Microsoft came out today to talk about their latest innovations to help customers transform their businesses. This wasn’t your typical newsletter to announce a service going GA or a price reduction. This was more like a feature release on steroids. If there was ever a question as to which public cloud service is gaining a competitive edge, I think we got our answer today. Listed below are the announcements that were made.
Applications
- Azure Container Service – open source container scheduling and orchestration service that builds on partnerships with Docker and Mesosphere (avail in preview later this year)
Big Data and IoT
- Azure IoT Suite available for purchase to address business needs such as remote monitoring, asset management, and predictive maintenance (solution types, device connectivity with wide protocol support, data analysis, and integration with backend systems to help automate business processes)
- Azure Data Lake is a fully managed system for Big Data analytics (comprised of store, analytics service, and HDInsight) – store and analytics available for preview later this year
- Cortana Analytics Suite available for purchase (suite to handle all analytics needs to transform data into intelligent actions)
- Azure HDInsight on Linux GA
Intelligent Infrastructure
- Currently there are 24 existing regions which is more than AWS and Google combined
- General availability of 3 new regions in India (Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai), immediately available
- Azure Security Center is an integrated security solution with end-to-end visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources. Helps find, deploy, and manage critical security services and provides recommendations. (avail later this year)
- New N series Nvidia GPU- enabled VMs for graphics-intensive workloads. Compute intensive workloads and RDMA (avail for preview in the next few months)
Continuous Innovation
- Azure Compute Pre-purchase plan designed for customers with predictable workloads, provides up to 63% savings over a year (avail globally Dec 1)
- App Service Environment GA in Dec, fully isolated and dedicated environment for securely running apps
- Azure Mobile Engagement Service GA, enables user segmentation, analytics, push notification, and in-app messaging across devices
- Azure Media Services Live Encoding GA, enables delivery of high quality video streaming
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse available for public preview, is an elastic data warehouse in the cloud
- ExpressRoute (21 locations worldwide and expanding). Office365 and Skype for Business ExpressRoute GA, with ability to connect to Azures Government Cloud via ExpressRoute, new pricing plans available as of Oct 1
- DV2 VM 35% faster than D series , faster CPU, more memory, better local disk performance
- Up to 60% price reduction on A8-A11 instances
- Azure File Storage GA fully managed file share, can now mount to on-prem or Azure VMs
- Azure Backup of application workloads GA, direct backup of SQL, Sharepoint, Dynamics
- DevTest Labs in Preview, really neat offering for dev/test groups
- Azure Resource Health exposes health of resources, root cause, actionable guidance and support ticket submission (avail for public preview in Oct)
- Financial Services Compliance Program provides access to audit report evidence and platform penetration testing
If the sheer number of announcements listed above are any indication of Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud, we are in for a wild ride. Microsoft’s goal is to empower customers with the capability to deliver unique offerings to their customers across any platform, regardless of language. Message heard, Loud and Clear!