Microsoft has unveiled some new improvements to Microsoft Azure today, showcasing the company’s ongoing commitment in delivering a world-class cloud computing platform in order to take advantage of today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world. As the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) approaches, Microsoft has made some new innovations to the Azure platform.
Microsoft is set to add a few new capabilities to the Azure Preview Portal starting next week. The portal will feature IaaS Functionality, Resource Group enhancements, Azure Image Gallery Updates, and Azure SQL Database. IaaS Functionality allows you to create, deploy, monitor, and manage applications on virtual machines, and manage virtual networks within a fully customizable Portal experience. Resource Group enhancements allow one to manage virtual machines and virtual networks along with websites and databases within the same Resource Group as a single application.
Microsoft has also added several new virtual machine images that enable you to provision developmental servers, test servers, or production applications in minutes. Azure customers can also manage their Azure SQL Databases within the portal.
“The announcements made today demonstrate Microsoft’s cross-company commitment to and investment in cloud technologies as it continues its transformation into a mobile-first, cloud-first company. Additionally, today’s news sets the stage for WPC and showcases Microsoft’s commitment to ensuring partners can derive business value from the cloud for themselves and their customers,” a Microsoft spokesperson told WinBeta.
Launching next week in preview, Microsoft Azure Event Hub will allow customers to reliably and efficiently stream millions of events per second from millions of devices into multiple applications and storage systems. The company will also roll out Azure ExpressRoute in six additional locations around the world. ExpressRoute bridges on-premises environments to Azure through a dedicated and private connection.
Microsoft is also planning on launching the US Central region in Iowa and the US East 2 region in Virginia next week. “With demand for Azure growing rapidly, these new regions will help us continue to double capacity every six to nine months without sacrificing performance,” the company explained.
Azure Government Cloud preview is also set to expand, with more partner and customer solutions and workloads.
“We are also excited to announce the Microsoft Azure StorSimple 8000 series hybrid storage arrays, addressing the needs of enterprise customers that require high performance, large on-premises capacity and 10G LAN connectivity. Finally, Azure Machine Learning, a fully managed service for advanced analytics in the cloud will be available for public preview next week,” Microsoft added.
The Worldwide Partner Conference takes place next week in Washington D.C., so expect to hear more about Azure during the event. We recommend heading over to the VIA link below to read the full press release for today’s Azure improvements.
