Microsoft has been committed to a ‘cloud-first’ world, and place a strong emphasis on their Cloud + Enterprise products. Today they announced updates targeting their cloud-focused enterprise software, such as their Azure platform.
Microsoft Azure Redis Cache is now available to everyone. It is based on the open-source project that provides a key-value cache and store, where the keys can contain data structures. Microsoft’s Redis Cache is a ‘distributed, in-memory, managed cache that helps you build highly scalable and responsive applications by providing you with fast access to your data.’ It comes in a Basic and Standard tier.
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is now out of beta and also available to everyone. With this you will not have to maintain your own secondary site. Instead you can rely on Azure to provide a recovery location in case of some unforeseeable disaster by replicating Hyper-V virtual machines to a recovery site on Azure.
Elastic Scale for Microsoft Azure SQL Database is now available as a preview. Elastic Scale aims to simplify scaling a web application’s data tier. There is functionality for an application with a few databases, to applications requiring thousands of databases. These new features leverage .NET libraries and Azure offers templates that you can host for flexibility. You can download the preview here.
In addition to these updates, Microsoft has introduced an early look into the future of the datacenter, Windows 10 enterprise management with System Center Configuration Manager and Windows Intune, Microsoft Azure Automation and Runbook Gallery, Microsoft Azure Instance-level public IPs, SSD-based instances for Microsoft Azure VMs and Cloud Services, new features in Microsoft Azure AD Premium GA, Microsoft Azure AD Basic, price reductions in select Azure services, and HDInisght Public Preview in China.
If any of these interest you, read the full blog post here. Sometimes it seems like Microsoft is updating cloud offerings everyday, but perhaps that’s why they are successful in the highly competitive, but lucrative, enterprise market.
