Microsoft has released a new update for Azure Government which adds a host of new features that includes: Media Services, Regional Virtual Networks and Oracle Searches, among others.
It has been clear for a while now that Microsoft wants every businessman and his dog to experience the wonders of Azure. Of course however, there were some whose needs stretched beyond the traditional scope of cloud services. As such, Azure Government was born in December 2014, aimed at drawing government clients from around the globe into the Microsoft fold.
Today, this software package became even more enticing, with the addition of a number of new features courtesy of an update. The first among these is the new availability of Azure Media Services for Azure Government. This brings on-demand encoding, content indexing, content protection via PlayReady DRM and AES encryption, live streaming and on-demand playback and premium encoding to the the fingertips of Azure Government users, expanding their capabilities significantly.
As of the new update, users can now run regional virtual networks also, having previously been limited to one scale alone. Along with this new ability, reserved and instance level public IP addresses, multi-NIC support and internal load balancing have been added, meaning that users have a great deal more control over their networks.
A number of pre-configured virtual machine images have also been added to complement the existing selection, with a total of 19 new additions, including: JDK 6\7\8, Oracle WebLogic 11g\12c Standard & Enterprise (Windows), Oracle Database 11g\12c Standard & Enterprise (Windows), Oracle Database 12 Standard & Enterprise (Linux) and Oracle WebLogic 12 Server(Linux).
In addition to all of this, users can now also access Azure Traffic Management, a new Service Bus option which provides access to queues, topics and relays and a Azure Files Preview, allowing virtual machines to mount a shared file system with the SMB protocol.
This update adds a great deal of functionality to Azure Government, and will no doubt increase the appeal of this service to government clients the world over.
Do you believe these new features will be enough to win over more support for Azure Government? Let us know in the comments below.
