Microsoft Azure

As the needs of your business grow, and you deploy business-critical applications at cloud scale, the complexity and administrative overhead of managing those applications can increase substantially. To help reduce this management overhead, Azure continues to invest in new capabilities that make it easier to build and distribute application updates across distributed cloud environments. We … Read more Build, distribute, and deploy application updates to Azure virtual machine scale sets

Whether you’re a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management + Billing comes in. We’re always looking … Read more Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – June 2020

The virtual event Azure Synapse Analytics: How It Works is now available on demand. In demos and technical discussions, Microsoft customers explain how they’re using the newest Azure Synapse Analytics capabilities to deliver insights faster, bring together an entire analytics ecosystem in a central location, reduce costs, and transform decision-making. This post outlines five key … Read more Five reasons to view this Azure Synapse Analytics virtual event

Organizations around the world are gearing up for a future powered by artificial intelligence (AI). From supply chain systems to genomics, and from predictive maintenance to autonomous systems, every aspect of the transformation is making use of AI. This raises a very important question: How are we making sure that the AI systems and models … Read more The next frontier in machine learning: driving responsible practices

Large enterprise customers running business-critical workloads on Azure manage thousands of subscriptions and use automation for deployment and management of their Azure resources. Expert support for these customers is critical in achieving success and operational health of their business. Today, customers can keep running their Azure solutions smoothly with self-help resources, such as diagnosing and … Read more Azure Support API: Create and manage Azure support tickets programmatically

This blog was co-authored by MacKenzie Olson, Program Manager, Azure Container Instances.  Today we’re excited about the first release of the new Docker Desktop integration with Microsoft Azure. Last month Microsoft and Docker announced this collaboration, and today you can experience it for yourself. The new edge release of Docker Desktop provides an integration between … Read more Deploy to Azure Container Instances with Docker Desktop

We are excited to announce that Azure Load Balancer customers now have instant access to a packaged solution for health monitoring and configuration analysis. Built as part of Azure Monitor for Networks, customers now have topological maps for all their Load Balancer configurations and health dashboards for their Standard Load Balancers preconfigured with relevant metrics. … Read more Introducing Azure Load Balancer insights using Azure Monitor for Networks

With massive workforces now remote, the stress of IT admins and security professionals is compounded by the increased pressure to keep everyone productive and connected while combatting evolving threats. Now more than ever, organizations need to reduce costs, keep up with compliance requirements, all while managing risks in this constantly evolving landscape. Azure Security Center … Read more Stay ahead of attacks with Azure Security Center

Today, we see a huge shift to remote work due to the global pandemic. Organizations around the world need to enable more of their employees to work remotely. We are working to address common infrastructure challenges businesses face when helping remote employees stay connected at scale. A common operational challenge is to seamlessly connect remote … Read more Streamline connectivity and improve efficiency for remote work using Azure Virtual WAN

Azure Lighthouse is launching the “Azure Lighthouse Vision Series,” a new initiative to help partners with the business challenges of today and provide them the resources and knowledge needed to create a thriving Azure practice. We are starting the series with a webinar aimed at helping our IT service partners prepare for and manage a … Read more Rapid recovery planning for IT service providers

Countries around the world are placing more compliance requirements on organizations of all types, and customers want to more easily understand which compliance offerings are available in their locale before they deploy cloud resources. Today we’re releasing a new infographic, along with a 37-page e-book showing compliance details in over 30 key geographies. Organizations around … Read more New Azure maps make identifying local compliance options easy

A top of mind concern among our customers is keeping their applications and data workloads running and recoverable in the case of unforeseen events or disasters. For example, COVID-19 has presented daunting challenges for IT, which are only compounded by growing threats from ransomware or setbacks related to technical or operational failure. These considerations further … Read more Minimize disruption with cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solutions on Azure

Azure is now available in over 140 countries and offers customers more than 60 datacenter regions worldwide (and growing) from which to choose. These Azure regions provide customers with the benefits of data residency and latency optimization and may enable regional compliance. We understand that with Azure’s over 200 services, advances in architecture, and data … Read more Making your data residency choices easier with Azure

The global health crisis has transformed the way we work and live. At Microsoft, we are committed to doing what we can to help our customers respond to the crisis and plan ahead for future success. In the past couple of months, I have been learning from—and inspired by—IT leaders around the globe who have … Read more Seven ways to achieve cost savings and deliver efficiencies with Azure infrastructure

This post was co-authored by Daniel Sumner, Worldwide Industry Director, Government—Smart Infrastructure at Microsoft. According to Flood Safety, flooding is the most common type of natural disaster worldwide. It affects tens of millions of people around the world each year and causes, on average, more than $200 billion in damages. Many communities face flood-related challenges, … Read more Town of Cary innovates flood prediction with IoT

We are in the midst of unprecedented times with far-reaching implications of the global health crisis to healthcare, public policy, and the economy. Organizations are fundamentally changing how they run their businesses, ensure the safety of their workforce, and keep their IT operations running. Most IT leaders that we have had the opportunity to speak … Read more Be prepared for what’s next: Accelerate cloud migration

Azure Media Services is pleased to announce the preview of a new platform capability called Live Video Analytics, or in short, LVA. LVA provides a platform for you to build hybrid applications with video analytics capabilities. The platform offers the capability of capturing, recording, and analyzing live video and publishing the results (which could be … Read more Introducing live video analytics from Azure Media Services—now in preview

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Files support for authentication with on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). Since preview in February 2020, we’ve received great feedback and growing interest from our customers, especially because of increased work from home scenarios. With file shares migrated to the cloud, maintaining access using Active Directory … Read more General availability of Azure Files on-premises Active Directory Domain Services authentication

Customers need full stack observability for their apps and infrastructure across Azure and hybrid environments to ensure their workloads are always up and running, for which they rely on Azure Monitor. Over the past few months, we have released many new capabilities targeting to improve native integration with Azure, enable easier onboarding at scale, support … Read more New features and insights in Azure Monitor

Machine learning (ML) is gaining momentum across a number of industries and scenarios as enterprises look to drive innovation, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning empowers developers and data scientists with enterprise-grade capabilities to accelerate the ML lifecycle. At Microsoft Build 2020, we announced several advances to Azure Machine Learning across the … Read more Azure Machine Learning—what’s new from Build 2020

Protecting your production data is critical for any business. That’s why Azure Files has a multi-layered approach to ensuring your data is highly available, backed up, and recoverable. Whether it’s a ransomware attack, a datacenter outage, or a file share that was accidentally deleted, we want to make sure you can get everything backed up … Read more Azure Files enhances data protection capabilities

As enterprises continue to evolve in their digital transformation journey, there is a need for augmenting Azure Maps content with project-specific and private business knowledge of places. Today we’re launching Azure Maps Creator in preview to extend location intelligence to indoor spaces. Enterprises are taking advantage of Azure Maps capabilities to optimize business operations and … Read more Azure Maps Creator now available in preview

Last week at the Microsoft Build conference, we announced that Azure Peering Service is now generally available. We also introduced “routing preference,” a new option for our customers to further architect and optimize their traffic to and from Azure over the “public Internet.” Networking is a critical enabler of the cloud. The experience when accessing … Read more Optimize for internet traffic with Peering Service and the routing preference option

Now more than ever, developers need agility to meet rapidly increasing demands from customers. Containerization is one key way to increase agility. Containerized applications are built in a more consistent and repeatable way, by way of defining desired infrastructure, dependencies, and configuration as code for all stages of the lifecycle. Applications often start and stop … Read more Microsoft and Docker collaborate on new ways to deploy containers on Azure

How businesses respond in times of uncertainty is as varied as the businesses themselves. Many slow down operations to operate more cost-effectively, while others lean into new opportunities that didn’t exist before. Regardless of how you respond, ensuring your organization can cost-effectively adapt and scale to rapidly changing conditions is key. When it comes to … Read more The Azure SQL family: Innovation and value in the cloud

Customizing virtual machine (VM) images to meet security and compliance requirements and achieve faster deployment is a strong need for many enterprises, but most don’t enjoy the process and energy needed for determining the right tooling, building the right pipeline, and maintaining it continuously. We built Azure Image Builder service to make building customized images … Read more Streamlining your image building process with Azure Image Builder

Enterprises and teams are adopting DevOps technologies combined with people and processes to deliver high-quality code, with faster release cycles and continuous delivery of value, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction for their own customers. However, it can often get difficult to craft CI/CD pipelines by editing multiple YAMLs to stitch your code to cloud automation workflows. … Read more Deploy to Azure using GitHub Actions from your favorite tools

As people around the globe adapt to new ways of working, the Microsoft Build 2020 conference took a new approach as well. Rather than gathering the developer community in person as planned, Microsoft shifted gears and put together 48 hours of streaming content for a virtual event. Despite the new format, Microsoft Build’s goals remained … Read more Virtual Build spotlights IoT updates and rollouts

Thousands of partners and enterprises use Azure Lighthouse to manage services across Azure tenants, representing tens of thousands of subscriptions and more than one million Azure resources from Azure Resource Manager—a unified control plane. With Azure Lighthouse, service providers, as well as self-managing enterprises, can achieve higher operational efficiency using Azure’s comprehensive and robust management … Read more Azure Lighthouse—managing cloud, hybrid, and edge environments at-scale through a single control plane

It’s inspiring to see how customers continue to reimagine how they work with the help of AI, which is more important today than ever. Our customers are finding innovative ways to deliver crisis management solutions, drive cost-savings, redefine customer engagement, and accelerate decision-making. Here are some notable examples we’ve recently seen: Scaling crisis management On … Read more Meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow with Azure AI

In November we announced Azure Synapse Analytics—a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics. Despite the massive disruptions occurring throughout industries in recent months, we continue to see a high level of excitement and enthusiasm for joining the private preview to use analytics in these times of crisis. Thank … Read more Azure Synapse Analytics: Insights for all

Today, more than ever before, it is essential that our colleagues, customers, and partners be able to react quickly and confidently to rapidly changing circumstances. The ability to ingest, analyze, and act on incoming information requires that an organization have a robust, scalable technology infrastructure. Such an infrastructure is not limited to one place or … Read more Azure Stack updates and how it enables intelligence at the edge

“When the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge are imbued with mixed reality and artificial intelligence, we have a framework for achieving amazing things and empowering even more people.” – Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO speaking at the HoloLens 2 launch At Microsoft Build 2020, we shared some exciting mixed reality news that is helping us create … Read more HoloLens 2 expands markets; Azure mixed reality services now broadly available

In November 2019, we announced the preview of Azure Arc, a set of technologies that unlocks new hybrid scenarios for customers by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure across datacenters, edge, and multi-cloud. Based on the feedback and excitement of all the customers in the private preview, we are able to deliver Azure … Read more Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes preview and new ecosystem partners

The global health crisis has transformed the way we work and live. Remote work has surged across industries, and the ability to scale and manage your business from anywhere has become essential. As our customers are moving beyond resolving immediate crisis needs, many are thinking about the next set of IT investments that can set … Read more Migrate to Azure: Save now, be future ready

The Azure Security Benchmark v1 was released in January 2020 and is being used by organizations to manage their security and compliance policies for their Azure workloads. We are pleased to share that you can now track and monitor your compliance with the benchmark across your Azure environment in Azure Security Center. The Azure Security Benchmark is … Read more Monitor your Azure workload compliance with Azure Security Benchmark

Today, it’s even more critical to have a data-driven culture. Analytics and AI play a pivotal role in helping businesses make insights-driven decisions—decisions to transform supply chains, develop new ways to interact with customers, and evaluate new offerings. Many organizations are turning to cloud analytics solutions to quickly create a data-driven culture, accelerate time to … Read more Learn how to deliver insights faster with Azure Synapse Analytics

Starting today, customers of Azure Front Door (AFD) can take advantage of new rules to further customize their AFD behavior to best meet the needs of their customers. These rules bring the specific routing needs of your customers to the forefront of application delivery on Azure Front Door, giving you more control in how you … Read more Announcing Azure Front Door Rules Engine in preview

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Spot Virtual Machines (VMs). Azure Spot VMs provide access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts. Spot pricing is available on single VMs in addition to VM scale sets (VMSS). This enables you to deploy a broader variety of workloads on Azure while enjoying access to … Read more Announcing the general availability of Azure Spot Virtual Machines

Now more than ever, enterprises must deliver their applications with speed and robustness that matches the high expectations of their customers. The ability to provide sub-millisecond response times, reliably support the demands of enterprises from small to large, and scale seamlessly to handle millions of requests per second are critical to modern application development. At … Read more Microsoft and Redis Labs collaborate to give developers new Azure Cache for Redis capabilities

This post is part 2 of a two-part series about how organizations use Azure Cosmos DB to meet real world needs, and the difference it’s making to them. In part 1, we explored the challenges that led the Microsoft Office Licensing Service team to move from Azure Table storage to Azure Cosmos DB, and how … Read more Office Licensing Service and Azure Cosmos DB part 2: Improved performance and availability

This post is part 1 of a two-part series about how organizations use Azure Cosmos DB to meet real world needs and the difference it’s making to them. In part 1, we explore the challenges that led service developers for Minecraft Earth to choose Azure Cosmos DB and how they’re using it to capture almost … Read more Minecraft Earth and Azure Cosmos DB part 1: Extending Minecraft into our real world

This post is part 2 of a two-part series about out how organizations are using Azure Cosmos DB to meet real world needs and the difference it’s making to them. In part 1, we explored the challenges that led service developers for Minecraft Earth to choose Azure Cosmos DB and how they’re using it to … Read more Minecraft Earth and Azure Cosmos DB part 2: Delivering turnkey geographic distribution

In the weeks and months we have all been grappling with the global pandemic, there’s no doubt about the impact it has had on the lives of people everywhere. A shift to remote work is one of the widespread effects of the global pandemic, and we heard from organizations around the world who are looking … Read more How Azure VPN helps organizations scale remote work

Today, I’m excited to announce the preview of the next generation of Azure VMware Solution, designed, built, and supported by Microsoft and endorsed by VMware. With the current economic environment, many organizations face new challenges to find rapid and cost-effective solutions that enable business stability, continuity, and resiliency. The new Azure VMware Solution empowers customers … Read more Microsoft announces next evolution of Azure VMware Solution

Blob Index—a managed secondary index, allowing you to store multi-dimensional object attributes to describe your data objects for Azure Blob storage—is now available in preview. Built on top of blob storage, Blob Index offers consistent reliability, availability, and performance for all your workloads. Blob Index provides native object management and filtering capabilities, which allows you … Read more Manage and find data with Blob Index for Azure Storage—now in preview

In the past few months, there has been a dramatic and rapid shift in the speed at which organizations of all sizes have enabled remote work amidst the global health crisis. Companies examining priorities and shifting resources with agility can help their employees stay connected from new locations and devices, allowing for business continuity essential … Read more Enable remote work faster with new Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities

Whether you’re a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management + Billing comes in. We’re always looking … Read more Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – April 2020

Azure Container Registry announces dedicated data endpoints, enabling tightly scoped client firewall rules to specific registries, minimizing data exfiltration concerns. Pulling content from a registry involves two endpoints: Registry endpoint, often referred to as the login URL, used for authentication and content discovery.A command like docker pull contoso.azurecr.io/hello-world makes a REST request which authenticates and … Read more Azure Container Registry: Mitigating data exfiltration with dedicated data endpoints

Today we’re introducing the preview of Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) support using Microsoft Azure Backup. Azure Backup uses Recovery Services vault to hold customers’ backup data which offers both local and geographic redundancy. To ensure high availability of backed up data, Azure Backup defaults storage settings to geo-redundancy. By … Read more Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Backup