Microsoft Azure

We’re happy to announce the new stable release of Docker Desktop includes the Azure Container Instances – Docker integration. Install or update to the latest release and get started deploying containers to Azure Container Instances (ACI) today. Azure Docker integration The Azure Docker integration enables you to deploy serverless containers to Azure Container Instances (ACI) … Read more Azure Container Instances – Docker integration now in Docker Desktop stable release

The Microsoft Azure Lighthouse product group is excited to launch a blog series covering areas in Azure Lighthouse where we are investing to make our service provider partners and enterprise customers successful with Azure. Our first blog in this series covers a top area of consideration for companies worldwide—Security with focus on how Azure Lighthouse … Read more Build a scalable security practice with Azure Lighthouse and Azure Sentinel

Azure Files is a distributed cloud file system serving file system SMB and REST protocols generally available since 2015. Customers love how Azure Files enables them to easily lift and shift their legacy workloads to the cloud without any modifications or changes in technology. SMB works great on both Windows and UNIX operating systems for … Read more NFS 4.1 support for Azure Files is now in preview

In early 2020, Frost & Sullivan recognized Microsoft as the “undisputed leader” in global Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms for the Healthcare IT (HCIT) sector on the Frost Radar™. In a field of more than 200 global industry participants, Frost & Sullivan independently plotted the top 20 companies across various parameters indicative of growth and innovation, … Read more Better outcomes with AI: Frost & Sullivan names Microsoft the leading AI platform for healthcare IT

Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 introduced SMB Multichannel technology for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 client. This feature allows SMB 3.x clients to establish multiple network connections to the SMB server 3.0 for greater performance over multiple network adapters and/or by taking advantage of NIC Receive Side Scaling (RSS).  Today, we are announcing the … Read more Azure Files SMB Multichannel provides improved performance for clients

Managing cloud costs can be challenging; especially if your organization needs to break down costs for internal chargeback. You might have separate business units, or you might need to facilitate external billing for distinct customer solutions. This becomes even more difficult when you employ shared services to reduce costs, since there may not be a … Read more Simplify financial reporting with cost allocation—now in preview

Azure Cache for Redis is an in-memory data store that is used to power fast, scalable applications. Now in preview, you can access all the caches under your Azure subscriptions and view their data with the new Azure Cache for Redis Visual Studio Code extension. With this new integration, you’ll be able to use Visual … Read more View your Azure Cache for Redis data in new Visual Studio Code extension

In 2019, we announced the preview of the connector for Azure Cost Management + Billing, which allows our customers to analyze their Azure and AWS spend from a single pane of glass in the Azure Portal. We are excited to announce that this feature is now generally available. This new connector simplifies handling different cost … Read more Connector for AWS in Azure Cost Management + Billing is now generally available

Azure Spring Cloud—a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps—is now generally available. With Azure Spring Cloud, you can focus on building the apps that run your business without the hassle of managing infrastructure. Simply deploy your JARs or code and Azure Spring Cloud will automatically wire your apps with the Spring service runtime. Once … Read more Azure Spring Cloud: a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps is now generally available

Achieving cost efficiency in your cloud usage is more critical today than ever before. At Azure Backup, we’re committed to helping you optimize your backup costs. Over the last few months, we’ve introduced a comprehensive collection of features that not only gives you more visibility into your backup usage, but also helps you take action … Read more 5 ways to optimize your backup costs with Azure Backup

“Customers value cloud services because they are agile and adaptable, scaling and transforming to meet the changing needs of business. Since the velocity of change can work against the tenets of reliability, our Azure engineering teams have evolved their culture, processes, and frameworks to balance the pace of innovation with assurance of performance and quality. … Read more Advancing a culture of reliability at the pace of Azure

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 – August 2020

Developing solutions with Azure IoT has never been faster, easier, or more secure. However, the tight coupling and integration between IoT device software and the software that matches it in the cloud can make it challenging to add different devices without spending hours writing device code. IoT Plug and Play can solve this by enabling … Read more Prepare and certify your devices for IoT Plug and Play

This blog post was co-authored by Anny Dow, Product Marketing Manager, Azure Cognitive Services. As schools and organizations around the world prepare for a new school year, remote learning tools have never been more critical. Educational technology, and especially AI, has a huge opportunity to facilitate new ways for educators and students to connect and … Read more Empowering remote learning with Azure Cognitive Services

Right now, every industry and every customer is going through a massive transformation, and cloud computing is often a central enabler of this. The silicon industry is also experiencing change as a critical part of the fast-growing cloud computing ecosystem—an ecosystem where silicon and chip design workloads must meet the rising bar for performance, complexity, … Read more Microsoft and TSMC announce Joint Innovation Lab to accelerate silicon design on Azure

In our current environment, organizations are increasingly looking towards digital solutions to engage their customers and remain competitive. They’re discovering that their customers’ needs can be best met through differentiated, digital experiences delivered by cloud-native applications. When building a new application, one of the most important decisions to make is where to store the application … Read more Power mission-critical applications with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Business disruptions, tactical pivots, and remote work have all emphasized the critical role that analytics plays in all organizations. Uncharted situations demand proven performance insights so that businesses can quickly determine what is and is not working. In recent months, the urgency for business-guiding insights has only been heightened, leading to a need for real-time … Read more How Azure Synapse Analytics can help you respond, adapt, and save

This post was co-authored by Jie Feng Principal Program Manager, and Sumi Venkitaraman Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure Data Share is an open, easy, and secure way to share data at scale by enabling organizations to share data in-place or as a data snapshot. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer is a fast and highly … Read more Share big data at scale with Azure Data Share in-place sharing for Azure Data Explorer

The trend toward the use of massive AI models to power a large number of tasks is changing how AI is built. At Microsoft Build 2020, we shared our vision for AI at Scale utilizing state-of-the-art AI supercomputing in Azure and a new class of large-scale AI models enabling next-generation AI. The advantage of large … Read more Bringing AI supercomputing to customers

“Service incidents like outages are an unfortunate inevitability of the technology industry. Of course, we are constantly improving the reliability of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. We meet and exceed our Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the vast majority of customers and continue to invest in evolving tools and training that make it easy for … Read more Advancing the outage experience—automation, communication, and transparency

Welcome to KubeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. While we won’t be able to see each other in person at KubeCon EU this year, we’re excited that this new virtual format of KubeCon will make the conference more accessible than ever, with more people from the amazing Kubernetes community able to join and participate from … Read more Build resilient applications with Kubernetes on Azure

The economic challenges posed by the global health pandemic continue to affect every organization around the world. During this difficult time, cost optimization has become an especially critical topic. Recently, we provided an overview of how to approach cost optimization on Microsoft Azure, which laid out three focus areas to help you get the most … Read more How to optimize your Azure workload costs

Cloud migrations are an effective way to drive operational efficiencies and to flip capital expenses to operational. Successful cloud migrations are rooted in bias towards action and execute with urgency towards triggers that need immediate attention. In our experience, migration projects that start with a deep understanding of the IT landscape, are best positioned to … Read more Prioritize datacenter discovery and readiness assessments to accelerate cloud migration

Azure Service Bus simplifies enterprise messaging scenarios by leveraging familiar queue and topic subscription semantics over the industry-driven AMQP protocol. It offers customers a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) offering with deep integrations with Azure services to provide a messaging broker with high throughput, reliable latency while ensuring high availability, secure design, and … Read more Announcing preview of Java Message Service 2.0 over AMQP on Azure Service Bus

Microsoft’s learning solutions pave the way toward data-centric jobs of the future “It’s been forecasted 800 million people need to learn new skills for their jobs by 2030. In this time of change, people are hungry to learn, gain new skills, and grow their economic opportunity.”—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Across Microsoft, we are helping a … Read more New Azure SQL Learning Tools help reduce the global technology skills gap

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 – July 2020

Azure Arc is a preview service that enables users to create and attach Kubernetes clusters both inside and outside of Azure. Azure Arc also enables the user to manage Windows and Linux machines outside of Azure the same way native Azure Virtual Machines are managed. To monitor these Azure Arc enabled clusters and servers, you … Read more Monitoring Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and servers

The way we work and live has changed. Over the last several months, enterprises have had to shift their strategy from “physical first” to digital first and accelerate their digital transformation to enable remote productivity, reduce costs, or rapidly address new opportunities. In a digital first world, websites and web applications play a significant role … Read more Three reasons to migrate your ASP.NET apps and SQL Server data to Azure

Across the globe, businesses are emerging into a new normal, eager to restart or rebuild, but still operating in uncertain times. Optimizing costs and redirecting the spend to where it matters most is as important as ever, and many companies see the cloud as a way to control costs, build resilience, and accelerate time to … Read more Eight ways to optimize costs on Azure SQL

Moving to the cloud creates an opportunity to pause and think about how to operate the IT environment. Most organizations in the world have seen their ability to innovate and adopt cloud technologies slowed down by the rules and operating model that governs their existing IT environments. Organizations have their own set of processes, tools, … Read more Creating cloud ready environments with Azure landing zones

With the global pandemic, customers are relying on remote work more than ever, and Windows Virtual Desktop is helping customers rapidly deliver a secure Windows 10 desktop experience to their users. Charlie Anderson, CIO of Fife Council in the United Kingdom, was planning to modernize his companies’ existing Remote Destop Services (RDS) infrastructure, and then … Read more New Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities now generally available

Many enterprise and organizations are moving their data to Microsoft Azure Blob storage for its massive scale, security capabilities, and low total cost of ownership. At the same time, they continue running many apps on different storage systems using the Network File System (NFS) protocol. Companies that use different storage systems due to protocol requirements … Read more NFS 3.0 support for Azure Blob storage is now in preview

“When I first kicked off this Advancing Reliability blog series in my post last July, I highlighted several initiatives underway to keep improving platform availability, as part of our commitment to provide a trusted set of cloud services. One area I mentioned was fault injection, through which we’re increasingly validating that systems will perform as … Read more Advancing resilience through chaos engineering and fault injection

Climate experts across the globe agree: if we can’t drastically reduce carbon emissions, our planet will face catastrophic consequences. Microsoft has operated carbon neutral since 2012, and in January 2020 Brad Smith announced our commitment to going carbon negative by 2030. This isn’t a goal we can reach in one easy swoop—it will take time, … Read more Aiming for more than just net zero

I want to congratulate the HashiCorp and Microsoft Azure teams on the general availability of HashiCorp Consul Service (HCS) on Azure. This is a first-of-a-kind achievement for HashiCorp running a cloud-based service. Within Azure, we have a deep commitment to build a platform where anyone from startups to large-scale enterprises can deliver reliable, compelling services … Read more Fully managed HashiCorp Consul Service generally available on Azure today

As the world navigates through the pandemic, it’s inspiring to see companies across every industry innovate to rethink their operations, engage with customers in new ways, and keep their employees safe. When it comes to innovating in the cloud, customers tell us that they need a platform that enables them to stand up solutions quickly, … Read more Innovate in Azure with confidence

The pandemic continues to test business principles, models, and strategies organizations once thought to be bedrock truths of business. The COVID-19 crisis has challenged everything, from leadership principles, financial models, operations, and sales process, to technology decisions and platform strategies. Organizations have been forced to quickly adapt to maintain efficient operations in these difficult times. … Read more Enabling customers for success on Azure

Organizations today are changing how they run their businesses to ensure safety and efficiency. As we work closely with our customers, their top priorities include optimizing business costs, scaling for a remote workforce, and ensuring business continuity. As a result, cloud migration remains a priority and partners play a critical role. To support your cloud … Read more Migrate to the cloud with confidence

We are coming together as a global community, looking for opportunities to act or perform small steps that drive change for the better. Many parts of the world are still in the first stage of responding, actively working through the immediate crisis with urgency. While other areas have started on recovery, looking at how to … Read more Build safer, more resilient workplaces with IoT solutions

As the technology requirements of your business or practice grow and change over time, deploying business-critical applications can increase complexity and overhead substantially. To help manage this ever-growing complexity, we are pleased to announce the introduction of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. Following industry standards and terms, the Azure Well-Architected Framework provides a set of … Read more Introducing the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework

Co-authored by Jorge Magana, Director, Azure Finance (Financial Planning and Analysis). In the kick off blog of this series, I shared our top recommendations to accelerate your cloud migration journey, one of which was around aligning key stakeholders across your organization. As you move through assessments and plan your migration, it is critical to get … Read more Preparing for what’s next: Financial considerations for cloud migration

With massive workforces now remote, IT admins and security professionals are under increased pressure to keep everyone productive and connected while combatting evolving threats. Windows Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive desktop and application virtualization service running in Azure, delivering simplified management for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). While organizations go through this transformation, allowing their employees … Read more Protecting Windows Virtual Desktop environments with Azure Security Center

Azure Data Factory is a fully managed, easy-to-use, serverless data integration, and transformation solution to ingest and transform all your data. Choose from over 90 connectors to ingest data and build code-free or code-centric ETL/ELT processes. Security is a key tenet of Azure Data Factory. Customers want to protect their data sources and hope that … Read more Azure Data Factory Managed Virtual Network

The Internet of Things (IoT) is well-established for helping businesses find real-time insights from their industrial assets opening the path towards Industry 4.0. Answering questions like “how are all of my assets performing right now?” or “how can I improve my manufacturing process and attainment?” and “when will my assets need servicing?” used to be … Read more Azure Time Series Insights Gen2: Leading the next generation of industrial IoT analytics platforms

Today, Microsoft released the preview of Azure IoT Connector for FHIR—a fully managed feature of the Azure API for FHIR. The connector empowers health teams with the technology for a scalable end-to-end pipeline to ingest, transform, and manage Protected Health Information (PHI) data from devices using the security of FHIR® APIs. Telehealth and remote monitoring. … Read more Microsoft Azure IoT Connector for FHIR now in preview

To help customers save on data warehouse migration costs and accelerate time-to-insight on critical SAP data, we are announcing two new analytics offers from Azure Synapse Analytics. Business disruptions, tactical pivots, and remote work have all emphasized the critical role analytics plays for every organization. Uncharted situations demand charted performance insights, so businesses can quickly … Read more Save up to 76 percent on Azure Synapse Analytics and gain breathtaking insights of your ERP data

On July 1, 2020, the Microsoft Azure team launched a new experience for Azure Partners on Azure Partner Zone. The site will feature the latest news, resources, and content to help partners stay abreast of emerging trends, learn about new products and features, and find the tools needed to build a thriving Azure practice. In … Read more Azure Partner Zone brings new resources and special events for Partners

A year ago we announced the general availability of advanced threat protection for Azure Storage, to help our customers better protect their data in blob containers from the growing risk of cyberattacks. Since then, advanced threat protection for Azure Storage has been protecting millions of storage accounts and helping customers to detect common threats such … Read more Azure Files support and new updates in advanced threat protection for Azure Storage

Commercial real estate developers, building owners, facilities management companies, and tenants have a huge opportunity to address, and solve for, the unique business challenges faced by their industry, by applying the Internet of Things (IoT) to buildings. For example, by leveraging data from IoT sensors and building management systems, companies can gain insights that enable … Read more Making buildings smarter with Azure IoT

As the world adjusts to new ways of working and staying connected, we remain committed to providing Azure AI solutions to help organizations invent with purpose. Building on our vision to empower all developers to use AI to achieve more, today we’re excited to announce expanded capabilities within Azure Cognitive Services, including:. Text Analytics for … Read more Azure AI: Build mission-critical AI apps with new Cognitive Services capabilities