Microsoft Azure

It’s always been a tricky business to handle mission-critical processes. Much of the technical debt that companies assume comes from having to architect systems that have multiple layers of redundancy, to mitigate the chance of outages that may severely impact customers. The process of both architecting and subsequently maintaining these systems has resulted in huge … Read moreReducing SAP implementations from months to minutes with Azure Logic Apps

Security and resource constraints are often at odds with each other. While some security measures involve making code smaller by removing attack surfaces, others require adding new features, which consume precious flash and RAM. How did Microsoft manage to create a secure Linux based OS that runs on the Azure Sphere MCU? The Azure Sphere … Read moreAzure Sphere’s customized Linux-based OS

Python support for Azure Functions is now generally available and ready to host your production workloads across data science and machine learning, automated resource management, and more. You can now develop Python 3.6 apps to run on the cross-platform, open-source Functions 2.0 runtime. These can be published as code or Docker containers to a Linux-based … Read moreAnnouncing the general availability of Python support in Azure Functions

Today, Tad Brockway, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure, announced the general availability of Azure Ultra Disk Storage, an Azure Managed Disks offering that provides massive throughput with sub-millisecond latency for your most I/O demanding workloads. With the introduction of Ultra Disk Storage, Azure includes four types of persistent disk—Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, … Read moreAzure Ultra Disk Storage: Microsoft’s service for your most I/O demanding workloads

Today, we are announcing the general availability (GA) of Microsoft Azure Ultra Disk Storage—a new Managed Disks offering that delivers unprecedented and extremely scalable performance with sub-millisecond latency for the most demanding Azure Virtual Machines and container workloads. With Ultra Disk Storage, customers are now able to lift-and-shift mission critical enterprise applications to the cloud … Read moreAnnouncing the general availability of Azure Ultra Disk Storage

Intelligent manufacturing transformation can bring great changes, such as connecting the sales organization with field services. Moving to the cloud also provides benefits such as an intelligent supply chain and innovations enabled by connected products. As such, digital transformation is the goal of many, as it can mean finding a competitive advantage. The Azure platform … Read moreBetter together, synergistic results from digital transformation

Announcing the preview of Geo Zone Redundant Storage in Azure. Geo Zone Redundant Storage provides a great balance of high performance, high availability, and disaster recovery and is beneficial when building highly available applications or services in Azure. Geo Zone Redundant Storage helps achieve higher data resiliency by doing the following: Synchronously writing three replicas … Read moreGeo Zone Redundant Storage in Azure now in preview

“Our goal is to empower organizations to run their workloads reliably on Azure. With this as our guiding principle, we are continuously investing in evolving the Azure platform to become fault resilient, not only to boost business productivity but also to provide a seamless customer experience. Last month I published a blog post highlighting several … Read moreImproving Azure Virtual Machines resiliency with Project Tardigrade

Optimizing your Azure workloads can feel like a time-consuming task. With so many services that are constantly evolving it’s challenging to stay on top of, let alone implement, the latest best practices and ensure you’re operating in a cost-efficient manner that delivers security, performance, and reliability. Many Azure services offer best practices and advice. Examples … Read moreYour single source for Azure best practices

New Azure reservations features can help you save more on your Azure costs, easily manage reservations, and create internal reports. Based on your feedback, we’ve added the following features to reservations: Azure Databricks pre-purchase plan App Service Isolated Stamp Fee reservations Ability to automatically renew reservations Ability to scope reservations to resource group Enhanced usage … Read moreSix ways we’re making Azure reservations even more powerful

As more and more organizations adopt Azure for their business-critical workloads, the connectivity between organizations’ on-premises networks and Microsoft becomes crucial. ExpressRoute provides the private connectivity between on-premises networks and Microsoft. By default, an ExpressRoute circuit provides redundant network connections to Microsoft backbone network and is designed for carrier grade high availability. However, the high … Read moreBuilding Resilient ExpressRoute Connectivity for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

MATCH_RECOGNIZE in Azure Stream Analytics significantly reduces the complexity and cost associated with building, modifying, and maintaining queries that match sequence of events for alerts or further data computation. What is Azure Stream Analytics? Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed serverless PaaS offering on Azure that enables customers to analyze and process fast moving … Read moreAzure Stream Analytics now supports MATCH_RECOGNIZE

Ever hear the Abbot and Costello routine, “Who’s on first?” It’s a masterpiece of American English humor. But what if it we translated it into another language? With a word-by-word translation, most of what English speakers laugh at, would be lost. Such is the problem of machine translation (translation by computer algorithm.) If a business … Read moreOvercoming language difficulties with AI and Azure services

Announcing the second-generation HB-series Azure Virtual Machines for high-performance computing (HPC). HBv2 Virtual Machines are designed to deliver leadership-class performance, message passing interface (MPI) scalability, and cost efficiency for a variety of real-world HPC workloads. HBv2 Virtual Machines feature 120 AMD EPYC™ 7002-series CPU cores, 480 GB of RAM, 480 MB of L3 cache, and … Read moreIntroducing the new HBv2 Azure Virtual Machines for high-performance computing

Microsoft is committed to giving our customers industry-leading performance for all their workloads. After being the first global cloud provider to announce the deployment of AMD EPYC™ based Azure Virtual Machines in 2017, we’ve been working together to continue bringing the latest innovation to enterprises. Today, we are announcing our second-generation HB-series Azure Virtual Machines, … Read moreAnnouncing new AMD EPYC™-based Azure Virtual Machines

If you’re experiencing problems with your applications, a great place to start investigating solutions is through your Azure Service Health dashboard. In this blog post, we’ll explore the differences between the Azure status page and Azure Service Health. We’ll also show you how to get started with Service Health alerts so you can stay better … Read moreWhen to use Azure Service Health versus the status page

As part of our commitment to provide the most cost-effective storage offering, we’re excited to share that we have dropped Azure Archive Storage prices by up to 50 percent in some regions. The new pricing is effective immediately. In 2017 we launched Azure Archive Storage to provide cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible … Read moreWe’re making Azure Archive Storage better with new lower pricing

As digital transformation expands beyond the walls of one company and into processes shared across organizations, businesses are looking to blockchain as a way to share workflow data and logic. This spring we introduced Azure Blockchain Service, a fully-managed blockchain service that simplifies the formation, management, and governance of consortium blockchain networks. With a few … Read moreImproved developer experience for Azure Blockchain development kit

To help our customers manage their compliance obligations when hosting their environments in Microsoft Azure, we are publishing a series of blueprint samples built in to Azure. Our most recent release is the NIST SP 800-53 R4 blueprint that maps a core set of Azure Policy definitions to specific NIST SP 800-53 R4 controls. For … Read moreNew Azure Blueprint simplifies compliance with NIST SP 800-53

Back in April we announced the Azure VMware Solution to deliver a comprehensive VMware environment allowing you to run native VMware-based workloads on Azure. It’s a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) that includes vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and corresponding tools. The VMware environment runs natively on Azure’s bare metal infrastructure, so there’s no … Read moreMoving your VMware resources to Azure is easier than ever