Summary: A raft of developments came out of the recent Microsoft Ignite conference. The most anticipated is that Azure Stack systems are now available to buy. There was a host of other Azure-related announcements, largely around the themes of hybrid deployment and easing enterprise migration to cloud.
Azure Stack: Integrated systems are now shipping and available to buy from Dell EMC, Lenovo and HPE, each of which has built Azure Stack-compatible hardware, while systems from Cisco are ready to order. On the service provider partner side, MSPs including NTT, Pulsant, Revera, Tieto and YourHosting, among others, will roll out Azure Stack-based managed services in the coming weeks. Wortmann plans to introduce terra integrated systems for Stack by the end of the year and Avanade announced a fully managed system.
Migration: The new Azure Migrate service is in preview to discover and migrate VMs and servers. It captures all on-premise apps, workloads and data, and helps map migration dependencies to Azure. It integrates with the new Database Migration Service, a fully automated service that migrates existing on-premise SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL databases to Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance or SQL Server on Azure VMs. Speaking of databases, the Azure SQL Database is now a fully managed service with 100% SQL Server compatibility. And talking of data, SQL Server 2017 is now in general availability, the first version to run on Windows Server, Linux and Docker.
Security: The Azure Security Center has been extended to hybrid environments to secure workloads running on-premise and in other public clouds, in addition to Azure, by installing the Microsoft Monitoring Agent on VMs and computers running outside of Azure. Now in limited preview, Azure Policy enables Security Center policies to be applied across multiple subscriptions using Management to Groups, as well as to workloads running on-premise and in other clouds. The new Azure DDoS Protection Standard service extends the free, basic service with additional DDoS mitigation capabilities and is automatically tuned to protect specific Azure resources. It is now in preview across Azure’s US regions.
AI: Major updates to Azure Machine Learning have been in private preview for six months with 100 companies and are designed for data scientists to build, deploy, manage and monitor models at any scale. Key services are the Docker-based Model Management service which provides deployment, hosting, versioning, management and monitoring for models in Azure, on-premise and in edge devices, and Azure Machine Learning Experimentation.
Azure Media Suite: Updates to Video Indexer, an AI-enabled cloud service, enable customers to extract information from their video content and make it searchable. According to Microsoft, the ‘improved encoding efficiency’ and other new features and functionality enable customers to deliver higher resolution and higher quality video to their viewers, at the same time as saving on storage and content delivery network (CDN) costs.
Azure Data Box: An appliance now in preview for the transfer of very large data sets with capacity of 100TB, in the vein of AWS Snowball.
Azure Cost Management: A free service that helps organisations manage and optimise cloud spend across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.
Azure Monitor: New monitoring and analytics capabilities across applications and infrastructure, plus the integration of Azure alerts with IT service management tools and new container monitoring capabilities.
Azure File Sync: A centralised file share management service now in preview that eliminates the need for special configuration or code changes to provide more redundancy and reduce complexity in file sharing.
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