MICROSOFT AZURE

ANNOUNCING THE PREVIEW OF AZURE SPOT VIRTUAL MACHINES

Azure Spot Virtual Machines provide access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts. The catch? They can be evicted anytime if Azure needs capacity. To ensure organisations don’t suffer as a result of this Azure has suggested workloads that are ideally suited to run on Spot Virtual Machines. These include, but are not necessarily limited to:

Batch jobs

Workloads that can sustain and/or recover from interruptions

Development and test

Stateless applications that can use Spot Virtual Machines to scale out, opportunistically saving cost

Short-lived jobs which can easily be run again if the Virtual Machine is evicted

For more information on pricing, deployment, handling evictions, and best practices click here.

MICROSOFT OPENS 35 DAY WINDOW FOR AZURE CUSTOMERS TO POSTPONE IMPACTFUL HOST UPDATES

Azure’s preview of a maintenance control feature for Azure VMs gives more control to customers with highly sensitive workloads for platform maintenance. Using this feature, customers can control all impactful host updates, including rebootless updates, for up to 35 days.

Azure frequently updates its infrastructure to improve the reliability, performance, and security, or to launch new features. Almost all updates have zero impact on your Azure VMs however some very sensitive workloads may require full control of all maintenance activities. This new feature will benefit those customers who deploy this type of workload.

How the maintenance control feature works. Source: Microsoft

SAP HANA BACKUP USING AZURE BACKUP IS NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

In December Azure shared the general availability of Microsoft Azure Backup’s solution for SAP HANA databases in the UK South region. Azure Backup is Azure’s native backup solution which allows you to seamlessly backup and restore SAP HANA databases running on Microsoft Azure VMs and leverage enterprise management capabilities that Azure Backup provides. Benefits include:

15-minute RPO: Recovery of critical data of up to 15 minutes is possible.

Recovery of critical data of up to 15 minutes is possible. One-click, point-in-time restores: Easy to restore production data on SAP HANA databases to alternate servers. Chaining of backups and catalogues to perform restores is all managed by Azure behind the scenes.

Easy to restore production data on SAP HANA databases to alternate servers. Chaining of backups and catalogues to perform restores is all managed by Azure behind the scenes. Long-term retention: For rigorous compliance and audit needs, you can retain your backups for years, based on the retention duration, beyond which the recovery points will be pruned automatically by the built-in lifecycle management capability.

For rigorous compliance and audit needs, you can retain your backups for years, based on the retention duration, beyond which the recovery points will be pruned automatically by the built-in lifecycle management capability. Backup Management from Azure: Use Azure Backup’s management and monitoring capabilities for improved management experience.

PROXIMITY PLACEMENT GROUPS NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

Back in July Azure announced the preview of Azure proximity placement groups to enable customers to achieve co-location of Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources with low network latency. Last month Azure informed us that these proximity placement groups are now generally available, ensuring that your IaaS resources (virtual machines, or VMs) are physically located close to each other with the additional of new features and best practices for success.

Additional capabilities include:

More regions, more clouds

Portal support

Move existing resources to, and from, proximity placement groups

Supporting SAP applications

Measure VM latency in Azure

Azure Proximity Placement Groups. Source: Microsoft

SQL SERVER ON AZURE IS FASTER, AND CHEAPER, THAN ON AWS

Over a million on-premises SQL Server databases have moved to Azure, representing a massive shift in where customers are collecting, storing, and analysing their data. This may be largely down to the fact that a recent study comparing performance between SQL Server on Azure VMs and SQL Server on AWS EC2 found that Azure was up to 3.4 times faster and up to 87% cheaper!

Have a read of Microsoft’s announcement or the GigaOm report for more information.

Performance and price-performance comparisons from the GigaOm report. Source: Microsoft

IN OTHER NEWS:

Microsoft is a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q3 2019

Azure Advisor announces new recommendation category

New enhancements for Azure IoT Edge automatic deployments

Azure founders reflect on Microsoft’s first decade as a public cloud vendor

Microsoft and Oracle extend multi-cloud partnership to Canada

Azure AD Connect cloud provisioning now in public preview