MICROSOFT AZURE

GENERALLY AVAILABLE: AZURE RED HAT OPENSHIFT

Azure Red Hat OpenShift was announced last year at Red Hat Summit 2018. The one-of-a-kind solution offers the best of OpenShift with 24×7 management and support from both Microsoft and Red Hat. This year, at Red Hat Summit 2019, we were told that it’s now generally available!

The fully managed service means that patching, upgrading, repairing and disaster recovery are all handled for you, leaving your application DevOps teams free to focus on operating your applications and not the underlying infrastructure.

Get started now by creating an Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

INTRODUCING MLOPS

What the heck is MLOps I hear you cry. Well, Microsoft revealed all at their Build 2019 conference in May. MLOps aka DevOps for machine learning, is the practice of collaboration and communication between data scientists and DevOps professionals to help manage the production of the ML lifecycle.

New features include:

Azure Machine Learning Command Line Interface

Management capabilities

Code management

Data set management

Simplified model debugging and deployment

Source: Microsoft

AZURE COST MANAGEMENT ADDS AWS

Yes, you read that right. Microsoft’s Azure Cost Management tool now integrates with AWS to track spending across both cloud platforms. The cross-cloud support is currently available in preview and has been designed with customer’s multi-cloud strategies and need for a central cost management solution in mind. Create your first AWS connector to explore the new capabilities of Azure Cost Management, including cost analysis, budgeting and alerts.

WINDOWS SERVER CONTAINER SUPPORT AVAILABLE IN AKS IN PREVIEW

In May, Microsoft shared that the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) was the fastest growing compute service in Azure’s history. Now, Microsoft have announced that Windows Server containers can now be deployed and orchestrated in AKS enabling new paths to migrate and modernise Windows Server applications in Azure. The preview means that we’re now able to manage Windows and Linux containers side by side in the same Kubernetes cluster with the exact same APIs, tools and support.

AZURE SQL DATABASE EDGE IN PREVIEW

At Build 2019 Microsoft announced Azure SQL Database Edge to help address the requirements of data and analytics at the edge using the highly available and secure SQL engine. Azure SQL Database Edge offers:

Develop once and deploy anywhere scenarios

Low latency analytics

Bi-directional data movement

Compatibility with popular T-SQL language

Cloud connected, and fully disconnected edge scenarios with local compute and storage

In-database AI capabilities

Azure SQL Database Edge capabilities. Source: Microsoft

ANNOUNCING KUBERNETES-BASED EVENT-DRIVEN AUTOSCALING

While it might sound a bit of a mouthful, Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) enables any container to scale from zero to potentially thousands of instances based on event metrics like the length of a Kafka stream or an Azure Queue. It also enables containers to consume events directly from the event source instead of decoupling with HTTP. KEDA can drive the scale of any container and is extensible to add new event sources.

Source: GitHub

GET HIGH-PERFORMANCE SCALING FOR YOUR AZURE DATABASE WORKLOADS WITH HYPERSCALE

Hyperscale is a new cloud-native solution purpose-built to address common cloud scalability limits with either compute, storage, memory or combinations of all three. Best of all, you can harness Hyperscale without rearchitecting your application.

In May Microsoft announced:

ADVANCED THREAT PROTECTION FOR AZURE STORAGE NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Azure Storage provides an additional layer of security intelligence that detects unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit storage accounts. This layer of protection allows you to protect and address concerns about potential threats to your storage accounts as they occur, without needing to be an expert in security.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Azure ExpressRoute now generally available in 8 additional locations

Microsoft extends password limit from 16 characters to 256 characters

Microsoft to reduce Azure outages with Project Tardigrade

The deadline to take Microsoft Azure transition exams is fast approaching