What’s Brewing ?

September 2015

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Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft Azure services via local datacenter regions in India. As the first public cloud provider from India, Microsoft has opened three new regions – Central India in Pune, South India in Chennai, and West India in Mumbai. Governments, large businesses, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and citizens can use the massive computing power now available locally to fuel India’s inclusive growth, spur innovation and accelerate digital transformation.

Details: Click here for major announcements at Azurecon

A virtual conference took place on September 29 for the Azure

community—developers and IT professionals who want to learn about the

latest Azure innovations and understand how customers are using the

platform to transform their businesses.

The event focused on new Azure capabilities in compute, storage, and

networking and provided instructions on using Azure to build, deploy, and

manage apps at scale. Discussion included strategies for enabling hybrid,

secure, and easy-to-manage cloud environments as well as areas such as

machine learning, IoT, containers, and more.

Watch the On-Demand Recording here

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Announcing the addition of two more assessments supporting Financial Services plus a detailed set of

Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Data Security Standard (DSS) guidance describing Azure and customer

shared responsibilities. Along with PCI DSS Level 1 validation and the Center for Financial Industry

Information Systems (FISC) assessment, Azure has added two additional assessment milestones

supporting Financial Services customers:

European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) Information Assurance Framework

(IAF) and the Shared Assessments Program (formerly known as BITS Shared Assessments).

• ENISA IAF – Microsoft Azure now supports customer adoption of the ENISA IAF, which includes a

set of topics and questions organizations should review with cloud providers to ensure they have

sufficient protections in place around customer data.

• Shared Assessments Program – Microsoft Azure now aligns to the Program’s Standard

Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire and the Agreed Upon Procedures (AUP), which

customers can use to assess and verify Azure’s IT, privacy and data security controls. The Shared

Assessments Program is used by many commercial, retail and investment banks around the world

as a proxy for managing their vendor risk assessment process.

Details: Click here

Security is built into Microsoft Azure from the ground up, and we make strong

commitments about the privacy and sovereignty of your data

Azure Security Center—a new Azure service that gives you visibility and

control of the security of your Azure resources without impeding agility, and

helps you stay ahead of cyber threats even as they evolve.

A new family of Azure Virtual Machines that enable GPU capabilities. GPUs have long been used for compute and graphics intensive workloads and we’re excited to bring the power of GPUs to Azure featuring NVidia’s best of breed Tesla GPUs, these Virtual Machines will help customers run a variety of workloads ranging from remote visualization to machine learning to analytics. We expect to preview the N-series within the next few months.

Details: Please visit the Virtual Machines pricing page.

As part of our commitment to save you costs whenever we can, we’re reducing prices of A8, A9, A10 and A11 instances by as much as 60%. These instances carry the powerful Intel Xeon E5 processors and are suitable for compute intensive workloads like high-performance clusters, modeling and simulations, video encoding, and other compute or network intensive scenarios. The new prices will be effective October 1st, 2015.

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Azure Cloud Switch is the software for running network devices like switches. It is a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux. ACS allows to debug, fix, and test software bugs much faster. It also allows the flexibility to scale down the software and develop features that are required for the datacenter and networking needs.

Details: Click here.

DV2-series instances are the next generation of D-series instances that can be used as Virtual Machines or Cloud Services. Based on the latest generation 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) processors, DV2-series instances carry about 35% faster CPUs than the current D-series instances. They feature the same memory and disk configurations as the D-series, and are ideal for applications that demand faster CPUs, better local disk performance, or higher memories for many enterprise-grade applications.

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Azure Container Service builds on our work with Docker and Mesosphere

to create and manage scalable clusters of host machines onto which

containerized applications can be deployed, orchestrated, and managed.

We will provide an Azure Container Service Resource Provider for Azure

Resource Manager (ARM), and secondly we have made available an early

prototype implementation of this service in the form of an Azure

QuickStart Template.

Details: Click here

We announced support for two debugging features: Console output and Screenshot support for Azure VMs v2. These features enable you to easily diagnose and recover your Virtual Machines from boot failures.

Details: Click here, here.

• General availability to access Office 365 including Skype for Business

• General availability to reach Microsoft’s Azure Government Cloud via ExpressRoute

• ExpressRoute connections to Microsoft Dynamics, by end of year

• Enablement of Azure Resource Manager with ExpressRoute

• More bandwidth options

• Simplified billing options with unlimited data or metered data plans on all bandwidth

options from 50 Mbps up to 10 Gbps

• Continued expansion of our global partner ecosystem

• New pricing plans for ExpressRoute: Effective October 1, 2015

These enhancements will provide you even more options to reach Microsoft’s cloud services

bypassing the Internet for better and predictable network performance, better privacy, better

security, lower latency, and higher bandwidths.

Details: Click here

• Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Preview SDKs are available for multiple languages and platforms. These include Java, Python, Go and Ruby SDKs. Each of these language implementations are available through their ecosystem package managers and GitHub, and they're ready for a test drive.

Preview

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• Azure IaaS VM backup provides application consistent backup for Windows operating systems and file system consistency for Linux operating systems without the need to shut down virtual machines, making it enterprise ready solution.

• Azure Backup transfers snapshots taken on a VM to a secure, reliable Azure Backup vault and can restore the VM in a single click.

• Backups taken on virtual machines can be retained for long-term using industry standard GFS based retention policies.

General Availability

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The elastic database client library simplifies the creation of ADO.NET applications that implement and use the pattern known as database sharding in Azure SQL Database. Sharding is a technique used for physically partitioning data across a number of identically structured databases. This library simplifies the creation and management of shards to support the growing and shrinking data storage demands of an application

Azure SQL Database Elastic Database Client Library is now available as well as open source software on GitHub.

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GS- Series combines the compute power of G-series with the performance of Premium Storage to create powerful VMs for your most storage and compute intensive applications. Powered by the Intel Xeon E5 v3 family processors, the GS-series can have up to 64TB of storage, provide 80,000 IOPs (storage I/Os per second) and deliver 2,000 MB/s of storage throughput.

Some of the key features are:

• Highest disk throughput

• Upto 20GBPS of network bandwidth

• Performance gains for relational databases like SQL Server and MySQL, NoSQL databases like MongoDB, and data warehouses.

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Azure HDInsight on Linux includes new features that wasn’t available at Public Preview such

as, cluster scaling, virtual network integration and script action support. You can also create

HBase and Storm clusters on Linux for your NoSQL and real time processing needs e.g.

building an IoT application.

Script action support is similar to HDInsight on Windows that lets you customize your Linux

cluster by installing additional applications or Hadoop components that are not part of

default HDInsight deployment. This can be accomplished using Bash scripts with script action

capability.

General Availability

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With the general availability release of Azure File Storage, we are announcing

these new features:

• SMB 3.0 support, includes encryption and persistent handles

• A new browser-based file explorer in the Azure Preview portal

• Azure Storage Metrics for Azure File storage

• The ability to mount Azure File Storage file shares from outside of Azure

datacenters

Further, Azure File Storage API endpoints are now enabled for all existing

storage accounts, so you no longer need to create new storage account just

to use Azure File Storage.

General Availability

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A new open-sourced Azure Storage data movement library (DML) based on the core data movement framework that powers AzCopy. The library is designed for high performance, reliable and easy Azure Storage data transfer operations enabling scenarios such as

• Uploading, downloading and copying data between Microsoft Azure Blob and File Storage

• Migrating data from other cloud providers such as AWS S3 to Azure Blob Storage

• Backing up Azure Storage data

Public Preview

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New Capabilities

• Azure SRP (Storage Resource Provider) enhancements

• New SAS capabilities

• Premium Storage improvements

• Azure Import/Export in new regions

Public Preview Announcements

• Azure Storage iOS client library preview

• Data Movement Library (DMLib)

• Java client-side encryption

• New Azure Storage Samples for consistent experience

Azure Data Lake is built to be part of the Hadoop ecosystem, using HDFS

and YARN as key touch points. The Azure Data Lake Store is optimized for

Azure, but supports any analytic tool that accesses HDFS. Azure Data Lake

uses Apache YARN for resource management, enabling YARN-based

analytic engines to run side-by-side. The Azure HDInsight managed

Hadoop service already supports the most widely used open source

engines, including Hive, HBase, Storm and Spark.

Details: Click here

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We are delighted at the wide Database variety of customer app scenarios being deployed in

Elastic Database Pools during the preview. Based on this feedback, we are happy to announce

a restructuring of the pricing to address these additional scenarios. Elastic database pools

provide allocated performance to a pool, and allow you to pay for the collective performance

of the pool, rather than single database performance. You don’t need to dial database

performance up or down. Elastic databases consume but don’t exceed the limits of the pool,

so your cost remains predictable even if database usage doesn’t. The following changes go

into effect today:

eDTU price - The preview price you pay today for eDTUs will be the price you pay at

general availability.

Database existence fee - To make elastic database pools more flexible, we are eliminating

the database existence fee.

Details: Click here, here, here, here

DocumentDB is also now generally available in Australia

New features like OrderBy, GeoSpatial, Routing, Index transformations, Migration tools, DF integration, Partitioning new Performance Metrics, increased query limited etc. have been added

Azure DocumentDB' s LINQ provider just got better. Azure DocumentDB supports querying of schema-less JSON documents without specifying a schema or secondary indexes. You can query using one of two server side languages - SQL and JavaScript language query.

Details: Click here

Index Advisor is a new Azure SQL Database feature that helps you improve the performance of your databases by optimizing the database index design and layout.

Index Advisor allows you to get better performance for your key queries and reduce the overall DTU utilization for your database without having to spend a ton of time and effort doing the analysis and optimizations yourself

Details: Click IoT site.

Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, now in public preview, provides capabilities for securely connecting,

provisioning, updating and sending commands to devices. IoT Hub enables companies to

control millions of IoT assets running on a broad set of operating systems and protocols to

jumpstart their Internet of Things projects. IoT Hub is available as a standalone service or as

part of Azure IoT Suite. IoT Hub enables companies to:

• Establish reliable bi-directional communication with IoT assets, even if they are

intermittently connected, so companies can analyze incoming telemetry data and send

commands and notifications as needed.

• Enhance security of IoT solutions by leveraging per-device authentication to

communicate with devices with the appropriate credentials.

• Revoke access rights to specific devices, if needed, to maintain the integrity of the

system.

Public Preview

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Microsoft announced the Azure IoT Suite built on Azure, which brings together preconfigured offerings to

enable companies to quickly and easily develop and deploy Internet of Things solutions. As a core service

in the Azure IoT Suite, we’ve added a number of updates to Azure Stream Analytics that further address

common business needs for IoT deployments. The latest Stream Analytics updates include:

• Support for IoT Hub input: Stream Analytics jobs now have a Preview feature to ingest data from

Azure IoT Hubs, enabling real-time analytics over millions of events from all of your connected

devices.

• Azure Preview portal integration: In addition to continued presence in the Azure Management

portal, Stream Analytics is now integrated in the Azure Preview portal.

• Support for DocumentDB output: Stream Analytics jobs can now output to Azure DocumentDB,

enabling data archival and low latency querying for unstructured JSON data.

• TIMESTAMP BY for heterogeneous events: When a single data stream contains multiple event types

having timestamps in different fields, you can now use TIMESTAMP BY with expressions to specify

different timestamp fields for each case.

Details: Click here

Azure Mobile Engagement is a user engagement platform that enables real-time fine-grain user segmentation, app user analytics, and contextually-aware smart push notifications across all connected devices. You will be able to

• Manage - Programmatic mobile campaign delivery across platforms and audiences

• Personalize – Contextually aware unique messaging for unique customers

• Boost - Optimized experiences for greater user retention and app usage

• Monetize - Amplified ROI with increased visitation and upsell opportunities to maximize lifetime value

Comprehensive analytics go beyond typical KPIs, highlighting what data to capture, track, analyze and act upon to improve engagement precisely when customers need your products or services.

General Availability

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Performance Test is a new feature developed in partnership with the Visual Studio load testing team. This feature allows you to stress test your web app to better understand how it will perform under load and deliver predictable performance to your users.

You can find the Performance Test under the Tools menu of your Web or Mobile apps.

During the Preview phase of this feature it will be available free of charge but you will be limited on how much load you can generate per execution.

Public Preview

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Node SDK for Azure Mobile Apps has been released, helping developers to build and run mobile backends using Node.js on App Service, as well as add push notifications, mobile auth, offline sync and other mobile features and backend APIs to any Node.js app running on App Service.

Details: Click here

Summary of updates on the 0.2.575 of the .NET Server SDK:

• Support for Azure Table Storage

• Removal of automatic OWIN setup for better integration with ASP.NET.

• Improvements to authentication middleware setup.

• Better defaults for database schema setup.

• Clients no longer need to request system properties, they are sent by default.

Details: Click here and here

1. Live encoding generally available

2. Introducing Live sub-clipping and archive extraction

3. Expanded reach for Azure Media Player

4. Azure Media Indexer adds Custom Language Models

5. Imagine Communications integration for Broadcast Channel Cloud Playout

6. Compliance certifications

7. Announcing support for Apple ProRes videos in Azure Media Services

8. Google Widevine now supported for Content Protection

Details: Click here

Azure Media Services now offers the ability to protect both Video-On-Demand (VOD) and Live Streams with Widevine Modular DRM technology. Widevine protection together with Microsoft PlayReady DRM packaging capability, now enables you to reach even more end points with protection for premium content using a single streaming end point in Azure Media Services.

Azure media player now also plays back Widevine protected content using Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) so you can stream securely to Chrome and Android devices using HTML5 Video.

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An App Service Environment provides a fully isolated and dedicated environment for securely running all of your apps including Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps and Logic Apps.

While the App Service Premium Plan remains in Public Preview, we are now backing the App Service Environment capability with the same SLA as our GA App Services so you can deploy your App Service Environments to production.

Details: Click here, here

Source control automation allows you to check-in code you're writing in Azure Automation to source control (push) and sync what’s in source control to Azure Automation (pull).

Source control integration allows you to link the runbooks in your automation account to a source control repository.

Azure Automation now includes another runbook type besides PowerShell Workflow and Graph – PowerShell. PowerShell runbooks have the same lifecycle, capabilities and management as other runbook types, but allows you to run native PowerShell in Azure Automation.

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Azure Service Bus is the core messaging platform that sits at the heart of many sophisticated Azure-based solutions today.

Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging is a new offering, now entering public preview, that builds on the successful and reliable foundation of Service Bus Messaging. Premium Messaging provides a number of key enhancements for greater predictability and performance required for the most demanding workloads – paired with an equally predictable pricing model.

Public Preview

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Customers can now deploy Cloudera Enterprise, Data Hub Edition via the Azure

Marketplace. In this new offering on Azure, Cloudera has expanded support in two key areas:

• Support of Impala, HBase, Spark, and Solr components under all production workload

types. This is suitable for higher resource-consuming services and production workloads

running a variety of services.

• Support for configuration on DS-14 instance types with up to 10 1TB Premium Storage

VHDs attached for worker nodes. This increases the node storage density to 10TB on each

worker node. In addition, a 512GB VHD is allocated for logs.

Cloudera Enterprise can be deployed with a single click from Azure Marketplace, or from a

Azure Resource Management template hosted on GitHub with additional level of control for

customization.

Details: Click here

Now monitor your Azure resources more effectively and take further actions

on them, automatically. You now have webhook support for Azure Alerts on

monitoring data (metrics) from your Azure resources.

Webhooks are user defined HTTP endpoints that are usually triggered by an

event. Webhooks allow us to get more out of Azure Alerts. You can specify a

HTTP or HTTPS endpoint as a webhook while creating or updating an alert on

the Azure Portal.

Details: Click here

Azure SQL Database now supports Azure Active Directory authentication in public preview, a mechanism of connecting to SQL Database by using identities in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). With Azure Active Directory authentication, you can centrally manage the identities of database users and other Microsoft services in one central location. Central ID management provides a single place to manage SQL Database users and simplifies permission management

Preview

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Cloud Foundry on Azure Preview 2 takes advantage of the newest open source

Cloud Foundry technologies and builds on Bosh-Init framework. It also integrates with the latest Azure resource management framework, supporting multiple Cloud Foundry VMs. With these new updates, customers will be able to deploy a standard Cloud Foundry infrastructure on Azure using Bosh-Init.

Preview 2

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To enhance CDN capabilities for our cloud customers, Azure announced

earlier this year we would be growing our existing CDN offer into Standard

and Premium bundles. To further that strategy, today we are announcing that

Microsoft and CDN market leader Akamai have agreed to partner and provide

an Azure CDN offering using the Akamai network.

This partnership is significant because we are integrating Akamai’s industry-

leading CDN capabilities directly into the Microsoft Azure cloud platform

Details: Click here

Summary of main changes:

• Improved navigation

• Resource experience

• Customization

• Moving a resource to another resource group and subscription (preview)

Architecture Blueprint

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The Azure team now has scenario based architecture diagrams that

help you build new solutions very fast!

Updates available at http://azure.microsoft.com

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/