Apps & Infrastructure Announcements
Last week Jon Woodward ran through the Data & AI updates that were announced at the Microsoft Envision and Microsoft Ignite events that recently took place in the US. This week, we've pulled together the key updates across applications and infrastructure, along with some further reading and resources to help you get up-to-speed on these latest announcements.
Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances
Available later this year, this will enable customers to reserve virtual machines on Azure for a one or three year term, and save up to 82% (comparative to pay-as-you-go prices) when combined with Azure Hybrid benefit and up to 72% on all VMs.
Customers select the VM type, term, and datacenter region, so the compute resources are available when and where needed. This update will improve budgeting, with a single up-front payment while maintaining the flexibility to exchange or cancel at any time.
Find out more on Azure.com.
Native integration between Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions
We're bringing the power of Azure Cosmos DB to our serverless offering, Azure Functions. With this integration, developers can write serverless apps backed by Cosmos DB, with just a few lines of code. They can innovate faster by reacting in real-time to changes happening in the database to drive more engaging and personalised customer experiences.
Using Azure Functions and Azure Cosmos DB, customers can create and deploy event-driven, planet-scale serverless apps with extremely low-latency access against very rich data.
Read the blog to learn more.
Azure Security Center hybrid support and investigation user experience, public preview
Security Center can now be used to secure workloads running on-premises and in other private and public clouds, in addition to already helping customers protect workloads running in Azure against cyber threats.
Security Center has a new interactive investigation user experience to help customers rapidly diagnose threats, automation, and orchestration for security workflows, and dynamic application whitelisting.
Learn more on the Azure Security Center blog, and on the Azure Security Center page.
Azure Update Management, now included at no cost for Azure customers
Update Management helps customers control when and how to apply missing updates for their Linux and Windows virtual machines across their hybrid environment, without unplanned downtime. Customers pay only for the logs stored in Azure Log Analytics, with change tracking and configuration management included at no cost for all Azure machines, and the cost for non-Azure machines has also been reduced.
Learn more on the Update Management blog.
Bringing together monitoring services in Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor end-to-end monitoring now gives customers visibility across infrastructure and applications in a single view.
In addition, we have significantly optimised the customer experience for Azure Log Analytics and Azure Application Insights with cross-querying capabilities, metrics exploration, application performance monitoring, and failure diagnostics. We have also integrated Azure alerts with IT Service Management tools and released new solutions for Container Monitoring.
Learn more on the Azure Monitor blog.
Azure Policy, limited preview
This new service allows customers to assess and enforce enterprise-wide governing standards across their entire Azure environment for proper control and compliance. Customers can opt-in to join the limited preview on our website.
Learn more on the Azure Policy product page.
Azure Cost Management by Cloudyn, available for free
Azure Cost Management helps organisations manage and optimise cloud spend across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. Cost management has been one of the most popular requests from our customers, and it is now available for free to Azure customers and partners to help them manage their Azure spend. Find out more.
For more information on any of these announcements, reach out to your Microsoft point of contact or get in touch with our Partner Concierge team.