Azure product announcements and updates
Todd Sweetser
Hi Cloud Partners! I thought I would share and example of information that is shared with partners and customers when they have an Azure tenant subscription. These are sent about once a month and have some excellent information on recent updates to the platform. Enjoy!
Read about important Azure product updates and announcements.
Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL generally availablePricing: Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL | Webpages: Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQLAzure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL are fully managed, enterprise-ready community database engines. Easily adjust resources and respond faster to market and customer demands with built-in high availability and the ability to elastically scale compute and storage independently—in seconds. Take advantage of unparalleled security and compliance, Azure IP Advantage, and our industry-leading global reach. Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL are generally available, and you now get an industry-leading 99.99 percent financially backed service-level agreement (SLA) with this release. Additionally, the services have achieved the following industry compliance: SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, ISO/IEC 27018:2014, Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Certification, HIPAA and the HITECH Act, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) Level 1. Until May 1, 2018, you’ll continue to pay preview pricing. Starting May 1, 2018:
Effective September 1, 2018, for the basic pricing tier, you’ll be charged for consumed I/Os. New names will appear in your bill—review the list of name changes for Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Learn more about Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and read more about this release on the Azure Blog. Find pricing on the Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL pricing webpages. Azure SQL Data Warehouse generally available in more regionsPricing | SQL Data Warehouse webpageAzure SQL Data Warehouse lets you quickly implement a high-performance, secure, and compliant cloud data warehouse. Scale compute and storage elastically and independently with a massively parallel processing architecture. Seamlessly integrate SQL Data Warehouse with big data stores, and create a hub for your data marts and cubes. SQL Data Warehouse is generally available in three additional regions: West India, Japan West, and Australia East. These locations bring the product’s worldwide availability to 33 regions. Note that West India general availability (GA) pricing is already in effect. Japan West and Australia East GA pricing will begin on May 1, 2018. Usage prior to May 1, 2018, will be billed at preview rates. Learn more about SQL Data Warehouse on the overview and pricing webpages. Azure Databricks generally availablePricing | Azure Databricks webpageAzure Databricks is a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics platform optimized for Azure. Accelerate innovation with one-click setup. Use streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace to enable collaboration among data scientists, data engineers, and business analysts—all backed by the Azure Databricks SLA. Azure Databricks is now generally available. GA pricing will begin on May 1, 2018. Usage prior to May 1, 2018, will be billed at preview rates. Learn more about Azure Databricks on the overview and pricing webpages. Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Data Lake Analytics now available in the West Europe regionPricing: Data Lake Store, Data Lake Analytics | Webpages: Data Lake Store, Data Lake AnalyticsAzure Data Lake Store is a hyperscale enterprise data lake in the cloud that is secure, massively scalable, and built to the open Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) standard. Bring together data from disparate data sources into a single data lake so that all your analytics can run in one place. Azure Data Lake Analytics is a distributed, on-demand analytics job service that dynamically scales so you can focus on achieving your business goals, not on managing distributed infrastructure. Select how many parallel compute resources a job can scale to. Data Lake Analytics is also cost effective, because you only pay for your job when it’s running. Data Lake Store and Data Lake Analytics are now generally available in the West Europe region, in addition to the previously announced regions. Find out how to migrate your Data Lake Store account across regions. Learn more about Data Lake Store and Data Lake Analytics. Find pricing on the Data Lake Store and Data Lake Analytics pricing webpages. Microsoft Cognitive Services: Custom Vision Service Preview and Face API updates now availablePricing: Custom Vision Service, Face API | Webpages: Custom Vision Service, Face APIMicrosoft Cognitive Services lets you infuse your apps, websites, and bots with intelligent algorithms. See, hear, speak, understand, and interpret your user needs through natural methods of communication. Part of Cognitive Services, Custom Vision Service Preview lets you easily build and refine customized image classifiers to recognize specific content in imagery. Using state-of-the-art machine learning, train your classifier to recognize what matters to you—like categorizing images of your products or filtering content for your website. Simply upload labeled images and let Custom Vision Service do the hard work. Custom Vision Service is in preview in Azure. Learn more on the overview and pricing webpages. The Face API in Cognitive Services lets you detect human faces and compare similar ones. Organize images into groups based on similarity. Identify previously tagged people in images. This generally available API now includes improvements like million-scale recognition and lowered GA pricing. These changes can better help you with your vision scenarios. Learn more about the Face API on the overview and pricing webpages. Microsoft Cognitive Services: Bing Entity Search API generally availablePricing | Bing Entity Search API webpagePart of Microsoft Cognitive Services, the Bing Entity Search API brings rich context about people, places, things, and local businesses to your apps, blog, or website for a more engaging user experience. It identifies the most relevant entity based on your searched term and provides primary details about those entities. Entities span across multiple international markets and market types, including information about famous people, places, movies, TV shows, video games, and books. The Bing Entity Search API is now generally available. Learn more on the overview and pricing webpages. Find out where this API can be used. Traffic view feature of Azure Traffic Manager generally availablePricing | Traffic Manager webpageAzure Traffic Manager gives you the ability to route incoming traffic for better performance and availability. Distribute your app traffic equally or with weighted values, and A/B test new deployments as necessary. The traffic view feature of Traffic Manager enables you to view information in a geographic map in the Azure portal or download the raw data. You’ll get actionable intelligence on how to manage your capacity in existing or new Azure regions. By using traffic view you’ll understand:
Traffic view is now generally available. GA pricing will begin on May 1, 2018. Learn more about Traffic Manager on the overview and pricing webpages. Real user measurements feature of Traffic Manager generally availablePricing | Traffic Manager webpageThe real user measurements feature of Traffic Manager helps reduce network latency for your users by increasing the accuracy of the routing decisions made by Traffic Manager for queries against your Traffic Manager profiles. Use the feature to ensure that existing network latency intelligence in Traffic Manager adequately spans the specific networks from which your users connect. With this feature, run Azure-provided JavaScript code on your web properties to measure latency from your users’ networks to Azure regions. These measurements are then sent to Traffic Manager to enhance routing decisions. Real user measurements is now generally available. GA pricing will begin on May 1, 2018. Learn more about Traffic Manager on the overview and pricing webpages. Azure Event Hubs dedicated tier available in GermanyPricing | Event Hubs webpageFocus on getting value from your telemetry rather than on gathering the data with Azure Event Hubs. This hyperscale telemetry ingestion service collects, transforms, and stores millions of events. Having your own dedicated event hubs means a single-tenant deployment. This is especially useful if you have demanding requirements around latency and overall performance. The dedicated tier is now available in Germany Central and Germany Northeast, which includes the capture feature. With capture, send your data from the event hub to your Azure Blob storage or Azure Data Lake Store accounts. Learn more about Event Hubs on the overview and pricing webpages. New alerts experience in Azure Monitor generally availablePricing | Azure Monitor webpageWith Azure Monitor, set up alerts to monitor the metrics and log data for the entire stack across your infrastructure, app, and platform. A new alerts experience is now generally available. It provides faster alerts so that you find out about issues more quickly, it supports more metrics, and it gives a consistent look and feel across the Azure portal to manage alerts. The new experience is now the default option in the portal, and GA pricing will begin on June 1, 2018. If you’d like to keep using the previous alerts experience, now called Alerts (Classic), it’s available at no additional cost. Learn more about Azure Monitor on the overview and pricing webpages. Read more about the new alerts experience—and how to keep using Alerts (Classic)—on the Azure Blog. Microsoft IoT Central renamed “IoT Central” Microsoft IoT Central is the first global scale software as a service (SaaS) offering that enables you to build intelligent, secure, enterprise-grade Internet of Things (IoT) apps and removes the infrastructure management overhead and hassle. No matter the size of your organization, IoT Central lets you manage your entire IoT ecosystem across devices, cloud, analytics, networks, and software—all without cloud or coding expertise. Effective May 1, 2018, Microsoft IoT Central will be renamed “IoT Central.” These changes won’t affect the usage data, price, or resource GUID. You may need to adjust your reports to accommodate the new naming convention. See a comprehensive list of changes on the Name changes: Microsoft IoT Central webpage. Visit Azure updates for a complete list of announcements and updates. Note: As an Azure customer, you are receiving this email because we are required to notify you of product changes that may affect your subscription. This is the only communication that you will receive directly from Microsoft regarding these product changes. Thank you, Your Azure team |