Tons of updates to Microsoft Azure unveiled at BUILD

In my last post, I was enumerating most of the new services that we have launched in the past 12 months. Just today, we’ve announced many exciting updates to Microsoft Azure at BUILD Conference. In this post I will go through most of them. But first of all, some statistics that we shared today:

And two more:

Let’s go with the announcements…

New Azure Management portal (in Preview)

The new Azure portal combines all of the components of a cloud Application into a single development and management experience. It’s a really cool UI and completely touch-friendly. Take a lot at how it looks on a big touch-enabled screen.

You can already access the new portal here.  Some of the new components in the portal include:

• Simplified Resource Managament: You can now create, manage, and analyze your entire application as a single resource. Resource group is a new concept in Azure that serves as the lifecycle boundary for every resource contained within it. More information here.
• Integrated billing: You can now get access to usage and billing without exiting the portal.
• Gallery: Integrated Marketplace of over 130 free and paid services.
• Visual Studio Online: Many features now available without leaving the portal. Team Projects, the lightweight “Monaco” editor and Application Insights analytics.

This new portal is still in preview and some features are still not available.

Infrastructure as a Service

Several interesting announcements:

• New “Basic” Compute Tier: From A0 to A4 they offer similar CPU and memory as the “Standard” tier of instances but these instances cost up to 27% less. They don’t have the Azure load-balancer and autoscaling capabilities. In a few weeks, the basic tier will also be available for Memory Intensive Instances.

• Zone Redundant Storage: ZRS is a new redundancy option that keeps data durable by storing an equivalent of 3 copies of data across multiple facilities.  These facilities may be within the same region or across two regions.  ZRS will be priced 37.5% lower than Geo Redundant Storage GRS when it becomes available.

DevOps

Automation Service (public preview): This Service allows users to automate the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in the Azure environment. You can orchestrate time-consuming tasks across Azure and third-party systems. For example, you can create a runbook to automate a complete deployment of your application. There is no charge for Azure Automation during preview, and the general availability date has not yet been determined. More information here.

AutoScale: AutoScale configure applications to automatically scale up or down to accommodate current demand, and use auto-scaling rules to minimize costs. Previously in public preview, AutoScale is now generally available for Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Web Sites, and Mobile Services.

Scheduler: Using Scheduler, you can invoke actions—such as calling HTTP/S endpoints or posting a message to a storage queue—on any schedule. Scheduler is now generally available for Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Web Sites, and Mobile Services. More information here.

Puppet/Chef partnership: Now fully integrated in Azure, using these technologies you will be able to more easily deploy and configure your cloud solutions. More information about Puppet here and Chef here.

SQL Database

Azure SQL Database Premium will soon have these new features:

Active Geo-Replication: You will be able to create up to 4 active, readable, secondaries in any Azure region and you can choose when to failover.

Database Restore Service: Restore your database to any point in time within the last 35 days in the case of a human or programmatic data deletion scenario. Simpler and more effective than current import/export workarounds.

Increased SLA: SLA will be increased to 99,95%.

New P3 tier: The new P3 tier will deliver higher performance for your database.

Maximum database size increased to 500GB

Web Apps

New “Basic” tier: Web Sites Basic tier is a new entry-level tier that provides support for small, medium and large virtual machine (VM) sizes and enables you to scale up to three VM instances. The Basic tier includes 10 GB of storage and supports custom domains. If you need features like AutoScale, Backup or web jobs, you will need to subscribe to the Standard tier. You can find more information here.

Updates for Standard tier: Standard tier will now include 5-SNI and 1-IP SSL certificates, 50GB of storage and new advanced capabilities including: live production debugging with up to 5 connections, 6 scheduled Web Jobs, 1 Scheduled Backup per day and 2 Site Slots to use as testing or staging environments.

Java Support: Web Sites have now the ability to host Java applications. This feature is in preview.

Other enhancements: WebSockets and live-debugging with Visual Studio are now generally available.

Mobile

Mobility Enhancements for Enterprise : New features in preview like Azure Active Directory integration, offline sync and Visual Studio support for .NET backend.

Kindle Mobile push notifications: Notification Hubs support now Kindle devices.

Identity Management

Azure Active Directory Premium : With the Premium edition of Azure AD you get all of the capabilities that Free has to offer, plus multi-factor authentication, self-Service password reset, company branding, etc. AD Premium is now generally available with a 99,9% SLA.

Other new features and announcements

Virtual Network Dynamic Routing Gateways and Point-to-Site : The use of Windows Server 2012 RRAS (Dynamic Routing Gateway) and Point-to-Site (or “software”) VPNs is now generally available. The Dynamic Routing VPN Gateway in a virtual network will now have the same SLA as the Static Routing VPN Gateway.

Azure Backup Price reduction: Effective April 1, you will see a significant price reduction for this service.

What do you think? Do you like these new announcements?

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2014
  Still don't get why Azure Backup Storage is 4.5x the cost of Azure Storage, when I'm guessing the former mostly consists of parked data so doesn't require speedy ($$$) storage?

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2014
  Hi Steve, you can't compare the pricing of Azure Storage with Azure Backup directly. Azure Backup is a managed end-to-end service and the per-GB cost includes bandwidth, storage, storage transactions, compute and other resources associated with providing the Backup Service. However, if you don't want to use this service, we have many other options available. This article may give you more ideas: blogs.msdn.com/.../how-to-backup-and-restore-windows-system-disk-in-a-windows-azure-iaas.aspx   You can also use third-party software like Gladinet or CloudBerry. Hope it  helps.

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2014
  Azure Backup is compressed.

• Anonymous
  August 20, 2014
  Hi Steve, When corporate network is deployed on azure (like LAN, active directory) user can perform single sign on for respective VM's.

1. Who will manage azure portal?
2. How will users know which machine they have to login? Do we provided any application where they get connected to individual VM's