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Build conference has just been held within which a great many announcements were made in all areas of development on Microsoft platforms. By tradition, especially many announcements concern the Azure cloud platform, its services and functions. You can independently see the plenary report, where many news in this video was voiced and shown.
Dozens of conference reports on a huge number of topics you can see today
on Channel9 portal !
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In this article we will try to aggregate all announcements into a quick reference with useful links and a brief description.
Azure functions
Azure Functions is a new service that allows you to describe handlers in C #, Node.js, Python, F #, PHP, batch, bash, Java, or use any executable file to react to external events. There is no need to create or administer virtual machines or environments. Another advantage is a flexible pricing model - you only pay for the time when your function works. At the same time, Azure independently scales the load and provides fault tolerance.
Azure Functions project is
open . The closest analogue to Azure Functions is AWS Lambdas. Here
you can find a good comparison of these two services.
Azure Service Fabric
The
Azure Service Fabric microservice platform has been commercially launched. Today, the platform offers to create ultra-reliable solutions based on Mircoservices with .NET and Azure (Windows). However, Build has run pre-release versions of Azure Service Fabric for Java, Linux, and deployments in user environments, including other clouds, such as Amazon.
Azure IoT
As part of Build, several announcements were made regarding the topic of Azure + IoT (Internet of Things). Including:
Azure DocumentDB
The NoSQL Azure DocumentDB service has received several important innovations, among them:
- MongoDB protocol support is an important announcement that will greatly simplify the migration of clients using MongoDB to Azure;
- Global Databases - the announcement of new database replication features across regions around the world;
- Partitioned collections - new opportunities for increasing productivity through partitioning and scaling of collections of documents;
- Price update - new pricing is presented with the ability to reserve performance and storage separately.
Azure Application Insights
The service of collecting and displaying analytics of Azure Application Insights has
received new features:
Azure Storage
Azure Storage has received
an encryption function that is currently only available for Blob objects. All data that will be placed in the storage with encryption enabled will be transparently encrypted and decrypted during extraction. Data is encrypted using AES-256.
Released the
March update of the free tool
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer . Among the new features: support for tables and queues, SaS-functions, increased performance, improved UX, a mechanism for notification of new versions.
Azure Developer Tools
Developer tools have received numerous innovations.
Azure DevTest Labs- VM preparation simplified
- Virtual Network Settings
- Price monitoring and control
- Reuse VM templates to speed deployment
Visual Studio Azure Tools and SDK 2.9- Performance Diagnostics with New Service Profiler (Preview)
- New diagnostic and visualization features with Application Maps
- Event Hub Diagnostics
- ARM and KeyVault deployment support
- Ability to create Secondary App Service (secondary instances)
- Tools Update for Docker Preview Tools
- Upgrading Service Fabric Tools for Visual Studio
- Update Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio
- Upgrade Azure Resource Manager Tools for Visual Studio Code.
Developer Analytics Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2- Manage beta packages with HockeyApp
Azure Coginitive Services
Presented a new service
Azure Coginitive Services , which is a set of functions to work with natural objects: images, speech, video for recognition and analytics, real-time translation and so on. In addition, the service includes functions for searching information based on Bing (hints, pictures, news, places, etc.) A list of all available APIs can be found
on this page .
Azure Coginitive Services, along with the announced bot bot building service, is now officially included in the
Cortana Intelligence Suite .
Azure Marketplace
Azure Markeptlace solutions store received a new functionality - Test Drives, which allows users to try solutions from the store without having to subscribe to Azure or pay money.
Currently, the following solutions are available for test drives: NetApp, YellowFin, SUSE, DataStax, Trend Micro, Consensys, OutSystems, AllDigitall, SoftNas, VMTurbo, and MapR. The list will be constantly expanded.
For a test drive, simply go to
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/ and find
one of the solutions in the search.
Other Azure News
Azure Data CatalogThe corporate data service has been launched into commercial operation.
More details .
Virtual Machines Scale Sets GAThe automatic deployment of multiple virtual machines of the same type has been put into commercial operation. The function is not worth the extra money.
More details .
New types of dv2 vmA new type of virtual machine size has been announced - D15v2, which becomes the largest in the Dv2 series with 20 CPU cores and 114 GB RAM.
Microsoft Power BI Embedded (public preview)The PowerBI team presented the ability to host PowerBI reports within applications and websites. Read more about embedding PowerBI
here .
SQL Database ElasticIn commercial operation launched functionality
elastic databases service Azure SQl Database. The functionality allows you to simplify the allocation of a large number of databases for SaaS-services.
More news
- First support for Hyper-V Containers on Windows 10 announced
- March release of Power BI Desktop update
- Docker PowerShell Update Released
- SQL Server Developer Edition is now free for all users.
- The first preview release of the next generation Visual Studio “15” has been released.