Every month Microsoft is releasing new Azure services and promoting other services from preview state to general availability. In October this year a few news services were released and a few graduated to general availability.
– Azure Automation is now generally available. Azure Automation is essentially a PowerShell scripting in the cloud. Microsoft was recommending to script Azure deployment tasks for a long time, but previously the scripting capabilities were limited by developer’s computer. Now, using Azure Automation it’s possible to actually run PowerShell scripts in Azure cloud, create jobs and schedule them at given times, create automation workflows. These PowerShell workflows are called “runbooks”. Microsoft is providing a comprehensive catalog of ready to use runbooks made to automate and manage different part of Azure: web site, cloud storage, media service, VMs, etc.
– Azure Service Bus received a new feature – Event Hubs. Event Hubs is hyper-scalable pub/sub event ingestor which can ingest data from millions of telemetry events per second so it could be processed by Azure cloud services. Event Hubs is designed for use with “internet of things” (IoT) – cloud-connected devices with sensors.
– Microsoft Animalware for Cloud Services and VMs graduated to general availability. Microsoft Antimalware is a service and SDK enabling protection of cloud services and VMs from malware.
– Instance-level public IPs are now generally available. It’s now possible to directly assign a public IP to VM or a web or worker role. Limit of two public IPs per subscription was removed.
– Elastic Scale preview is now available for SQL Azure. Elastic Scale is a set of .NET libraries and management tools making horizontal scale-out (sharding) of SQL Azure servers easier. Sharding was a recommended scale-out (and scale-in) pattern for Azure SQL for a while. However, implementation of sharding required custom coding and writing management scripts (or manual management of SQL instances). Now it’s much easier to implement.
– Azure Batch is now in public preview. Azure Batch is new platform which is enabling user to run large scale parallel applications on thousands of virtual machines, auto-scale depending on work in the queue, monitor job progress and stage data and build computing pipelines.
– Stream Analytic is now available in public preview. Stream Analytics is a realtime event processing engine and built to process mullions of telemetric events per seconds when used together with Event Hubs.
– Data Factory is now available in public preview. Azure Data Factory is a framework for creating, managing and orchestration of data pipelines for connecting all kinds of data sources (SQL on premises or Azure, Azure tables or blobetc) to Hadoop cluster .
