Microsoft has had a very busy week with a large number of announcements coming out of its Azure Convention.
With developments around IoT, Big Data, containers and plenty of partner releases, it can be difficult to stay on top of it all.
To help, CBR has compiled a list of the big things that happened.
1. Microsoft launches Azure IoT
The company made available its Azure IoT Suite, this integrates with its existing processes, devices and systems.
It is designed to quickly build and scale IoT projects across a business through pre-configured solutions.
The suite can apply functions such as remote monitoring, fleet or asset management and predictive maintenance.
2. Mesos support on Azure Container Service
The company is providing an Azure Container Service Provider for its Azure Resource Manager.
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ARM aims to make it easy to create and manage clusters of hosts that are pre-configured with Docker, Apache Mesos, Marathon and Docker Swarm.
3. Expanding the Azure Data Lake
The cloud-based service, which is designed for running queries on Big Data, uses a query language that draws on the SQL language and Microsoft’s C# programming language.
The expanded Data Lake also includes analytics, which are built on Apache YARN and dynamically scales.
The service includes U-SQL which offers scalable distributes query capabilities in order to analyse data in the store and SQL Servers in Azure as well as Azure SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse.
4. BT widens offering on Azure
BT expanded its Cloud of Clouds offering with Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365.
This allows BT’s corporate customers to set up a privacy-enhanced, managed connection for Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 capabilities.
The service will be provided by BT in Europe, the US and Asia.
5. HDInsight on Ubuntu Linux
Microsoft selected Ubuntu to be its first Linux-based Azure offering. The company’s cloud offering will be running HDInsight on Ubuntu and Hortonworks.
The idea behind this is to help enable hybrid cloud computing by increasing the choice of on-premise or on-cloud computing for customers.
6. Office 365 live at Equinix and Telecity data centres
The two colo providers, Equinix and TelecityGroup, have scaled capabilities by offering Office 365 connectivity through Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute.
Equinix said users will get enhanced data privacy since ExpressRoute enables most Office 365 network traffic to avoid the public internet.
Telecity has added ExpressRoute for Office 365 to its Cloud-IX ecosystem, a software defined networking platform.
7. DataTorrent integration with Azure HDInsight
The real-time Big Data analytics company is teaming up with HDInsight via the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
The idea behind this is to spur the adoption of Hadoop by providing a single platform that delivers stream and bath processing.
Azure customers will be able to deploy DataTorrent RTS directly from the marketplace, ingest data from multiple sources and create and deploy batch and streaming Big Data applications.
8. Azure IoT ecosystem
It’s all well and good to create an IoT suite, but to help make it successful there needs to be partners.
Microsoft announced that a number of companies would be certified for the IoT offering. ARM is one of them, the benefits of this are that developers using ARM will have access and guided instructions to the software development kits published on Github.
Some of the other companies include Intel, Freescale and Resin.io.
9. Microsoft offers Datameer on Azure HDInisght
Datameer sits natively on the Hadoop platform and will extend the existing HDInsight capabilities by facilitating integration, preparation and analysis of structured and unstructured data.
The goal of this is to help advance Big Data adoption, much like the DataTorrent integration.
Microsoft made a number of moves in the past week to make its HDInsight on Azure a more attractive proposition.
10. Talon CloudFAST
Available for Azure File Storage, CloudFAST is designed to enable distributed enterprises to centralise secure file data into Azure File Storage.
It creates real-time global file sharing and collaboration with central file locking. It also ensures Microsoft integration with Azure Active Directory and NTFS security.
