Azure ExpressRoute General Availability:

• Announcing new partnerships with:
• TelecityGroup and SingTel to expand ExpressRoute’s reach in Europe and APAC
• Zadara to allows Azure customers to use Zadara storage via ExpressRoute in the U.S. 

 

Azure Compute-intensive A8 & A9 Virtual Machines General Availability for virtual machines.

 

Azure Files - Public Preview - enables virtual machines in an Azure datacenter to mount a shared file system using the SMB protocol.   

 

Azure Import/Export - General Availability. 

 

Microsoft Antimalware and security partnership with Trend Micro and Symantec - Public Preview.

 

• Deep integration for Trend’s Deep Security™ and SecureCloud™ products in the Azure platform.  Additionally, Microsoft is also working to integrate PortalProtect™ with Azure.  
• Symantec End Point Protection (SEP) is being supported on Azure. Through deep portal integration, customers have the ability to specify that they intend to use SEP within a VM.

  

Internal Load balancing - Public Preview.  Provides the ability to load balance Azure virtual machines with private IP addresses.

 

Virtual Networking features - General Availability of multiple site-to-site VPN and VNET-to-VNET connectivity. 

  

IP Reservation for VIPs and Instance-level public IP’s for Virtual Machines – General Availability:

 

• Customers can now reserve public IP addresses and use them as virtual IP (VIP) addresses for their applications.
• With Instance-level Public IPs for VMs, customers can now assign public IP addresses to their virtual machines, so they become directly addressable without having to map an endpoint.

 

Azure Site Recovery (formerly Hyper-V Recovery Manager) – New features announced:

 

• Today, Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager provides a disaster recovery solution for customers which helps protect the availability of System Center private clouds. 
• In June a public preview of new features will enable customers to replicate virtual machines from their primary site directly to Azure, instead of a second customer site. 

  

Azure RemoteApp: New service delivering remote applications from the Azure cloud - business applications run on Windows Server in the Azure cloud where they’re easier to scale and update. Employees install Microsoft Remote Desktop clients on their Internet-connected laptop, tablet, or phone—and can then access applications as if they were running locally. 

 

API Management - Public preview - new service enabling organizations to publish APIs to developers, partners and employees securely and at scale. 

 

Azure Cache Services:

 

•  General Availability for Azure Managed Cache service.
• Azure Redis Cache service is available in Public Preview. 
• Azure Shared Caching Service will be retired in September 2014 and with it the Microsoft’s Silverlight-based portal. 

  

Azure Traffic Manager - General Availability - supports both Azure endpoints and external endpoints.

 

BizTalk Hybrid Connections- Public Preview of BizTalk Hybrid Connections – this new Azure service enables cloud services to more securely, quickly, and easily integrate Azure cloud solutions with on-premises applications. With no custom code required, Hybrid Connections enables customers to connect to any on-premises TCP or HTTP resource—such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, or any web service—from Azure Web Sites.

  

Windows Client VMs for MSDN Subscribers: Virtual machine images for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 are now available in the Azure virtual machine gallery for MSDN subscribers.

 

 

Media File: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode28.mp3

 

Links:

 

VM Depot is a community-driven catalog of preconfigured operating systems, applications, and development stacks that can easily be deployed on Windows Azure. Find your favorite software and deploy it in minutes, or join the community, build a virtual machine image, and share it with others.

 

 

VM Depot is brought to you by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. The virtual machine images on this site are provided and licensed to you by community members. Microsoft Open Technologies does not screen these images for security, compatibility or performance, and does not provide any license rights or support for them.

 

 

https://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index

 

 

RemoteApp demo: https://www.remoteapp.windowsazure.com/ClientDownload/WindowsDemo.aspx

 

 

Automate (resource on Azure environment)

 

• Creation
• Deployment
• Monitoring
• Maintenance

 

 

 

Frequent or time-consuming jobs 

 

• WebSites
• Cloud Services
• Virtual Machines
• Storage
• SQL Server

 

 

 

Extend by importing a PowerShell module or writing in C#

 

 

 

Write runbooks in PowerShell Workflow syntax

 

Extensible Workflows

 

 

 

Backups

 

Logs processing

 

Command line tools

 

 

Links:

 

Media: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode27.mp3 

 

Azure Datacenter in Brazil:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/04/17/microsoft-azure-brazil-region-now-in-public-preview.aspx

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/trust-center/compliance/

 

 

The guys talk about a new service that is still in preview but has the potential to make designing an IoT system easy.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/intelligent-systems-service.aspx

 

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/intelligent-systems.aspx

 

Preview signup: https://connect.microsoft.com/site1132/

 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode26.mp3

 

MongoDB as a service:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/04/22/announcing-new-mongodb-instances-on-microsoft-azure.aspx

 

Retiring Guest OS 1.X family:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/ee924680.aspx

 

OneDrive for Business goes to 1TB now!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2149023/microsoft-boosts-onedrive-for-business-storage.html

 

 

 

Notification Hubs provide a push infrastructure with the following advantages:

 

• Multiple platforms : iOS, Android and Windows
• Works with any back-end. Cloud or on-premises, .NET, PHP, Java, Node, etc.
• Scale. Notification Hubs scale to millions of devices without the need of re-architecting or sharding. Available in all regions.
• Rich set of delivery patterns. Associate devices with tags, representing logical users or interest groups.
• Personalization. Each device can have one or more templates, to achieve per-device localization and personalization without affecting back-end code.
• Security. Shared Access Secret (SAS) or federated authentication.
• Rich telemetry. Available in the portal and programmatically.

 

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/notification-hubs/

 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode25.mp3

 

Device APIs

 

Device APIs are only used to register devices from mobile apps (for security reasons, they do not expose Send methods). They automate the management of Notification Hubs-related information in the device local storage, and they support registration for a single PNS (for example, the Windows Store device APIs only register Windows devices).

 

Notification Hubs currently provides the following device API sets:

 

• Windows Store, managed C# (for WNS): Download, Reference
• Windows Phone 8 (for MPNS): Download, Reference (coming soon)
• Objective-C (for APNS): Download, Reference (coming soon)
• Java/Android (for GCM): Download, Reference

 

 

 

Back-end APIs

 

Back-end APIs are used to send notifications and for registration management from the back-end for all platforms.

 

Notification Hubs currently provides the following back-end API sets:

 

• .NET: Download, Server API References
• Node.js: Download, Reference

 

 

 

REST APIs

 

All Notification Hubs functionality is available using REST APIs. For more information, see Notification Hubs REST APIs.

 

 

The Build video on Notification Hubs is at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-616.

 

Evan and Cale talk about Azure Mobile Services which allows app developers on any platform to spin up a quick 'n easy back-end for storing data ad do authentication.

 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode24.mp3

 

 

SQL Server 2014 and Windows Azure Blob Storage Service: Better Together

 

Summary: SQL Server 2014 introduces significant new features toward a deeper integration with Microsoft Azure, thus unlocking new scenarios and provide more flexibility in the database space for IaaS data models. This technical article will cover in depth SQL Server 2014 Data Files on Azure Blob storage service, starting from step-by-step configuration, then providing guidance on scenarios, benefits and limitations, best practices and lessons learned from early testing and adoption. Additionally, a fully featured example of a new (Windows Server Failover Clustering) - like feature will be introduced to demonstrate the power of Microsoft Azure and SQL Server 2014 when combined together. 

 

SQL Server 2014 and Windows Azure Blob Storage Service: Better Together

 

 

 

Script Browser for Windows PowerShell ISE

 

Script Browser for Windows PowerShell ISE enables you to search for over 9000 script samples in the TechNet Script Center from within the scripting environment.

 

Script Browser for Windows PowerShell ISE

 

 

 

Microsoft Analytics Platform System

 

The Microsoft Analytics Platform System is your turnkey big data analytics appliance combining a high performance MPP SQL Server data warehouse with Hadoop into a single solution that offers seamless integration for of all of your data.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/analytics-platform-system

 

 

 

Microsoft Azure Intelligent System Service

 

Built on Windows Azure, the Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service (ISS) makes it easier for enterprises to securely connect, manage, capture and transform machine-generated data from Line of Business (LoB) assets, such as industry devices and sensors, regardless of OS platform.  When enterprises use ISS to harness machine-generated data, they can drive improvements in operations and unlock new business opportunities by leveraging Microsoft assets like Power Business Intelligence (BI) and HD Insight for analytics to produce meaningful insights.

 

Link to request preview

 

 

 

Express Route

 

Dynamic Gateway / P2S

 

Basic Instances

 

IoT - Orleans - Framework for massive scale

 

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-java-get-started/

 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode23.mp3

 

Azure SDK 2.3 for .NET is available.

The new Azure SDK 2.3 for .NET supports the following additional features:

• Virtual Machines: Remote debug native or managed code [Article] and create virtual machines from Server Explorer [Article]
• Web Sites: View and edit remote files and logs [Article] and easily publish Web apps using the improved Publish Web experience [Article]
• Cloud Services: General availability of Emulator Express [Article] with Run as Normal User support & Remote debugging for native code [Article]
• Storage: Updated Storage Emulator & Storage Client 3.0 now included in new projects [Storage Dev Center]
• PowerShell, X-Plat CLI and .NET Automation (separate downloads from Azure SDK 2.3): Support for using Resource Manager [PowerShell Article; X-Plat CLI Article], and lots of new commands for automating Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs and more [PowerShell Article; X-Plat CLI Article]

The Azure SDK 2.3 can be downloaded from the Azure .NET Developer Center. 

 

http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/mark-russinovich-how-microsoft-building-its-cloud-future-237465?page=0,0

 

A selection of Microsoft Azure Active Directory Samples on github

 

Process automation capability to simplify Azure cloud management

Use runbooks (in a form of a PowerShell script) to automate the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated tasks that are commonly performed in a cloud environment.

 

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/04/09/new-microsoft-azure-expressroute-alliances-help-enterprises-move-to-the-cloud-on-their-terms.aspx

 

 

Internet of Things with Azure Service Bus

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/3-635

A nice video on the advent of the Internet of things and how connected devices are presenting numerous integration and messaging challenges, which can be tackled with Service Bus. In this session, Todd Holmquist-Sutherland & Paolo Salvatori  demonstrates how to use queues and topics to enable a variety of M2M scenarios--everything from command/control to telemetry.

 

At the Build 2014 conference, we introduced the new Microsoft Azure Preview portal and the new Basic tier of compute instances.

We also announced the general availability of the Web Sites Basic tier along with enhancements to the Web Sites Standard tier, Active Directory Premium, Scheduler, RA-GRS, Dynamic Routing Gateways and Point-to-Site, AutoScale, and Visual Studio Online.

In addition, Azure Automation public preview was announced and Azure Backup pricing was reduced

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode22.mp3

Links:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/preview-portal/

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/visual-studio-online/

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-how-to-scale/

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/automation/

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/backup/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/03/31/microsoft-azure-innovation-quality-and-price.aspx

 

 

Latest news that Microsoft is choosing to rename Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure

 

What is this saying about how Azure fits into Microsoft's entire ecosystem

 

OSS @ Microsoft

 

Drupal, DotNetNuke, NodeJS 

 

What is support of Linux OS on Azure vs Windows? 

 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode21.mp3

 

 

https://www.microsoft.com/india/movetoazure/

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/03/26/windows-azure-services-now-generally-available-in-china.aspx

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/03/20/open-source-and-microsoft-developer-tools.aspx

 

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/linux-endorsed-distributions/

 

 Why caching?

History of caching on Windows

Cache Service (Preview) gives you access to a secure, dedicated cache that is managed by Microsoft.

In-Role Cache - Use the memory in your VM or cloud service as a distributed cache

Programming the cache

Capacity Planning http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn386139.aspx

Monitor Windows Azure Cache Service

Learn how to monitor and configure key performance metrics through the Windows Azure Management Portal.

Troubleshooting and debugging for Windows Azure Cache Service

Change diagnostic level via log files or programmatically.

 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode20.mp3

 

Links & Updates:

 

Windows-based Oracle software images are now generally available.

 

Dear Azuresupplies unique answers to all of your cloud questions. Want to host your Java application in the cloud? Need to scale resources dynamically? Answers to these and many more are featured on DearAzure.com.   

 

Windows Azure Traffic Manager now supports Windows Azure Web Sites 

 

HDInsight: Hadoop 2.2 support is now GA.

 

Special guest Bill Zack from the Windows Azure product team shares his passion for getting customers to try Azure and talks tech about moving VMs.

 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode19.mp3

Bill's blog http://cloudyinnashville.com/

CloubBerry: http://www.cloudberrylab.com/

Cerebrata: http://www.cerebrata.com/

Async Blob Copy: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/06/12/introducing-asynchronous-cross-account-copy-blob.aspx

http://www.meetup.com/The-Nashville-Windows-Azure-Users-Group/ 

Windows Azure Friday: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/videos/windows-azure-friday/

Scott Guthrie’s blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

Windows Azure Training Kit: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/other-resources/training-kit

The Windows Azure Trust Center: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/

Windows Azure Script Center:  http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/scripts/

Azure Storage Explorer: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2014/03/11/windows-azure-storage-explorers-2014.aspx