Service Updates

Use the Azure Preview portal to create, manage, and monitor your virtual machines.

Deploying multi-virtual machine applications is easier than ever before. Create a three-server or nine-server SharePoint Server Farm by providing only a name, username, and password.

Multiple updates for Azure PowerShell are included in our latest releases.

We’ve added support for reverse DNS for all Azure Cloud Services at no additional cost!

We’ve added Azure Storage to the preview portal. Create accounts, view your containers, and monitor performance.

Set up a monitoring experience that keeps track of new metrics.

The recommended pricing tier is the simplest way to select an offering.

Machine Learning is a fully managed service for advanced analytics in the cloud.

Azure Event Hubs helps solve data flow challenges where you want to ingest, persist, and process millions of events per second.

Manage your Azure SQL Database subscriptions using the new Azure Preview Portal.

The US Central region in Iowa and US East 2 region in Virginia are generally available.

More options for the secure, dedicated Redis Cache, managed by Microsoft.

Service Bus Basic and Standard tiers provide price flexibility that better accommodate different use cases.

4 decimals gives you more accurate pricing for Azure Block Blob Storage.

The GA release of backup and restore for Azure Web Sites includes lots of new tools and features.

Host middle tier or backend applications behind a private IP address that is visible only within your cloud service or Virtual Network.

We’ve created a new Web Deploy endpoint that lives as a site extension on each customer’s site.

HDInsight 3.1 (HDP 2.1) is now generally available and includes enhancements to HBase, Mahout and Tez.

Azure Traffic Manager’s round robin load-balancing method now supports weights.

The new Scheduler Premium tier and updates to the Standard tier give you access to more units and job collections.

Now you can replicate virtual machines from your primary site directly to Azure, instead of to your own secondary site.

The new Azure Status page is available on status.azure.com.

Azure Websites supports Python 3.4, along with automatic configuration in the Azure Portal.

There’s a new gallery of website extensions for Azure – use them to leverage a powerful set of tools deployed as site extensions.

This PowerShell release includes updates for Web Sites, Traffic Manager, and individual cmdlets.

The preview of Apache HBase clusters is available in the HDInsight Service. HBase is a low-latency NoSQL database that allows online transactional processing of big data.

Host services in Brazil South with the same service-level agreement coverage offered in Azure regions worldwide.

Deploy SAP solutions in the cloud using Azure’s secure and reliable cloud infrastructure platform.

Two new regions for Azure Virtual Machines.

This new region joins 10 worldwide that are supported by Azure Websites.

New support for Managed Cache, Azure Automation, Traffic Manager and the Anti-Malware Cloud Service extension.

Instead of transferring your data over the Internet, send your hard drives directly to an Azure datacenter.

Directly and securely connect multiple Azure virtual networks.

Virtual machine images for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 are now available in the Azure virtual machine gallery.

A highly secured, dedicated cache that’s managed by Microsoft.

Reserve public IP addresses and use them as virtual IP (VIP) addresses for your applications.

Connect to any on-premises TCP or HTTP resource from Azure Web Sites.

If you’re running Linux in Azure Virtual Machines and have purchased Azure support, you can take advantage of priority support plans.

Microsoft Antimalware offers customers the ability to install an antimalware agent for both PaaS roles and virtual machines

Azure Websites deployment slots have been expanded to 4+1.

Azure EA customers in North America and Europe can purchase a range of application and data services from 3rd party providers through the Azure Store and have these subscriptions automatically billed against their EA.

Assign public IP addresses to your virtual machines, so they become directly addressable.

Scheduler GA pricing is now in effect.

Manage traffic for endpoints that live inside or outside of Azure.

Load-balance Azure (VMs) with private IP addresses within a virtual network.

Securely connect multiple on-premises locations with a virtual network (VNet) in Azure.

Azure RemoteApp delivers Windows Server session-based applications from Azure. The service is now in public preview and provided at no additional cost during the preview period

Mount a shared file system and access it from various virtual machines in an Azure datacenter.

Publish APIs more reliably, more securely, and at scale.

Faster processors, faster interconnectivity, more virtual cores for higher computing power, and larger amounts of memory.

ExpressRoute offers a 99.9% SLA on ExpressRoute connection uptime and two new bandwidth tiers for the Exchange Provider scenario: 200 Mbps and 500 Mbps.

A distributed, in-memory, managed cache based on the open-source Redis Cache.

The April 2014 Guest OS release (versions 4.7, 3.14, 2.26, and 1.34), which incorporates all the latest MSRC updates, started release on May 2 and completed today May 6.

Azure SQL Database introduces two new service tiers, Basic and Standard, to join Premium, which is already in preview. The Web and Business service editions will be retired in 12 months.

Memcached Cloud is a reliable, fully-managed, fail-safe service that runs Memcached. Your dataset is constantly replicated, so if a node fails, an auto-switchover mechanism guarantees data is served without interruption.

The Azure Brazil South Region, located in Sao Paulo state, is now broadly available for public preview.

Azure Web sites is now available in Southeast Asia for all customers.

Redis Cloud is a fully-managed cloud service for hosting and running your Redis dataset in a highly-available and scalable manner, with predictable and stable top performance.

The new GA release of Autoscale includes performance- and schedule-based scaling, and you can customize it to scale based on metrics you define.

Get Read access to your secondary storage replica, in case your primary location fails.

This Preview release includes support for Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Scheduler is generally available in all Azure regions, backed by an enterprise SLA, and is ready to use for production scenarios.

This Azure Cross Platform Command-Line Interface release includes support for Azure Resource Manager and Azure Active Directory authentication.

Share features like auto-scale, web tests, backup, and computing capacity across your web sites.

Azure Web Sites now supports an additional Basic SKU tier.

Use resource groups to manage all of your application resources.

The Azure Portal preview adds new features to help you monitor and operate your Azure Web Sites.

Automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage infrastructure.

View billing info using new charts and visualizations.

Create team projects, view your Git and TFVC repositories, edit source code, make commits, view your builds, and continuously deploy to Azure Web Sites.

The Azure Preview portal radically simplifies the cloud—whether you write code, operate infrastructure, or manage finances.

Add and manage over 1000 apps using Azure Active Directory.

Automate how you create, monitor, deploy, and maintain Azure resources.

We’ve improved the Standard pricing tier with storage, SSL, and Web Sockets updates.

Host Java web apps on Azure Web Sites and send all incoming site HTTP traffic to the Java HTTP listen port.

Newly created HDInsight clusters will run on Windows Server 2012 R2, have .NET 4.5 available, and allow inbound connections to any executable on worker nodes.

Azure Web Sites supports wildcard domains that can be combined with SNI SSL to secure all your subdomains (without creating individual bindings).

Get notified if a sign-in attempt doesn’t fit with your normal user sign-in patterns.

This Azure PowerShell release includes support for Azure Resource Manager and Scheduler, and infrastructure cmdlet improvements.

VM Images replaces OS Images, and includes data disks (in addition to the OS disk).

Self-service password reset, group management, customized branding, and more is now available to premium subscribers.

New management libraries include an SDK that automates how you provision and manage Azure assets.

Self-service group management is now available to Azure Active Directory Premium subscribers.

We’ve partnered with 21Vianet to bring Azure to China.

New deployment and performance improvements are part of the Hadoop 2.2 in Azure HDInsight GA release.

Effective today, customers will see lower prices for Block Blobs Storage and Disks/Page Blobs Storage.

Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Java, and Oracle Linux are available in the Azure Image gallery. These images include a license and are fully supported by Oracle.

Manage and load balance Azure Web Sites with Azure Traffic Manager. Available for all Standard websites.

Microsoft has opened two new Azure datacenters in Japan. Japan East and Japan West offer new options for data residency and durability, plus disaster recovery.

Mobile Services integration with Notification Hubs simplifies push channel management.

WebJobs allows the website owner to setup recurring and scheduled tasks and jobs.

This post describes Azure Service Health Notifications (also known as Incident Notifications) within the Azure Management Portal.

Write backend Mobile Service logic using .NET and the ASP.NET Web API framework, run Mobile Service code locally, and debug remotely.

Disable standard server headers (like “X-Powered-By” and “X-AspNet-Version”) on Azure Web Sites.

Save a snapshot version of your web app and restore it later.

Windows IaaS virtual machines show VM configuration (internal and public IP, disk space, memory, deployment ID, etc.) on the desktop.

ExpressRoute enables dedicated, private, high-throughput network connectivity between Azure datacenters and on-premises IT environments.

VM Agent is a lightweight process that runs inside your virtual machines. Use it to install and manage extensions.

Co-Admin limit per subscription increased from 10 to 200.

Develop cross-platform mobile apps with PhoneGap and Azure Mobile Services.

Recycle a worker process based on specific conditions or triggers.

WordPress 3.8 is now available in the Azure Web Sites App Gallery.

A8 and A9 feature 8 virtual cores with 56 gigabytes (GB) or 16 virtual cores with 112 GB of memory. They include faster processors and more virtual cores for higher compute power, larger amounts of memory, and a 40 GB/S InfiniBand network.

Together with our partners at Sencha, we recently added support for SenchaTouch to Mobile Services.

Azure ISO Certification expanded to include SQL Database, Active Directory, Traffic Manager, Web Sites, BizTalk Services, Media Services, Mobile Services, Service Bus, Multi-Factor Authentication, and HDInsight.

Set up alerts for Azure Web Sites and SQL Databases.

Configure multiple environments and switch between them at will.

Site metrics are shown at a high level of granularity, down to the minute level.

Azure has been validated for compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) by an independent Qualified Security Assessor (QSA).

Always On keeps your website up and available, even when it’s idle.

Protect important services by replicating and recovering System Center 2012 private clouds

Use Azure Traffic Manager’s load-balancing capability to create applications that set the bar for responsiveness and availability.