Service Updates

You can now deploy G-Series Virtual Machines in either US West or US East 2

The G-Series provides more memory and more local solid state drive (SSD) storage than other Azure virtual machine sizes.

Azure Key Vault offers an easy, cost-effective way to safeguard keys and other sensitive data that is used by cloud applications and services.

Azure Machine Learning now supports logging of Web Services

Azure Backup enables customers to back up files and folders from computers running Windows 8.1, Windows 8, and Windows 7 to Azure.

Premium Storage delivers high-performance, low-latency disk support for I/O intensive workloads that are running on Azure Virtual Machines.

By using the Azure DocumentDB Java SDK, you can create, read, update, and delete DocumentDB resources and manage configuration settings.

Administration delegation in Azure Active Directory through administrative units is available in public preview.

The high-performance VPN gateway provides higher bandwidth and more connections than the current virtual network VPN gateway.

Azure ExpressRoute is available in the Brazil South region.

We’ve changed the amount of egress data included in the 10 Gbps ExpressRoute Exchange Provider and reduced the price of 10 Gbps connections.

Azure RemoteApp delivers Windows applications from Azure, and it helps IT pros bring scale, agility, and global access to their business applications.

With Premium Storage, you can add up to 32 TB of persistent storage per virtual machine, with more than 50,000 IOPS per virtual machine at less than one millisecond latency for read operations.

Live Channels for Azure Media Services is available and fully supported by the Azure SLA.

Disaster recovery is available for branch offices and SMB through Azure Site Recovery.

This preview marks the first step in delivering the next generation of the SQL Database service that will bring customers more compatibility, flexibility, and performance.

Azure Site Recovery has the ability to replicate and recover virtual machines directly within Azure without requiring System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

This module allows on-premises web applications to be published via Azure Active Directory and made available to external users in the same way as SaaS applications.

The Application Insights Status Monitor and SDK are updated.

Performance improvements enable continuous export of your telemetry data from the Application Insights portal in JSON format. Additionally, you can enable, disable, and customize segmentation charts in Metrics Explorer.

Microsoft Avro Library includes a code generation tool that enables the conversion of JSON schemas into C# types.

This release of Azure Machine Learning contains new features and important module changes.

HDInsight has expanded its geographical presence to three new regions: Japan East, Australia East, and Australia Southeast.

HDInsight clusters can now be customized to run a variety of Hadoop projects, including Spark and R Modules, by using Script Action.

Non RFC 1918 space is now allowed in a virtual network.

Bandwidth templates allow you to configure multiple time-of-day schedules to tier the data from the StorSimple device to the cloud. You can create, modify, delete, and save these schedules as templates.

Azure StorSimple is now available in Australia with the same service-level agreement coverage that is available in other regions worldwide. StorSimple offers a unique hybrid cloud storage solution.

Azure Backup is now available in Australia with the same service-level agreement coverage that is available in other regions worldwide.

Now it is easier than ever for anyone to try Azure Machine Learning because the service is available to test free-of-charge without a credit card or Azure subscription.

Azure Machine Learning now offers support for optional and required web-service parameters for properties such as table names, account names, and paths to blob storage.

HDInsight Tools for Visual Studio: Write Hive queries and view Hive jobs right from Visual Studio.

New networking features announced at TechEd Europe 2014 are available in regions except China North and China East.

On November 1, 2015, Azure Media Packager and Azure Media Encryptor reach their end-of-life.

Now there is a consistent contract for customers who purchase subscriptions to Microsoft Online Services, such as Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics Online, or Windows Intune.

Azure Site Recovery is now available in Australia.

This free preview of Azure Site Recovery offers storage array-based replication and disaster recovery.

Operational Insights is an Azure-based service that is tailored for IT operations teams. It leverages the power of Azure HDInsight to glean machine data across environments, and turns the data into real-time operational intelligence to enable better-informed business decisions.

A new support experience was added to the Azure Preview portal, which gives organizations the ability to obtain first-class support in a simplified, seamless experience for submitting, viewing, and managing Azure support incidents.

Auditing for Azure SQL Database tracks and logs all events that occur on your database, such as updates and queries against data. Auditing can now be managed from the Azure Management Portal or via Windows PowerShell commands.

The query authoring experience for Azure Stream Analytics jobs has been extended to enable query validation and debugging over sample data.

The latest release of Azure Machine Learning provides a new sample experiment gallery feature, a streamlined experiment page, and a new visualization for data tables.

New networking features such as Network Security Groups, Forced Tunneling, and Advanced Gateway Policies for Virtual Networks are now available in the Azure North Europe region.

Use Azure Automation to create, monitor, deploy, and maintain resources in your Azure environment using a highly scalable and reliable workflow execution engine.

Powered by Azure, Stream Analytics is an event-processing engine that helps uncover insights from devices, sensors, cloud infrastructure, and existing data properties in real time.

Azure Batch is a new platform service that enables you to run large-scale parallel and HPC applications in the cloud.

As the onramp for stream processing in the cloud, Event Hubs enables publish-subscribe data distribution in a flexible platform-as-as-service (PaaS) model that can scale with your needs and provide a durable buffer between event publishers and event consumers.

Traffic Manager Nested Profiles enable you to create more flexible and powerful load balancing and failover schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments.

You now have the ability to run your Big Data Hadoop workloads as a preconfigured Azure VM, using your choice of Cloudera Enterprise or Hortonworks HDP operating on Linux.

The Azure Marketplace (formerly Azure Store/Azure Gallery) is a unified applications and services ecosystem for Azure customers and partners.

Azure Data Factory gives you an agile way to manage the production of trusted information from complex processes, making it easier to create, orchestrate, and manage data-processing pipelines over a range of transformation services and diverse data sources.

Now available to try in the Azure Preview portal, new functionality allows you to manage existing SQL Database business-continuity features with greater ease and a highly visual graphic interface.

Microsoft Antimalware for Cloud Services and Virtual Machines (VMs) is now generally available to help identify and remove viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

In this release of the new Azure Preview portal, we’re introducing breakthrough business continuity and disaster recovery administration along with support for self-service Point in Time Restore and restoring deleted databases.

Yesterday, we announced the general availability of the Microsoft Azure Australia Geo, including the Australia East Region in New South Wales and the Australia Southeast Region in Victoria.

Service providers can easily extend, automate, and offer Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service using this update of Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Event Hubs are a real-time highly scalable and fully managed data stream ingestion service.

We’ve updated Azure Machine Learning modules, tools, and services with our October 23, 2014, release.

The Azure Websites Migration Assistant will analyze your IIS installation and identify which sites can be migrated to the cloud, and creates the relevant websites and databases for those that can.

WebJobs is now generally available, providing an easy way for you to run programs such as services or background tasks on an Azure-hosted Website.

We have added to the Azure Marketplace a wealth of examples of APIs that are built with Azure Machine Learning. These APIs are free to use, and illustrate how the reach and power of the cloud allow advanced analytics to be consumed by more users in more ways.

With the public preview of Apache Storm clusters, HDInsight can now also process real-time events. In addition, we’ve teamed up with Hortonworks to deliver hybrid data connectors between on-premises and cloud deployments.

Virtual Network (VNet) support for HDInsight is now generally available. In addition to HBase clusters, now you can provision Hadoop clusters in a VNet. HDInsight supports deploying only into a location-based VNet.

Azure Mobile Services has recently released several updates to the .NET backend including the following: custom scopes for authentication providers, single sign-on for Windows Store applications, CORS for SignalR, and support for Web API 5.2.

With Instance-Level Public IPs, you can enable scenarios such as running FTP servers in Azure and monitoring virtual machines directly using their IPs.

Use tags to categorize and manage related Azure resources across resource groups and subscriptions.

Now you can replicate the Hyper-V virtual machines running in your datacenter to Azure for disaster recovery protection—and recover them there, as needed.

With Azure Site Recovery, you can protect and recover your production workloads while saving on capital and operational expenditures.

In July 2014, we announced changes to Service Bus Queues and Topics, with messaging now offered in Basic and Standard tiers. These new tiers provide price flexibility that better accommodate different use cases. Updated pricing for these changes will be effective starting November 1, 2014, and not October 1, 2014, as previously communicated.

With the general availability of the Basic, Standard, and Premium service tiers, the SQL Database now has a quota of 1,600 DTUs for Basic, Standard, and Premium databases.

The new Azure SQL Database Elastic Scale APIs simplify the process of scaling out (and in) a cloud application’s data tier by streamlining development and management.

We are lowering public list prices for many higher-level Azure services by 27 percent or more. For specifics, see the table. We’re also adjusting rates for our commitment plans—and introducing a new six-month offer.

Azure Redis Cache now supports caches larger than 26 GB and provides 99.9% availability SLA.

Today, we’re announcing support for a new series of virtual machine sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and Web/Worker Roles called the D-Series.

To help enterprises set up robust CMS-backed sites, we are introducing a scalable WordPress offering available in the application gallery.

The Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a service that allows you to send audio, images, and other static files faster and more reliably to customers across the globe.

Azure Websites VNET integration feature allows customers to securely connect to on premise resources or other VM’s hosted in Azure using a VPN connection.

Get started more quickly with Azure Site Recovery and take advantage of integrated Azure Automation.

Azure API Management is generally available with plenty of new features for management and authentication.

This release includes support for role-based access control and some storage improvements

Manage access to Azure subscriptions, resource groups, or resources such as websites or databases in the Azure Preview Portal by assigning Owner, Contributor, or Reader roles to Active Directory users or groups.

Three new Azure SQL Database service tiers—Basic, Standard, and Premium—are generally available. The tiers target seven performance levels, so they’re flexible enough for light to heavyweight workloads.

The same live streaming solution that delivered the 2014 Winter Olympics and 2014 FIFA World Cup to broadcasters around the world is now available in preview.

The new release adds support for Role-based access control, SQL Database auditing support in Azure Resource Manager mode and more

Azure Automation can now use an Azure Active Directory OrgId credential to automate management of Azure resources.

Use Process Explorer to view and manage your website processes.

Azure DocumentDB is the highly scalable NoSQL document database-as-a-service that offers rich query and transactional processing over schema-free data.

StorSimple is now available in Japan with the same service-level agreement coverage available in other regions worldwide.

Azure Backup is now available in Japan with the same service-level agreement coverage available in other regions worldwide.

Incorporate search capabilities into applications without having to worry about the complexities of full-text search

In this update, we have added server management experiences for SQL Database in the new Azure Preview portal. You can now easily reset the server administrator password, and configure firewall rules and default auditing settings for databases in the server.

Write your services using the power of ASP.NET Web API and your favorite .NET language.

WebJobs can now be created and managed in the Azure Preview portal.

Azure Site Recovery is now available in Japan with the same service-level agreement coverage available in other regions worldwide.

Azure is now commercially available in 51 additional countries.

Host Azure HDInsight in Japan West and US Central with the same service-level agreement coverage available in other regions worldwide.

Azure Resource Manager Tools Preview for Visual Studio 2013 enables developers to create and deploy reusable deployment templates (JSON files) that declaratively describe the resources that make up an app.

MyGet provides hosted NuGet Servers. Developers can use their own packages to create and host NuGet feeds, or use another package source (such as NuGet.org).

Azure development tooling features include support for WebJobs publishing, Dev/Test environments for Mobile Services, Remote debugging for Virtual Machines, Emulator Express, and more.

This Azure PowerShell release includes Compute, SQL Database, and Windows Azure Pack updates.

RavenHQ Database is the official hosted solution for RavenDB, and includes a fully managed cloud of RavenDB servers running in Azure and a variety of scalable plans.

MemCachier is now offering their popular memcache-as-a-service in the Azure Store. MemCachier manages and scales clusters of memcache servers so that you can focus on your app.

New preview service pricing tiers get feature updates: geo-restore, standard geo-replication, and auditing.

HDInsight has now expanded its geographical presence to three new regions: East Asia, North Central US, and South Central US.

Users can now create Azure Scheduler jobs in the Brazil South region.

Changes to Basic and Standard tiers mean most customers will see a decrease in pricing (effective September 1, 2014).

Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) is a new redundancy option with multiple copies replicated at least 25 miles apart.

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.