Preview features
To obtain your feedback, Azure offers the following preview features to you for evaluation purposes. A preview may include preview, beta, or other pre-release features, services, software, or regions. Previews are subject to reduced or different service terms, as set forth in your service agreement and the preview supplemental terms. Previews are made available to you on the condition that you agree to these terms of use, which supplement your agreement governing the use of Azure.
Azure Data Box
The Azure Data Box is a secure, ruggedized, tamper resistant appliance created by Microsoft to help customers transfer large amounts of data into Azure Storage. Customers can order the Data Box through the Azure portal and have it delivered at their site to rapidly copy data to the device using a standard NAS protocol (SMB/CIFS). The information on the Data Box is secured using 256-bit AES encryption to ensure privacy. When returned to Microsoft, the data is uploaded directly into Azure Blob or File storage and then the device is securely erased. Partner solutions also integrate with the Azure Data Box to help their customers with large Azure Data transfer projects. Availability for the preview will be limited to US regions but we encourage all interested customers to register.Azure Policy
With Azure Policy, turn on built-in policies or build your own custom policies to enable security and management at scale for Azure resources. Construct policies in the Azure portal with full IntelliSense and apply policy to a resource group, subscription, or even a management group that spans your entire organization. Choose either to enforce policies or audit policy compliance against best practices.
Cloud Shell
Cloud Shell is your Microsoft-managed admin machine in the cloud with authenticated shell access to Azure from virtually anywhere. It includes popular command-line tools, support for common programming languages, and attached Azure File storage to persist your data across sessions.
DDoS Protection
Azure DDoS Protection is a new service, which helps protect your applications from being impacted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks at OSI Layers 3-7. This service monitors the public IP addresses of your resources within Azure, learns an application’s normal traffic patterns, and instantly mitigates an attack when it is detected. When you subscribe to this service, you also receive advanced telemetry and alerts related to the attacks that were carried out against your application. During preview, you will not incur any cost for using the service.
Azure Migrate
Run a migration assessment for getting your on-premises resources to the Azure cloud, using the Azure Migrate service. The service helps you assess migration suitability, right-sizing, and costing.
Machine Learning Experimentation service
Increase your rate of experimentation. Rapidly prototype on your desktop, then easily scale up on virtual machines through Docker containers or scale out using Apache Spark clusters. Proactively manage model performance, identify the best model, and promote the best model with data. Collaborate and share solutions using powerful, industry standard GIT repositories.
Machine Learning Model management
Deploy and manage your models everywhere. Use Docker containers to quickly deploy models into production in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. Promote your best performing models into production and re-train them when their performance degrades. Deploy as real-time or high-throughput batch services.
Machine Learning Workbench
Tie it all together with a downloadable desktop application and command-line tool, featuring built-in data preparation that learns your data preparation steps as you perform them. Increase your productivity with project management, run history, and notebook integration. Use popular open source frameworks, such as TensorFlow, Cognitive Toolkit, Spark ML, and scikit-learn.
Machine Learning Visual Studio Code extension
Build deep learning models easier with built-in Azure Machine Learning services. Use our Visual Studio Code extension for a seamless developer experience across desktop, cloud, and edge. Develop deep learning models and call services straight from your preferred integrated development environment.
Machine Learning MMLSpark
Quickly create powerful, highly-scalable predictive and analytical models for large image and text datasets using deep learning and data science tools for Apache Spark.
Azure Availability Zones
Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. Availability Zones allow you to run mission-critical applications with high availability and fault tolerance to failures of entire datacenters. With Availability Zones, Azure provides the most comprehensive set of high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to meet your most demanding business continuity needs.
Event Grid
Event Grid is a fully managed event routing service that lets you connect serverless logic to events from multiple sources. Eliminate polling, and build reactive apps with reliable event delivery—at massive scale.
Azure Bot Service
Azure Bot Service enables rapid intelligent bot development, bringing together the power of the Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Functions. Build, connect, deploy, and manage intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking. Allow your bots to scale based on-demand and pay only for the resources you consume.Web Apps on Linux
Azure App Service provides default containers for versions of node.js and php that make it easy to quickly get up and running on the service. With our new container support, developers can create a customized container based on the defaults. For example, developers could create a container with specific builds of node.js and php that differ from the default versions provided by the service. This enables developers to use new or experimental framework versions that are not available in the default containers.Apache Kafka for HDInsight
Kafka for HDInsight is an enterprise-grade, open-source, streaming ingestion service that is cost-effective and easy to provision, manage, and use. This service enables you to build real-time solutions like IoT, fraud detection, click-stream analysis, financial alerts, and social analytics.
Analysis Services
Built on the proven analytical engine in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services delivers enterprise-grade BI semantic modeling capabilities with the scale, flexibility, and management benefits of the cloud. Azure Analysis Services helps you transform complex data into actionable insights. And by leveraging the skills, tools, and data your team has today, you can get more from the investments you’ve already made.
Billing Alert Service
Use Azure Billing Alert Service to quickly and easily create customized billing alerts that help you monitor and manage billing activity for your Azure accounts.
Cognitive Services
A portfolio of APIs and SDKs that enable developers to easily add intelligent services such as vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search capabilities to their solutions.Container Instances
Easily run containers with a single command. With Azure Container Instances, get started in seconds and lower your infrastructure costs by taking advantage of per-second billing. There are no container orchestration tools for you to learn—just your application, in a container, running in the cloud.
Custom Decision Service
Create intelligent systems with a cloud-based, contextual decision-making API that sharpens with experience.
Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights
Customer Insights helps you engage customers better by empowering your employees with actionable insights from a finished solution. Break organizational silos and bring together disparate customer data sets to create a dynamic 360-degree view of your customers’ interactions, engagement, and purchase history.
Media Analytics
Azure Media Analytics provides a collection of speech and vision components that make it easier for organizations and enterprises to derive actionable insights from their video files through advanced machine learning technology. Azure Media Analytics services are hosted on the Azure Media Services platform, Azure’s cloud media solution for encoding, encrypting, and streaming audio or video at scale, live, or on demand (VOD). Media Analytics services are offered at enterprise scale, delivering the compliance, security, and global reach large organizations need.
Performance Test Azure Web and Mobile Apps
You can now do performance/load testing and verify the app performance under load. Generate thousands of virtual users from various locations across the globe simulating real world traffic on your application. Use it for free with public preview of this functionality.R Server for HDInsight
R Server for HDInsight is a scale-out implementation of R integrated with Hadoop and Spark clusters created from HDInsight. It’s a 100 percent open-source R implementation that runs in the cloud.
Storage Service Encryption
Storage Service Encryption for Azure Blob storage helps you address organizational security and compliance requirements by automatically encrypting your Blob storage—including block blobs, page blobs, and append blobs. Azure Storage handles all the encryption, decryption, and key management in a totally transparent fashion. All data is encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption, one of the strongest block ciphers available. You can enable this feature on newly created ARM storage accounts, and there is no additional charge for enabling this feature.Azure Active Directory conditional access policies
Azure Active Directory now provides conditional access policies that let you create access rules for Azure Active Directory-connected apps based on user location and group membership. More sensitive apps can be assigned stricter policies, such as requiring Azure Multi-Factor Authentication outside of the corporate network, while less sensitive apps can have more open policies.
Azure Active Directory dynamic group membership
With this preview, administrators set rules on any group in Azure Active Directory based on user attributes like “department” or “country” to dynamically define group membership. These groups can be used to provide access to applications or cloud resources or assign licenses to users.
Azure Active Directory password rollover
Azure Active Directory lets you assign shared application accounts to groups. This is particularly useful for managing access to company-owned social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. The real password for these accounts is known only to the administrator, while other members of the group use their work credentials to access them. This enhances security by letting you configure passwords to automatically roll over, which makes shared accounts more secure by automatically creating new, strong, complex passwords at an interval that you define, minimizing the risk that company-owned social media accounts will be exploited.
Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management
Privileged Identity Management, a new feature of Azure Active Directory Premium, lets you discover, restrict, and monitor privileged identities and their access to resources, and also enforce on-demand, just-in-time administrative access when needed. Access this new capability, currently available in public preview, through the Microsoft Azure portal.
Azure Active Directory self-service access requests
This preview lets users of Azure Active Directory choose from a list of applications made available by their organization and request access to them through a self-service process. This process can either provide access to the chosen application immediately or via an approval workflow.
Azure Database for MySQL
Azure Database for MySQL provides a managed database service for app development and deployment that allows you to stand up a MySQL database in minutes and scale on the fly—on the cloud you trust most.
With inclusive pricing models, you get all the capabilities you want like high-availability, security, and recovery built-in, at no extra cost.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Azure Database for PostgreSQL provides a managed database service for app development and deployment that allows you to stand up a PostgreSQL database in minutes and scale on the fly – on the cloud you trust most.
With inclusive pricing models, you get all the capabilities you want – like high-availability, security, and recovery – built-in, at no extra cost.
Bing Custom Search
Bing Custom Search is an easy-to-use, ad-free, commercial-grade search tool that lets you deliver the results you want.Video Indexer
Quickly extract insights from videos using the artificial intelligence of Video Indexer. Detect words, identify faces and emotions, and build workflows.Emotion API
The Emotion API recognizes facial expressions of people in images or video and returns a summary of their emotions. The emotions detected are anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise.Video API
Intelligent video processing produces stable video output, detects motion, creates intelligent thumbnails, and detects and tracks faces.Custom Speech Service
Overcome speech recognition barriers such as speaking style, vocabulary, and background noise.Speaker Recognition API
Identify individual speakers, or use speech as a means of authentication with the Speaker Recognition API.Language Understanding Intelligent Service
Build your own language models that allow any application or bot to understand your commands and act accordingly. Language Understanding Intelligent Service helps your app communicate the way people really speak.Linguistic Analysis API
Simplify complex language concepts and parse text with the Linguistic Analysis API. Use advanced linguistic analysis tools for natural language processing, and to access part-of-speech tagging and parsing.Text Analytics API
Detect sentiment, key phrases, topics, and language in your text. Learn the sentiment of text, either positive or negative. Identify key phrases and topics, and determine what language is used in text.Web Language Model API
Use state-of-the-art language modeling APIs to automate a variety of standard natural language processing tasks including word breaking, joint probabilities, conditional probabilities, and next word completions.Entity Linking Intelligence Service API
Given a specific paragraph of text within a document, the Entity Linking Intelligence Service will recognize and identify each separate entity based on the context.Knowledge Exploration Service
Enable interactive search experiences over structured data using natural language inputs.QnA Maker API
Distill information into conversational, easy-to-navigate questions and answers.Recommendations API
Predict what your customers want, and increase catalog discoverability. Built using Azure Machine Learning, the Recommendations API uses customer data to offer recommended items for your customers and increase conversion rates.Custom Vision Service
Easily customize your own state-of-the-art computer vision models for your unique use case. Just upload a few labeled images, and let Custom Vision Service do the hard work.Bing Entity Search API
Bing Entity Search API can help you enrich your app with the knowledge of the web. It lets you access the ever-growing Bing Knowledge Graph to get primary details about billions of real world entities like people, places, movies, books, things, and local businesses.