A little over a year ago, Microsoft Build 2020 was Microsoft’s first flagship event to become all-digital early in the COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted to ensure we were there to support developers, who had become more critical than ever to business and societal continuity during the pandemic. During these most challenging times, developers have enabled businesses large and small to continue growing, transforming, and even reimagining the way they fulfill their purpose of supporting their customers and employees.

Microsoft Azure’s mission is to help people and organizations invent with purpose. We are proud to support developers—in many ways, the digital-first responders and pioneers of our generation—and the broader organizations they drive with their innovation. At digital Microsoft Build 2021 this week, we announced a host of new capabilities that help developers create intelligent, connected, and secure cloud-native apps that harness the power of data and AI and run anywhere. Below are the key stories we landed this week at Microsoft Build, with ways to explore for more details.

Increase developer velocity with Microsoft’s end-to-end developer platform

As a company built by developers and for developers, our goal at Microsoft is to provide them with the agility to address the real-world needs of their customers. With the Microsoft Cloud, we have an incredibly comprehensive platform that developers can use to build apps and solutions to reach any person on the planet. Learn about the latest steps we are taking to help accelerate developer velocity and enable developers to build productively, collaborate securely, and innovate at scale—no matter where they are.

Harness the power of data and AI in your applications with Azure

When it comes to empowering all developers with limitless scale, choice, and possibilities, Azure has their back. Our commitment to developers is to make Azure the best cloud for developing intelligent applications that harness the power of data and AI. Learn about our latest set of exciting new capabilities and offers that make it easy and cost-effective for developers to get started with Azure data and AI services.

Build cloud-native applications that run anywhere

Customers on Azure are successfully building the applications of the future today, by leveraging cloud-native technologies like containers, microservices, serverless functions, and API-centric designs. We are helping them extend that success to on-premises environments, edge locations, and even other public clouds. Learn about how developers can move from ideas to applications rapidly with turnkey application services, now available on Kubernetes and anywhere with Azure Arc.

Azure is the home for your enterprise Java applications

Developers can achieve greater productivity, scale, and flexibility by modernizing and extending their Java applications on Azure. Azure’s open platform provides broad developer tooling integration, fully managed compute, database, and platform services, as well as an extensive set of partner offerings supporting the amazing things customers do with Java. Microsoft is invested heavily in Java through our own use of Java, plus our support of the community and projects improving the Java developer experience. Read the latest on what’s possible with Java on Azure.

Gain flexibility to run open source applications your way with Microsoft Azure

Developers are empowered to innovate and build their applications when they use Azure as their open playground—complete with the best tools and building blocks. We purposely designed Azure to give developers control over their infrastructure and provide the greatest flexibility regardless of their chosen operating system, database, language, development tool, or methodology. Learn about our latest efforts to enable developers to develop flexibly and innovate quickly with open source on Microsoft Azure.

New Azure capabilities to simplify deployment and management

Organizations around the world build, deploy, and manage business-critical applications at scale with Azure. In order to help organizations and their developers focus on building great solutions, we continuously improve the app deployment and management experience. This includes helping developers get infrastructure up and running more easily during app development with innovations like Bicep, native integration of Elastic with Azure, and more. Learn about these and additional Azure infrastructure improvements.

Power your business applications data with analytical and predictive insights

Customer feedback makes it clear that when data barriers are dissolved, the impact of analytics grows exponentially. Today, the barrier between business applications data and analytical systems impedes the expanded discovery of insights. With Azure Synapse Link for Microsoft Dataverse, customers can now automatically ensure that data flowing into their business apps is also flowing into their analytics solution. This enables customers to perform advanced analytics tasks in tandem with managing the data in their business apps—rather than having these be separate workstreams.

Converging the physical and digital with digital twins, mixed reality, and metaverse apps

Cloud and edge computing are coming together as never before, leading to huge opportunities for developers and organizations around the world. Digital twins, mixed reality, and autonomous systems are at the core of a massive wave of innovation from which our customers are already benefitting. Read our latest update covering the possibilities this technological convergence creates, how customers are already benefitting from it, as well as Microsoft’s journey to make this technology easier to use and within reach of every developer and organization. 

Learn more and get started

To learn more about how you can build amazing things on your terms, anywhere, with Microsoft and Azure, watch these key Microsoft Build 2021 sessions detailing the key technologies and announcements discussed above:

• Increase developer velocity with Microsoft’s end-to-end developer platform
• Harness the power of data in your applications with Azure
• Build intelligent applications infused with world-class AI
• Build cloud-native applications that run anywhere

You can also discover more about Azure and get started with 12 months of free services by creating your Azure free account today.

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Azure. Invent with purpose.