Microsoft Azure Gets New Features And Improved Services

The cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure recently got many new and substantial updates. These updates include services like RemoteApp, better and faster search results, facility to recover from calamity etc. The prime good news is for those who are working on the Virtual Machine (VM) on Azure, especially where the input-output (I/O) workload is pretty high. Even better are the results if the database workloads are hosted inside the VM. Additionally, Microsoft has made it easy to upgrade their current database simply by selecting the upgrade option in the management portal of Azure.

Azure now offers durable storage in two forms: Premium and Standard. Premium storage is durable and is especially cut out for high loads. It uses Solid State Drives (SSD) and provides up to 32 TB of storage per VM. Plus, the I/O operations per second (IOPS) for each VM is around 50K. Durability is one other factor where Azure has improved its performance. Since, it is important that a persistent storage is maintained, Azure will now keep 3 copies of your data. Furthermore, there is an option to create snapshot of your data and store it in the geo-redundant snapshot storage account. Azure assures that this account will be atleast 400 miles away from the primary storage region.


With a price of just 10 dollars per user per month, Azure has made the availability of the RemoteApp service very reasonable. Using this service, users can deploy Windows desktop apps to the cloud easily. Moreover, once empowered, the user can connect to the cloud from any device irrespective of its OS or configuration and can use the applications from that device.

Besides, all the above facilities, Azure also announced some trifling tweaks such as better search results by making changes to Azure search portals and the facility to search in over 27 languages. Azure has also made the live streaming possible on any Android or iOS device by simply using Flash, HTML5 and Live Media Streaming service. Uploading of JSON documents in bulk is now permitted to Azure DocumentDB NOSQL database.With these updates and the recent Microsoft And Accenture Collaborate To Develop A Hybrid Cloud Platform, Azure has made the building and accessing of cloud applications very easy.

Source: ScottGu's Blog - Azure: Premium Storage, RemoteApp, SQL Database Update, Live Media Streaming, Search and More