Tuesday, Microsoft Corp said it advanced the intelligent cloud with new solutions that span app development, big data, IoT and cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft said its growing list of customers of all sizes including Alaska Airlines, Jet.com Inc. and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Nepal can enjoy its innovation on the Azure cloud platform.
“We live in a connected world, and the intelligent cloud is powering it all,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise Division.
“As data and devices continue to proliferate, there is vast opportunity for businesses to tap into their data to make their applications more intelligent. Through our offerings across applications, data and IoT, and cloud infrastructure, we are enabling companies to innovate more easily and rapidly, using the tools and platforms they know and love.”
In view of the growing importance of the container technology, Microsoft announced a new Azure Container Service. The new service will combine the openness of Apache Mesos and Docker with the hyper-scale of Azure for container orchestration and management.
With the service, Microsoft said organizations using Azure will now be able to easily deploy and configure Mesos to cluster and schedule Dockerized applications across multiple virtual hosts.
Unlike many other container services in market today, Microsoft said that this offering is based on open source to enable customer choice across the ecosystem and will support Windows Server containers in the future. The service will be available for preview by the end of the year.
“With large-scale production users like Airbnb, Twitter and Apple, Apache Mesos is the most scalable and flexible container orchestration platform available on the market today,” said Florian Leibert, co-founder and CEO, Mesosphere.
Furthermore, Microsoft announced that its Azure IoT Suite is now available for customers to purchase. In addition, Microsoft announced the new Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT program, an ecosystem of partners whose offerings have been tested and certified so businesses can take their next IoT project from testing to production, more quickly.
To further enable customers to better manage their data Microsoft on Monday announced the expansion of Azure Data Lake. This includes Azure Data Lake Analytics, Azure Data Lake Store, a new programming language U-SQL, and Azure HDInsight general availability on Linux. Helping customers be productive from day one, Azure Data Lake makes big data processing and analytics simpler and more accessible for everyone.
Microsoft also announced the Azure Compute Pre-Purchase Plan, a new pricing program designed for customers with steady state, predictable workloads on Azure. As per the plan, customers who pre-purchase Azure compute for one year can realize cost savings of up to 63 percent. This plan will be available globally starting Dec. 1.
