Articles about Microsoft Azure

Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing Azure Service Fabric, which allows developers to run and manage microservices, to Linux.

Azure's CTO Mark Russinovich is very enthusiastic about microservices, which the company has been using internally for seven years. Russinovich believes that the vast majority of apps even including enterprise apps will soon be built using this technology.

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Microsoft has announced that local datacenters are now available in the UK to Office 365 and Azure customers. This enables companies dealing with UK-only customers to ensure that data remains within the country and fully complies with data protection and privacy laws.

Describing itself as the "first global cloud productivity provider" to offer UK residency for data, Microsoft says Azure and Office 365 are now generally available from multiple data center locations in the UK. It has already attracted the custom of the Ministry of Defence.

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Microsoft has announced that its Azure Stack offering won’t be released before mid-2017. What’s more, it will come in appliance form, with just a few vendors -- so far only Dell, HPE and Lenovo -- being mentioned.

Announcing the news in a blog post, corporate vice president for Enterprise Cloud, Mike Neil, says the decision has been made following months of feedback gathering.

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While many companies have been hesitant to adopt the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the blockchain technology that made it possible is now being sought after by a number of companies due to the way it acts as a decentralized ledger that can be used to store data and keep track of how assets are exchanged.

Microsoft has just released the first details into how it will use blockchain in its upcoming Project Bletchley, which will add the technology into Azure services through some new middleware.

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Citrix and Microsoft announced recently that they will be expanding their partnership. More precisely, Citrix will use Microsoft’s Azure as its cloud.

Besides Azure, they will also integrate Citrix XenMobile and NetScaler into Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite.

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Having a good password can make the difference between your account being hacked and receiving a notification informing you of a failed login attempt. Even though this should be common knowledge, it seems that many folks are in the dark about this. You do not need to look hard to find evidence of this, as there are many reports that reveal passwords like "1234567890" to be very popular still.

Since it is clear that it cannot rely on its users to make the right decisions about their account security, Microsoft is taking a proactive approach by "dynamically banning commonly used passwords". So, if you think that "qwerty123" is good enough to keep all your emails private, luckily you will not have to find out whether you are right or not.

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In order to hasten the transition from its traditional retail products to its cloud based products, Microsoft has just announced that it will be offering one year of free technical support to Azure users.

From May 1, 2016 through to June 30, 2017 users who purchase Azure Services under an Enterprise Agreement (EA) will receive a year of free support from the company.

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As more businesses turn to the use of public cloud services, they're keen to find ways to gain more visibility into their deployments and make them more secure.

Cloud native networking pioneer Aviatrix Systems is addressing this with the launch of its Cloud Native Networking 2.0. The solution combines a software-defined network controller and software gateways to enable businesses using a combination of public, private and hybrid clouds to quickly and easily roll out virtual private clouds.

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It is hard to take Windows 10 Mobile seriously when Microsoft announces sales of just 2.3 million Lumias in a whole quarter. If you ever thought that the platform can actually be competitive in today's market, now is the time to wake up. This year, smartphones sales are expected to reach 1.5 billion units. If Microsoft manages to move 10 million Lumias in 2016, Windows 10 Mobile's market share would likely be around the one percent mark.

Microsoft is not the only Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile vendor, but it is the largest by far. It sells about 90 percent of the smartphones running the tiled operating system, so its performance has a major impact on the platform's popularity.

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Microsoft Azure's Container Service in now available to help companies deploy and manage containers using their choice of software.

Users of the service will be able to move their container workloads to the cloud easily and can still run their operations using open-source tools. The two most popular tools -- Mesosphere’s Data Centre Operating System (DC/OS) and Docker’s Swarm and Compose -- will be both be supported by Azure Container Service and users will be able to continue running their operations using the one they prefer.

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Microsoft is both an open source and Linux champion nowadays -- on the surface at least (pun intended). In other words, while it does embrace those things, we may not know the motivation of the Windows-maker regarding them. Regardless, Linux and open source are now important to the Redmond company.

Today, Microsoft announces a CentOS-based VM image for Azure called 'Linux Data Science Virtual Machine'. The VM has pre-installed tools such as Anaconda Python Distribution, Computational Network Toolkit, and Microsoft R Open. It focuses on machine learning and analytics, making it a great choice for data scientists.

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Microsoft has joined forces with a collective of more than 40 financial institutions to help push the development of blockchain technology. Working with the R3 consortium, Microsoft wants to develop and test new technologies to replace and streamline old systems used in banking and enterprise industries.

The announcement comes as the company launches the first Microsoft Envision event with the aims of bringing together business leaders to pool ideas for the digital age. Using Microsoft Azure, the company wants its partners to expand the use of Blockchain-as-a-Service and bring about change faster.

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Many organizations are looking at the benefits they can gain from big data but are put off by the infrastructure costs involved.

Analytics company Kyvos Insights is aiming to make big data more accessible by making its scalable, self-service online analytical processing (OLAP) solution available to users of Microsoft Azure HDInsight.

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Platform-as-a-service provider Mendix and Microsoft today announced a partnership which will bring Mendix services on the Azure cloud platform.

Mendix says the new partnership will allow Azure customers to seamlessly access Mendix’s rapid application development capabilities, adding that two versions are available -- free and commercial.

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Azure already supports a number of major Linux distributions, like CentOS and openSUSE, but Microsoft is now taking things one step further by offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances through the cloud platform's Marketplace.

This comes as a direct result of Microsoft's partnership with Red Hat, which, among other things, is meant to "help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions" on the software giant's cloud platform.

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