Tag: azure

Microsoft teams up with Red Hat

Posted on November 5, 2015 by - News

redmondMicrosoft and Red Hat have announced a partnership that will help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure.

Vole is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure.

Redmond and Red Hat are also working together on common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.

In the coming weeks, Microsoft Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. This will enable customers to run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads on Microsoft Azure.

Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will be able to bring their own virtual machine images to run in Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure customers can also take advantage of the full value of Red Hat’s application platform, including Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat JBoss Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage and OpenShift, Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service offering. In the coming months, Microsoft and Red Hat plan to provide Red Hat On-Demand — “pay-as-you-go” Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available in the Azure Marketplace, supported by Red Hat.

Customers will be offered cross-platform, cross-company support spanning the Microsoft and Red Hat offerings in an integrated way, unlike any previous partnership in the public cloud. By co-locating support teams on the same premises, the experience will be simple and seamless, at cloud speed.

Red Hat CloudForms will work with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft System Centre Virtual Machine Manager, offering Red Hat CloudForms customers the ability to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on both Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure. Support for managing Azure workloads from Red Hat CloudForms is expected to be added in the next few months, extending the existing System Center capabilities for managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Developers will have access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, jointly backed by Microsoft and Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be the primary development and reference operating system for .NET Core on Linux.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise division said the move will be a powerful win for enterprises, ISVs and developers.

“With this partnership, we are expanding our commitment to offering unmatched choice and flexibility in the cloud today, meeting customers where they are so they can do more with their hybrid cloud deployments — all while fulfilling the rigorous security and scalability requirements that enterprises demand.”

 

 

 

Microsoft opens up Visual Studio to Java developers

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

microsoft-in-chinaMicrosoft has opened its Visual Studio Application Insights cloud software telemetry service so that Java developers can come up with new Azure designs.

For those who came in late, Application Insights is part of the Visual Studio Online set of services that Redmond announced in November 2013. It gathers and generates reports on usage and performance data for online applications.

These can be accessed through the Microsoft Azure Portal – which means you need an Azure subscription to use Application Insights.

The service had only allowed for the connection web applications and apps written using Microsoft’s own ASP.Net framework. But the new rules allow the same kind of monitoring to Java applications.

Microsoft is also offering support for Application Insights in its new version of the Azure Tookit for Eclipse.

A free trial of Application Insights is available. After that, pricing depends on the level of Visual Studio Online service you need and the amount of Azure resources you consume each month.

Open saucy Microsoft puts Azure on Ubuntu

Posted on February 20, 2015 by - News

Every silver has a cloudy liningMicrosoft has released its Azure hosted service so that it can run Linux.

Microsoft showed off a preview of Azure HDInsight running on Ubuntu and the makers of the open saucy gear Canonical claims that it is a recognition that Ubuntu is great for running Big Data solutions.

For those who came in late, Azure HDInsight, is Microsoft’s Apache Hadoop-based service in the Azure cloud. It is designed to make it easy for customers to evaluate petabytes of all types of data with fast, cost-effective scale on demand, as well as programming extensions so developers can use their favourite languages.

The big idea is that people that already use Hadoop on Linux on-premises like on Hortonworks Data Platform, because they can use common Linux tools, documentation, and templates and and now they can extend their deployment to Azure with hybrid cloud connections.

It is not all one way traffic.  Canonical has Juju which  is a Cloud Orchestration tool. This is the result of years of effort to optimize Big Data workloads on Ubuntu. This will mean that Azure will effectively gain access to this.

Microsoft offers start ups Azure credits

Posted on February 11, 2015 by - News

Pic Mike MageeMicrosoft has launched a package to lure start-ups and SME’s to its Azure profile by offering them $500,000 in Azure credits. 

The deal, announced by partner Y Combinator, is only available to Y Combinator-backed companies and will be offered to the 2015 Winter and future batches.

It seems that Microsoft is following Google, AWS and IBM which already offer incentives for start-ups to join them.

Microsoft is giving Y Combinator start-ups a three years Office 365 subscription, access to Microsoft developer staff and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.

It is starting to look like Microsoft is getting more aggressive in its competition with Amazon Web Services and Google, both of whom already offer credits and freebies.

Amazon offers $25,000 in AWS credits and other freebies, while Google offers $100,000 in Google platform credits and IBM offers $120,000 in credit for SoftLayer infrastructure of BlueMix PaaS.

Writing in his company’s bog Sam Altman said that this brings the total value of special offers extended to each YC company to well over $1,000,000. “The relentless nagging from partners to grow faster we throw in for free,” he said.

It is likely that the YC deal is the first of many which will be rolled out worldwide to Microsoft’s partners.

 

Microsoft’s cloud blue screens

Posted on November 19, 2014 by - News

Pic Mike MageeMicrosoft ‘s Azure cloud-computing service, suffered a kick in the credibility on Tuesday after it suffered serious outages. Microsoft’s MSN web portal was taken offline.

According to Microsoft’s Azure status page, the problems started around 5pm Pacific time and have still not been fully solved. “We are experiencing a connectivity issue across multiple Azure Services,” the page said.

“Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “We are working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible.”

Azure outages are a serious problem for Microsoft as the company tries to sell its cloud-computing service as a cost-effective and reliable alternative to Amazon’s AWS.

The outage was a major problem for those punters relying on Azure to host websites – such as Microsoft.

Microsoft suffered its last major Azure outage in August.  Amazon also has outages which does not bode well for those who look to the cloud for total reliability.

 

Microsoft adds more to Azure

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

MSlogoSoftware giant Microsoft said today it has added a number of additions to its Azure offerings.

At a conference in Barcelona, Jason Zander, VP of Azure, said that it will release Azure “Operational Insights” which combines HD Insight and MS System Centre to gather and analyse machine data across clouds.

Azure Batch gives access to thousands of cores to analyse complex problems while Azure Automation, as its name suggests, allows batch operations on both Azure and third party environments.

Microsoft said it has also made improvements to security with support for multiple network interface cards (NICs), Network Security Groups for creating security boundaries and giving better control over traffic flow, and a service, at no charge, called Anti-Malware for virtual machines.

The company also said it has improved its Enterprise Mobility Suite and Office 365, allowing administrators to manage Office mobile apps, conditional access features, and secure mobile app viewing.  These improvements will arrive in the next few months, Zander said.

Microsoft improves its Azure offerings

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSoftware company Microsoft said it has added features to its “cloud-first” media services.

The features incude HD quality live streaming, protection capabilities and a service to simply indexing audio and video content.

In addition, Microsoft has added four industry partners to its Azure Media Services including Telestream’s Wirecast, NewTek TriCaster, Cires21 and JW Player.

Microsoft said it is indtroducing faster encoding speeds and more cost effective billing.  The better Azure Media Encoder is billed on output GBs while it used to be based on both input and output GBs – that means cost savings, the company claims.

The Azure Media Indexer is a content extraction service to index media libraries so they can be searched by keywords, phrases or clips and also create transcripts of audio files.

Azure fails

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

cloud (264 x 264)Microsoft has fixed a worldwide outage on its Azure cloud computing service, which occurred across multiple regions.

Partial disruptions began as of 1.40pm on Aug. 18, the company said on the Azure website.

This is bad news for Microsoft which is touting its cloud-based platform for creating, deploying and maintaining online applications and services such as websites and web-hosted applications. As such, it has to work 24/7 or customers will be severely put out.

Azure is used by governments and corporations around the world, supports various programming languages, tools and frameworks.

Microsoft said that Azure services such as virtual machines, cloud services, mobile services, service bus, site recovery, HDInsight, websites and Storsimple were down during the outage.

However, Vole insisted that the core platform components were working properly throughout and only a small subset of customers were affected by the outage.

Still reports of outages might make many firms question if moving to the cloud is such a good idea, or if they can get the same levels of reliability on-site.

Microsoft and Solidsoft go for medical system

Posted on July 4, 2013 by - News, Products

pillMicrosoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform has been selected to power the new European Medicines Verification System (EMVS).

The system will be developed by Solidsoft, a Microsoft Gold Partner. The system was conceived by European Stakeholders Model (ESM) Partners, which represents the majority of the European pharmaceutical industry. 

The system will handle information on more than 10 billion medicines dispensed throughout all 28 European Union member states. All meds will feature a unique, encrypted product identifier which will be scanned at the point of dispensation and then verified for authenticity in the Azure cloud.

“We look forward to the start of the implementation of the European Medicines Verification System. Patients need to be able to trust in the medicines they take and this is a timely and important step towards finding a solution to the urgent problem of counterfeiting in the EU,” said Richard Bergstrom, Director General of ESM partner, The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). 

Solidsoft CEO Garth Pickup said the cloud has changed the dynamics of large IT projects forever.

“The almost limitless scale provided via the Microsoft Windows Azure platform means that this massive project can be delivered to the EFPIA at much lower cost than on-premises. It will also easily scale to the 10 billion+ transactions it will handle each year in real time,” he said.

Mark Smith, Director for Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft UK, said the Windows Azure platform innovative companies to take on large projects, leveraging the vast computing resources of Microsoft’s data centres.

Microsoft confuses on Azure

Posted on February 6, 2013 by - News, Products

clouds3Software giant Microsoft is trying to encourage its channel to come up with more cloud offerings by cutting the price on its Azure licencing.

Microsoft lowered Windows Azure price on SQL Reporting Services, which is used for business intelligence-type applications.
The SQL Reporting Service is now measured at increments of 30 reports at $0.16 per hour. The previous charge was measured at $0.88 per hour in increments of 200 reports.

Writing in its bog Vole claims that “the smaller report increment will give customers better use of the service and lower effective price points”.

Like most of the postings that Microsoft has made on its cloud offerings this one is as clear as mud. That is one of the things that resellers have been moaning about when it comes to Azure. The licensing arrangements are so Byzantine you have to be Constantine the Great to understand how they all work.

Customers have to pay for the compute time, data storage and data access and the bandwidth of the data transferred out of the cloud. Those various services get priced per GB. Then there is a monthly fee rolled into the overall cost if an organization uses SQL Azure.

To make matters worse, at the end of last year, Vole started reducing the price for Windows Azure Storage (WAS), claiming that costs could be reduced by 28 percent. WAS offers geo-replication storage support, as well as lower cost “redundant storage”. The geo-replication storage service is turned on by default.

However according to RPC magazine the service cannot be that good because when there was a two-day Windows Azure service disruption in December, Vole did not bother using it. If it had, Microsoft would have lost customer data.

Microsoft is apparently planning a few price more cuts which look even more complex as they are discounts based on spending tiers.

All this is because of the effectiveness of Amazon, particularly Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon cut data transfer prices by as much as 83 percent. In addition, Amazon decreased some EC2 on-demand prices by up to 13 percent.

All up this is making the life of the reseller trying to sell Azure based offerings a little harder. Price cuts would make things a lot more competitive, if the original pricing structure was not so complex. Trying to sell such a complex structure to a client is a tough sell, particularly when the customer does not know what they are getting into.