Microsoft Cloud Platform Roadmap

Hello folks,

Throughout the year Anthony and I have been travelling across Canada speaking with IT pros about the Microsoft Cloud Platform.  We know this is something that is important to you.  We hear it from each of our encounters with IT pro groups and customers.  We read it when we look at surveys results. We understand that you want to know we cares about your needs, that we can provide integration with your existing infrastructure and that we need to provides a product and service roadmap that meets your future IT needs.

You asked for it.  Now you have it.  You now have line of sight into cloud platform roadmap. You can use it to find out what products and services were recently made GA, which ones have been released into public preview, and which one are still under development.

The roadmap covers cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Intune, Power BI, and Visual Studio Online; it also covers server offerings such as Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server and Visual Studio; and converged system appliance offerings such as Cloud Platform System (which is really cool if you’re looking at hosting an “Azure like” environment in your own datacenter) and finally the Analytics Platform System and StorSimple

You can find the roadmap here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/roadmap/

Cloud Service Update

On top of the cloud platform roadmap I typically look at the Azure Service Updates to give me a more granular update on specific services that are being released.  The roadmap is a snapshot of what we’re working on.  The Service Updates are more a listing of specific services and features being released to preview or to General Availability.

for example. In January we had the following updates:  (this is just a copied listing of the type of info you will get in the service update page. )

Preview: Azure SQL Database Row-Level Security: January 29, 2015 - Row-Level Security is a programmable security feature that can be implemented in databases to enable fine-grained access over rows in a table.

Application Insights support for Windows Phone and Windows Store: January 29, 2015 - Application Insights adds a landing page and improved visualizations for Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps.

Public Preview: Azure Active Directory Connect Health: January 29, 2015 - Azure AD Connect Health helps you monitor your on-premises identity infrastructure.

Public Preview: Multifactor authentication per application: January 29, 2015 - Conditional access policies can be created with Azure Active Directory Premium to enforce multifactor authentication for users and groups trying to access specific applications.

General Availability: Content Protection for Azure Media Services: January 29, 2015 - Content Protection for Azure Media Services offers static and dynamic encryption with PlayReady license delivery and an AES 128-bit key delivery service.

Public Preview: API Management Premium with VPN, geo-distribution, and Azure Active Directory support: January 29, 2015 - The Premium tier of API Management simplifies massive scale and high availability.

Azure Websites integration with HDInsight for weblog analytics: January 29, 2015 - All customers who deploy their websites and web apps by using Azure Websites can generate weblogs that track all HTTP transactions and errors in detail.

General Availability: Script Action for Azure HDInsight: January 29, 2015 - You can now customize your Azure HDInsight clusters with projects that are available from the Apache Hadoop ecosystem.

Easily enable Operational Insights for Azure virtual machines: January 29, 2015 - Quickly enable Azure Operational Insights on your virtual machines by using Windows PowerShell or the Azure management portal.

General Availability: Azure SQL Database V12 service version: January 29, 2015 - Azure SQL Database V12 introduces near-complete SQL Server engine compatibility, greater support for larger databases, and expanded performance with Azure Premium service.

G-Series Support in US East 2: January 23, 2015 - You can now deploy G-Series Virtual Machines in either US West or US East 2

General Availability: G-Series for Virtual Machines: January 8, 2015 - The G-Series provides more memory and more local solid state drive (SSD) storage than other Azure virtual machine sizes.

Public Preview: Azure Key Vault: January 8, 2015 - Azure Key Vault offers an easy, cost-effective way to safeguard keys and other sensitive data that is used by cloud applications and services.

Cheers!

Pierre Roman | Technology Evangelist
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