Azure Updates and Announcements (May 2018)

Azure Virtual Machines E64i v3 and E64is v3 are now available for public use!

These machines have support for Linux, Windows Server, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM and SAP. Microsoft have made sure that they are on isolated hardware that are dedicated to single customers. These machines are best put to use for customers that need to meet to very strict compliance standards. Microsoft have mentioned that these machines will be available in all regions that the current E65 v3 and E64s v3 VM’s are available, more information about which VM’s are available in which region can be found here.

Azure Maps are now available for public use!

Azure maps is a service that used to be known by the name ‘Azure Location Based Services’. It is a set of service APIs that allows users to integrate mapping, search, routing, traffic and time zone functionalities into apps of your choice. This became generally available on 7th May 2018, it also includes name changes of resources because the names of the services have changed. A full list of these name changes can be seen here.

A new preview of the S3 standard tier in Azure Content Delivery Network is here!

Azure Content Delivery Network is used to provide a secure and reliable way to deliver content with global capabilities. The S3 standard tier has now been released into preview stage giving users access to a network of global Microsoft Edge sites. You can get on-by-default regional caching and other options that provide better performance while reducing the strain load on users origins.

Microsoft Cognitive Services is now available with exciting feature updates!

Microsoft Cognitive Service was created to allow you to infuse users apps, websites, and bots with intelligent algorithms. This allows you to understand your audiences needs clearer through natural communication methods.

Some of the updates for this service include:

  • Speech services (preview) – This unites multiple APIs into one offer in the Azure portal, this allows users to access a single offering  so they can easily perform speech to text, text to speech and speech translation. More information on this can be found here.
  • New features in Bing Custom Search – This allows you to build a query on your website or a selected handful of websites/domains, the new features include: statistics, image search and autosuggest.
  • QnA Maker is now generally available – This a web-based service to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) to respond to questions in a way that sounds more natural rather than robotic.
  • Bing Statistics add-in is now publicly available – With this you can tap into metrics such as call volume, top queries, API response code distribution, market distribution and many more.
  • Language Understanding now includes speech-to-intent bundle –  This is a tool that lets you build your own language understanding model to help provide more natural based language interactions. This bundle combines speech-to-text with text-to-intent capabilities.
  • Computer Vision updates – Computer vision represents a collection of state of the art image processing algorithms which are designed to return information which is based on visual content and help generate thumbnails. There is a new OCR model in preview mode that includes accuracy improvements.

Azure Managed Disks premium tier GUID update!

Azure Managed Disks are designed to bee used for persistent, secure, highly scalable storage for users Azure Virtual Machines. Currently the Managed Disks premium tier is named ‘Premium Storage – Page Blob’ on users bills. Microsoft plan to change this on 1st June 2018 to a new GUID called ‘Premium Managed Disks’ however all other characteristics will stay the same.

Network bandwidth rates are being reset!

Microsoft have mentioned that they made a pricing error back on 1st February 2018 where customers were being undercharged they plan to reset their prices on 1st June 2018 to the original prices that were in place before February 2018. This change will take place automatically and will not need any user interaction,

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