Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Microsoft today launched two new Azure regions in China. These new regions, China North 2 in Beijing and China East 2 in Shanghai, are now generally available and will complement the existing two regions Microsoft operates in the country (with the help of its local partner, 21Vianet).

As the first international cloud provider in China when it launched its first region there in 2014, Microsoft has seen rapid growth in the region and there is clearly demand for its services there. Unsurprisingly, many of Microsoft’s customers in China are other multinationals that are already betting on Azure for their cloud strategy. These include the likes of Adobe, Coke, Costco, Daimler, Ford, Nuance, P&G, Toyota and BMW.

In addition to the new China regions, Microsoft also today launched a new availability zone for its region in the Netherlands. While availability zones have long been standard among the big cloud providers, Azure only launched this feature — which divides a region into multiple independent zones — into general availability earlier this year. The regions in the Netherlands, Paris and Iowa now offer this additional safeguard against downtime, with others to follow soon.

In other Azure news, Microsoft also today announced that Azure IoT Edge is now generally available. In addition, Microsoft announced the second generation of its Azure Data Lake Storage service, which is now in preview, and some updates to the Azure Data Factory, which now includes a web-based user interface for building and managing data pipelines.

No matter what cloud you build on, if you want to build something that’s highly available, you’re always going to opt to put your applications and data in at least two physically separated regions. Otherwise, if a region goes down, your app goes down, too. All of the big clouds also offer a concept called ‘availability zones’ in their regions to offer developers the option to host their applications in two separate data centers in the same zone for a bit of extra resilience. All big clouds, that is, except for Azure, which is only launching its availability zones feature into general availability today after first announcing a beta last September.

Ahead of today’s launch, Julia White, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure, told me that the company’s design philosophy behind its data center network was always about servicing commercial customers with the widest possible range of regions to allow them to be close to their customers and to comply with local data sovereignty and privacy laws. That’s one of the reasons why Azure today offers more regions than any of its competitors, with 38 generally available regions and 12 announced ones.

“Microsoft started its infrastructure approach focused on enterprise organizations and built lots of regions because of that,” White said. “We didn’t pick this regional approach because it’s easy or because it’s simple, but because we believe this is what our customers really want.”

Every availability zone has its own network connection and power backup, so if one zone in a region goes down, the others should remain unaffected. A regional disaster could shut down all of the zones in a single region, though, so most business will surely want to keep their data in at least one additional region.

 Microsoft announced a new product in its Azure line-up in preview today that will make it easier for developers to build event-based applications. The Azure Event Grid makes events (like uploading a picture or video, clicking a button, updating a database, etc.) first-class Azure objects. Event Grid complements Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps, Microsoft’s existing serverless offerings. Read More

 Since the dawn of Azure, Microsoft has talked about how enterprises can benefit from a hybrid cloud approach — that is, using the public cloud while still running some of their applications in their own data centers. Even today, Microsoft says that 80 percent of the companies it talks to still want to use a hybrid cloud approach and to help them move to its cloud services, the company… Read More

 Companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google continue to compete fiercely in the area of cloud services for consumers, developers and enterprises, and today Microsoft made its latest moves to lay out its bid to lead the race, while also launching a new mission to position itself as the cloud provider you can trust. Microsoft announced it would build its first Azure data center in France… Read More

 Microsoft’s CTO for Azure (and occasional novelist) Mark Russinovich is extremely bullish about microservices. In his view, the vast majority of apps — including enterprise apps — will soon be built using microservices. Microsoft, with its variety of cloud services and developer tools, obviously wants a piece of that market. With Service Fabric, the company offers a service… Read More

 MongoDB, the company behind the eponymous open source database, is launching Atlas today, its third major revenue-generating service. Atlas is MongoDB’s database-as-a-service offering that provides users with a managed database service. The service will offer pay-as-you-go pricing and will initially allow users to deploy on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with support for Microsoft Azure… Read More

 Docker is hosting its developer conference in Seattle this week and showcasing the quickly growing ecosystem that has grown up around its container tools. One of the companies on stage today was Microsoft, which announced that it is great expanding its support for Docker containers by more deeply integrating it into a number of its enterprise and DevOps tools. Microsoft’s interest in… Read More

 Late last year, Microsoft announced it would start hosting its Azure cloud computing platform and some of its other cloud-based services out of local data centers in both Germany and Canada. Both of these new regions, Azure Canada and Azure Germany, are now officially in preview. To ensure data sovereignty in Germany, Microsoft partnered with Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems as its… Read More

 With Azure Stack, Microsoft wants to bring its Azure cloud computing services into its customers’ data centers. Today, the company announced that it will launch the first technical preview of Azure Stack later this week on Friday, January 29. For now, this is a pretty limited version of Microsoft’s overall vision for Azure Stack. It’ll only support a single machine, for… Read More