Microsoft announced an update to its Azure cloud computing platform today. This update includes the launch of a couple of new features for developers who want to run large-scale, compute-intensive applications on the platform, as well as new features for Azure Site Recovery that will make it easier for developers to migrate to Azure from AWS.
After Microsoft acquired InMage almost exactly a year ago, the company quickly started to integrate InMage’s technology for migrating workloads between clouds into its own portfolio. The first result of that was a preview release of the Azure Migration Accelerator, which makes it easier to move physical, VMware, AWS and Hyper-V virtual machines to Azure. Now, this service is essentially integrated into Azure Site Recovery.
Microsoft argues that its platform — unlike AWS — allows businesses to fully take advantage of hybrid cloud deployments. “With AWS, you are often constrained in taking advantage of a consistent and complete hybrid cloud solution,” Mike Schutz, Microsoft’s general manager for its cloud platform marketing group, writes in today’s announcement. “These new capabilities provide an easy onboarding to Azure, along with the hybrid flexibility and freedom of the Microsoft Cloud.”
Microsoft is also making Azure Site Recovery available for users of its Operations Management Suite now, which allows admins to manage their workloads across their on-premise installs and public clouds like Azure and AWS.
On the high-performance computing front, Microsoft is adding a couple of new features that will allow developers to gain more control over how Azure manages their workloads. They can now use Linux’s Remote Direct Memory Access feature on their virtual machines, for example, which makes moving data between machines significantly faster. Microsoft is also launching and update to its high-performance computing pack, which makes it easier for developers extend their existing on-premise solutions into the Azure cloud and to deploy them in the cloud.
Azure Batch, Microsoft’s service for job scheduling and compute management for large batch jobs based on the company’s acquisition of GreenButton last year, is also hitting general availability today.