Azure Updates: Ignite; Azure Arc; Cloud Adoption Framework; Database changes; Partner announcements

Microsoft Azure users, ISVs, and partners had a lot to digest over the past week as Microsoft hosted its increasingly important annual Ignite conference.

One of the most significant announcements is sure to be Azure Arc. Partner director Jeremy Winter turned the focus to hybrid IT in his blog about Arc, recommending the new offering as a way to manage Kubernetes clusters and servers and apply role-based access control, app auditing, Azure Policy, institute Azure security and manage a number of different locations at scale. Corporate vice president Rohan Kumar added that Arc helps with automatically patching, applying Container Registry updates all while using common tools such as Azure portal, CLI or Data Studio.

Evelyn Padrino, director of product marketing drew the attention of customers to the Cloud Adoption Framework which visually breaks down the cloud migration process into different stages like strategy, planning, adoption and governance. Corporate vice presidents Erin Chapple and Girish Bablani emphasized Azure Infrastructure and compute options. Ea v4 and Eas v4 VMs are generally available with NVv4 and HBv2 VMs still in-preview, smaller 4, 8 and 16 GB sizes for Premium and Standard SSDs and the preview of Azure Peering Service, for more optimized internet service. As a result of its partnership with SAP, Microsoft is providing generally available Large Instances, with 3 to 9 TiB of memory, for S/4HANA users.