Azure Updates: AT&T; IoT Hub; Event Grid; Databases; Language transcription

During a traditionally slow business week  in which the US marked its Thanksgiving holiday and some dealt with snow, Microsoft made sure to put out at least a few updates.

After announcing a strategic partnership in July, Microsoft and AT&T are finally getting up and running with a focus on 5G, edge computing, and cloud. The companies are jointly offering Network Edge Compute, combining AT&T software-defined networking and 5G capabilities as part of its Network Cloud to deliver Azure. After uptake by initial customers in Dallas, the service will be offered in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Microsoft paid a lot of attention to IoT Hub and databases in its announcements toward the end of November. An integration between IoT Hub and Event Grid enables sending event notifications to trigger downstream processes and IoT Hub message routing to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is available together with added information options for message enrichment.  Meanwhile, over on the database side the team made SQL Database backup storage metrics generally available, previewed private endpoint support for Cosmos DB, added Cosmos DB API support for MongoDB 3.6 and setup CosmosDB