Microsoft Azure Updates: Developer experience; ML for fantasy baseball; Lighthouse; Data residency

In another busy week for the Azure team, updates spanned machine learning, VMs, VAR finances, and more. CTO Mark Russinovich took a look at declaratively provisioning and managing infrastructure with ARM templates. In a bid to get new users up to speed more quickly, Microsoft simplified Visual Studio coding experiences, is offering tools for pre-development impact analysis, and improved support for provisioning at scale. 

Julia White, CVP of Azure, announced that Microsoft and Udacity are providing Machine Learning scholarships based on data  showing a 74 percent annual growth rate in hiring for these skills in the last four years.