Azure Updates: Revenue report; Lighthouse; Cloud Services deployment model

Microsoft outperformed Wall Street estimates for cloud revenue in recent days, achieving 50 percent Azure growth. Earlier projections suggested it would see only 41.4 percent Azure growth.

Principal program manager Archana Balakrishnan highlighted some of the capabilities of Azure Lighthouse. Managed Service Providers commonly provision guest identities in an Azure tenant but this can run into problems with overhead. According to Balakrishnan, Lighthouse lets users onboard service providers, manage service partners through a centralized control plane, achieve more comprehensive visibility, and achieve granularity with privileged identity management and the mutli-factor authentication preview.

In geographic updates, Availability Zones is on offer in the South Central US region, Data Factory is available in China North 2 and South India, Germany West Central Availability Zones are GA, and Cognitive Services Translator added support for the Inuktitut language spoken in northern Canada. Among general updates, Python 3.9 in Azure Functions is generally available, along with HDInsight capabilities for encryption of data in transit and at rest and the Confluent Cloud integration.