Azure Review: AI for emergencies, DevOps; Cosmo DB; Database security; Azure Load Balancer

Shell and Microsoft teamed up for a unique partnership, rigging up cameras at gas stations to spot potential cigarette smoking, processing the images in Azure and sending out emergency notifications to station managers.

In a bid to extend Office 365 usage, Microsoft announced Windows Virtual Desktop, with support for multi-user Windows 10.

Kate Baroni, software architect with the Azure team, touched on CRISP-DM and Microsoft Team Data Science Process as approaches to aligning AI, machine learning and DevOps. Ellis Butterfield, program manager for Azure SQL Data Warehouse updated users that Fivetran has updated its data pipelines product for Azure, and discussed replicating data sources into the canonical data warehousing database. Anupam Vij, senior product manager for Azure Networking highlighted new features such as DDoS Attack Analytics, DDoS Rapid Response, Attack Mitigation Reports and Attack Mitigation Flow Logs. Other security updates included Advanced Threat Protection for MySQL and PostgreSQL, both in preview as tools to spot anomalous database activity.

Python support, and Consumption plan for deploying to Linux are in preview for Azure Functions, and Microsoft has launched a limit preview of