Azure Review: Alliance Intelligent Cloud; EOH; Topologies; PostgreSQL; Sentinel

Mid-March brought news of a major alliance between Microsoft, Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi. The collaboration has produced the Alliance Intelligent Cloud, with initial connectivity for the Nissan Leaf and Renault Clio. The new cloud offering offers internet access for diagnostics and infotainment systems and is intended to align with future smart city infrastructure initiatives. 

More operating entities of South Africa-based IT services group, EOH, have announced the cancellation of partnership agreements with Microsoft, causing the company's shares to drop 4.3 percent on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. In February, news outlets reported that Microsoft was terminating its EOH partnership as a result of an anonymous complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission about alleged financial malfeasance with the South African military. In New York, a Mizuho Americas—the US subsidiary of Mizuho Financial Group has adopted Xenomorph TimeScape EDM+, an enterprise data management platform built on Azure for financial trading.

Swedish newspapers are reporting that Microsoft has acquired 130 hectares of land in the towns of Gävle and Sandviken outside of Stockholm to build two new data centers.

Software architect, Arlan Nugara, writing on Arlan Blogs, shared visuals of Azure topologies such as hub and spoke, Azure Landing Zone or deploying to a primary Azure region. In a closely related post, he also showed how to elevate access to the global admin role and insights on key governance. Dave Bermingham, writing on InfoWorld, stated that the "clock is ticking" for SQL Server 2008 users as extended support comes to an end in July (and six months later for 2008 R2). The good news is that Microsoft is offering on-premises users a 180-day transition period in which on-prem licenses apply to the cloud as well. In his article, Bermingham gave a broad view of high availability and disaster recovery options and configurations with Azure.

Gorka Madariaga, product marketing manager, highlighted serverless, event-driven microservices with Azure. He shared a sample architecture for a fictitious ridesharing company, using API Management to expose endpoints to backend services, Azure Functions-powered public facing APIs, a workflow orchestrator and Azure Event Grid to pass information and messages between the different services.

Azure Monitor Availability Testing is being deployed in a new version, intended to produce fewer false alarms and reduce the number of clicks to see requested information. The service will also be extended to new IP ranges, to try out different test agents. Although an additional testing region will be added for Europe, France South is being curtailed and shifted to France Central.