Azure Review: DevOps rebrand; Outage investigation; Migrations; Azure Stack adoption; Simplifying AI; Marketplace additions

In the world of Azure, early September brought news of the Azure DevOps rebrand and a renewed focus on data center reliability along with other announcements.

Jamie Cool, director of project management for Azure DevOps, announced the rebranding of the suite, which groups together Azure Pipelines, connecting to GitHub or Git repositories, Kanban boards, dashboards and Maven, npm and NuGet package feeds. The new grouping also includes unlimited, privately hosted Git repositories, advanced file management, pull requests together with Azure Test Plans. Jeremy Epling, principal group program manager for the newly launched Azure DevOps went into additional depth about the Azure Pipelines CI/CD service, which has cloud-hosted agents for macOS and Linux, as well as its native Windows. Further emphasizing the theme of GitHub repositories, Maxime Rouiller wrote in the Microsoft .NET Blog about Azure Durable Functions, a new programming model based off of Azure Functions.

With Hurricane Florence striking the U.S. East Coast and Typhoon Manghkhut in East Asia, Microsoft conducted an internal and external reviews of its US East, US East 2, US Gov Virginia and East Asia data centers, preparing their onsite teams to switch to emergency generators.

The risk of an outage weighed heavily on the Azure team, which issued a lengthy postmortem on the VSTS outage on September 4th, which was pinpointed to voltage "sags and swells" following a storm near the South Central US data centers in Texas. ...