Azure Review: Multi-Factor Authentication; SQL updates; Cryptographic keys; Live migration machine learning

The end of November saw Microsoft overtake Apple as the highest market capitalization company, but for Azure users, service problems in some regions occupied attention. On November 27, Azure Multi-Factor Authentication experienced a worldwide service interruption. Microsoft blamed a DNS failure which made authentication temporarily undiscoverable, followed by a traffic surge when service was restored. Smaller issues cropped up on November 28 and 29 when an incorrect backend authentication setting temporarily disconnected some West US 2 from storage or a scheduled power maintenance in North Europe made a few hardware instances unhealthy, leading to Data Lake Store resources becoming temporarily unavailable.

Nerdio launched its Plans Designer tool set aimed at helping managed service providers to customize Azure sales packages.