Azure Review: Qatar data center; Precision medicine; Southeast Asia Availability Zones; Azure Kubernetes Service; Monitor Logs UX

Globally, the Microsoft channel was quieter than usual in a week that marked the end of 2018 and the start of 2019. But even as much of the world contemplated and celebrated, news continued unabated from the channel.

On January 2, Qatar's prime minister, H.E. Skeikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al-Thani  opted to help setup a large Azure data center. The prime minister and the Cabinet issued a draft law creating a "Media City" with an independent budget that will host the data center.

Codero Holdings, a hybrid cloud hosting provider based in Kansas announced the successful migration of 1000 servers and 500 customers to Azure in 2018. In Taiwan, Microsoft Taiwan and Taiwan AI Labs jointly unveiled TaiGenomics, a gene analysis platform in a bid to increase precision medicine capabilities. Along similar lines, cardiologists at Apollo hospital in India are using Azure, in partnership with Microsoft's Healthcare NExT to assess the records of 400,000 patients and tailor heart attack data for the Indian population.