Azure Updates: 24/7 Matching; Multicloud, hybrid cloud; Guest health; US Gov

Microsoft emphasized progress on its renewable energy goals and focused on its multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies. The Azure team shared details about the guest health feature, updates for the US federal government and more

CVP Noelle Walsh touted Microsoft's 100 percent renewable energy initiative in Sweden. Using the Vattenfall 24/7 Matching solution for its new data center in Sweden, Microsoft indicated that it will be the first hyperscale cloud provider to track hourly energy consumption for renewable energy matching. The solution that supports it, developed with Vattenfall, is generally available to other customers as well.

Product marketing manager Lucia Stanham discussed the need for multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies in the financial services industry. Customers around the world are rapidly accelerating their cloud migrations due to the Covid-19 pandemic, while complicated regulations continue to loom large in the thinking of financial services organizations. Stanham wrote that a hybrid model allows existing apps, housed on-prem, to be migrated to the public cloud. The Azure team has prioritized hybrid scenarios across services, putting out new offerings like Arc to help with management. She highlighted wide-ranging benefits such as extending geographic reach, elasticity, reduced CapEx and accelerating time to market, shedding light on customer examples such as Banco de Credito e Inversiones and VW Financial Services.

Among general updates, Unified Connection Monitor is GA and Microsoft has introduced additional input/output per second (IOPS), supporting bursting up to 4000 IOPS for even many small workloads. Cloud Shell image is now updated, Delivery Plans 2.0 is in-preview and the November update to Azure portal is out.