Azure Updates: Confidential computing; Cost Management; Event Grid; ML; High-performance computing; FHIR

Microsoft issued a slate of announcements spanning many  Azure offerings in mid-November, touching upon hardware capabilities for Kubernetes, Cost Management, Event Grid, high-performance computing and FHIR updates.

On November 19, Microsoft announced confidential computing for Kubernetes. As a result, customers can run code workloads on the CPU with "secure hardware enclaves," thanks to Intel SGX technology. The company recently open-sourced its Open Enclave SDK to the Confidential Computing Consortium.

Cloud solution partners learned that they can now access Azure Cost Management, tapping into cost management capabilities previously limited to pay-as-you-go and enterprise customers. Going forward, CSPs will be able to view resource costs with Partner Earned Credit applied, set notifications and automation for programmatic budgeting, reconcile costs to invoices and enable cost management across all retail rates for customers.

A slot of small updates extended the reach of Event Grid, with support for CloudEvents v1.0, enhancing interoperability, a high throughput batch delivery preview, publishing to Azure AD protected endpoints, and alert changes.

AI and ML also received some attention from the team. Azure Machine Learning supports PyTorch 1.3 for asset tracking, packaging, validation, monitoring and creating reproducible training with ML pipelines. Meanwhile, general manager JG Chirapurath highlighted advanced data mining with Cognitive Services.