Azure Updates: Covid-19; Teams; SAP; VMs; IoT Hub

The world is no longer as tightly locked down as it was in March, April, or May, but the specter of the Covid-19 coronavirus is far from vanished. Azure CTO Mark Russinovich shared some of his observations on the pandemic in a pair of recent blog posts. From an already high level of use, with 20 million daily users in November, Teams soared to 75 million daily users in April, as well as 200 million daily meeting participants and 4.1 billion minutes of meetings daily.

Founded on a microservices architecture, Microsoft Teams relies on Service Fabric, VMs, Cache for Redis, Cosmos DB, Event Hubs and Queue Storage among other services to operate. After building the backend with Pipelines, Microsoft counts on Data Explorer for analytics. During the pandemic, Johns Hopkins University case data was incorporated as an outside data source, joining predictive modeling like logarithmic, multiplicative and ARIMA techniques. According to Russinovich, to maintain quality of service, some microservices were deployed to smaller compute clusters, with fewer VM-specific requirements or network routing across multiple regions. Additionally, he shared a video to explain Microsoft's overall response to the pandemic.

Since late 2019, much has been written about Microsoft's efforts to serve SAP customers. Azure CVP Girish Bablani shared his thoughts on support for SAP, pointing to the important roles of M-series VMs, Large Instances options, expanded DevOps capabilities, NetWeaver-certified VMs and more. Azure Marketing senior director Talal Alqinawi chimed in as well, listing off six main reasons to choose Azure for SAP workloads. The list included increased agility, costs savings, expanding services, scalability, compliance and an established partnership.