Azure Updates: Digital Twins Explorer; API Management; NCBI Blast

Build 2021 dominated Microsoft headlines in recent days as the company highlighted new capabilities for customers, partners and their developers.

Azure Digital Twins Explorer is available in public preview as a web app. Access is through Digital Twins instances in Azure portal, with a visual developer tool to explore the API, validate queries, control the twin graph, and reference model graphs.

Microsoft has slashed API Management Premium tier prices by 50 percent for units purchased after the first unit. The purpose of the change is to improve cost effectiveness for features like Availability Zone support and multi-region capabilities. The company also offered a roundup of recent Cost Management & Billing changes, such as expanded support for cost allocation across APIs, Azure Government management group exports, and changes to Azure reservations.

The Azure team released May updates for Security Center such as Defender for DNS and Resource Manager GA, open-source relational database options, expanded alerts, additional Resource Graph queries, SQL data classification recommendations, and a cloud environment filter. Other features are in public preview like options to enable trusted launch capabilities and hardening for Kubernetes clusters.