Azure Updates: Web PubSub; Site Recovery; Policy

Microsoft Partner Director of Product Management Balan Subramanian touted new ways to build real-time apps with Azure Web PubSub and Websockets, out now in-preview. Real-time app scenarios are increasingly common, such as interactive whiteboards and chat for streaming videos, to say nothing of IoT dashboards. The offering supports common programming languages like Java, C# and Python, along with the json.webpubsub.azure.v1 subprotocol. Backend server code may need to parse a message for natural language processing and is integrated with Azure Functions to route to that service.

He wrote:

Real-time scenarios often require high-frequency data flows and large quantities of concurrent connections between the client and server. For example, a finance app to visualize market data may need up to 100,000 connections and live data with low latency in milliseconds. A non-trivial infrastructure setup is required to get such functionality up and running at scale. To implement a WebSocket-based real-time experience, a developer would first need to set up infrastructure for handling client connections, establish mechanisms to scale it on demand and ensure the setup is able to meet business SLA requirements. This infrastructure management takes away a developer’s time from focusing on end-user experiences, and we built Azure Web PubSub service to solve this. The service offers built-in support for large-scale client connections and highly available architectures so that developers can focus on the application logic that delivers real-time connected experiences.

Microsoft touted Site Recovery changes. Customers are now able to use Azure Policy to support Site Recovery at scale for VMs. ...