The Latest Azure News: Spark; ThreadX RTOS; Azure Advisor; Analysis Services; Backup; IPv6

Microsoft closed the month of April with Q3 2019 earnings revelations and a slate of spring conferences and events including the Global Azure Bootcamp on April 27.

At the Spark+AI Summit, Microsoft introduced new models for the SparkML ecosystem to use Azure Cognitive Services with terabytes of data. Cognitive Services on Spark are compatible with Azure Databricks, Spark in SQL Server, clusters on Azure Kubernetes Service and other options. Microsoft touted the ability to setup high-throughput, low-latency workloads in Cognitive Services containers.

Microsoft bought an industrial operating system used by billions of deployments in what seems to be a bid to expand Azure's IoT reach. Thread Logic ThreadX Real Time Operating System (RTOS) is specifically geared toward 65kb battery powered devices.

Users can configure Azure Advisor in command line interface to issue recommendations only for services that are most relevant to them. Examples could include customizing CPU thresholds by identifying low usage VMs.

Google recently announced that it would migrate push notifications from Google Cloud Messaging to Firebase Cloud Messaging. As a result, Azure Notification Hubs had to update too, with changes to its API and SDKs. John Margo, a principal program manager with the Azure team shared additional details about what impacted users should know.

The Change History ...