Microsoft Azure Updates: Marketplace changes; Azure SQL Database SLAs; TLS 1.0; VNet peering

Microsoft closed the busy month of July on a quiet note, perhaps anticipating a reduced attention spans from customers and partners preparing for vacations in North America, Europe and East Asia. Company representatives attended the SIGGRAPH event in Los Angeles for a deep dive into the graphics creation potential of the cloud, as Microsoft showed off its little discussed Azure Render Hub for hybrid cloud rendering environments, NV-series VMs run on NVIDIA GPUs and Azure FXT Edge Filer for storage optimization.

Changes to Azure marketplace charges are coming soon, with the preview of Cost Analysis for Pay-As-You-Go customers. This adds a marketplace usage CSV download API, unified cost dimensions and separate invoice charges for different marketplace resource purchases.

Among geographic updates, Azure Blob lifecycle management is available across all Azure regions. Other updates include new Azure Boards apps for Slack, new Azure Boards reports and changes to meters for Cognitive Services Form Recognizer.

Josh Mandel, chief architect for Microsoft Healthcare, highlighted the FHIR Server for Azure and Azure API for FHIR as part of the company's commitment to healthcare. In coordination with the US federal government's Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Microsoft has ...