Windows Azure Review of 2013

One of the things I find so exciting about Windows Azure (apart from the challenge of keeping on top of it all) is the rate at which new features are being added. 2013 has seen Azure take a massive jump forward with the general release of infrastructure services opening up the platform to the IT Pro community. We have also seen quite a few moves in the open source direction with the introduction of a Hadoop service (HDInsight) as well as the extension of our mobile and notification services to iOS and Android not to mention a new Ruby SDK. Enhancements to monitoring and logging as well as Azure AD and Virtual Networking mean Azure is now a solid offering for larger enterprises that require tighter control over resources.

All in all it has been an exciting year for Azure and the overall Cloud OS strategy for Microsoft and 2014 is looking very exciting too!

Here is a summary of all of the updates this year with some links for further information.

January 2013

• Release of Media Services. https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/solutions/media/
• Preview of Notification Hubs https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/jj927170.aspx
• Extension of the Azure Store https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/gallery/store/?fb=en-us

March 2013

• Mobile Services Extended to support HTML5/PhoneGap and Android https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/
• Preview of HDInsight https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/hdinsight/

April 2013

• General Availability of Azure AD https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/active-directory/
• General Availability of Infrastructure Services https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/virtual-machines/
• Virtual Network support for Point to Site VPN https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/virtual-network/
• Ruby SDK and Developer Centre https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/ruby/
• Preview of Azure Recovery Services: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/recovery-services/ 
• Websites Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/web-sites/

May 2013

•  AMQP support with Windows Azure Service Bus https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/service-bus/

June 2013

• General Availability of Websites including SLA https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/web-sites/
• General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/
• New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines
• New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines)
• No more credit card requirement for sign-up of MSDN subscriptions

July 2013

• Support for Automated SQL Export and a New Premium Tier SQL Database option https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/sql-database/
• New support for managing Windows Azure Traffic Manager in the HTML Portal https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/traffic-manager/
• AutoScale: Support for Windows Azure Mobile Services, AutoScale rules for Service Bus Queue Depth, Alerts on AutoScale actions
• Updates to the IaaS management experiences in the Management Portal, Cloud Services and support for Traffic Manager

August 2013

• SQL Server AlwaysOn Support: General Availability support with Windows Azure Virtual Machines (enables both high availability and disaster recovery)
• General Availability Release of Windows Azure Notification Hubs (broadcast push for Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS and Android) https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/notification-hubs/
• Schedule-based AutoScale rules and richer logging support
• Virtual Machines: Load Balancer Configuration and Management
• Management Services: New Portal Extension for Operation logs + Alerts

September 2013

• Dedicated Cache Service: Announcing the preview of our new distributed, dedicated, high performance cache service https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/cache/
• AutoScale: Schedule-based auto-scaling for Web Sites and Virtual Machines and richer AutoScale history logs
• Web Sites: New Web Server Logging Support to save HTTP Logs to Storage Accounts https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/web-sites/
• Operation Logs: New Filtering options on top of Operation Logs
• Virtual Machines: Support for Oracle Software Images, Management Operations on Stopped VMs and New 2-CPU Core 14 GB RAM instance option
• Active Directory: Richer Directory Management and General Availability of Multi-Factor Authentication Support https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/active-directory/
• Spending Limit: Reset your Spending Limit, Virtual Machines are no longer deleted if it is hit
• Storage: New Storage Client Library 2.1 Released
• Web Sites: IP and Domain Restriction Now Supported

October 2013

• Backup Services: General Availability of Windows Azure Backup Services https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/recovery-services/
• Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Public preview of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/recovery-services/
• Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration
• Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/active-directory/
• Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure
• Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of our SDK + Visual Studio tooling support
• Virtual Machines: Support for Windows Server 2012 R2
• Cloud Services: Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and .NET 4.5.1
• Windows Azure Pack: Use Windows Azure features on-premises using Windows Server 2012 R2 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows-azure-pack
• Price Cuts: Up to 22% Price Reduction on Memory-Intensive Instances

November 2013

• General Availability of HDInsight https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/hdinsight/
• New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs
• WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support for Websites https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/web-sites/
• Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions for notifications hub https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/notification-hubs/
• Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services
• New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services
• New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define
• General Availability Release of BizTalk Services https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/biztalk-services/
• Traffic Manager: General Availability Release of Traffic Manager, Application Access support for Azure AD
• Active Directory Support, Xamarin support for iOS and Android with C#, Optimistic concurrency for Mobile Services
• Notification Hubs: Price Reduction + Debug Send Support
• Web Sites: Diagnostics Support for Automatic Logging to Blob Storage
• Storage: Support for alerting based on storage metrics
• Monitoring: Preview release of Windows Azure Monitoring Service Library https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Management.Monitoring/0.9.0-preview

December 2013

• New Windows Azure Scheduler Service Preview https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/scheduler/
• New Read-Access Geo Redundant Storage Option https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/solutions/storage-backup-recovery/
• Enhancements to Monitoring and Diagnostics for Azure services