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Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Azure just got better! New cloud offerings announced by Scott Gu.

Yesterday, Scott Gu announced a great big swath of features for Azure.  There are four that make me smile. Here is my top 4 list of new features:


  • Virus protection.  We all know we need it on our servers but we just can't seem to remember to put it on until it is too late.
  • Data import/export.  FedEx is the highest bandwidth service there is.  I recall something I heard about over 20 years ago about scientists shipping whole machines with multiple drives inside, this is just that, industrialized. 
  • Capture VMs with attached drives.  This has been somewhat available through the command line tools, but it is great to see it front and center in the portal.  I sill need to work on snap-shotting a full lab and making sure the domain survives, but this is promising.
  • Reserved IPs.  This is a big one for me.  Our plans are to be able to have a lab that we can trash/crash/rebuild at will.  We are doing SharePoint, so domain names matter and having to update DNS after each rebuild would have made it less fun.