InfoQ Homepage Azure Content on InfoQ
-
Microsoft Previews Neural Network Text-To-Speech Capabilities
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a public preview of their neural network-powered text-to-speech capability, which is part of their Azure Cognitive Services offering. Within this release, the service makes computer generated voices indistinguishable from actual recordings. This technology has applications in chatbots, virtual assistants and converting digital text into audio books.
-
Microsoft Announces New Features and Integrations for Azure Pipelines
At the recent Connect() event, Microsoft announced several new features and integrations with Azure Pipelines. The new features and integrations include an Azure Pipelines extension for Visual Studio Code, management of GitHub Releases, support for IoT projects, and ServiceNow integration.
-
Microsoft Announces Azure Kubernetes Service Updates
Microsoft has announced multiple updates to Azure Kubernetes Service, their managed Kubernetes offering. The announcements include features around AKS virtual nodes, GPU support for Azure Container Instances, and the donation of the Virtual Kubelet project to the Cloud Native Compute Foundation.
-
Microsoft Introduces New API Management Consumption Tier for Serverless Architectures
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new Azure API Management Consumption tier. This tier allows for micro-based billing and aligns to serverless architecture principles including automated scaling, built-in high availability, per action billing and no infrastructure to provision or manage.
-
Amazon Introduces Managed Blockchain and Quantum Ledger Database
Amazon has announced a new managed service for creating and managing blockchain networks. The Hyperledger Fabric project is currently supported and support for Ethereum is coming soon. Amazon has also introduced a complementary blockchain service called Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) which provides a managed ledger database to store immutable transaction logs.
-
Microsoft Announces Container Support for Azure Cognitive Services
Microsoft has announced container support for Cognitive Services, which allows taking advantage of machine learning capabilities anywhere, whether it is in the cloud, on the edge or on-premises. With Azure Cognitive Services, organizations can start using various cognitive features, like vision, speech and text processing, without the need for a dedicated data scientist.
-
Amazon Introduces CloudFormation Drift Detection
In a recent blog post, Amazon announced CloudFormation Drift Detection which organizations can leverage to automate configuration consistency across AWS cloud resources. The CloudFormation Drift Detection feature allows organizations who have templated their configurations and deployments, known as stacks, to detect when configuration drift occurs from out-of-band changes.
-
Microsoft Announces the Availability of the MongoDB Atlas Free Tier on Azure
Microsoft announced the usage of MongoDB Atlas for free on Microsoft Azure. A free tier known as M0 is available on Azure, which grants users 512 MB of storage to allow learning MongoDB, prototyping, and early development.
-
Microsoft Updates Azure Event Grid with Event Domains, Advanced Filtering Features and More
With Event Grid, customers can manage all their event in one place in Azure. Recently, Microsoft announced enhancements to this service with two new features, advanced filters, and Event Domains. Furthermore, the team responsible for Event Grid has been working to improve the developer experience, and has made Event Grid available in more regions.
-
Microsoft Announces the General Availability of Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka
Recently, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka. Customers will get the best of both worlds—the ecosystem and tools of Kafka, along with Azure’s security and global scale.
-
Microsoft Announces the General Availability of the New Azure Media Services API (V3)
With Azure Media Services, customers can encode, protect, index, and deliver videos at scale. Recently, Microsoft announced several enhancements to this service in Azure, including the general availability of the new Azure Media Services v3 API, as well as updates to Azure Media Player.
-
Microsoft Announces General Availability of Azure IoT Central
Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure IoT Central, a software as a service solution for working with the internet of things. With Azure IoT Central, Microsoft envisions a low-code approach to designing, developing, configuring and managing IoT devices, while providing out-of-the-box security, scalability, and integration with processes and applications.
-
Microsoft Announces Several Updates to Azure Cosmos DB Features
Microsoft has announced multiple updates to Azure Cosmos DB, their globally distributed, massively scalable, multi-model database service. The announcements include features around support for globally scaled multi-master, the addition of a Cassandra API, and price-lowering options with reserved capacity.
-
Microsoft Announces the General Availability of Azure Functions 2.0
Microsoft announced the general availability of the second version of Azure Functions, an event-driven, compute-on-demand service on the Azure platform. This new version release of Azure Functions includes several capabilities to let developers build scalable serverless applications more easily than with version one.
-
Robot Operating System Comes to Windows
Robot Operating System (ROS), a meta-operating system for robot development, is now available on Windows 10. Microsoft’s initial, experimental build, dubbed ROS1, is integrated within Visual Studio and includes a full port of ROS Core and several modules. According to Microsoft, ROS on Windows will evolve to include full integration with GPU-based machine learning and Azure IoT Hub.