Microsoft Build Developer Conference, April 2014: New Azure Features
Rajkumar Selvaraj
In Thursday’s Build developer conference, Microsoft rolled out tools and features for programmers. From the announcements of the events, it’s clear that Microsoft is ready to embrace the outside technologies which are not invented by Microsoft.
Microsoft Azure Cloud platform started to use non-Microsoft technologies, including popular open source tools such as the Chef and Puppet configuration management software, the OAuth authorization standard, and the Hadoop platform.
“Clearly Microsoft’s message is its support of multi-platform. It will take any part of your stack, it doesn’t have to be a just Microsoft software, This is good for Microsoft and good for the ecosystem.” said Al Hilwa, IDC research program director of software development.
Microsoft has redesigned the Azure portal with Windows Tile design, allowing users to add their own tiles that can display live information. One of the tiles can even show the bill amount of the current billing cycle.
Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC with two-way communication between the Visual Studio IDE and browsers. Typically, Visual Studio is used to code Web Applications. Developers can check if it runs correctly by running it in a browser. Now, using the new feature called “Browser Link”, developers can edit the source code directly in the browser. “Browser Link” will write the changes back to the source code file in Visual Studio.This will work in Google Chrome and Firefox, in addition to Internet Explorer.
Microsoft announced the general availability of Visual Studio Online which works within Azure. To enable rapid development , Visual Studio Online can be integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Service.
Azure has integrated two industry leading open source configuration management tools, Chef and Puppet.
“Traffic Management Server” is the new azure service that can route application requests to the copy of a distributed application that is closest to the requester’s geographic location to reduce the latency times.
Enterprises can use their AD directories to use the same password for desktop and mobile device access to an organization’s resources with single sign on feature.
The Azure’s SQL Server service now offers more space up to 500GB of data, rather than 150GB.
“Microsoft’s Azure strategy is to enable developers to use the best of Windows ecosystem and the best of the Linux ecosystem together and one that enables you to build great applications and services that work on every device,” Said, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s new executive vice president, the cloud and enterprise group.
Microsoft also added a backup service to revert the database back to an earlier state, anytime in the previous 31 days.
Microsoft has updated the HDInsight Hadoop service to run the latest version of Hadoop ( version 2.2). Microsoft also integrated the Hadoop YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator) scheduler to process jobs based on streaming data.
