Azure Updates Improve Management and Dev, Cut Prices

The latest Azure updates enhance management capabilities, improve developer tools, and continue a trend of adding support for non-Microsoft technologies. Azure Virtual Machines, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering added about a year ago, gains deployment improvements such as integration with Puppet and Chef configuration management systems. Scaling and traffic management services have moved to general availability. A revised management portal, available as a public preview, offers advanced visualizations, billing detail, and access to new features that manage resources on a per-application basis. The updates and new price reductions aim to keep Azure competitive with rivals such as Amazon Web Services.

(Windows Azure was renamed Microsoft Azure in Apr. 2014.)

VM Management Enhanced

The Azure Virtual Machines feature allows customers to provision virtual machines (VMs) running Windows Server or Linux in Azure data centers. Customers have full administrator control of the VMs, and OS and application state is preserved across reboots and data center reconfigurations. Customers can select VM images from a gallery that includes Windows Server and several Linux distributions. Customers can also upload their own VM images.