Azure Roadmap Summary

Azure, Microsoft’s hosted application and storage cloud services offering, has evolved substantially since it became commercially available in Feb. 2010. It consists of dozens of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) components. Customers can leverage Azure’s massive scale and geographic reach for solutions in diverse areas, including VM and Web site hosting, mobile application services, relational and nonrelational storage, disaster recovery, and machine learning (AI). Azure supports many non-Microsoft technologies, including Linux, Hadoop, Android, iOS, and Java. Azure can provide many capabilities of a traditional data center, but it comes with new skill, connectivity, and administration requirements.

Microsoft continues to evolve Azure with frequent updates that include new services and enhancements to existing ones. The company often builds on lower-level services that were available earlier on Azure and has expanded and advanced Azure’s PaaS portfolio. Microsoft also has substantially updated the management technology and options for on-premises deployment of Azure infrastructure and solutions as the company de-emphasizes and reduces investments in its traditional on-premises software offerings. Azure’s improvements could give customers better capabilities and deployment experiences, but use of high-level Azure services could foster a dependence on Microsoft-specific implementations, and customers should continue to be prepared for changes that could disrupt processes.