Microsoft Azure is getting another good news for developers and cloud customers. Microsoft this week shared the latest details about the company's cloud service, Azure Cloud platform. Microsoft made the big announcement this week.

Microsoft Shares New Details About Azure Cloud

Microsoft has already revealed to the world the third technical preview of the Azure Stack. The final Azure product is said to run across a number of Windows Server 2016 servers supplied by selected Azure technology partners.

As mentioned earlier by Petri, the third preview of Azure Stack also includes key bug fixes, along with some deployment and compatibility improvements. Some of the newly added features include support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale sets, support for Azure D-Series VM sizes, the Use ADFS for disconnected scenarios, the ability to create Azure-consistent templates, IaaS and SaaS functionality improvements, some additional cloud infrastructure and fabric management, and an isolated IT admin portal for more added system security. Additionally, the TP3 of the Azure Stack also include the ability to Syndicate VM images from Azure Marketplace.

In addition to the Azure Stack Preview, the Redmond-based company is also adding a new service tier to Azure SQL Database, increases Azure's storage limits on existing databases. Microsoft is currently making a series of enhancements to its Azure SQL Database, the company's managed cloud database for app developers that makes application development lots easier and productive. The service also includes built-in intelligence that learns app patterns and adapts to maximize performance, reliability, and data protection.

Lenovo Joins Microsoft Azure

Lenovo this week announced the release of ThinkAgile for Microsoft Azure Stack. The Lenovo ThinkAgile, according to tech site CRN, is a turnkey, rack-scale hybrid cloud offerings that come pre-integrated and that is designed to give customers the convenience of public cloud with the control of on-premise offerings.

The ThinkAgile offering includes Lenovo's RackSwitch G8272 10 GbE enterprise switch, which said to provide line-rate, high-bandwidth switching, filtering, and traffic queuing. The switch also includes hot-swap redundant power supplies and fans for better cooling, and also include large data center-grade buffers to help keep data moving around the system.

According to the Chinese hardware maker Lenovo, the ThinkAgile for Microsoft Azure Stack appliance is designed to help customers take a common DevOps approach across the hybrid cloud environment. The offering will allow developers to build applications once and deploy them to either public or private cloud environments.

Finally, the launch of ThinkAgile has put the Beijing, China-based data center upstart in a direct collision with some of the feared and well-established data center vendors in the IT market, which include the massive company of Dell EMC and the more agile Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

For more information about Azure Stack pricing and availability, check out Microsoft Azure website. For the latest update and news about Microsoft Azure SQL Database, check out the latest Azure SQL database blog post by Jan Engelsberg, Azure SQL Database Senior Program Manager, at the Azure's official website.

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