Announcements are rolling out of AzureCon 2015, with Microsoft announcing changes to the Azure Data Lake, IoT Suite, and Security Centre.
Azure Data Lake
To accommodate Cortana Analytics as part of Windows 10, Microsoft is expanding Azure Data Lake.
First, in order to make analytics more accessible, the company is allowing customers to preview what it is now calling the “Data Lake Store” later this year.
According to Microsoft, the store provides “a single repository where you can easily capture data of any size, type and speed without forcing changes to your application as data scales.”
Furthermore, data can be securely shared and is accessible to HDFS applications.
Data Lake Analytics is also among the new offerings available later in the year, and is a YARN-based service that dynamically scales, supports U-SQL, allowing users to analyse data in the store and across SQL servers in Azure, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
Lastly, HDInsight, a fully managed Apache Hadoop cluster service will offer various analytics options including Hive, Spark, HBase and Storm. With this, Microsoft is also announcing general availability of managed clusters on Linux. HDInsight is designed to increase throughput, scale and security.
Azure IoT Suite
Microsoft also announced a new partnership with Mesosphere and Docker to provide a new container service called the Azure IoT Suite.
This suite, now available for purchase, consists of preconfigured solutions built on the cloud platform that work with a company’s existing IoT devices to provide “near-real-time information” to help businesses gain and act on insight.
The software giant is offering a new Azure Certified for IoT Program to verify compatible hardware, and has said that remote monitoring is available today with predictive maintenance and asset management solutions coming in the near future.
Azure Security Center
Lastly, Microsoft also wants to give customers end-to-end visibility and control of security of their Azure resources. The new security solution integrates with partner solutions from companies including Barracuda, Checkpoint, Cisco, CloudFlare, F5 Networks, Fortinet, Imperva, Incapsula, and Trend Micro.
Available “by the end of the year”, the solution will provide security, monitoring and policy management, as well as provide custom recommendations once threats have been detected.
