The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170526031814/http://www.microsoft.com:80/en-us/cloud-platform/roadmap-archive

Cloud Platform roadmap

The Cloud Platform roadmap provides a snapshot of what we’re working on in the Cloud Platform business. Use the roadmap to find out what we’ve recently made generally available, released into public preview, are still developing and testing, or are no longer developing. Learn more about the types of updates you can expect to find on the Cloud Platform roadmap here.

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Azure Automation for GOV

Automation provides a way for user to automate the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated tasks that are commonly performed in a cloud environment.

By efficiently handling processes that span tools, systems, and department silos, Azure Automation lets our government customers deliver services faster and more consistently. Gov customers can create checkpoints to resume workflow after unexpected errors, crashes, and network issues. For example:

Shutdown/Start of Azure Virtual Machines
Copy a file to/from a VM
Archive logs to Storage
Backup and restoration of SQL DB
Backup disks on your VMs

Azure Backup IaaS VM protection

Azure Backup for IaaS VM is now GA. Azure Backup can perform online backups of Azure IaaS Windows and Linux VMs, and restore them as needed. You can use powershell to do backups, restores, monitor jobs, alert on job failures and generate reports. You can retain copies of your applications and data for years to meet regulatory requirements.

In addition to protecting Azure IaaS VMs, Azure Backup can protect data on your corporate laptops and in your datacenter. Azure Backup protects Windows Clients data, and shared Files and Folders. With first class integration with SC DPM, Azure Backup can protect Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Hyper-V VMs and other application data.

Azure Backup on Azure Portal

With this update, customers can backup both Azure Resource Manager based VMs as well as Azure classic VMs with a single seamless experience in the new 'Ibiza' portal. Customers get access to a brand new type of ARM resource called “Recovery Services Vault” that enables backup of Azure Virtual Machines and eventually will enable site recovery as well. Given the 'Recovery Services vault' is an ARM resource, CSP customers can resell and manage backup of their customer’s virtual machines enabling a host of partner scenarios.

In addition to IaaS VM backup, Windows Server machines as well as Azure Backup Server and System Center Data Protection Manager machines can register to the new “Recovery services vault” and send backup data to cloud.

Azure File Storage

Azure File Storage is fully managed cloud file share offering. It is based on industry standard SMB 3.0 protocol. The SMB 3.0 protocol provides persistent network connectivity and security on transit. This service enables sharing data across on-premises and cloud, migrating apps to cloud with no code change, integrate modern applications with File Storage, and simplifying hosting high availability workload data. Customers get geo replication, high availability and cloud scale all at very low cost. Currently RBAC is not part of GA so there is no integration with AD.

Azure File Storage

Azure Multi-NIC virtual machines

With Multi-NIC virtual machines (VMs), customers can create and manage multiple virtual network interfaces (NICs) on a VM. This capability enables designing network infrastructure with a greater degree of flexibility and control. As an example, you can designate one NIC as the frontend NIC, and the other as backend NIC and isolate traffic between them; or you can separate data plane traffic from the management plane.

Azure Virtual Machine chart Vnet: ThreeTier-Vnet with a backend subnet, midtier subnet and frontend subnet. Left shows VPN Gateway pointing to Cross Premises Connectivity, and points right to Internet.

Azure Operational Insights

Azure Operational Insights is a software as a service (SaaS) tailored for IT operations teams. This service leverages the power of Azure HDInsight to glean machine data across environments, and turn it into real-time operational intelligence to enable better-informed business decisions. Operational Insights provides powerful search capabilities that enable ad-hoc root cause analysis and automated troubleshooting across multiple data sources. Direct code instrumentation or knowledge of complex schema are not required to quickly receive interactive results. Drill deeper into areas of interest and use search to find custom insights through proactive exploration or reactive troubleshooting. Use this information to gain deep visibility into your datacenter capacity, and manage both current and future needs for your infrastructure.

Dashboard of Azure Operational Insights Overview.

Azure Site Recovery SAN Replication

Azure Site Recovery adds the ability to offload replication to SAN’s from EMC, NetApp, HP 3PAR, and Hitachi, and enables high performance synchronous and asynchronous replication between on-premises private clouds. With array-based replication, customers attain the lowest possible Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Chart showing how Azure Site Recovery works.

Azure Site Recovery standalone

Azure Site Recovery has been enhanced to run in small environments as a standalone product, making proven enterprise grade availability services more cost effective for small businesses and branch offices that do not have SCVMM deployed. Operating as a cloud service with minimal expense and complexity, Azure Site Recovery can replicate and recover vital data and applications to a secondary site, a service provider, or Azure.

List of items with all status completed.

Azure Site Recovery – US Gov

Azure Site Recovery provides you with full-featured disaster recovery that is simple, and provides automated protection and replication of your physical and virtual environment. The addition of Site Recovery as part of our Azure Backup and disaster recovery features help meet a Government agency’s security rigor and requirements, as well as help meet your hybrid cloud objectives. More updates will become available in the near future as we enable physical Linux and VMWare Linux VM replication scenarios to Azure Storage and/or a secondary datacenter.

Azure Virtual Machine Backup for Government

With Azure Backup in Azure Government, government customers will have the protection of Azure IaaS VMs to leverage the cloud for critical business needs by backing up their assets on the cloud. Government customers can leverage this Microsoft Azure Backup server to back-up their key Microsoft workloads like SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange to Azure.

Client Side Encryption for Azure Storage objects

Client-Side Encryption enables application layer encryption of storage objects before transmitting them to Azure, with keys controlled by customer rather than Azure, including optional Key Vault integration. Client Side Encryption will be added to a new version of the Azure Storage Client Library and it will enable enterprise developers to easily use encryption technologies to protect their data.

Key Vault generally available in Azure Government

Azure Key Vault is generally available in both Azure Government regions. Government agencies using Azure Key Vault will be able to safeguard cryptographic keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services, enhance data protection and compliance:

Secure key management is essential to helping protect government data in the cloud
Store keys and small secrets like passwords protected by hardware security modules (HSMs)
For added assurance, keys can be stored in HSMs that are validated to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 standard (hardware and firmware)
Key Vault is designed so that Microsoft doesn’t see or extract your keys

Note that there are two tiers: Standard and Premium. Only the Premium tier supports creating HSM-protected keys.

Microsoft Cloud in Canada

On May 10th, 2016, Microsoft announced general availability of Microsoft Azure and Office 365 from datacenter regions in Toronto and Quebec City. Azure provides a platform for innovation for organizations large and small, delivering on the Microsoft mission of empowering people and organizations to achieve more. Azure customers in Canada can now benefit from world-class reliability and performance combined with in-country data residency, including data replication in multiple locations within Canada for business continuity. Microsoft will soon add data residency in Canada for Dynamics CRM Online, giving customers even greater choice with a suite of services that work together seamlessly to enable productivity.

Microsoft Cloud Platform System

Microsoft brings its experience running some of the largest datacenters and cloud services into a factory-integrated and fully validated converged system. Cloud Platform System combines Microsoft’s proven software stack of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack, with Dell’s cloud server, storage and networking hardware. As a scalable building block for your cloud, Cloud Platform System shortens the time to value and enables a consistent cloud experience.

Dell Data warehouse.

Microsoft Operations Management Suite

The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) takes our innovative IT management solutions to the cloud, enabling greater control and new capabilities across your hybrid cloud. OMS provides customers with simplified IT management for any enterprise, backup and integrated recovery for all their servers and applications, in-built automation to orchestrate complex and repetitive operations, log analytics to collect and search across multiple machine data sources and easily identify the root cause of operational issues, inbuilt protection to help identify malware status and missing system updates. OMS works with existing infrastructure, including System Center 2012 R2, to manage current environments. To support future needs, we will bring additional functionality to OMS, including management for Azure Stack and integration with System Center 2016. OMS will also expand to cloud based patching, inventory, container management and more.

Dashboard of Microsoft Operations Management Suite Overview.

Operations Management Suite enables continuous IT services delivery

Deploying and maintaining the desired state of your servers and application resources has been tedious and error-prone. With Azure Automation Desired State Configuration (DSC), you can consistently deploy, reliably monitor, and automatically update the desired state of all your IT resources, at scale from the cloud. Built on PowerShell DSC, Azure Automation DSC can align machine configuration with specific state across physical and virtual machines, Windows or Linux, in the cloud or on-premises. So you can enable continuous IT services delivery with consistent control and you can manage rapid change across your heterogeneous hybrid IT environment with ease. Azure Automation DSC is generally available in free and basic tiers. It is also included as part of the System Center add-on for Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), the simplified hybrid cloud IT management solution for any enterprise.

Operations Management Suite Log Analytics forwarder

With Operations Management Suite Log Analytics forwarder, you can transfer data from agents installed on devices behind firewalls to OMS. This way, all agent data is sent through a single server that has the OMS forwarder installed, and access to the Internet. In this scenario, the forwarder efficiently transfers data from the agents to OMS directly without analyzing any of the transferred data.

Operations Management Suite Power BI integration

Operations Management Suite (OMS) enables forwarding the search results to Power BI. This will allow users to create multiple dashboards to provide insights depending on end user responsibilities.

Virtual machines and Cloud Services – D-Series – US Gov

D-Series for Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services is now generally available in the US Gov Virginia Region. The D-Series sizes offer up to 112 GB in memory with compute processors that are approximately 60 percent faster than our A-Series VM sizes (relative to the A1-A7 VM sizes). Even better, these sizes have up to 800 GB of local solid-state drives (SSDs) for blazingly fast disk read/write. The new sizes offer an optimal configuration for running workloads that require increased processing power and fast local disk input/output (I/O). In meeting US government requirements, this expanded support houses all customer data, applications, and hardware in the continental United States.

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Azure Active Directory Identity Protection

Azure Active Directory Identity Protection takes secure identity and access management to the next level by detecting attacks in real time, informing you of risks, and applying controls to keep your enterprise safe.

The service detects suspicious activities for users and privileged (admin) identities based on signals like brute force attacks, leaked credentials, sign ins from unfamiliar locations, infected devices and more, and provide remediation recommendations to protect against these activities in real-time. More importantly, based on these suspicious activities, a user risk severity is calculated and risk-based conditional access policies can be configured and automatically protect the identities of your organization from future threats.

Dashboard of Azure AD Identity Protection.

Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management

Privileged Identity Management enables security administrators to discover, restrict, and monitor privileged identities and their access to resources, and also enforce on-demand, just in time administrative access when needed.

Dashboard of Azure AD Privileged Identity Management.

Azure RemoteApp

Azure RemoteApp combines Windows application experiences with the powerful capabilities of Remote Desktop Services on Microsoft Azure – the cloud for modern business.

Dashboard of remoteapp.

Azure Rights Management Document Tracking

Document Tracking, a feature of Azure Rights Management enables document owners to track activities on sensitive files that they share with others. Activities such as recipients opening the files, unauthorized users being denied access to the files and the latest state of the files can be viewed on a web hosted site. With a single click, document owners can also revoke access to shared files.

Azure Rights Management support for Office for iPad

Office for iPad apps now support viewing of Azure Rights Management protected Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. This helps you protect your data while retaining your mobile productivity experiences.

Azure Rights Management View Permissions popup support for Office for iPad.

Microsoft Intune: expanded iOS capabilities

Intune can now help you manage apps you purchased through the Apple Volume Purchase Program (VPP) for Business. This includes synchronizing license information between Apple and Intune, and tracking how many copies of each app you have deployed. We will continue to build additional support for Apple VPP in the coming months.

Microsoft Intune: New MAM enabled apps from Skype for Business, Dynamics CRM, Adobe Reader

New MAM enabled apps available for MDM enrolled devices:

Microsoft Skype for Business (MAM with MDM) available now for iOS and Android
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (MAM with MDM) available now for iOS and Android
Adobe Reader (MAM with MDM) available now for iOS

Microsoft Intune: Outlook support for MAM without device enrollment

This update to the Outlook app allows you to protect your corporate data using MAM controls without device enrollment. This is a great option for BYOD scenarios where you want to keep corporate data safe without managing a user’s device. Available now for iOS and Android.

Microsoft Intune: January 2016 service update

New features and enhancements that were made available as part of this service update include support for new Windows 10 features.

System Center Configuration Manager and Endpoint Protection (Version 1511)

We are excited to announce that the new current branch of System Center Configuration Manager and Endpoint Protection (version 1511) is now generally available, and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Evaluation Center, MSDN, and Volume Licensing Service Center. Product improvements include comprehensive support for Windows 10 and improved unified device management.

System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager SP1 and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP2

System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager SP1 and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP2 deliver full compatibility with existing features for Windows 10 deployment, upgrade and management. Also included in these service packs are new hybrid features for customers using System Center Configuration Manager integrated with Microsoft Intune to manage devices.

Screenshot of Create Application Management Policy Wizard.

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Analytics Platform System (APS) AU5

Microsoft is pleased to announce the release of the Analytics Platform System (APS) Appliance Update (AU) 5. APS is Microsoft’s scale-out Massively Parallel Processing fully integrated system for data warehouse specific workloads. Powered by industry-leading SQL Server as its core engine, APS leverages PolyBase, the tool that allows for integrated querying between relational and non-relational data technology, for Hadoop/Big Data integration.

This release offers customers additional language surface coverage to aid in migrations from SQL Server and other platforms, PolyBase connectivity to the current versions of Hadoop from Hortonworks and Cloudera, string predicate pushdown and Parquet file format support, Bulk Copy Program (BCP) support for data loading using well known SQL Server patterns and TSQL compatibility improvements. These features continue to provide greater alignment with SQL Server and bring significant value to our customers.

Chart of Azure HDInsight connected to Hortonworks on Windows Server and Cloudera & Hortonworks on Linux pointing to Polybase pointing to SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse pointing to Result set.

Analytics Platform System appliance update 3

The Analytics Platform System appliance update 3 (APS AU3) introduces a scalable, high performance enterprise data hub (Data Management Gateway) that enables Azure cloud services like PowerBI to access on-premises data sources. AU3 also further improves how SQL Server customers can migrate to APS by enhancing T-SQL Compatibility, including Error Handling.

Chart showing relationship between Office 365, Azure and Intranet.

Azure Data Lake

Azure Data Lake is a hyper scale repository for big data analytic workloads. It provides organizations with a single place to store every type of data prior to any formal definition of schema or transformation requirements. It has no fixed limits to either file or account size, and has massive throughput to increase analytic performance. Azure Data Lake is a Hadoop File System compatible with HDFS that works with the Hadoop ecosystem providing integration with Azure HDInsight, and will be integrated with Microsoft offerings such as Revolution-R Enterprise and industry standard distributions like Hortonworks and Cloudera.

Microsoft Azure Data Lake works with HDInsight, Revolution Analytics, Hortonworks, and Cloudera.

Azure SQL Database Full-text Search

Full-text search in Azure SQL Database support richer search capabilities in new cloud applications. With this and other features such as the in-memory columnstore and parallel query, we continue to bring the benefits from the decades of innovation in query processing technologies on-premises to the cloud and make it even easier to migrate existing on-premises SQL Server applications to the cloud.

Microsoft JDBC 4.2 driver for SQL Server

We are pleased to announce availability of the Microsoft JDBC 4.2 Driver for SQL Server! The updated driver provides robust data access to Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database for Java-based applications. The JDBC Driver for SQL Server is a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) type 4 driver that implements full compliance with the JDBC specifications 4.1 and 4.2 and supports Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.8.

Power BI content packs - February 2016

Power BI continues to make it easier for users to connect to their data, providing pre-built solutions for popular services as part of the experience. This month we added content packs for Azure Search and Troux.

Azure Search for Power BI allows you to monitor and understand the traffic to your Azure Search service. The Azure Search content pack for Power BI provides detailed insights on your Search data, including Search, Indexing, Service Stats and Latency. Connecting Power BI to your Azure Search analytics storage is easy and the analytics will include metrics from the last 30 days for you to explore.

Troux enables businesses to manage technology investments and ensure the greatest impact while minimizing risk. The Power BI content pack allows you to visualize your applications, technologies and capabilities of your current system as well as analysis over time.

Subscribers to these supported services can now quickly connect to their account from Power BI and see their data through live dashboards and interactive reports that have been pre-built for them. Getting started with data visualization and analysis has never been easier, for additional information visit the Power BI blog.

Power BI publish to web

We are announcing the public preview of the exciting new Microsoft Power BI publish to web capability. Microsoft Power BI publish to web allows you to tell compelling stories with interactive data visualizations in minutes. You can easily embed interactive Power BI visualizations in your blog and websites or share the stunning visuals through your emails or social media communications. You can reach millions of users on any device, any place. You can edit, update, refresh or un-share visuals with ease. Real-life industry usage and reference examples, videos, demos, and supporting blogs and details are now publicly available at www.powerbi.com/publishtoweb.

Revolution R Open 3.2.2

Revolution R Open (RRO) is the enhanced distribution of R from Revolution Analytics. RRO 3.2.2 includes R 3.2.2, the most widely used statistics software in the world, and is therefore fully compatibility with all packages, scripts, and applications that work with that version of R.

RRO 3.2.2 offers its users enhanced capabilities over R for improved performance, reproducibility, as well as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux based platform support. Like R, Revolution R Open is open source and free to download, use, and share.

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.NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 now available

.NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 are now generally available. .NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications that run everywhere. This release includes the runtime and libraries for .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. Aligned with this release we are also releasing the Preview 2 of the corresponding tooling. This tooling includes a new set of command line tools, as well as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions that enable developers to work with .NET Core projects. This tooling will be available as RTM aligned with the next major release of Visual Studio, Visual Studio “15”.

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Visual Studio Community 2015

Visual Studio Community 2015 is a new free, fully-featured edition of Visual Studio that lets developers target any platform, such as desktop and mobile, web and cloud, and even IoT devices. Visual Studio Community also supports full Visual Studio extensibility, offering access to the ecosystem of over 5000 extensions.

Visual Studio Team Services: extensibility

REST APIs and Service Hooks to extend and integrate with Visual Studio Team Services.

Visual Studio Team Services: multi datacenter support

Visual Studio Team Services Team Projects can now be hosted in US or EU datacenters.

Zend Z-Ray for Azure App Service

Now available as a free preview, this integration of innovative Zend Z-Ray technology with Azure App Service helps offer excellent productivity and insight to both PHP developers and developers of PHP-based applications such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and Joomla. You can enable Z-Ray for App Service web apps in the Settings blade of the Azure portal.

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Azure IoT Suite

Capture and analyze untapped device data to improve results across your business with Microsoft Azure IoT Suite. With Azure IoT Suite, you can connect your devices and harness disparate data to create new intelligence, enabling you to integrate and transform your business and processes. Built on the flexible and innovative Microsoft Cloud Platform, Azure IoT Suite integrates with your company’s existing processes, devices, and systems to enable you to make the best use of your existing and new data sources. With preconfigured solutions, you can quickly and confidently get started with a solution that is tailored to meet your business needs, then scale your IoT projects across your company. Get started with the Internet of Things by working with Microsoft to enable your company to use new insights to improve your business processes and create new business models to stay ahead of your competition.

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The information on this page is subject to change at any time without notice, and may not be applicable to customers in all geographies.

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