At the second part of its virtual Ignite conference this year, Microsoft has unveiled new improvements coming to its Azure analytics tooling and solutions. These are meant to enable faster deployments and better insights for customers.
With respect to catering to its Chinese customers, Microsoft has announced a new datacenter region for the country. Currently, China has four datacenter regions, with the most recent one made available in 2018. With the new region, the company will be able to offer its cloud solutions to more customers. Chinese datacenter regions are meant for organizations operating in China only. The announcement also comes with the general availability of Azure Resource Mover. This tool allows customers to migrate their existing applications to other regions if required.
Microsoft has also launched a tool called Azure Synapse Pathway. As the name suggests, it allows customers to migrate their data warehouse to Azure Synapse Analytics while automating the translation code containing business logic. It currently supports BigQuery, SQL Server, Teradata, Redshift, and more. Azure Stream Analytics has received an updated to enable dedicated single tenant clusters for increased reliability.
The Redmond tech giant has also added new capabilities to its unified data governance service, Azure Purview. These features are in preview for now and include autonomous scanning and classification of data in multiple storage solutions such as S3 and Oracle Database. Scanning of data is possible on Azure Synapse Analytics workspaces too.
Enterprise and Enterprise Flash tiers of Azure Cache for Redis are finally available generally too. These offer larger cache sizes, real-time search, and geo-replication for increased availability. For customers who utilize Cassandra NoSQL data on Azure and find it difficult to choose between a self-managed infrastructure or migrating fully to platform-as-a-solution offerings such as Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft has introduced Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra as a semi-managed service in preview.
Speaking of Azure Cosmos DB, there are four new updates on that front as well. Two that have hit general availability are Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB and Mongo v4.0 server support in Azure Cosmos DB API for Mongo DB. The former links Azure Cosmos DB to Azure Synapse Analytics while the latter allows better error handling support, increased flexibility in processing data, and new aggregation operators. Finally, the two capabilities that are currently in preview are the self-explanatory Azure Cosmos DB Continuous Backup and Point-in-Time, as well as role-based access control (RBAC) support.
Check out our other Ignite 2021 coverage right here.