At the recent Build 2018 developer conference, Microsoft shared the breadth of innovation coming to Azure–across Azure Stack, data and analytics solutions, IoT and more. Government customers can continue to count on this rapid pace of commercial innovation coming to Azure Government over time, as services becoming generally available, throughout the year.

Azure Stack unlocks hybrid cloud scenarios for government customers

In disconnected scenarios when you can’t bring your data to the cloud, Azure Stack extends the Azure application platform and brings the power of Azure cloud services to your data, enabling the intelligent edge. In mid-2018, Azure Stack will integrate with the Azure Government cloud, building connections to Azure Government identity, subscription, registration, billing, backup/DR, and Azure Marketplace.

Some recent announcements about Azure Stack:

• We’re continuing to extend Azure SDK support to Azure Stack by enabling API Profiles capability for .NET and other languages later this summer. We are also publishing a new API Profile to represent the latest capability in Azure Stack. You can learn more about API version profiles in our documentation.
• Azure Stack now supports availability sets across multiple fault domains. Cloud application developers have been using availability sets in Azure to ensure high availability for their workloads and protect themselves from underlying maintenance and outages. You can bring this capability into your own facility with Azure Stack.
• Updates to Azure Storage Services simplifies the movement of data between Azure and Azure Stack. This will be especially beneficial to customers looking to create hybrid applications that span Azure and Azure Stack.
• Helping customers meet custom regulatory requirements for their cloud applications is one of the charter missions for Azure Stack. Accordingly, we’re doing a lot of the legwork to help customers navigate this complicated and time-consuming task. To learn more about the reports, and how they could factor into your architecture, check out the blog post.

You can read more about recent Azure Stack news and momentum here.

Unlocking IoT from the intelligent cloud to the intelligent edge

As a company, Microsoft is making a big push to enable developers to build IoT solutions that create real-world impact to the intelligent edge. Recently we announced that we will invest $5 billion in IoT over the next four years to continue to bring the best tools, services, security and experiences to connected solutions.

Below are some of the updates announced at Build for Azure IoT Hub, our PaaS service for connecting and managing IoT devices easily and securely:

• Automatic device management enables customers to specify configurations or deployments once, and then have IoT Hub automatically manage devices as they are added to IoT Hub—perfect for handling the complexities of deploying and monitoring device updates at scale.
• Module twins allow fine-grained management for applications on devices, or even modules within an application, such as an IoT Edge deployment.

In addition, Windows 10 IoT continues to drive security and performance at the edge:

• Windows 10 IoT enables developers to create powerful solutions at the edge that are secure and scalable, featuring built-in integration with Azure IoT. In the next release of Windows, Windows AI platform with Windows 10 IoT will provide hardware-accelerated machine learning model evaluation with any DirectX 12 compute device. This technology will enable you to extract the most performance from the broadest range of modern hardware. Today, nearly any new Windows PC will have a DirectX 12-compatible GPU, giving you a broad range of choices for your intelligent edge solution.

You can read additional IoT updates from Microsoft here, and learn more about enabling more device-management scenarios with new features in Azure IoT Hub.

Data & analytics solutions:

At Build, we also shared a wealth of recent Microsoft investments that continue to empower every developer, data scientist, and data professional to do more with data. Only Microsoft delivers a consistent and global platform optimized for hybrid environments with a rich set of data and analytics technologies that empower today’s innovators to unleash the power of data and reimagine the possibilities that will improve our world.

Here are some of the updates that will soon be relevant to Azure Government:

• Azure Cosmos DB updates: With new multi-master at global scale capabilities designed to support both the cloud and the edge – on-premises and IoT devices as regions, increased security through the general availability of VNET, and general availability of Bulk Executor library delivers a 10x improvement in write throughput—importing over a terabyte of data in under an hour. These updates are currently in preview in Azure.
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse updates: To help organizations derive fast insights from exponentially growing data, we announced a new performance-optimized tier to dramatically accelerate query performance and concurrency for our customers. These updates are currently available in Azure Government.

You can read more about data and analytics solutions and support for data migration here.

You may also be interesting in viewing the videos of key Build content. Enjoy!