Cloud Platform Release Announcements for October 17, 2018

Azure App Service | Price reductions for App Service on Linux basic and premium tiers

We’ve recently reduced prices for Azure App Service on Linux for the basic and premium tiers.

Azure App Service allows you to quickly build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web, mobile, and API apps running on any platform. Meet rigorous performance, scalability, security, and compliance requirements while using a fully managed platform to perform infrastructure maintenance and build enterprise-grade applications.

See full details.

Azure Digital Twins | Now in preview

Azure Digital Twins is now available in preview. Digital Twins is a cloud, AI, and IoT platform that uniquely enables customers and partners to create a comprehensive digital model of the physical environment that includes people, places, and things, as well as the relationships and processes that bind them.

Create comprehensive digital models and spatially aware solutions that can be applied to any physical environment. Build secure and contextually aware solutions that optimize energy efficiency, space utilization, improve employee and occupant satisfaction, and better serves peoples’ needs. The platform significantly accelerates and simplifies the creation of digital twin solutions attuned to specific industry needs and is equipped with multi-tenancy and nested tenancy capabilities that enable you to securely repeat your solutions to scale your business.

The release of Digital Twins in preview is another powerful example of how Microsoft continues to deliver on its commitment to simplify IoT so any customer, no matter where they’re starting from, can create trusted, connected solutions for digital transformation. By removing layers of complexity and accelerating the creation of innovative spatial intelligence solutions, Azure Digital Twins provides organizations with the foundation they need to create the next wave of innovation in IoT.

To learn more, read the full blog post and visit the Azure Digital Twins webpage.

Azure Cognitive Services available in new regions

Pricing | Azure Cognitive Services webpage

New regions are now available for Azure Cognitive Services. The Content Moderator, Computer Vision, Face, Text Analytics, Translator Text, and Language Understanding (LUIS) Services are now generally available in US Government regions.

See the pricing page for additional details.

Azure SQL Database | Dev/test pricing now available as part of the Azure Enterprise dev/test offer

Now generally available for vCore-based resource types in Azure SQL Database (excluding Managed Instance), dev/test pricing provides a cost-effective way to run your development and testing workloads on Azure SQL Database. With dev/test pricing for Azure SQL Database, you can save up to 55 percent versus list prices.

Get started today with a Visual Studio subscription and visit the Azure Dev/Test pricing page for more information.

Determine your savings with our pricing calculator.

Azure Database for MySQL | Read replica in preview

Azure Database for MySQL now supports continuous asynchronous replication of data from one Azure Database for MySQL server (master) to up to five Azure Database for MySQL servers (replicas) in the same region. This allows read-heavy workloads to scale beyond the capacity constraints of one Azure Database for MySQL server and be balanced across replica servers according to the users' preference. Replica servers are read-only except for writes replicated from data changes on the master. Stopping replication to a replica server causes it to become a standalone server that accepts reads and writes.

Learn more about Read replicas in Azure Database for MySQL.

Azure Media Services and Video Indexer | Azure Media Services v3 API now available

Azure Media Services v3 API is now generally available. This API allows developers and media companies to build media applications that include encoding, content protection with DRM, video indexing, live streaming, dynamic packaging, and content delivery at scale. The API now features a simplified development and management model, and a new live streaming entity. There are also new updates to Azure Media Player.

For more information about the capabilities, read the announcement.