Microsoft Azure vs Oracle Cloud

2023. ChatGPT comes to Microsoft Azure



Microsoft has announced that ChatGPT is generally available through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, corporate-focused offering designed to give businesses access to OpenAI’s technologies with added governance and compliance features. ChatGPT joins the range of other OpenAI-developed systems already served through the Azure OpenAI Service, including the text-generating GPT-3.5, the code-generating Codex and the image-generating DALL-E 2. Microsoft has a close working relationship with OpenAI, having invested billions into the startup and inking an exclusive agreement to commercialize OpenAI’s AI research.


2021. Microsoft launches Azure Container Apps, a new serverless container service



Microsoft today announced the preview launch of Azure Container Apps, a new fully managed serverless container service that complements the company’s existing container infrastructure services like the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Microsoft notes that Azure Container Apps was specifically built for microservices, with the ability to quickly scale based on HTTP traffic, events or long-running background jobs. In many ways, it’s probably most like AWS App Runner, one of Amazon’s small fleet of serverless container services, with App Runner also specifically focused on microservices. Google meanwhile also offers a set of container-centric services, including Cloud Run, its serverless platform for running container-based applications.


2019. Microsoft launched cloud APIs for form and handwriting recognition



Microsoft introduced several new cognitive services on its Azure Machine Learning cloud platform. First, these are gifts for companies dealing with documents, forms and office notes with handwritten text. The Ink Recognizer and Form Recognizer services allow to transform all these paper documents into digital text and data. Conversation Transcription service - transforms phone dialogs into text with each phrase author recognition. Another new service Personalizer allows you to provide personalized recommendations for website or online store visitors basing on behavioral factors. In addition, Microsoft introduced a new visual interface to create machine learning models. Now even marketers can play with ML. You just need to load the database and specify which parameter you want to predict.


2019. Microsoft launched own Windows Virtual Desktop service


Virtual desktop services have been long provided by Microsoft's numerous cloud partners, and now the company has realized that it can do it alone. The new Windows Virtual Desktop service (which is now available for companies on Microsoft Azure cloud platform) allows to install Windows, Office and other software licenses on the cloud, but not on employees' computers. And employees will be able to work with their software via a virtual desktop. What is the sense of this? First, it allows even an old Win7 computer to work fast, and provide Windows 10. Second, it is more convenient for the administrator to create new workplaces, maintain them and ensure security. The service itself is free. You only pay for the additional Azure resources (memory, CPU time) that you consume.


2018. Microsoft Azure gets new high-performance storage options



Microsoft Azure is getting a number of new storage options that mostly focus on use cases where disk performance matters. The first of these is Azure Ultra SSD Managed Disks, which are now in public preview. Microsoft says that these drives will offer “sub-millisecond latency,” which unsurprisingly makes them ideal for workloads where latency matters. Standard SSD Managed Disks are now generally available after only three months in preview. To top things off, all of Azure’s storage tiers (Premium and Standard SSD, as well as Standard HDD) now offer 8, 16 and 32 TB storage capacity. Also new today is Azure Premium files, which is now in preview. This, too, is an SSD-based service. Azure Files itself isn’t new, though. It offers users access to cloud storage using the standard SMB protocol. This new premium offering promises higher throughput and lower latency for these kind of SMB operations.


2017. Microsoft launched new archival storage option for Azure



Microsoft introduced a new storage option for its Azure cloud computing platform - Azure Archive Blob Storage. This will give developers a cheaper alternative for the long-term storage of large amounts of archival data like logs, raw camera footage, audio recordings, transcripts and medical documents and images. The main difference between the cool and archive tiers is that while archival storage is cheaper, the data retrieval costs are higher. Data that’s stored in the archive tier is also not immediately available for retrieval. The blobs first have to be “rehydrated” and that can take up to 15 hours for blobs that hold less than 50GB of data. It’s worth noting, though, that alternative cold strorage services Amazon Glacier and Google Near have been around for years now.


2017. Microsoft launches new tools to help enterprises move to its Azure cloud



Microsoft says that 80 percent of the companies it talks to want to use a hybrid cloud approach and to help them move to its cloud platform Azure, the company is launching a number of new tools. The most important of these is the new Cloud Migration Assessment service. With this, companies can scan their existing IT infrastructure and get an estimate for what it would cost to move these services to Azure (and how much they could save in the process). Azure users can now also get a discount for moving their Windows Server licenses (with Software Assurance) to Azure. This new Azure Hybrid Use Benefit can save them up to 40 percent and is obviously meant to make it more attractive for existing Windows Server users to move their workloads to the cloud. For those who want to make that move, the Azure Site Recovery (ASR) tool is also getting a minor update. This service is mostly meant to help enterprises orchestrate their disaster recovery plans, however, it can also be used to migrate existing virtual machines to Azure.


2014. Following SAP and Oracle, IBM jumps to Microsoft Azure



Microsoft already partnered with SAP and Oracle on its cloud-computing platform. And now IBM becomes the latest partner in Microsoft's enterprise software layer. According to the deal, companies will make IBM middleware such as WebSphere Liberty, MQ, and DB2 available on Microsoft Azure. Windows Server and SQL Server will be offered on IBM Cloud. Microsoft .NET runtime will become available for IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform. So, now Microsoft can boast about having the Big Four on its cloud platform for enterprises.


2014. Microsoft Azure appliance makes comeback



Microsoft is launching a new Azure appliance that companies or service providers can deploy in their own data centers. Called the Cloud Platform System, the new appliance will run the same Azure APIs, services, hypervisor, and everything as the Azure public cloud and will be able to connect easily to the Azure public cloud. The appliance is especially interesting considering Microsoft’s previous dabbling into the idea of Azure appliances. It has previously floated the idea of selling appliances to a few large service provider partners such as HP, and even launched a program to help web hosts to launch their own versions of Azure. Both of them appear to have fallen along the wayside for various business and technological reasons, but now the appliance is back.


2014. Microsoft and Docker team up to make containers play nice on Windows Server and Azure



Microsoft and Docker are partnering up to ensure that Docker’s container technology will be fully compatible with the next release of Windows Server. Through this partnership, developers will have a native version of the Docker engine running inside Windows. While Microsoft has previously enabled the use of Docker on its Azure cloud, developers had to do a series of tasks to get containers up and running. Now, it will be much easier for developers to spin up Docker containers on Azure without having to do any modifications as they’ll will be able to access the Docker Hub within the Azure management portal.