Four Microsoft Azure Improvements Happening During WPC 2014

There's a lot of valuable announcements to glean from WPC 2014 already, and the week has barely gotten started.

Here's a couple links to help get caught up:

All the Announcements to Follow at WPC 2014

WPC 2014 Opens with New Programs Designed for Partner Cloud Success

With those ingested, I think it's also important to highlight several key improvements to Microsoft Azure this week. A couple of the improvements align directly with WPC 2014 announcements, while the others will better enable Microsoft Partners to be successful in selling the Microsoft Cloud.

Azure Machine Learning enters Preview – as promised the service preview opened on Monday to partners and customers. What is it? Read more: Microsoft Azure Machine Learning: Fixing Today's Problems Yesterday. Visit: Machine Learning Center.

Event Hubs enters public Preview – available now in public Preview, Event Hubs is Microsoft's answer for ingesting and processing millions of events per second in the race to be the lead provider in the Internet of Things (IoT). Visit: Event Hubs page.

Azure SQL Database Management in Azure Preview portal – customers can now manage Azure SQL Database subscriptions (web and business, Basic, Standard, and Premium) directly within the Azure Preview portal. Visit: Azure Preview portal.

Azure Block Blog Storage pricing altered – taking effect on September 1, 2014, Azure Block Blob Storage pricing is being adjusted to charge to the 4^th decimal (instead of the existing pricing of 3 decimals). Visit: Storage Pricing details page.

New Virtual Machine Diagnostics and Reporting – new ways to monitor Azure has been released including metrics every minute, increased number of performance counters, encompassing alerting, and direct data storage monitoring.

Easier pricing consumption – a new recommended pricing tier is available in the Azure Preview portal, providing 3 pricing recommendations based on your usage and requirements.

Microsoft Azure Cost Estimator Tool Released in Beta – Microsoft has released a new tool into beta that profiles existing on-premises infrastructure and then estimates the cost of running apps and services in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Read more: Microsoft Azure Cost Estimator