At its Inspire 2021 conference this week, Microsoft has announced a bunch of enhancements to its Azure solutions and detailed how it is innovating its products to make it easier for organizations to migrate to the cloud.
First up, Microsoft is rebranding the Azure Migration Program (AMP) to Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP). As the name suggests, this means that Microsoft will be aiding customers in not only migrating their infrastructure to Azure, but also in modernizing their existing solutions. AMMP is also being extended to support Azure Spring Cloud and Azure Cosmos DB as well.
Secondly, the Redmond tech giant is now offering free extended security updates to Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, and SQL Server 2012. But this facility is only available on Azure, and customers will have to purchase extended security updates for on-premises infrastructure. Similarly, Microsoft says that in order to give customers time to upgrade Windows Server and SQL Server 2008/R2 on Azure to newer versions, the company is giving another year of free extended security updates.
John Chirapurath, Vice President, Azure Data & AI at Microsoft, emphasized the company"s continued commitment to innovate its cloud-native Azure solutions, saying that:
Our commitment to developers is to make Azure the best cloud for developing intelligent cloud-native applications that harness the power of data and AI.
[...] With the exponential growth in the volume, type, source, and interconnectedness of data, the need has never been greater to discover and govern that data across the organization.
To that end, App Containerization, which is currently in preview, now supports deployments to Azure App Service. Similarly, the general purpose tier for Azure Arc-enabled Azure SQL will hit general availability on July 30, 2021. The service allows customers to manage their SQL Server environments during migrations to the cloud.