Microsoft Azure cloud updates: Key Vault, Docker, and large virtual machines

Microsoft rings in New Year by rolling out new enhancements to its Azure cloud computing platform. The company has announced larger, high-performance virtual machines, a Key Vault for secure storage of customer encryption keys, and availability of Docker images for customers to use on Azure. The company has announced the general availability of a new series of VM sizes for Azure Virtual Machines, called the G-series. G-series offers up to 32 vCPUs using the latest Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family, 448GB of memory, and 6.59 TB of local Solid State Drive (SSD) space. This large amount of memory will enable much faster deployments of mission critical applications such as large relational database servers like SQL Server and MySQL and large NoSQL and BigData solutions like MongoDB, Cassandra, Cloudera, xTremeData, and DataStax. These new sizes also increase the maximum count of attached data disks to 64, enabling the attachment of up to 64 TBs of persistent disks in Azure Storage. [caption id=“attachment_2011291” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] In addition, to help organisations better manage their cloud data security, Microsoft unveiled a public preview of its new Azure Key Vault. Azure Key Vault helps customers safeguard and control keys and secrets using Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances in the cloud, with ease and at cloud-scale. Key Vault can be configured in minutes, without the need to deploy, wait for, or manage an HSM and has a single programming model across HSM-protected and software-protected keys. The service scales to meet your needs, and is available in multiple regions to enable application redundancy. The Key Vault preview is available in East US, North Central US, North Europe, West Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The company said it expects to enable more regions over the next few months. “In October, we made several announcements about Azure embracing Docker as a core part of our application and infrastructure investments going forward. Today marks another milestone of the Microsoft Azure integration with Docker container technology and ecosystem with a fully integrated Docker engine on an Ubuntu image, available in the Azure Marketplace,” said Corey Sanders, director of program management, Azure, in a blogpost. Users can now easily select a Docker gallery item and provision an Azure Ubuntu VM with the latest Docker engine immediately ready to use. Just give your credentials and SSH to the VM.