At TechEd in Houston today, Microsoft announced a wide range of updates to its Azure cloud platform. As has become customary for Azure updates, the new features announced today include a mix of previews of brand-new capabilities, and general availability releases of features previously only in preview.

 

In the general availability bucket are a set of new networking options for connectivity to Azure. Currently, Azure users connect to Azure through a mix of public Internet addresses and private VPNs, with all traffic going over the Internet. The new ExpressRoute capability provides a third option: direct private connections to Azure, either through exchange providers, or by connecting Azure to existing corporate WANs.

 

ExpressRoute will be offered with a 99.9 percent SLA and four bandwidth tiers: 200Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, and 10Gbps. Though now generally available, the connectivity is currently limited to connections via two US sites—Silicon Valley and Washington, DC—and London. Microsoft intends to make it available in 13 further locations by the end of the year.

Organizations using the existing VPN connectivity will also have new options. Previously, Azure's virtual networks could only have a single on-premises endpoint, so there was no good way for multiple Azure virtual networks (in different data centers, say) to communicate with different corporate locations or with each other. Today, multiple site connections are possible, and virtual networks can be joined to each other, addressing both of these shortcomings.

 

Microsoft is also announcing finer control of the public IP addresses exposed by Azure virtual machines. Going into general availability today is the ability to reserve public IPs on the Azure load balancer. This will allow applications to be exposed at the same public IP address, even when the virtual machines are reprovisioned. And going into public preview today is the ability to give individual virtual machines public IP addresses, so that non-load-balanced services, such as FTP or system monitoring, can be used.

 

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