Real-time application scenarios such as chat for streaming videos, interactive whiteboards for remote education, and IoT dashboards are becoming ever more popular. Businesses are keen to build such applications for enhanced user experiences and real-time interactions with end customers.

Today, we are announcing the preview of the Azure Web PubSub service for building real-time web applications with WebSockets. WebSocket is a standardized protocol that provides full-duplex communication. It is key to building efficient real-time web interactions and is supported by all major browsers as well as web servers. Azure Web PubSub enables you to use WebSockets and the publish-subscribe pattern to easily build real-time web applications, like live monitoring dashboards, cross-platform live chat, real-time location on maps, and more.

Figure 1: Azure Web PubSub service usage scenarios

Fully managed, globally available

Real-time scenarios often require high-frequency data flows and large quantities of concurrent connections between the client and server. For example, a finance app to visualize market data may need up to 100,000 connections and live data with low latency in milliseconds. A non-trivial infrastructure setup is required to get such functionality up and running at scale. To implement a WebSocket-based real-time experience, a developer would first need to set up infrastructure for

The ability to run Kubernetes anywhere, whether in the cloud or on-premises, has been a high priority for Azure customers looking to rapidly innovate, with increasing customer focus on the benefits of container-optimized workloads and operating systems, lean application modernization, easier operations, and platform resiliency.

To support this rapid evolution, we’re announcing that Microsoft has acquired Kinvolk GmbH.

Kinvolk’s founding mission statement is “to build and promote an enterprise-grade open cloud-native stack”—we think this fits perfectly with our growing customer needs and our ongoing investments in open source and Kubernetes.

Kinvolk has a rich, innovative history in open source cloud-native distributed computing, including Kubernetes, eBPF, community building, and container-optimized Linux, as well as critical early work with CoreOS (the company) on the rkt container runtime. Kinvolk ultimately went on to create Flatcar Container Linux, a popular alternative to CoreOS Container Linux, as well as the Lokomotive and Inspektor Gadget projects.

Microsoft is excited to bring the expertise of the Kinvolk team to Azure, where they will be key contributors to the engineering development of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, and future projects that will expand Azure’s hybrid container platform capabilities and increase Microsoft’s upstream open source contributions in the Kubernetes and container space.

Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Get retail prices in non-USD currencies. New date picker in the cost analysis preview. What’s new in Cost Management Labs. Deploy key design principles with enterprise-scale architecture. Empowering operators on their cloud migration journey. New ways to save money with Azure. New videos and learning opportunities. Documentation updates.

Let’s dig into the details.

Get retail prices in non-USD currencies

In September 2020, you learned about the new Retail Prices API and how it gives

Microsoft is excited to join Red Hat Summit 2021. It is our fifth year consecutively participating, and we look forward to engaging with the Red Hat community. In the April segment (April 27-28), Scott Guthrie, our executive vice president of Cloud + AI, will join Paul Cormier in the keynote “Open hybrid cloud: Changing what’s possible” to talk about our partnership, followed by an Ask the Expert session, “Azure Unplugged: Everything you need to know running Red Hat workloads on Azure.” Later in the June segment (June 15-16), we will feature more in-depth technical sessions and demos.

During the event, we will share the latest developments that enable Red Hat customers to operate natively in Azure. We will cover innovations across migration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) workloads, building cloud-native apps with Azure Red Hat OpenShift, running Red Hat workloads in hybrid with Azure Arc, operating and managing enterprise Java apps, and automating all tasks with Ansible on Azure.

Here’s a preview of what you will hear from us:

In addition to migrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to Azure Pay As You Go images, Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux now also supports Azure Reserved Instances. This allows customers

The past several months have seen their share of hardship, but despite the challenges, organizations continue to see digital transformation in the cloud as a path to growth. The promises of accelerated innovation, efficient operations, and lower costs among others, have helped many businesses remain viable—if not thrive—and they’re now looking at how they can do even more.

“We can do more now because our small team offloads all the heavy lifting to Azure. We can ship more features and ultimately give customers a faster, more secure, more feature-rich product.”—Paul Hill, Principal Cloud Architect, Schneider Electric

Back in October, we held our first digital event for Azure SQL, where customers learned how to boost scalability and resiliency by migrating their mission-critical SQL Server workloads onto Azure SQL. The event was successful and left many ready to take the next steps to continue their transformation journey and innovate in the cloud.

To help with this next step, we are hosting the Azure SQL digital event: Innovate Today with Azure SQL on May 4, 10:00 AM Pacific Time. During this hour-long virtual event, you’ll join Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President Azure Data, and a full team of Azure SQL experts to