A little over a year ago, Microsoft Build 2020 was Microsoft’s first flagship event to become all-digital early in the COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted to ensure we were there to support developers, who had become more critical than ever to business and societal continuity during the pandemic. During these most challenging times, developers have enabled businesses large and small to continue growing, transforming, and even reimagining the way they fulfill their purpose of supporting their customers and employees.

Microsoft Azure’s mission is to help people and organizations invent with purpose. We are proud to support developers—in many ways, the digital-first responders and pioneers of our generation—and the broader organizations they drive with their innovation. At digital Microsoft Build 2021 this week, we announced a host of new capabilities that help developers create intelligent, connected, and secure cloud-native apps that harness the power of data and AI and run anywhere. Below are the key stories we landed this week at Microsoft Build, with ways to explore for more details.

Increase developer velocity with Microsoft’s end-to-end developer platform

As a company built by developers and for developers, our goal at Microsoft is to provide them with the agility to address the real-world needs of

“Tech companies born with an open-source mentality get it. It’s our ability to work together that makes our dreams believable, and ultimately achievable; we must learn to build on the ideas of others”—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Microsoft has always been a developer-first organization, and we are striving to make our tools and platforms better to serve developers. In that spirit, Azure is designed to give developers control over their infrastructure and provide the greatest flexibility regardless of operating system, database, language, deployment tool, or methodology, and to extend those options on-premises and to the edge. Today, many of those systems are open source: Linux, Kubernetes, Spark, and Python—just some of the best-known examples. And so Azure has been built to run those technologies, either at the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) levels, through Linux running in virtual machines (VMs), or our Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for cloud-native development, often in tandem with one of our managed services for popular open-source databases.

We are committed to open source at Microsoft. We contribute to Linux, Kubernetes, Visual Studio Code, and serving in open-source organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) or Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). At

As your ally in the cloud, our Azure mission is to deliver thoughtfully designed products and services that equip you to solve challenges and invent what’s next. Our ability to meet your business and innovation needs is in part due to our growth mindset—which extends from front-end user experiences to small details like graphics and icons.

One detail updating today is the Azure “A” icon, which will be rolled out in product experiences and across related sites in the coming weeks. The new Azure icon represents the unity of Azure within the larger Microsoft family of product icons. It’s part of Microsoft’s Fluent Design System, carefully crafted to produce icons that look familiar to what customers know and love, while representing the agile future of our business.

The new Azure product family icon

The constant evolution of the cloud industry—and your business needs—is inspiring. It drives us to deliver products and services that support your growth and adapt to your shifting requirements. Your feedback is priceless for identifying and prioritizing updates. Please let us know what you’d like to see in the future on our feedback forum.

Azure. Invent with purpose.