This article is based on announcements made at Microsoft Build 2017. Original reporting attributed to heraldkeeper.com.
Microsoft Build 2017: A Shift Toward Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge
At Microsoft Build 2017, CEO Satya Nadella framed the event around a fundamental shift in computing: the convergence of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge. In Nadella’s words, “It is a pretty unbelievable world you can create using intelligent cloud and intelligent edge.” That theme ran through nearly every major announcement at the conference, spanning databases, IoT, managed open-source services, AI, and developer tooling.
Azure Cosmos DB: A Globally Distributed, Multi-Model Database
One of the headline announcements was Azure Cosmos DB, described by Microsoft as a database built from scratch to “power planet-scale cloud services.” Cosmos DB evolved from DocumentDB, Microsoft’s earlier NoSQL database service, and extends its capabilities significantly.
Key characteristics of Cosmos DB include:
- Multi-model support: Handles documents, graphs, key-value pairs, and columnar data under a single service.
- Global distribution: Designed for planet-scale workloads with configurable consistency levels.
- Fault tolerance: Built-in high availability and automatic failover capabilities.
- Tiered availability: The Basic tier was announced as broadly available, while the Standard tier was planned for a limited number of Azure regions at launch.
For DevOps teams managing globally distributed applications, Cosmos DB positions itself as a single managed database back-end that can replace multiple specialized data stores.
Managed MySQL and PostgreSQL on Azure
Microsoft also announced fully managed instances of MySQL and PostgreSQL on the Azure cloud platform. These offerings bring familiar open-source relational databases into a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model, removing the operational overhead associated with self-managed instances—patching, backups, scaling, and high availability are all handled by Azure.
For teams already running MySQL or PostgreSQL workloads on-premises or on other clouds, these managed services lower the barrier to migrating into Azure without rewriting application code or retraining teams on a proprietary database engine.
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) integration was also highlighted, enabling continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for containerized applications built on these databases.
Azure Database Migration Service: Moving from Oracle and SQL Server
Complementing the managed database announcements, Microsoft launched a Database Migration Service that helps developers and DBAs move third-party databases—including Oracle—and existing SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Database. This signals Microsoft’s continued push to compete directly with Oracle in the enterprise database market, giving organizations a structured migration path rather than a lift-and-shift approach.
Azure IoT Hub: Multi-Language Support for Edge Devices
For IoT workloads, Microsoft reinforced the capabilities of Azure IoT Hub as a central management plane for connected devices. Developers can write device-side applications using a broad set of languages and runtimes:
- C
- Node.js
- Java
- .NET
- Python
This flexibility is important for teams that have existing codebases in multiple languages or that are building heterogeneous fleets of edge devices. Centralized management through IoT Hub means device provisioning, telemetry ingestion, and command-and-control operations can all be handled through a single Azure service.
AI and Cognitive Services Expansions
Microsoft used Build 2017 to expand its Cognitive Services portfolio. New and updated offerings announced at the conference included:
- Bing Custom Search: Allows developers to build tailored search experiences scoped to specific content domains.
- Custom Vision Service: Enables training of image classification models without deep machine learning expertise.
- Custom Decision Service: Provides reinforcement-learning-based personalization capabilities.
- Video Indexer: Extracts metadata and insights from video content automatically.
- Presentation Translator: Uses Microsoft’s Translation APIs to deliver real-time multilingual subtitles within PowerPoint presentations.
The Microsoft Bot Framework was also highlighted as a way for developers to build conversational AI interfaces, enabling human-to-AI interaction through natural language across channels such as web, mobile, and messaging platforms.
Cortana Skills Kit: Public Preview
The Cortana Skills Kit entered public preview at Build 2017, initially available in the United States. It allows developers to extend Cortana’s capabilities by building custom “skills”—essentially voice-driven integrations—accessible across:
- Windows 10
- iOS
- Android
- Cortana-powered Invoke speakers (manufactured by Harman Kardon)
This positions Cortana as a cross-platform voice assistant with a developer ecosystem, similar in concept to Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit.
Where Azure Fits in the Cloud Platform Landscape
For teams evaluating cloud platforms, Azure competes directly with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offering comparable compute, storage, networking, database, AI, and developer tooling capabilities. The announcements at Build 2017 reflect Microsoft’s strategy of differentiating Azure through deep integration with enterprise tooling (Visual Studio, SQL Server, Active Directory), strong open-source support (Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes), and a growing AI and cognitive services layer.
For DevOps practitioners, the practical takeaways from Build 2017 were concrete: managed open-source databases reduce operational burden, VSTS CI/CD integration simplifies containerized deployments, and the Cosmos DB and IoT Hub announcements offer new options for globally distributed and edge-connected application architectures.
Original reporting sourced from heraldkeeper.com (2017). Some service names and availability details may have changed since this article was published.