[Updated 10-1-2015]

Today at AzureCon Microsoft announced a whole raft of features.  The announcements can be grouped into three categories.

1. Features that were previously in Preview that have just gone into General Availability
2. Features that have just entered the Public Preview Stage
3. Features that will be Previewed in the near future

The Category 1 announcements were pretty interesting, but you have probably heard about them before since they have been in Preview for a while. I am not going to  cover them here. Category 2 and 3 are more interesting.

Here is a partial list of the announcements:

• Azure Security Center: Azure-provided security analysis and threat reporting
• Dev/Test Lab: Including the ability to provision  development resources, set quotas and VM size limits,specify shutdown rules and track spending against budgets
• Data Lake: A new distributed analytics platform with a new SQL-like language
• Reserved Compute VM prices: With heavy discounts based on up-front commitments
• New N-Series VMs: VMs that have GPU support and a new partnership with NVidia
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse: An Elastic data warehouse offering
• HDInsight on Linux
• Azure Container Service: A resource provider to allow you to manage container clusters of Docker, Mesos, Marathon and Docker Swarm
• New India Data Centers
• Azure-Akamai CDN partnership
• Azure Files enhancements: Including SMB 3.0 support and the ability to mount file shares outside of Azure

And more.  We will have much more to say about these announcement over the coming weeks.

In addition to three announcement packed keynotes there were over 60 on demand sessions which are currently available on the AzureCon site.

Bill