Weekly Cloud Provider News – Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Azure Virtual Machine, Azure Price Incentives and Google Cloud VMware Engine
Here’s our weekly update on recent cloud provider news. This week, Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and Bulk Insert, Azure offers Virtual Machine-level disk bursting, Microsoft offers Azure licensing incentives, and news about Google Cloud VMware Engine.
- Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which provides the ability to host the report server web portal on the same Amazon RDS DB instance as your SQL Server database. There is no additional cost to install SSRS directly on an Amazon RDS database. AWS is continually adding features to the RDS platform, removing technical barriers to make it easier for enterprises to adopt the service. SSRS is a common feature used by enterprises, and by adding support with RDS, customers can continue to use this feature. Read more here.
- Amazon RDS for SQL Server now also supports Bulk Insert on highly-available DB Instances using Amazon S3 integration, in both Multi-AZ and Single-AZ configurations. This gives customers the ability to transfer files between a DB instance and Amazon S3. Organizations can now stage data in S3 and load directly in Amazon RDS for SQL Server. This feature can be used as a one-time load task as customers adopt RDS or as an integration solution. Get more details here.
- Azure Virtual Machine-level disk bursting is a new feature that enables workloads to handle unforeseen disk traffic spikes smoothly, without the need to overprovision a virtual machine. The feature is now enabled on all of Azure Lsv2-series virtual machines. With this feature, Azure has provided the ability for organizations to select a lower-tier virtual machine (VM) to handle workloads for the vast majority of time. In instances where peak or high utilization processes take place, this feature allows VMs to take advantage of unused disk capability to increase performance. This represents a cost-savings opportunity for organizations that would normally need to select from a higher-performance tier VM with a higher cost. They can now select a lower-priced VM, using this feature as a temporary stop-gap. IT teams no longer need to size VMs to handle peak workload demands. Right-sizing of VMs can be the priority, rather than sizing VMs for those short peaks of performance requirements. Enterprises looking to migrate these types of workloads to the cloud now have a viable solution to these concerns which would normally keep them away from the public cloud. Learn more here.
- Microsoft is offering licensing incentives to organizations considering a move to Azure. This news gives organizations a real cost-savings incentive to move to Azure, including hybrid-cloud incentives that extend to security patching and additional migrations tools that would normally be cost-prohibitive to some organizations. Find out more here.
- Google has announced the full integration of the CloudSimple service into GCP Google Cloud VMware Engine, streamlining the ability to import and run VMWare VMs on GCP. It is a fully managed service and Google expects it to be generally available in two U.S. regions this quarter. It will also expand into additional global regions in the second half of 2020. The principal advantage of Google’s offering is that it can all be initiated through the GCP console. Once the VMware cluster has been created in GCP, you can extend on-premises VMware estate into GCP, allowing customers to rapidly extend into GCP if required. This is a fully managed VMware solution where all patching and maintenance is managed by GCP, lowering the cost of running the estate. Read more here.
If you have any questions about these product updates and how they can optimize your environment, please contact us at hello@navisite.com.
You May Also Like