Senior Software Engineer Romit Girdhar and Senior PM Tolu Agunbiade dive into the new Oracle-Azure Cloud Partnership that has opened up a world of possibilities for customers that use the benefits of both clouds for applications that run on Azure but rely on Oracle databases, software and services.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode288.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/412422f41d/?location=EUS2

Resources:

Public Announcements:
 
Oracle Press Release: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/microsoft-and-oracle-to-interconnect-microsoft-azure-and-oracle-cloud-060519.html
Microsoft Press Release: https://news.microsoft.com/2019/06/05/microsoft-and-oracle-to-interconnect-microsoft-azure-and-oracle-cloud/
 
Landing pages:
 
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/oci-azure.html
https://aka.ms/oracleonazure
 
Technical Content:
 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/oracle/oracle-oci-overview
https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/Network/Concepts/azure.htm
https://cloud.oracle.com/iaas/whitepapers/deploy_peoplesoft_jdedwards_across_oci_azure.pdf
https://cloud.oracle.com/iaas/whitepapers/deploy_oracle_retail_merchandising_suite_across_oci_azure.pdf 
https://cloud.oracle.com/iaas/whitepapers/deploy_ebusiness_suite_across_oci_azure_sso_oam.pdf 
https://cloud.oracle.com/iaas/whitepapers/deploy_ebusiness_suite_across_oci_azure_sso_idcs.pdf
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/saas-apps/oracle-cloud-tutorial

Other updates: 

Ephemeral OS disks for Azure VMs

Ephemeral OS disks are created on the local virtual machine (VM) storage and not saved to the remote Azure Storage. Ephemeral OS disks work well for stateless workloads, where applications are tolerant of individual VM failures, but are more affected by VM deployment time or reimaging the individual VM instances. With Ephemeral OS disk, you get lower read/write latency to the OS disk and faster VM reimage.

The key features of ephemeral disks are:

• Ideal for stateless applications.
• They can be used with both Marketplace and custom images.
• Ability to fast reset or reimage VMs and scale set instances to the original boot state.
• Lower latency, similar to a temporary disk.
• Ephemeral OS disks are free, you incur no storage cost for OS disk.
• They are available in all Azure regions.
• Ephemeral OS Disk is supported by Shared Image Gallery.

Loads of announcements this week due to inspire - I've put a few below, but it's not exhaustive.

Availability Zones support is now available for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in preview

Protect applications and data from datacenter failures with redundancies across Availability Zones. 

Blob API interoperability with Azure Data Lake Storage        Gen2 is now in preview

Proximity placement groups are now in preview

New 48vCPUs sizes for the Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, Esv3, Fsv2, and Lsv2 Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are now available so you can better match your workload requirements. 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-preview-of-azure-data-share/ 

Introducing the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure provides end-to-end guidance, best practices, documentation, and tools that cloud architects, IT professionals, and business decision makers need to successfully achieve their objectives.

Cognitive Services Form Recognizer prebuilt capability

Form Recognizer learns the structure of your forms to intelligently extract text and data.

• Introducing Azure Lighthouse

Azure Lighthouse provides service providers with a single control plane to manage across customer estates with increased automation, efficiency, and governance.

Announcing Azure Migration Program

Azure Migration Program, which allows customers and partners to apply to work directly with Microsoft to plan and implement Azure migration projects, is now available. Using proven Microsoft cloud adoption methodologies, tools, resources, and best practices, you’ll simplify and accelerate your Azure cloud migration with an approach that’s tailored to your organization’s unique needs.

Azure Resource Graph is now generally available 

Azure Resource Graph, which enables exploration of your resources at scale, is now generally available for all Azure customers.