Azure Updates: India outage; Analytics; COVID-19 apps; Responsible ML

Microsoft highlighted expanding Azure database and analytics capabilities, as well as new options with Digital Twins and continued support for the Covid-19 response in its latest round of news and updates.

Azure went down briefly in India, with users reporting problems with portal loading or connection issues. Downdetector found most problems were reported over a three hour span in the early evening in central India.

Azure Data CTO Raghu Ramakrishnan looked at growing Analytics capabilities. Since November, users have had access to Synapse Analytics which has played an important role in reducing complexity around hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP) workloads. The Azure team is introducing Synapse Link as a cloud-native implementation for HTAP needs, available in Cosmos DB and soon in PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL as well. It is aimed at removing remaining barriers and eliminating complicated extract, load and transform pipelines.