Microsoft has today announced new capabilities for its Azure cloud platform. The company has debuted improvements to Azure, CDN, Azure Storage, and Azure Media Services. All the additions were announced at IBC 2017.
Starting with Azure Media Services, Microsoft has added the Video Indexer feature. This brings integration for Microsoft’s AI and cognitive software for video content on the cloud. Additionally, the company has added HEVC Encoding support, which brings higher resolution video to service operators.
Azure Storage scores several important new abilities. Microsoft says the changes are specifically for media customers. The company has introduced the following capabilities:
- Azure Archive Blob Storage – Azure Archive Blob storage is designed to provide Media organizations with a low cost means of delivering durable, highly available, secure cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements.
- Higher performance – Azure Blob Storage now supports significantly higher throughput for object reads, up to gigabytes per second for a single object to support post production, transcoding and other workloads.
- Encryption at rest (including customer managed keys)– Azure Blob Storage has support for Encryption at rest to meet the security needs of our media customers. Azure is the only public cloud compliant with the MPAA certification.
Azure CDN Additions
Finally, Azure CDN is also getting some new features that deliver improved performance when streaming dynamic content:
- Media streaming optimized delivery With Azure CDN: We have added the ability to easily optimize the delivery of streaming media. With a single click, media streaming optimizations are automatically applied. This results in fast and efficient delivery of media assets to users and optimized requests to origins.
- Dynamic content acceleration: Azure CDN now supports Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA) to optimize the delivery of dynamically served content. When DSA is enabled the performance of web pages with dynamic content is significantly improved as a result of route/network optimizations, resource prefetching and smart image compression.
- One Click Integration with Storage and Web Apps: Pursuant to our goals of simplifying & making CDN capability transparent to our users we have enabled “One Click” enablement for assets in Azure storage as well a simple on click enablement of CDN for Websites & Web apps built on Azure.
Customers can now optimize the delivery of streaming media. Support for DSA in Azure CDN to make web pages and dynamic content snappier. The last new CDN capability is “One Click”, which makes the service more transparent.
