//build/ 2015 started today and there were some really nice announcements regarding the Microsoft Azure platform. Let’s see a brief summary on each one:

SQL Database improvements

For those SaaS (Software as a Service) business models in which you need to create a database for each customer, we face the challenge of provisioning our databases taking the highest demand into account. This spikes the costs, and usually results in overprovisioning.

To solve this problem, Microsoft launched a new elastic database pool model (in preview). This allows hundreds, and even thousands, of databases within the pool to grow and dynamically consume resources within a given budget we control.

This model gives us a predictable price, over an unpredictable set of databases.

They also announced the availability of the previews for Transparent Data Encryption and Full-Text Search, for Azure SQL Database, at no extra cost.

Azure Data Lake

The new member of the big data and analytics family of products. Azure Data Lake is a hyper scale data repository for big data analytics workloads. It provides a single data store for all types of data before a formal schema definition or transformation requirement. It has no file size or account size restrictions and a huge throughput to thrive performance on analytics. Azure Data Lake is a Hadoop File System, compatible with HDFS, so it provides integration with HDInsight, and standard distributions like Hortonworks and Cloudera, and individual projects like Storm, Spark, Flume, Sqoop, Kafka, etc.

Azure SQL Datawarehouse

Microsoft finally included support for datawarehousing in their database-as-a-service offering. As this was a pre-announcement, you can register here to be notified as soon as the public preview is available.

The service provides integration with Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory and Power BI, making it a complete datawarehousing and business intelligence solution in the cloud.

Azure Service Fabric

The developer preview for this service, oriented to the creation of cloud services with a high level of scalability and customization based in microservices (an architectural pattern in which a complex application is built from small independently versioned services), is now open. This service allows us to build the most complex, low-latency and data-intensive services, and scale them in the cloud. The service supports stateful and stateless services.

I’ll be trying this new product and writing about it in a few days.

Azure App Service Premium

Adding to the recent announcement of Azure App Service (the service that groups Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps and Logic Apps), Microsoft launched the preview for Azure App Service Environment, a new Premium service plan, for applications that need high scale and direct corporate connectivity. This introduces a new P4 compute resource (8 cores and 14 GB of RAM).