Azure

On Wednesday, several new Microsoft Azure services were announced that let customers — whether business executives, developers or IT professionals – embrace the cloud and maximize the opportunity it brings, writes Vibhor Kapoor, Microsoft Azure director of product marketing, in a blog post.

The new SQL Database service tiers — Basic, Standard and Premium — are now generally available, it was announced Wednesday.

The Microsoft Azure Media Services Indexer, launched Wednesday, extracts keywords from a video file as metadata that can be used for categorization of audio-video in a custom application, such as whether the content pertains to entertainment, politics or neural-network research.