Azure

Now, all customers will have the option to create their websites in the new region, with all of Azure Websites’ great features available from day one. Azure Websites is now available in four different Asia regions: East Asia, Japan West, Japan East and Southeast Asia.

The Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute ecosystem is expanding with new alliances with BT and Verizon. These partnerships will help customers move to a mobile-first, cloud-first world on their terms, providing multiple options for secure and reliable connections to Microsoft Azure.

The primary change to the pricing tiers is the introduction of the new Basic tier, which is designated for production sites, supporting smaller sites, as well as development and testing scenarios. The Basic pricing tier offers up to three instances of dedicated Virtual Machine running your websites, SSL support, Scheduled Jobs, Endpoint Monitoring and more, writes Byron Tardiff, a program manager on the Microsoft Azure Websites team, in a blog post.

Azure Automation lets customers automate the creation, deployment, monitoring and maintenance of resources in their Azure environments using a highly-scalable and reliable workflow execution engine.

Microsoft Azure Preview Portal, announced Thursday at Build 2014, is “an important step forward in delivering our promise of the cloud without complexity,” writes Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group.