Microsoft Enhances Azure Dedicated Host, Grows Cloud Portfolio

Microsoft has been busy in recent weeks keeping its Azure cloud service up and running in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic while also expanding services with new capabilities.One of the Azure services Microsoft recently enhanced is Azure Dedicated Host, which became generally available at the end of 2019. On March 25, Microsoft revealed a series of updates to help reduce costs for compute instance reservations as well as resource health activity log alerts.A dedicated host in some cloud computing contexts is a bare-metal service, but not so with the Azure Dedicated Host service. A Microsoft spokesperson told ITPro Today that Azure Dedicated Host should not be viewed as a bare metal as a service offering.  Rather with the service, customers can choose their server type, including CPU, RAM or others, but can only deploy Azure virtual machines (VMs) on Azure Dedicated Host. They do not have access to the underlying bare-metal server.A key use case for Azure Dedicated Host is organizations in regulated industries or with internal requirements around physical security, data integrity and monitoring requirements. Organizations are able to choose the capabilities of the physical servers running their Azure VMs, gain better control over the performance of their workloads and increase their visibility over the underlying physical server infrastructure. Another benefit of the service is customers are also able to control the timing of Azure planned maintenance events within the maintenance window.