On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the company’s Cloud and Enterprise group, made several announcements related to Microsoft’s cloud computing services. First, the company is adding two new cloud regions in Australia, bringing the company’s total number of regions up to 19. “That’s more than twice the number of regions that AWS [Amazon Web Services] offers today, and that’s more than six times the number of regions than the Google cloud offers today,” said Guthrie.
In addition, they announced new G-Series VMs that “are optimized for data workloads” and Azure Premium Storage, which can provide “up to 32TB of storage per virtual machine.” They also unveiled a private cloud solution called “Azure Cloud Platform,” a combination of hardware and software that will be sold by Dell beginning next month.
Nadella also took the opportunity to brag about Microsoft’s cloud offerings and to make a somewhat surprising statement about Linux. “The Microsoft cloud is the most complete cloud offering that empowers every business across every industry in every geography,” he said. “We are also a cloud that supports any OS on any container technology, so we support both Linux and Windows Server,” he added. “Microsoft loves Linux.”
