Microsoft and Apache Jump Into the Cloud Bed, New Tools for Devs Announced

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This week, Microsoft is in New York where they are hosting their Connect(); 2017 conference. This year, the company is focusing on making sure its platforms work for any dev, for any app, on any platform. In addition, they are continuing their pursuit of working more with open-source technologies and by being a contributing partner to the open source community.

Announced today is Azure Databricks Preview which was designed in concert with the founders of Apache Spark. This new service is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform that delivers simple set up, streamlined workflows, and an interactive workspace. More importantly, native integration with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Active Directory and Power BI which makes it much easier to create a modern data warehouse for self-service analytics.

For Apache fans, this will obviously be good news but the company also announced that there is now a Cassandra API preview for Azure Cosmos DB too. For those that are using the company’s newest database, this delivers Cassandra as-a-service for simplified global distribution with redundancy and SLA-backed services.

If you work with Visual Studio, Visual Studio App center has reached general availability. This product is designed to help developers ship higher quality applications more frequently and can be used by Objective-C, Swift, Android Java, Xamarin and React Native
developers.

And for the developer who is looking to improve their collaboration while coding, Visual Studio Live Share is for you. Developers can share projects with teammates, or other developers, to edit and debug the same code in their personalized editor or IDE.

Microsoft is announcing quite a bit at this event, it’s worth paying attention to the company’s blogs and similar as there are sessions taking place and demos showing off the new features. As for why the company continues to expand its open-source integrations, which was unheard of a decade ago, it’s because they don’t care what technology you are using as long as it is running on Azure.