
The shift toward online digital conferences has prompted Microsoft to reconvene Ignite about six months early this year. Scanning the data and analytics announcements, the overriding theme is of extending the reach of the portfolio of Azure data platforms.
For data and analytics, the headlines on this go-round include a new Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra; support for a MongoDB 4.0 API in Azure Cosmos DB; the general availability of Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB; and some enhancements to Azure Cache for Redis offering. And Microsoft is introducing new tools for data warehouse users to automate their migration to Azure Synapse Analytics. On the hybrid cloud front, there are several announcements for the software-defined hybrid platform Azure Arc, including support of Kubernetes (K8s) and the addition of Azure Machine Learning to the small, but growing stable of Azure services available on Arc.