The Microsoft Build conference is taking place this week in Seattle. Microsoft is using the event to make a lot of announcements regarding its own solutions and a few other companies are also using the event to discuss new solutions and integrations with Azure.

Twilio partners with Microsoft Azure IoT
Cloud communications platform, Twilio, announced that it is integrating with Azure IoT, which allows IoT developers to sync devices to their Azure cloud from the Twilio console.

Twilio’s new feature called Trust Onboard enables developers to identify and authenticate cellular connected devices against cloud services. Users can associate their SIMs with their Microsoft Azure account so that each device can be identified and trusted by Azure IoT Hub the first time it comes online.

“This joint solution means the whole process enables zero touch provisioning for customers, so that non-experts will be able to turn devices on wherever they are in the world and they will automatically show up in their Azure IoT Applications and be fully operational. That is a huge customer benefit and supports our drive to simplify IoT,” said Sam George, the director of Azure IoT at Microsoft Corp.

Twilio Programmable Wireless SIMs equipped with Trust Onboard are available for pre-order and will be generally available in July for a one-time fee of $5 per SIM for everything required to get connected.

HERE launches serverless functions for Azure
HERE Technologies, the providers of mapping and location platform services, launched seven core services called HERE Maps & Location Services via Microsoft Azure’s serverless functions.

“By opening up our core location platform services including the largest POI database on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as serverless functions, we want the Azure developer community to have new capabilities and fully tap into the power of location intelligence” said Mithun Dhar, Head of Developer Relations at HERE Technologies.

The location-based APIs and services include:

  • Geocoding – maps geo-coordinates and addresses
  • Positioning – device tracking and positioning for indoors and outdoors, online or offline
  • Fleet Telematics – advanced algorithms for optimal truck routing and planning with a deep set of data
  • Routing – precise instructions to a destination using various transport modes (car, truck, public transit, bicycle) and leveraging matrix and isoline algorithms
  • Places – Extensive set of Points of Interest with rich attribution for 400+ categories providing real world context and relevance for a variety of use cases
  • Map Tiles – Pre-rendered map tiles with different display types, such as regular map, satellite imagery and terrain
  • Map Image – Pre-rendered map images already optimized for both desktop & mobile devices

These serverless functions are available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and functions library in three Azure Resource Manager (ARM) solution templates and developers can get started with 250,000 location transactions for free.

Azure gets new developer tools and cloud experiences
Microsoft introduced new cloud experiences and tools for Azure to improve it in the competition against AWS.

This includes new features for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), the open sourcing of Q# compilers and simulators, easy access through GitHub and new scalability options for Azure’s SQL database.

Meanwhile, the enterprise identity system Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is on GitHub and developers can now use their existing GitHub account, including Azure Portal and Azure DevOps, to sign in to Azure.

In addition, Hyperscale (Citus) option in Azure Database for PostgreSQL was added to the SQL database to scale out compute, storage and memory resources as needed.