Microsoft is positing its Azure cloud infrastructure service as "the world's computer," CEO Satya Nadella said during his keynote at the hyperscaler's Ignite event.

Nadella cited Microsoft's 60 data center regions connected by 175,000 miles of fiber as the backbone for moving past digital transformations to deliver on "the digital imperative for every organization." Naturally, this is centered around Microsoft's cloud efforts.

"No other cloud offers the best of category products and the best of suite solutions," Nadella said, explaining that Azure is the only cloud with the ability to support all organizations and workloads for enterprises, startups, and regulated industries.

As hybrid and multi-cloud environments continue to rise in prevalence, Nadella touted new Azure Arc deployment options with the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) orchestration platform.

"As Kubernetes adoption takes off, you can use Arc to run containerized applications with AKS on Azure Stack HCI, Windows Server, Windows devices, [and] Windows IoT," which should provide consistency across Azure on-premises and at the edge, Nadella explained. "We will enable AKS to run on even more platforms going forward," he added.

Microsoft also announced that Azure Automanage, which automates server configuration and management over a customer’s entire lifecycle, is now available for Azure Arc servers and Azure virtual machines (VMs) in Microsoft's cloud or hybrid environments.

Specifically, the new capabilities aim to simplify management and improve workload uptime to boost efficiency and save costs. This means Hotpatch, for example, can now provide patch installation without requiring a reboot, which reduces VM downtine in Azure.

Nadella also highlighted Microsoft's Azure Elastic storage area network (SAN) service, which is "the industry's first" cloud native and fully managed SAN offering, he said during the keynote.

Azure Elastic SAN, which is now in preview, connects to various Azure services and lets enterprises deploy, manage, and host workloads on Azure with an end-to-end SAN experience that's the same as on-premise SAN.

"It offers massive scale and enables customers to seamlessly transition their SAN data estate to the cloud without having to refactor their application architectures," Nadella added.

The service also offers bulk provisioning of block storage at scale with single-digit millisecond latencies for a large number of possible workloads, according to the company.

Photo: Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. Source: Microsoft