Microsoft is constantly working to improve their offerings in the Cloud space. Most recently, they made available the general availability of the Redis Cache as well as Microsoft Azure Site Recovery.
Microsoft released a public preview of Redis Cache at Tech Ed earlier this year. This preview has now been released for general availability. Azure Redis Cache is a distributed, in-memory, managed cache, which is based on the open source Redis Cache. Often referred to as a data structure server, Redis Cache is an advanced key-value cache and store that can contain keys with bitmaps, hashes, hyperloglogs, lists, sets, sorted sets, strings, and more. Microsoft has released two levels of support, Basic and Standard.
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, is relatively straight-forward in that it allows you to use Azure as a disaster recovery location. This service allows you to replicate virtual machines. You can use this to protect on-premises applications. A key feature is that this allows you to replicate and recover Hyper-V virtual machines directly to and from Azure.
On October 27th, Microsoft is making Azure Automation generally available. This service can be used to automate tasks you do on Azure. You can script the creation, deployment, monitoring, or maintenance of items in Azure.
You can learn about a number of other Azure updates and services at Technet. You’ll also find that Microsoft has lowered the price on a number of Azure services including Express Route NSP (1 Gbps), standard BizTalk Services, standard Mobile Services, and basic Cache. You can find a more complete list of price changes listed on the posted Azure pricing updates.