Microsoft announced six new ExpressRoute locations in the U.S. (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York and Seattle) and Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore), as well as new partnerships with Orange and IIJ. This brings the total number of Express Route locations to 10.
Azure ExpressRoute ensures private connections between Azure data centers and on-premise infrastructure or colocation facilities by using an MPLS VPN or other secure tunnel.
Azure ExpressRoute partners include AT&T, Equinix (7 locations running), Level 3 (EVPL service and IP VPN service), Verizon, BT, Orange, TeleCity, Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) and SingTel. The new partnership with Orange Business Services will bring Azure ExpressRoute to the Orange Business VPN Galerie service, which is an integrated WAN-to-Cloud solution.
Microsoft also announced two partnerships with Packer.io and OpenNebula that enable Azure customers to manage their applications and services across different technology providers.
With Packer.io, Microsoft is introducing two Packer plug-ins for Microsoft Azure and Hyper-V. Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer can use tools like Chef or Puppet to install software onto the image.
With OpenNebula. Microsoft is adding a set of plug-ins to enable the use of OpenNebula for building hybrid cloud deployments on Microsoft Azure. This enables OpenNebula tools to manage cloud deployments across Microsoft’s private, public and hosted cloud platforms.
Microsoft has previously announced Azure support for Docker’s libswarm project and Kubernetes.
