Good technical chat with Azure PM Arturo Lucatero about Azure Active Directory Domain Services. Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode181.mp3 Experimental Cognitive Indexed file: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/664d29ee13/ Other Updates: Storage accounts available only in the Azure portal from May 15   portal Effective May 15, 2017, storage accounts will be available only in the Azure. Access from the classic portal to storage accounts will no longer be supported. Azure resources that are in classic portal and that depend on storage accounts will continue to be accessible from the classic portal. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-batch-updates-may-2017/ We continue to add new capabilities to our lightweight R package, doAzureParallel, built on top of  Azure Batch that allows you to easily use Azure's flexible compute resource right from your R session. Combined with the recently announcedlow-priority VMs on Azure Batch, you can now run your parallel R jobs at a fraction of the price. We also included other commonly requested capabilities to enable you to do more, and to do it more easily, with doAzureParallel. From I am excited to announce the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). You can now easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in your subscription. This new capability, along with Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, allows you to create a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for all your IaaS based applications running on Azure. From One of the key endeavors of the cloud-first approach of Azure Backup is to empower enterprises to recover from security attacks, corruptions, disasters, or data loss situations quickly, securely, and reliably.  Restoring servers efficiently in the wake of evolving IT threats involves going beyond recovering data alone from backups. Our customers have expressed varying degrees of complexity in how their operating systems and applications are configured. Restoring this dynamic configuration captured in the form of the Windows Server System State, in addition to data, with minimum infrastructure, forms a critical component of disaster recovery. Today we are extending the data backup capabilities of the Azure Backup agent to enable customers to perform comprehensive, secure, and reliable Windows Server recoveries. We are excited to preview the support for backing up Windows Server System State directly to Azure with Azure Backup. From Announcing the preview of Azure’s Largest Disk sizes Tuesday, May 30, 2017 At Build Conference, we announced the addition of new Azure Disks sizes – which provide up to 4TB of disk space. These new sizes allow you to perform up to 250 MBps of storage throughput and 7,500 IOPS. The details of the announcement are captured in the build session here. From Earlier this month at BUILD 2017, we announced the public preview of Video Indexer as part of Microsoft Cognitive Services. Video Indexer enables customers with digital and audio content to automatically extract metadata and use it to build intelligent innovative applications. You can quickly sign up for Video Indexer from https://vi.microsoft.com/ and try the service out for free during our preview period. On top of using the portal, developers can easily build custom apps using the Video Index