Government Secret data centers; Azure CDN; Database capacity; Data Accelerator; Automation management

Microsoft is taking big steps to lure the US federal government away from AWS. On April 17, Lily Kim, general manager for Azure Global  announced two new Government Secret data centers in preview and awaiting accreditation, slated for the US Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. The two data centers are so secretive that Microsoft won't reveal their locations publicly, stating simply that they are 500 miles apart. Across all Azure Government regions, Microsoft is enabling DoD Impact Level 5 accommodating controlled unclassified information.The Azure Content Delivery Network is adding new security and user features. With a "bring your own certificate" approach, users can connect third-party certificates to Azure CDN from Verizon or provision Azure-managed custom domain SSLs from Akamai endpoints. The team also added DNS Root Apex support and new edge sites in Berlin, Dubai, Honolulu, Atlanta, Brisbane and Perth.Reserved Capacity pricing for Azure SQL Data Warehouse became generally available, allowing users to cut their data warehouse usage costs by up to 65 percent by reserving compute power for current and future clusters. Database users will discover a few other recent updates. MariaDB has the option to scale to 64 vCores in general pricing tiers or 32 vCores in memory optimized tiers, while Azure Database for PostgreSQL added asynchronous replication from one server to five other PostgreSQL servers.