https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/02/microsoft-azure-wants-to-make-working-with-data-on-its-platform-easier/

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced a number of new features for its Azure data platform. These range from a first preview of the 2022 edition of its venerable SQL Server line to updates to the Azure Synapse Analytics platform and new tools that make it easier to move Cassandra workloads to the cloud. But at the core of many of these updates is a deeper integration between the platform’s various services — and that’s no coincidence.

As Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data, told me, the plethora of available data services available in the cloud has become a pain point for customers. “There’s a purpose-built service for everything. Pick your favorite tasks that you want to do for data and there’s a service for that,” he said. “The thing that we heard loud and clear from our customers is that gets super challenging. First of all, there’s this plethora of options, things are changing almost on a daily basis. And then, a lot of customer pain truly comes from stitching a bunch of these things together.”