During the keynote, Guthrie presented Azure's premium storage offering and the new app-style marketplace. He performed a live demonstration of the new Azure Marketplace, saying: "In the marketplace we have a host of VMs, apps and services that you can deploy within the cloud.
"You can setup things like Sharepoint farms, websites, Windows VMs," said Guthrie. "We have offerings not just from Microsoft, but from lots of partners around the world."
Premium storage for Azure features 32TB per virtual machine and claims more than 50,000 IOPS per VM with less than 1ms read latency. "The elastic nature of the service means you can turn it off, turn it on, scale out… according to your business needs."
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said last week that the vendor was spending a staggering US$4-5 billion per annum on its public cloud service, saying that very few providers could put up the amount of capital needed to compete in the space.
Almost two months ago, Marlow announced at the Australian Partner Conference on the Gold Coast that locally hosted Azure was live and in private preview with select customers and resellers. She said at the time that public release would come before Christmas.
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