A month after infrastructure-as-a-service kingpin Amazon stole the industry limelight with the addition of native container support and on-demand event processing to its cloud service, Microsoft has responded with the largest upgrade to its Azure cloud platform since launch. The enhancements target the most sensitive Windows workloads still kept behind the firewall.

To make it feasible for organizations to move those applications onto its platform, Microsoft is introducing Premium Storage, a new flash option geared toward important data that must stay accessible at all times with as little latency as possible. Customers can now provision up to 10 solid-state drives to a single instance for a total of 32 terabytes of capacity and over 50,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), according to the company.

That brings Azure closer up to par with Amazon Web Services, where users can allocate an unlimited amount of flash storage to their virtual machines, and makes Azure more attractive for running the data-intensive applications powering everyday operations at Windows shops. Standing out in particular among the workloads that could benefit from the update is SQL Server, the latest version of which is now available on a managed basis as part of the landmark update.

Previously, the only way to run the newest release was by manually spinning up virtual machines with the database image, which is optimal for organizations that have already bought licenses but less so for customers who wish to avoid the burden of configuring and maintaining their databases. The upgrade now allows users to take advantage of the new in-memory query processing and analytic capabilities of SQL Server 14 without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

The update is a response to the Aurora service that Amazon introduced last month, a managed MySQL implementation running exclusively on flash that Amazon  says provides up to five times the throughput of alternatives. Whether Azure SQL Database can compete that is up for debate, but thankfully, Microsoft is not putting all of its cloudy eggs in one basket.

Besides the storage and data management improvements, the Redmond giant is also rolling out improved integration with on-premise environments. Azure now syncs profiles from in-house Active Directory deployments across popular Microsoft services, which means workers only need to go through the process of changing their password once when the need to arises, and extends the convenience of single sign-on to applications kept behind the firewall.

That functionality is now also available in the other direction through RemoteApp, another new service that allows organizations to deploy traditional Windows applications on Azure in order to enable access from mobile devices. This puts the company ahead of Amazon for a change, largely owning to the dominance of Active Directory in the enterprise, which the latter has only recently begun countering. But Microsoft still has a lot of catching up to do in other areas.