Microsoft’s blockbuster acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. overshadowed a lot of its other moves last week, but that didn’t stop it from pushing out a ton of cloud updates.

The biggest move last week was that Azure Backup‘s data protection capabilities are now being offered for Premium Storage virtual machines (VMs). Microsoft’s Azure Premium Storage service uses solid-state drives (SSDs) as opposed to regular hard drives to inject a Flash-powered performance boost into cloud applications running on them.

The move follows a decision by Microsoft last month to introduce data replication to Premium Storage via an update to Azure Site Recovery. Now Azure Backup gets the same boost, which means organizations can protect data stored in Cassandra, Oracle and SAP databases. The new cloud backup solution means customers can safeguard application data for both classic VMs and Azure Resource Manager-based VMs.

“One of the reasons customers deploy premium storage for virtual machines is to satisfy the IOPS requirements of enterprise critical workloads,” said Giridhar Mosay, a Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise program manager, in a statement last week.

Mosay explained how it works, saying that backup data gets copied to the customers’ storage account before later being stored on the backup vault. This staging is done to reduce the impact of IOPS on production workloads while making incremental changes to the backup vault, Mosay said. Once the backup data is fully copied to the vault, the customer’s storage account is cleared of any remaining data.

Elsewhere last week, Microsoft updated Azure’s resiliency technical guidance, which relates to disaster recovery, business continuity, restoring on-premises applications to Azure, recovering from data corruption, dropped databases and other errors.

Microsoft also added the SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition to its Azure Gallery. The developer version is a free copy of Microsoft’s new database software that can be used for cloud-based tests.

“The SQL Server 2016 Developer image supports the full set of SQL Server 2016 Enterprise features (In-Memory OLTP and DW, Advanced Analytics, Availability Groups, Row-Level Security, etc.),” wrote Luis Vargas, Microsoft SQL Server principal program manager. “The image doesn’t have any limits (memory, storage, etc.), but it can’t be used in production environments.”

However, although the image is free to use, customers still have to pay for the Azure VM that runs it. However, users can minimize costs by pausing VMs and only paying for the time when they actually use it.

Last but not least, Microsoft released its HDInsight Tool for developers who build Big Data apps in the IntelliJ integrated development environment. Jenny Jiang, a principal program manager in Microsoft’s Big Data group, said in a blog post that the HDInsight Tool for IntelliJ supports Spark application lifecycle management from beginning to end, allowing users to view job history, information, and statistics for Spark apps integrated with IntelliJ.

Image credit: Microsoft