As 2020 starts, Azure has a bunch of things in preview that are worth paying attention to. Some of them will ship and matter. Some will quietly disappear. Here's what I think you should be watching, and why it matters.
Azure Arc for hybrid management
Azure Arc is in preview as of early 2020, providing Azure management capabilities for non-Azure resources. The promise: govern on-premises servers and Kubernetes clusters through Azure Resource Manager, apply Azure Policy to resources regardless of where they run, and use Azure Monitor for hybrid observability. The GA of Azure Arc for servers and Kubernetes in 2020 will change the hybrid infrastructure management landscape.
Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly Azure SQL Data Warehouse) is evolving into a unified analytics platform combining dedicated SQL, serverless SQL, and Apache Spark in a single workspace. The preview in early 2020 shows the direction: breaking down the silos between SQL analytics, Spark data processing, and Power BI integration. GA is targeted for late 2020.
Azure Kubernetes Service improvements
AKS in 2020 is receiving significant improvements: ephemeral OS disks for node pools (faster node provisioning), confidential computing node pools (SGX-based encrypted compute), proximity placement groups for latency-sensitive workloads, and improved private cluster support. The control plane is free; you pay only for the node VMs. AKS operational maturity is tracking the broader Kubernetes ecosystem maturity closely.
Bicep language preview
The Bicep language for authoring ARM templates is in early development as of 2020. The goal: replace the verbose ARM JSON syntax with a concise, readable DSL that compiles to ARM JSON. Early previews show the direction. The GA is still a year away but the community response to the preview is strongly positive, the ARM JSON developer experience problem is real and widely felt.