Microsoft capped off its Ignite conference this week with a rash of private and public preview announcements for its Azure platform.

Where to start? How about the front door.

Redmond has opened Azure Front Door Services to public preview. It describes the service as an “enterprise grade” way to deliver high performance, global, hyperscale apps. It handles application acceleration via anycast and uses Microsoft’s “massive global network” to connect to customers’ Azure deployed backends. It also offers HTTP load balancing and path-based routing. The promised result is lower latency and higher throughput. Details here.

You can now enjoy a private preview of Azure VM Image builder which allows you to create an image building pipeline in Azure, or move an existing pipeline. The preview only covers Azure Marketplace Linux images for now, but Windows VM support is on its way.

Image Builder is integrated with Azure’s Shared Image Gallery which has moved from limited to public preview. While this sounds like a holdover from Microsoft’s Encarta days, it’s simply Redmond’s effort to make managing and deploying VM images easier in Azure, within organisations, and across regions.

Microsoft has also announced a public preview of its Azure HDInsight Management SDK, which extends language support for the Hadoop cluster management tool to Python, Java and Go.

And if all this sounds really exciting, but you wonder how much it’s going to cost once the services move from preview to priced-up, Microsoft has also announced a preview of Azure Resource Manager APIs “to view cost and usage information in the context of a management group for Enterprise Customers.” As long as everything is covered by a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. Other cost models will come in the future.