Monat: Januar 2022

7 reasons to attend Azure Open Source Day

To show you the latest capabilities of using Linux and Azure—and share some exciting announcements—we will be hosting Azure Open Source Day on Tuesday, February 15, 2022, from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Pacific Time.

Push your apps and data to the next level by using Azure, open source, and Linux together. Join this free digital event to learn how to natively run your open-source workloads on Azure, expand their capabilities, and innovate in new ways using Azure services.

At this event, you’ll learn how Microsoft is committed to open source and works with the open source community to develop new technologies. Hear about the latest trends and capabilities of using Linux and Azure together—direct from Microsoft insiders. Whether you’re new to Azure or are already using it, you’ll discover how to turbocharge your apps and data with open source and hybrid cloud technologies.

Here are seven reasons to attend the event

Get the inside scoop on CBL-Mariner, the Linux distribution built by Microsoft to host Azure open source services.
Find out how to better automate and manage Linux investments on Azure using Azure Hybrid Benefit and Project Bicep.
Discover tools for every developer, including Visual Studio Code, GitHub Codespaces, and Azure managed database and AI services.
Learn about application modernization best practices using containers and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Hear from Microsoft insiders and Linux industry leaders like Red Hat and SUSE.
Ask the experts your questions during the live chat Q and A.
Plus, be among the first to hear Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, share a special announcement on the 30th anniversary for Linux.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Register today for the Azure Open Source Day

Azure Open Source Day
Tuesday, February 15, 2022,
9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Pacific Time.

Delivered in partnership with AMD.
Quelle: Azure

Rightsize to maximize your cloud investment with Microsoft Azure

If you are running on-premises servers, chances are that you utilize a fraction of your overall server cores most of the time but are forced to over-provision to handle peak loads. Moving those workloads to the cloud can greatly reduce cost by “rightsizing” server capacity as needed.

Rightsizing is one of the key levers you have for controlling costs and optimizing resources. By understanding cloud economics, and using what Azure provides, you can identify the smallest virtual server instances that support your requirements and realize immediate savings by eliminating unused capacity.

Many industries experience spikes in server usage. When you rightsize with Azure, you are no longer compelled to buy and provision capacity based on peak demand, which results in excess capacity and excess spending.

For instance, H&R Block found that its servers got used most at specific times of the year—namely, tax season, and maintaining expensive on-premises infrastructure throughout the year was driving up costs. Once the tax preparer migrated the first 20 percent of its apps and platforms to Azure, it became very clear how the variable cost model of the cloud contrasted with the fixed model of the on-premises datacenters and revaluated its architecture.

Rightsizing in the cloud will mean different things to different organizations. One of the first questions to ask is how much of your environment is elastic versus static to get an idea of savings based on the reduction in footprint. In the example below, static usage never went above 30 percent of capacity, indicating a huge opportunity for savings.

What does rightsizing look like for you?

Turning off workloads can obviously have an immediate impact on your budget. But how aggressively should you look to trim? Do you always know what is driving the consumption? Are there situations where you can not immediately rightsize? For workloads still needed, what can be done to optimize those resources?

That optimization can take several forms:

Resizing virtual machines: Business and applications requirements evolve, so committing to a specific virtual machine size ahead of time can be limiting.
Shutting down underutilized instances: With workloads in the cloud, use Azure Advisor to find underutilized resources and get recommendations for resource optimization. This tool also can help determine the cost savings from rightsizing or shutting down central processing units (CPUs).
Interrupting workloads with Azure Spot Virtual Machines: You can get deep discounts for interruptible workloads that do not need to be completed within a specific timeframe.
Identify workloads that need extra capacity: With Azure, it is easier to meet consumption demands. In fact, the process can be largely automated.

When migrating workloads to Azure, do not consider it a one-to-one migration of server cores. The cloud is infinitely more flexible, allowing for unpredictable workloads and paying only for the resources needed. Plan for the peak but know that you do not have to hold on to that capacity. Under consistently high usage, consumption-based pricing can be less efficient for estimating baseline costs when compared to the equivalent provisioned pricing.

Be sure to consider tradeoffs between cost optimization and other aspects of the design, such as security, scalability, resilience, and operability. When using tools like Azure Advisor, understand that they can only give a snapshot of usage during their discovery period. If your organization experiences large seasonal fluctuations, you can save on provisioning your base workloads, typically your line-of-business applications, by reserving virtual machine instances and capacity with a discount. And when those seasonal patterns and occasional bursts drive up usage, pay-as-you-go pricing kicks in.

Those consistent workloads, like a batch process that runs every day using the same resources, you can get reduced pricing by taking advantage of Azure Reservations and receive discounts up to 72 percent by reserving your resources in advance.

And speaking of cost optimization tools, use the Azure Well-Architected Framework to optimize the quality of your Azure workloads. Read the overview of cost optimization to dive deeper into the tools and processes for creating cost-effective workloads. These tools really can help. According to an IDC assessment, Azure customer enablement tools can lower the three-year cost of operations by 24 percent.

Planning for growth no longer means overprovisioning for fear of hitting capacity. When you understand cloud economics and follow the key financial and technical guidance from Azure, your workloads will be much more cost-effective in Azure.

Learn more

Read the cost optimization documentation.
Review the cost optimization checklist.
Understand Azure Cost Management and Billing.

Quelle: Azure

Azure DDoS Protection—2021 Q3 and Q4 DDoS attack trends

This blog post was co-authored by Anupam Vij, Principal PM Manager, and Syed Pasha, Principal Network Engineer, Azure Networking

In the second half of 2021, the world experienced an unprecedented level of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) activity in both complexity and frequency. The gaming industry was perhaps the hardest hit, with DDoS attacks disrupting gameplay of Blizzard games1, Titanfall2, Escape from Tarkov3, Dead by Daylight4, and Final Fantasy 145 among many others. Voice over IP (VoIP) service providers such as Bandwidth.com6, VoIP Unlimited7, and VoIP.ms8 suffered outages following ransom DDoS attacks. In India, we saw a 30-fold increase of DDoS attacks during the nation’s festive season in October9 with multiple broadband providers targeted, which shows that the holidays are indeed an attractive time for cybercriminals. As we highlighted in the 2021 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, the availability of DDoS for-hire services as well as the cheap costs—at only approximately $300 USD per month—make it extremely easy for anyone to conduct targeted DDoS attacks.

At Microsoft, despite the evolving challenges in the cyber landscape, the Azure DDoS Protection team was able to successfully mitigate some of the largest DDoS attacks ever, both in Azure and in the course of history. In this review, we share trends and insights into DDoS attacks we observed and mitigated throughout the second half of 2021.

August recorded the highest number of attacks

Microsoft mitigated an average of 1,955 attacks per day, a 40 percent increase from the first half of 2021. The maximum number of attacks in a day recorded was 4,296 attacks on August 10, 2021. In total, we mitigated upwards of 359,713 unique attacks against our global infrastructure during the second half of 2021, a 43 percent increase from the first half of 2021.

Interestingly, there was not as much of a concentration of attacks during the end-of-year holiday season compared to previous years. We saw more attacks in Q3 than in Q4, with the most occurring in August, which may indicate a shift towards attackers acting all year round—no longer is holiday season the proverbial DDoS season! This highlights the importance of DDoS protection all year round, and not just during peak traffic seasons.

Microsoft mitigated a 3.47 Tbps attack, and two more attacks above 2.5 Tbps

Last October, Microsoft reported on a 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps) DDoS attack in Azure that we successfully mitigated. Since then, we have mitigated three larger attacks.

In November, Microsoft mitigated a DDoS attack with a throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), targeting an Azure customer in Asia. We believe this to be the largest attack ever reported in history.

This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan. Attack vectors were UDP reflection on port 80 using Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP), Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), Domain Name System (DNS), and Network Time Protocol (NTP) comprising one single peak, and the overall attack lasted approximately 15 minutes.

In December, we mitigated two more attacks that surpassed 2.5 Tbps, both of which were again in Asia. One was a 3.25 Tbps UDP attack in Asia on ports 80 and 443, spanning more than 15 minutes with four main peaks, the first at 3.25 Tbps, the second at 2.54 Tbps, the third at 0.59 Tbps, and the fourth at 1.25 Tbps. The other attack was a 2.55 Tbps UDP flood on port 443 with one single peak, and the overall attack lasted just a bit over five minutes.

In these cases, our customers do not have to worry about how to protect their workloads in Azure, as opposed to running them on-premises. Azure’s DDoS protection platform, built on distributed DDoS detection and mitigation pipelines, can scale enormously to absorb the highest volume of DDoS attacks, providing our customers the level of protection they need. The service employs fast detection and mitigation of large attacks by continuously monitoring our infrastructure at many points across the Microsoft global network. Traffic is scrubbed at the Azure network edge before it can impact the availability of services. If we identify that the attack volume is significant, we leverage the global scale of Azure to defend the attack from where it is originating.

Short burst and multi-vector attacks remain prevalent, although more attacks are lasting longer

As with the first half of 2021, most attacks were short-lived, although, in the second half of 2021, the proportion of attacks that were 30 minutes or less dropped from 74 percent to 57 percent. We saw a rise in attacks that lasted longer than an hour, with the composition more than doubling from 13 percent to 27 percent. Multi-vector attacks continue to remain prevalent.

It’s important to note that for longer attacks, each attack is typically experienced by customers as a sequence of multiple short, repeated burst attacks. One such example would be the 3.25 Tbps attack mitigated, which was the aggregation of four consecutive short-lived bursts that each ramped up in seconds to terabit volumes.

UDP spoof floods dominated, targeting the gaming industry

UDP attacks rose to the top vector in the second half of 2021, comprising 55 percent of all attacks, a 16 percent increase from the first half of 2021. Meanwhile, TCP attacks decreased from 54 percent to just 19 percent. UDP spoof floods was the most common attack type (55 percent), followed by TCP ACK floods (14 percent) and DNS amplification (6 percent).

Gaming continues to be the hardest hit industry. The gaming industry has always been rife with DDoS attacks because players often go to great lengths to win. Nevertheless, we see that a wider range of industries are just as susceptible, as we have observed an increase in attacks in other industries such as financial institutions, media, internet service providers (ISPs), retail, and supply chain. Particularly during the holidays, ISPs provide critical services that power internet phone services, online gaming, and media streaming, which make them an attractive target for attackers.

UDP is commonly used in gaming and streaming applications. The majority of attacks on the gaming industry have been mutations of the Mirai botnet and low-volume UDP protocol attacks. An overwhelming majority were UDP spoof floods, while a small portion were UDP reflection and amplification attacks, mostly SSDP, Memcached, and NTP.

Workloads that are highly sensitive to latency, such as multiplayer game servers, cannot tolerate such short burst UDP attacks. Outages of just a couple seconds can impact competitive matches, and outages lasting more than 10 seconds typically will end a match. For this scenario, Azure recently released the preview of inline DDoS protection, offered through partner network virtual appliances (NVAs) that are deployed with Azure Gateway Load Balancer. This solution can be tuned to the specific shape of the traffic and can mitigate attacks instantaneously without impacting the availability or performance of highly latency-sensitive applications.

Huge increase in DDoS attacks in India, East Asia remains popular with attackers

The United States remains the top attacked destination (54 percent). We saw a sharp uptick in attacks in India, from just 2 percent of all attacks in the first half of 2021 to taking the second position at twenty-three percent of all attacks in the second half of 2021. East Asia (Hong Kong) remains a popular hotspot for attackers (8 percent). Interestingly, relative to other regions, we saw a decrease in DDoS activity in Europe, dropping from 19 percent in the first half of 2021 to 6 percent in the second half.

The concentration of attacks in Asia can be largely explained by the huge gaming footprint10, especially in China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and India, which will continue to grow as the increasing smartphone penetration drives the popularity of mobile gaming in Asia. In India, another driving factor may be that the acceleration of digital transformation, for example, the “Digital India” initiative11, has increased the region’s overall exposure to cyber risks.

Defended against new attack vectors

During the October-to-December holiday season, we defended against new TCP PUSH-ACK flood attacks that were dominant in the East Asia region, namely in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan. We observed a new TCP option manipulation technique used by attackers to dump large payloads, whereby in this attack variation, the TCP option length is longer than the option header itself.

This attack was automatically mitigated by our platform’s advanced packet anomaly detection and mitigation logic, with no intervention required and no customer impact at all.

Protect your workloads from DDoS attacks with Microsoft

As the world moves towards a new era of digitalization with the expansion of 5G and IoT, and with more industries embracing online strategies, the increased online global footprint means that the threat of cyberattacks will continue to grow. As we have witnessed that DDoS attacks are now rampant even during non-festive periods, it is crucial for businesses to develop a robust DDoS response strategy all year round, and not just during the holiday season.

At Microsoft, the Azure DDoS Protection team protects every property in Microsoft and the entire Azure infrastructure. Our vision is to protect all internet-facing workloads in Azure, against all known DDoS attacks across all levels of the network stack.

Combine DDoS Protection Standard with Application Gateway Web Application Firewall for comprehensive protection

When combined with DDoS Protection Standard, Application Gateway web application firewall (WAF), or a third-party web application firewall deployed in a virtual network with a public IP, provides comprehensive protection for L3-L7 attacks on web and API assets. This also works if you are using Azure Front Door alongside Application Gateway WAF, or if your backend resources are in your on-premises environment.

If you have PaaS web application services running on Azure App Service or Azure SQL Database, you can host your application behind an Application Gateway and WAF and enable DDoS Protection Standard on the virtual network which contains the Application Gateway and WAF. In this scenario, the web application itself is not directly exposed to the public Internet and is protected by Application Gateway WAF and DDoS Protection Standard. To minimize any potential attack surface area, you should also configure the web application to accept only traffic from the Application Gateway public IP address and block unwanted ports.

Use inline DDoS protection for latency-sensitive workloads

If you have workloads that are highly sensitive to latency and cannot tolerate short burst DDoS attacks, we recently released the preview of inline DDoS protection, offered through partner network virtual appliances (NVAs) that are deployed with Azure Gateway Load Balancer. Inline DDoS protection mitigates even short-burst low-volume DDoS attacks instantaneously without impacting the availability or performance of highly latency-sensitive applications.

Optimize SecOps with Azure Firewall Manager

DDoS Protection Standard is automatically tuned to protect all public IP addresses in virtual networks, such as those attached to an IaaS virtual machine, Load Balancer (Classic and Standard Load Balancers), Application Gateway, and Azure Firewall Manager. In addition to Azure Firewall policy management, Azure Firewall Manager, a network security management service, now supports managing DDoS Protection Standard for your virtual networks. Enabling DDoS Protection Standard on a virtual network will protect the Azure Firewall and any publicly exposed endpoints that reside within the virtual network.

Learn more about Azure DDoS Protection Standard

•    Azure DDoS Protection Standard product page.
•    Azure DDoS Protection Standard documentation.
•    Azure DDoS Protection Standard reference architectures.
•    DDoS Protection best practices.
•    Azure DDoS Rapid Response.
•    DDoS Protection Standard pricing and SLA.

1Overwatch, World of Warcraft Go Down After DDoS | Digital Trends

2After years of struggling against DDoS attacks, Titanfall is being removed from sale | PC Gamer

3'Escape From Tarkov' suffers sustained server issues in possible DDoS attacks (nme.com)

4Dead by Daylight streamers are being DDoS attacked

5'Final Fantasy 14' EU servers affected by DDoS attack (nme.com)

6Bandwidth CEO confirms outages caused by DDoS attack | ZDNet

7DDoS Attack Hits VoIP and Internet Provider VoIP Unlimited Again UPDATE2 – ISPreview UK

8VoIP company battles massive ransom DDoS attack | ZDNet

930-fold increase in DDoS cyber attacks in India in festive season (ahmedabadmirror.com)

10Gaming industry in Asia Pacific – statistics and facts | Statista

11Di-Initiatives | Digital India Programme | Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Government of India
Quelle: Azure

Save big by using your on-premises licenses on Azure

Are you still hesitating to move some or all your workloads to the cloud due to the added cost? One of the easiest ways to significantly lower your cost of ownership is by using a special licensing offer called Azure Hybrid Benefit.

When migrating Windows Server or SQL Server on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure, Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to use your existing licenses covered by Software Assurance (SA) or other subscriptions in Azure. By bringing both Windows and SQL Server licenses with SA to Azure, you can save up to 85 percent compared to pay-as-you-go pricing.

Don’t pay double

Server migration cost concerns take several shapes, including paying double for the cloud and on-premises licenses while migrating, and the added infrastructure and security costs. During migrations, Azure Hybrid Benefit helps reduce risk by allowing 180 days to run Azure and on-premises workloads simultaneously at no additional cost. Or you can keep both licenses permanently to continue running a hybrid infrastructure.

When using cloud services from other providers, organizations are required to pay for both the infrastructure and the licenses. With Azure Hybrid Benefit, you pay only for additional infrastructure. You will need to repurchase your Windows Server license on other providers’ clouds. And only Azure offers free extended security updates. When you move a Windows or SQL Server workload to Azure, the extended security updates provide three years of free security updates after the end of support, reducing risk and cost.

Moreover, Azure Hybrid Benefit applies to active and unused on-premises Red Hat or SUSE Linux subscriptions, allowing you to use your existing Linux workloads on Azure and pay only for your virtual machine infrastructure costs.

Windows Server savings

Only Azure Hybrid Benefit enables Windows Server license assignment in the cloud. The benefit is applicable to customers with an active SA or subscription license, such as EAS, SCE, or Open Value subscription on Windows Server (both Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019). It is supported in all Azure regions and on virtual machines that are running SQL or third-party marketplace software.

Only Azure Hybrid Benefit offers unlimited virtualization for dedicated hosts. For a breakdown of the number of virtual cores allocated for those licenses, their requirements, and how to apply for benefits, check out Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server.

Below is a snapshot of how much Azure Hybrid Benefit can save when moving Windows Server workloads.

SQL Server savings

The Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines allows customers with Software Assurance to use their on-premises licenses when they run SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines. With Software Assurance, you can use the benefit when deploying a new SQL virtual machine or activate SQL Server Azure Hybrid Benefit for an existing SQL virtual machine with a pay-as-you-go license.

And know that only with Azure Hybrid Benefit can you leverage your existing SQL Server licenses in both IaaS and PaaS environments. And only Azure Hybrid Benefit applies to SQL Server DBaaS and gives you four virtual CPUs for one core of SQL Server Enterprise in the exchange.

You can centrally manage your Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server across the scope of an entire Azure subscription or overall billing account. In the Azure portal, you can now centrally manage your Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server by assigning licenses to the scope of an entire Azure subscription or overall billing account.

Here is an example of the benefit applied to SQL Server:

Azure Hybrid Benefit helps you to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud. See the benefit description and rules for more on the licensing structure and use cases.

More ways to save

Even more savings can be found by purchasing Azure reserved instances, which provides discounts on Azure services when purchasing predicted capacity in advance. It gives us visibility into your one-year or three-year resource needs, which allows us to be more efficient and these savings are passed on to you as discounts of up to 72 percent. Together with Azure Hybrid Benefit, these reservations can provide more than 80 percent savings over the standard pay-as-you-go rate. Your actual savings may vary so use the Azure Hybrid Benefit Savings Calculator to estimate your savings range.

Learn more

Get more financial and technical guidance from Azure by visiting cloud economics.
Find out more special offers at Azure benefits and incentives.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft launches landing zone accelerator for Azure Arc-enabled servers

We continue to innovate and add new capabilities to Azure Arc to enable new scenarios in hybrid and multicloud. We also want to provide our customers with the right guidance and best practices to adopt hybrid and multicloud technologies to meet their business needs. Today we’re launching the Azure Arc-enabled servers landing zone accelerator within the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework. The landing zone accelerator provides best practices, guidance, and automated reference implementations so that customers can get started with their deployments quickly and easily.

Azure Arc-enabled servers landing zone accelerator makes it easier for customers to increase security, governance, and compliance posture on servers that are deployed outside of Azure. Along with Azure Arc, services such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Sentinel, Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Policy, and many others are included in the reference implementations that can then be extended to production environments.

Design areas within the landing zone accelerator

The Azure Arc-enabled servers landing zone accelerator enables customers’ cloud adoption journey with considerations, recommendations, and architecture patterns most important to customers. For deploying Azure Arc-enabled servers in the most recommended way, we created a set of seven critical design areas. Each of these specific areas, walks customers through a set of design considerations, recommendations, architectures, and next steps:

Identity and access management
Network topology and connectivity
Resource organization
Governance and security disciplines
Management disciplines
Cost governance
Automation disciplines

Automation for landing zone accelerator

Azure Arc landing zone accelerator uses the sandbox automation powered by Azure Arc Jumpstart, for reference implementations. Since launching 18 months ago, Azure Arc Jumpstart has grown tremendously, with more than 90 automated scenarios, thousands of visitors a month, and a vivid open-source community sharing their learnings on Azure Arc. As part of Jumpstart, we developed ArcBox, an automated sandbox environment for all-things Azure Arc, deployed in customers’ Azure subscriptions.

Here’s what Kevin Booth, Principal Cloud Architect at Insight, a technology provider, had to say about Jumpstart—“The Azure Arc Jumpstarts have proven invaluable to us at Insight in familiarizing our people and our clients with Azure Arc’s use cases, feature set, and capabilities. We at Insight have taken the Jumpstart scenarios and integrated them into our own IP to help accelerate implementation to more rapidly onboard customers, in a best practice manner.”

For the Azure Arc-enabled servers landing zone accelerator, we developed the new ArcBox for IT Pros, which will act as the sandbox automation solution for Azure Arc-enabled servers with services like Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, and more.

This provides customers with a comprehensive experience that can just be deployed and have a fully operational Azure Arc-enabled servers environment.

The sandbox automation supports Bicep, Terraform, and ARM templates, so customers can choose what makes sense to them and their organizations’ automation practices. This is also part of our new ArcBox 2.0 release.

Getting started

Hop over to the Hybrid and multicloud Cloud Adoption Framework page and explore the Azure Arc-enabled servers landing zone accelerator, the critical design areas, and sandbox automation.
Quelle: Azure