Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure HPC Cache: Reducing latency between Azure and on-premises storage

Today we’re previewing the Azure HPC Cache service, a new Azure offering that empowers organizations to more easily run large, complex high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Azure. Azure HPC Cache reduces latency for applications where data may be tethered to existing data center infrastructure because of dataset sizes and operational scale.

Scale your HPC pipeline using data stored on-premises or in Azure. Azure HPC Cache delivers the performant data access you need to be able to run your most demanding, file-based HPC workloads in Azure, without moving petabytes of data, writing new code, or modifying existing applications.

For users familiar with the Avere vFXT for Azure application available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, Azure HPC Cache offers similar functionality in a more seamless experience—meaning even easier data access and simpler management via the Azure Portal and API tools. The service can be driven with Azure APIs and is proactively monitored on the back end by the Azure HPC Cache support team and maintained by Azure service engineers. What is the net benefit? The Azure HPC Cache service delivers all the performance benefits of the Avere vFXT caching technology at an even lower total cost of ownership.

Azure HPC Cache works by automatically caching active data in Azure that is located both on-premises and in Azure, effectively hiding latency to on-premises network-attached storage (NAS), Azure-based NAS environments using Azure NetApp Files or Azure Blob Storage. The cache delivers high-performance seamless network file system (NFSv3) access to files in the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant directory structures. The cache can also aggregate multiple data sources into an aggregated name space to present a single directory structure to clients. Azure compute clients can then access data as though it all originated on a single NAS filer.

Ideal for cloud-bursting applications or hybrid NAS environments, Azure HPC Cache lets you keep your data on existing datacenter-resident Azure NetApp or Dell EMC Isilon arrays. Whether you need to store data on premises while you develop your cloud strategy for security and compliance reasons, or because you simply have so much data on-premises that you don’t want to move it, you can still take full advantage of Azure compute services and do it sooner, rather than later. Once you are ready or able to shift data to Azure Storage resources, you can still run file-based workloads with ease. Azure HPC Cache provides the performance you need to lift and shift your pipeline.

 

To the cloud in days, not months

Combined with other Azure services such as the Azure HB- and HC-series virtual machines (VMs) for HPC and the Azure CycleCloud HPC workload manager, Azure HPC Cache lets you quickly reproduce your on-premise environment in the cloud and access on-premise data without committing to a large-scale migration. You can also expect to run your HPC workloads in Azure at performance levels similar to your on-premises infrastructure.

Azure HPC Cache service is easy to initiate and manage from the Azure Portal. Once your network has been set up and your on-premises environment has IP connectivity to Azure, you can typically turn on Azure HPC Cache service in about ten minutes. Imagine being able to do HPC jobs in days rather than waiting for months while your IT team fine-tunes data migration strategies and completes all required data moves and synchronization processes.

From burst to all-in: Your choice, your pace

The high-performance Azure HPC Cache delivers the scale-out file access required by HPC applications across an array of industries, from finance to government, life sciences, manufacturing, media, and oil and gas. The service is ideally suited for read-heavy workloads running on 1,000 to 50,000 compute cores. Because Azure HPC Cache is a metered service with usage charges included on your Azure bill, you can turn it off—and stop the meter—when you’re done.

Azure HPC Cache helps HPC users access Azure resources more simply and economically. You can deliver exactly the performance needed for computationally intensive workloads, in time to meet demand. Start by using Azure capacity for short-term demand, and enabling a hybrid NAS environment, or go all-cloud and make Azure your permanent IT infrastructure. Azure HPC Cache provides the seamless data access you need to leverage cloud resources in a manner and at a pace that suits your unique business needs and use cases.

Proven technology maintained by Azure experts

Azure HPC Cache service is the latest innovation in a continuum of high-performance caching solutions built on Avere Systems FXT Edge Filer foundational technology. Who uses this technology? A diverse, global community that includes post-production studio artists in the UK, weather researchers in Poland, animators in Toronto, investment bankers in New York City, bioinformaticists in Cambridge and Switzerland, and many, many more of the world’s most demanding HPC users. Azure HPC Cache combines this most sought-after technology with the technical expertise and deep-bench support of the Microsoft Azure team.

Can’t wait to try it?

Ready to get off the sidelines and start running your HPC workloads in Azure? We have a few opportunities for customers to preview Azure HPC Cache. Just complete a short survey, and we’ll review your submission for suitability.

The Azure HPC Cache team is committed to helping deliver on Microsoft’s “Cloud for all” mission and will work with you to design a cloud that you can use to quickly turn your ideas into solutions. Have questions? Email them to AzureHPCCache@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Azure available from new cloud regions in Germany

Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, and others trust Microsoft for their digital transformations

Today, we’re announcing the availability of Azure in our new cloud regions in Germany. These new regions and our ongoing global expansion are in response to customer demand as more industry leaders choose Microsoft’s cloud services to further their digital transformations. As we enter new markets, we work to address scenarios where data residency is of critical importance, especially for highly regulated industries seeking the compliance standards and extensive security offered by Azure.

Additionally, Office 365—the world’s leading cloud-based productivity solution—and Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, the next generation of intelligent business applications and tools, will be offered from these new cloud regions to advance even more customers on their cloud journeys.

Trusted Microsoft cloud services

Microsoft cloud services delivered from a given geography, such as our new regions in Germany, offer scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud services while helping enterprises and organizations meet their data residency, security, and compliance needs. We have deep expertise protecting data and empowering customers around the globe to meet extensive security and privacy requirements by offering the broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations in the industry. We also have a history of collaborating with customers to navigate evolving business needs, including delivering innovative strategies to help customers accelerate their European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.

Addressing the evolving needs of German customers

In Germany, companies across industries are adopting cloud technology amidst a changing regulatory framework that includes GDPR and a need for in-country data residency. Cloud services are becoming a key driver of product development, business model creation, and international stage competition. Responding to these changes, we’ve evolved our cloud strategy to better enable the digital transformation of our German customers.

Azure is now available from our new cloud datacenter regions in Germany to provide customers and partners with greater flexibility, the latest intelligent cloud services, full connectivity to our global cloud network, and data residency within Germany. The new regions with German-specific compliance, including Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (C5) attestation, and will remove barriers so in-country companies can benefit from the latest solutions such as containers, IoT, and AI. These customers include:

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s leading bank, is leveraging our cloud services to accelerate the innovation of financial products and services while maintaining high-quality service and data security. With our collaboration, Deutsche Bank has developed a data platform that meets both international and local regulatory requirements while offering customers secure and cost-efficient services.
Deutsche Telekom, one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies, will play an integral role in onboarding customers to our new cloud regions in Germany.
SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, will combine Microsoft Azure and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to provide solutions directly from Germany—for the "Intelligent Enterprise in the Intelligent Cloud."
Arvato Systems, a global IT specialist and multi-cloud service provider, is now able to offer their customers fully integrated Azure services with data retention in Germany, empowering the digital transformation of German medium-sized companies.

These investments help us deliver on our continued commitment to serve our customers, reach new ones, and elevate their businesses through the transformative capabilities of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Please contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about opportunities in Germany or follow this link to learn about Microsoft Azure.
Quelle: Azure

Satellite connectivity expands reach of Azure ExpressRoute across the globe

Staying connected to access and ingest data in today's highly distributed application environments is paramount for any enterprise. Many businesses need to operate in and across highly unpredictable and challenging conditions. For example, energy, farming, mining, and shipping often need to operate in remote, rural, or other isolated locations with poor network connectivity.

With the cloud now the de facto and primary target for the bulk of application and infrastructure migrations, access from remote and rural locations becomes even more important. The path to realizing the value of the cloud starts with a hybrid environment access resources with dedicated and private connectivity.

Network performance for these hybrid scenarios from rural and remote sites becomes increasingly critical. With globally connected organizations, the explosive number of connected devices and data in the Cloud, as well as emerging areas such as autonomous driving and traditional remote locations such as cruise ships are directly affected by connectivity performance.  Other examples requiring highly available, fast, and predictable network service include managing supply chain systems from remote farms or transferring data to optimize equipment maintenance in aerospace.

Today, I want to share the progress we have made to help customers address and solve these issues. Satellite connectivity addresses challenges of operating in remote locations.

Microsoft cloud services can be accessed with Azure ExpressRoute using satellite connectivity. With commercial satellite constellations becoming widely available, new solutions architectures offer improved and affordable performance to access Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, with one of the largest networking ecosystems in the public Cloud now includes satellite connectivity partners bringing new options and coverage.

 SES will provide dedicated, private network connectivity from any vessel, airplane, enterprise, energy or government site in the world to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform via its unique multi-orbit satellite systems. As an ExpressRoute partner, SES will provide global reach and fibre-like high-performance to Azure customers via its complete portfolio of Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites, Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) O3b constellation, global gateway network, and core terrestrial network infrastructure around the world.

 Intelsat’s customers are the global telecommunications service providers and multinational enterprises that rely on our services to power businesses and communities wherever their needs take them. Now they have a powerful new tool in their solutions toolkit. With the ability to rapidly expand the reach of cloud-based enterprises, accelerate customer adoption of cloud services, and deliver additional resiliency to existing cloud-connected networks, the benefits of cloud services are no longer limited to only a subset of users and geographies. Intelsat is excited to bring our global reach and reliability to this partnership with Microsoft, providing the connectivity that is essential to delivering on the expectations and promises of the cloud.

Viasat, a provider of high-speed, high-quality satellite broadband solutions to businesses and commercial entities around the world, is introducing Direct Cloud Connect service to give customers expanded options for accessing enterprise-grade cloud services. Azure ExpressRoute will be the first cloud service offered to enable customers to optimize their network infrastructure and cloud investments through a secure, dedicated network connection to Azure’s intelligent cloud services.

Microsoft wants to help accelerate scenarios by optimizing the connectivity through Microsoft’s global network, one of the largest and most innovative in the world.

ExpressRoute for satellites directly connects our partners’ ground stations to our global network using a dedicated private link. But what does it more specifically mean to our customers?

Using satellite connectivity with ExpressRoute provides dedicated and highly available, private access directly to Azure and Azure Government clouds.
ExpressRoute provides predictable latency through well-connected ground stations, and, as always, maintains all traffic privately on our network – no traversing of the Internet.
Customers and partners can harness Microsoft’s global network to rapidly deliver data to where it’s needed or augment routing to best optimize for their specific need.
Satellite and a wide selection of service providers will enable rich solution portfolios for cloud and hybrid networking solutions centered around Azure networking services.
With some of the world’s leading broadband satellite providers as partners, customers can select the best solution based on their needs. Each of the partners brings different strengths, for example, choices between Geostationary (GEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and in the future Low Earth Orbit(LEO) satellites, geographical presence, pricing, technology differentiation, bandwidth, and others.
ExpressRoute over satellite creates new channels and reach for satellite broadband providers, through a growing base of enterprises, organizations and public sector customers.

With this addition to the ExpressRoute partner ecosystem, Azure customers in industries like aviation, oil and gas, government, peacekeeping, and remote manufacturing can deploy new use cases and projects that increase the value of their cloud investments and strategy.

As always, we are very interested in your feedback and suggestions as we continue to enhance our networking services, so I encourage you to share your experiences and suggestions with us.

You can follow these links to learn more about our partners Intelsat, SES, and Viasat, and learn more about Azure ExpressRoute from our website and our detailed documentation.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft’s connected vehicle platform presence at IAA, the Frankfurt Auto Show

This post was co-authored by the extended Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP) team. 

A connected vehicle solution must enable a fleet of potentially millions of vehicles, distributed around the world, to deliver intuitive experiences including infotainment, entertainment, productivity, driver safety, driver assistance. In addition to these services in the vehicle, a connected vehicle solution is critical for fleet solutions like ride and car sharing as well as phone apps that incorporate the context of the user and the journey.

Imagine you are driving to your vacation destination and you start your conference call from home while you are packing. When you transition to the shared vehicle, the route planning takes into account the best route for connectivity and easy driving and adjusts the microphone sensitivity during the call in the back seat. These experiences today are constrained to either the center-stack screen, known as the in-vehicle infotainment device (IVI), or other specific hardware and software that is determined when the car is being built. Instead, these experiences should evolve over the lifetime of ridership. The opportunity is for new, modern experiences in vehicles that span the entire interior and systems of a vehicle, plus experiences outside the vehicle, to create deeper and longer-lasting relationships between car makers and their customers throughout the transportation journey.

To realize this opportunity, car manufacturers and mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) providers need a connected vehicle platform to complete the digital feedback loop by incorporating the seamless deployment of new functionality that is composed from multiple independently updatable services that reflect new understanding, at scale, and with dependable and consistent management of data and these services from Azure to and from three different edges: the vehicle, the phone, and the many enterprise applications that support the journey.

The Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP) is the digital chassis upon which automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can deliver value-add services to their customers. These services areas include:

In-vehicle experiences
Autonomous driving
Advanced navigation
Customer engagement and insights
Telematics and prediction services
Connectivity and over the air updates (OTA)

MCVP is a platform composed from about 40 different Azure services and tailored for automotive scenarios. To ensure continuous over-the-air (OTA) updates of new functionality, MCVP also includes different Azure edge technologies such as Automotive IoT Edge that runs in the vehicle, and Azure Maps for intelligent location services.

With MCVP, and an ecosystem of partners across the industry, Microsoft offers a consistent platform across all digital services. This includes vehicle provisioning, two-way network connectivity, continuous over-the-air updates of containerized functionality, support for command-and-control, hot, warm, or cold path for telematics, and extension hooks for customer or third-party differentiation. Being built on Azure, MCVP includes the hyperscale, global availability, and regulatory compliance that comes as part of the Azure cloud. OEMs and fleet operators leverage MCVP as a way to “move up the stack” and focus on their customers rather than spend resources on non-differentiating infrastructure.

Automotive OEMs already taking advantage of MCVP, along with many of our ecosystem partners, including the Volkswagen Group, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, and Iconiq.

In this blog post, we are delighted to recap many of the MCVP ecosystem partners that accelerate our common customers’ ability to develop and deploy completed connected vehicle solutions.

Focus areas and supporting partnerships

Microsoft’s ecosystem of partners include independent software vendors (ISVs), automotive suppliers, and systems integrators (SIs) to complete the overall value proposition of MCVP. We have pursued partnerships in these areas:

In-vehicle experiences

Cheaply available screens, increasingly autonomous vehicles, the emergence of pervasive voice assistants, and users’ increased expectation of the connectedness of their things have all combined to create an opportunity for OEMs to differentiate through the digital experiences they offer to the occupants, both the driver and the passengers, of their vehicles.

LG Electronics’ webOS Autoplatform offers an in-vehicle, container-capable OS that brings the third party application ecosystem created for premium TVs to In-vehicle experiences. webOSAuto supports the container-based runtime environment of MCVP and can be an important part of modern experiences in the vehicle.

Faurecia leverages MCVP to create disruptive, connected, and personalized services inside the Cockpit of the Future to reinvent the on-board experience for all occupants.

Autonomous driving

The continuous development of autonomous driving systems requires input from both test fleets and production vehicles that are integrated by a common connected vehicle platform. This is because the underlying machine learning (ML) models that either drive the car or provide assistance to the driver will be updated over time as they are improved based on feedback across those fleets, and those updates will be deployed over the air in incremental rings of deployment by way of their connection to the cloud.

Teraki creates and deploys containerized functionality to vehicles to efficiently extract and manage selected sensor data such as telemetry, video, and 3D information. Teraki’s product continuously trains and updates the sensor data to extract relevant, condensed information that enables customers’ models to achieve highest accuracy rates, both in the vehicle (edge) as well in Azure (cloud.)

TomTom is integrating their navigation intelligence services such as HD Maps and Traffic as containerized services for use in MCVP so that other services in the vehicles, including autonomous driving, can take advantage of the additional location context.

Advanced navigation

TomTom’s navigation application has been integrated with the MCVP in-vehicle compute architecture to enable navigation usage and diagnostics data to be sent from vehicles to the Azure cloud where the data can be used by automakers to generate data-driven insights to deliver tailored services, and to make better informed design and engineering decisions. The benefit of this integration includes the immediate insights created from comparing the intended route with the actual route with road metadata. If you are attending IAA, be sure to check out the demo at the Microsoft booth.

Telenav is a leading provider of connected car and location-based services and is working with Microsoft to integrate its intelligent connected-car solution suite, including infotainment, in-car commerce, and navigation, with MCVP.

Customer engagement and insights

Otonomo securely ingests automotive data from OEMs, fleet operators, etc., then reshapes and enriches the data so application and service providers can use it to develop a host of new and innovative offerings that deliver value to drivers. The data services platform has built it privacy by design solutions for both person and aggregate use cases. Through the collaboration with Microsoft, car manufacturers adopting the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform can easily plug their connected car data into Otonomo’s existing ecosystem to quickly roll out new connected car services to drivers.

Telematics and prediction services

DSA is a leading software and solutions provider for quality assurance, diagnostics, and maintenance of the entire vehicle electrics and electronics in the automotive industry. Together, DSA and Microsoft target to close the digital feedback loops between automotive production facilities and field cars by providing an advanced Vehicle Lifecycle Management, based on the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform.

WirelessCar is a leading managed service provider within the connected vehicle eco-system and empowers car makers to provide mobility services with Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform that supports and accelerates their customers’ high market ambitions in a world of rapid changing business models.

Connectivity and OTA

Cubic Telecom is a leading connectivity management software provider to the automotive and IoT industries globally. They are one of the first partners to bring seamless connectivity as a core service offering to MCVP for a global market. The deep integration with MCVP allows for a single data lake and an integrated services monitoring path. In addition, Cubic Telecom provides connected car capabilities that let drivers use infotainment apps in real-time, connect their devices to the Wi-Fi hotspot, and top-up on data plans to access high-speed LTE connectivity, optionally on a separate APN.

Excelfore is an innovator in automotive over-the-air (OTA) updating and data aggregation technologies. They provide a full implementation of the eSync bi-directional data pipeline, which has been ported to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and integrated as the first solution for MCVP OTA updating.

Tata Communications is a leading global digital infrastructure provider. We are working with them to help speed the development of new innovative connected car applications. By combining the IoT connectivity capabilities of Tata Communications MOVE™ with MCVP, the two companies will enable automotive manufacturers to offer consumers worldwide more seamless and secure driving experiences.

Microsoft is incredibly excited to be a part of the connected vehicle space. With the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, our ecosystem partners, and our partnerships with leading automotive players – both vehicle OEMs and automotive technology suppliers – we believe we have a uniquely capable offering enabling at global scale the next wave of innovation in the automotive industry as well as related verticals such as smart cities, smart infrastructure, insurance, transportation, and beyond.

Explore the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform today and visit us at IAA.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 43

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 94 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Applications

AZULINK: Get your application fully managed on Azure with a one-stop-shop partner committed to results and centralizing governance and scalability of your Azure services on IaaS and PaaS.

BI for Dynamics 365FO: Enable your organization to do more with company data. With Hillstar's standard BI connector for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, users can easily slice and dice through reports and drill down to deeper levels to see more detail.

Blender with Flamenco worker on Windows – ATLG: Blender with Flamenco on Azure provides an easy-to-deploy Flamenco manager/worker environment that can be plugged into Blender Cloud. This marketplace image serves the "render vm" role in the worker pool.

Build Agent PRO for Azure DevOps: This template offers a Linux-based build agent for Azure DevOps that can build and deploy .NET CORE, Angular, Node.JS, Java, C/C++, and Container projects by default. An emulation for ARM devices is also included.

Cisco Firepower Management Center Virtual (FMCv): Control access to your network, control application use, and defend against known attacks. Use AMP and sandboxing technologies to address unknown attacks and track malware infections throughout your network.

Cobra – Commercial Broker Assistant: Cobra includes everything brokers need for business, including Office 365 integration for easy communication with clients and intuitive storage for client data, contracts, and damages.

Data One: Data One can host, design, build, and manage existing and new reports for organizations that don’t have the capacity to manage their BI demands. The Data One platform simplifies reporting through Northern Data's dynamic BI portal.

DataRoad Reflect: DataRoad Reflect is a rapid data movement solution that lets you focus on delivering advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence instead of spending hours programming data migrations.

desknets NEO: desknets NEO reduces the burden of operation management with extensive administrative functions, such as user and organization registration information management and flexible access rights management. This application is available only in Japanese.

Docker Community Edition with Ubuntu 18.04 Lts: Docker Community Edition (CE) is ideal for individual developers and small teams looking to get started with Docker and experimenting with container-based apps.

EVE – cloud-based live captions for your event: EVE not only helps organizations comply with accessibility standards, it is also an additional medium, capturing every spoken word and sharing a transcript after a speech for further actions, including subtitles and SEO.

FM Converge on Azure: FM Converge on Azure is a highly responsive, cross-asset front-office/middle-office/operations/risk platform for pre-trade pricing, structuring, book valuation, and managing enterprise risk for a wide variety of financial instruments.

Get Azure Ops Data into Splunk – in 3 minutes: StreamWeaver offers a systematic, automated approach to distributing valuable operations data, including event, metric, topology, and log information, from all domains and clouds to the appropriate applications and teams.

Go timesheets, expense and leave software: Go is a scalable, web-based and mobile app for managing timesheets, expenses, and leave. Users can connect from anywhere – in the office or in the field – to submit time, leave, and expenses with attached receipts.

Hyper-Q Express Edition for Teradata to SQL DW: Hyper-Q takes SQL extensions and scripts written for Teradata and makes them interoperable with Azure SQL Data Warehouse while requiring little to no change to the business logic your company relies on.

Imredi Audit: The Imredi Audit solution is designed to audit stores, collect and analyze data from retail outlets, and help manage field employees. This application is available only in Russian.

iNAS: Unissoft is pleased to provide its iNAS cloud-based record-keeping solution for Azure and Office 365 users. iNAS protects records from inadvertent or unauthorized alteration, deletion, access, and retrieval while monitoring the integrity of records through an audit trail.

Indoorway InSite 4.0: Indoorway provides accurate data and useful analytics about the movement of assets in industrial sites. Locate in real time any moving resources relevant to key production and intralogistics processes.

IoT Core Services: IoT Core Services by conplement AG provides a fast and secure end-to-end solution for device/machine connections in the Internet of Things and digital value-added services. This application is available only in German.

Jenkins with CentOS 7.6: Jenkins is an open source automation server written in Java. Jenkins helps automate the non-human part of the software development process, with continuous integration and facilitating technical aspects of continuous delivery.

Lamp with CentOS 7.6: LAMP is an archetypal model of web service stacks, named as an acronym of its original components: Linux operating system, Apache HTTP server, MySQL relational database management system, and PHP programming language.

Lamp with Ubuntu Server 18.04 Lts: LAMP is an archetypal model of web service stacks, named as an acronym of its original components: Linux operating system, Apache HTTP server, MySQL relational database management system, and PHP programming language.

LANCOM vRouter: The LANCOM vRouter is a software-based router for operation in virtualized environments. With its comprehensive range of functions and numerous security features based on the operating system LCOS, it offers a leading basis for modern infrastructures.

Mediant CE Session Border Controller (SBC): AudioCodes' Mediant Session Border Controllers deliver seamless connectivity, enhanced security, and quality assurance for enterprise and service provider VoIP networks.

MinIO Helm Chart: MinIO is an object storage server mainly used for storing unstructured data such as photos, videos, and log files.

Mojro Technologies Private Limited: Mojro's proprietary algorithms are deployed to perform space and route optimization together at scale and enable your organization to automate the planning and execution of logistics.

Movie Viewer: Movie Viewer is a virtual editing tool that enables you to create clips from multiple videos and combine them into playlists. This application is available only in Japanese.

NGINX Plus Developer Edition: NGINX Plus brings enterprise-ready features such as application load balancing, monitoring, and advanced management to your Microsoft Azure application stack.

Nginx with Ubuntu Server 18.04 Lts: NGINX is open source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. NGINX started as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability.

Objectivity Metadata Connect: Metadata Connect allows you to define information about data from any external source and form connections within it. You can then understand how data interacts as it is changed and perform powerful navigational and pathfinding queries.

On-Net Integration Business Series: On-Net Integration Business Series on Microsoft Azure boosts operational efficiency with a wide range of functions. This application is available only in Japanese.

Opus Suite: Opus Suite gives you fast, accurate analyses, optimization, simulation, and answers throughout your system's lifecycle, helping you take control over performance and lifecycle cost.

OrangeHRM: OrangeHRM is a free, comprehensive human resource management system that captures the essential functionalities required for any enterprise.

ProScheduler WFM: ProScheduler is an enterprise-class workforce management system offering cutting-edge optimization and real-time features. ProScheduler is quick to implement, easy to learn, and typically offers a return on investment within six months.

PyTorch from NVIDIA: PyTorch is a GPU-accelerated tensor computation framework with a Python front end. This image bundles NVIDIA's container for PyTorch into the NGC base image for Microsoft Azure.

PyTorch Helm Chart: PyTorch is a deep learning platform that accelerates the transition from research prototyping to production deployment. This Bitnami image includes Torchvision for specific computer vision support.

Remote Desktop Services 2019 RDS Farm: Set up a basic remote desktop services (RDS) IaaS farm on Azure for testing or a production environment. Scale from 1 RDS host to 50 RDS hosts and allow users to connect to published desktops and applications from any device or OS.

SecureBox: SecureBox is a secure cloud file sharing platform. Access your data anywhere and back up, view, sync, and share your data on Microsoft Azure.

SFTP Gateway: Built on the base Ubuntu 18.04 image from Canonical, SFTP Gateway is a secure-by-default, pre-configured SFTP server that saves files to Azure Blob Storage. Use SFTP Gateway as a traditional SFTP server or to upload files to Azure storage.

SmartGov for Administration: Proven in over 30 government departments and SOEs, SmartGov for Administration is a tried and tested solution for the digitization of some of the most problematic processes in the South African public sector back office.

Speech to Text: Zoom Media offers its highly accurate Speech to Text service in 10 languages (Arabic, Danish, Dutch, English US, Filipino, Finnish, Flemish, Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish). All models can be used in batch or real time and are customizable upon request.

TensorFlow from NVIDIA: TensorFlow is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. This image bundles NVIDIA's GPU-optimized TensorFlow container along with the base NGC Image.

Theobald Software Xtract IS for Azure: With Xtract IS for Azure you can either develop new SSIS packages from scratch or use your existing SSIS packages developed with Xtract IS Ultimate/Enterprise. Develop on-premises and run in the cloud.

Tidal Migrations – Premium Insights for Database: Tidal Migrations provides your team with a simple, fast, and cost-effective cloud migration management solution. This add-on empowers your team with actionable insights on the databases you plan to migrate to Azure.

Total Access Control: Total Access Control from PortSys offers a Zero Trust approach to secure access to valuable resources wherever they may reside, locally or in the cloud. This single, scalable solution manages access across the enterprise.

Wanos WAN Optimization (SD-WAN): Reduce bandwidth and boost remote network access to Azure resources through TCP acceleration, compression, deduplication, object caching, packet loss recovery, forward error correction, QoS, and related WAN acceleration techniques.

WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.3: WISE-PaaS/RMM IoT by Advantech is a reliable, scalable, and extensible IoT device management platform that bridges layers in Advantech IoT platform architecture, including IoT device, system, and cloud layers.

WordPress with Ubuntu Server 16.04 Lts: WordPress is a free and open source content management system based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system.

Consulting Services

AI Roadmap – 1 Day Brief: This one-day briefing from StrategyWise will illustrate why you should use Azure AI tools with industry-specific case studies showing the value you can expect from digital transformation, prescriptive modeling, and AI applications built on Azure.

AI Roadmap – 3 Week Assessment: StrategyWise's three-week assessment will provide you with a comprehensive blueprint for executing successful AI projects on the Azure stack, helping you to drive organizational change and process improvements.

AI Roadmap – 5 Day Workshop: This five-day workshop from StrategyWise will help you identify prime opportunities in your organization to drive organizational change and process improvements through artificial intelligence powered by Azure.

Analytics Roadmap – 1 Day Brief: StrategyWise will illustrate why you should democratize analytics with industry-specific case studies showing the value you can expect from digital transformation, prescriptive modeling, and AI applications built on Azure.

Analytics Roadmap – 3 Week Assessment: Looking to launch an advanced analytics initiative on Azure? This three-week assessment will provide a blueprint for executing successful analytics projects on Azure, helping you to drive organizational change and process improvements.

Analytics Roadmap – 5 Day Workshop: This five-day workshop from StrategyWise will help you identify prime opportunities in your organization to drive organizational change and process improvements through analytics democratization powered by Azure.

App Modernization using App service 10 Weeks Imp.: Build, deploy, and scale modern web, mobile, and API apps using Azure App Service. This service includes architecture design, engineering, and deploying applications in the Azure environment.

Application Portfolio Assessment: 6 Weeks: Cloudreach's six-week Application Portfolio Assessment with Cloudamize provides enterprises who want to migrate to Azure with a comprehensive migration strategy and a high-level estimate of run and build costs.

Assessment for Modern Datacenter – 4 weeks: Sonata's four-week assessment service advises customers and recommends a roadmap to build a datacenter in the Azure cloud. This service includes analyzing the feasibility of moving existing datacenter infrastructure to Azure.

Azure Application Modernization Assessment – 2 weeks: Sonata's two-week assessment service advises customers on application modernization options and recommends a roadmap to modernize legacy applications in the Azure cloud.

Azure Datacenter Modernization 8 weeks Imp: Sonata's eight-week implementation will migrate and establish a modern datacenter in the Azure cloud. The service will provision datacenter resources and migrate data, databases, and applications to Azure.

Azure IoT: 3-Day Proof of Concept: This three-day engagement from Tallan will educate your team on what is possible in Azure IoT Hub and build out your POC utilizing Azure IoT services and Power BI.

Azure IoT: 3-Day Workshop: Tallan's three-day workshop includes presentations, stakeholder interviews, analysis, demos, and hands-on learning to help you create a technical strategy for your IoT solution.

Azure Managed Services: 8 Week Implementation: Cloudreach Cloud Core delivers service management of your cloud platform through monitoring, configuration, troubleshooting, security services, delivery management, and continual service improvement.

Azure Migration: 1-day Assessment: Atmosera's cloud assessment delivers a clear roadmap with options to evaluate workloads and performance data, prioritize business needs, and understand trade-offs when migrating to Azure.

Azure MSP Powered by CLIP: 6-Wk Assessment: Brillio Azure Managed Services Provider (MSP) Powered by CLIP offers 360-degree coverage to enterprises throughout their cloud journey – from assessment to managing the cloud environment.

Big Data Roadmap – 1 Day Briefing: This StrategyWise briefing will illustrate why you should leverage big data with industry-specific case studies showing the value you can expect from digital transformation, prescriptive modeling, and AI applications in the Azure environment.

Big Data Roadmap – 5 Day Workshop: Looking to ramp up on big data powered by Azure? This five-day workshop will help you identify prime opportunities in your organization to drive organizational change and process improvements through big data on Azure.

Business Continuity Disaster Recovery 2 Weeks Imp.: This two-week implementation helps customers set up business continuity planning and disaster recovery on Azure. The service includes setting up BCP/DR environments in Azure and configuring apps and databases.

Connected Factory by APEx: Cognizant APEx is an Industry 4.0 solution accelerator that enables the integration of devices, systems, and processes powered by the Azure IoT cloud platform to build a connected factory for optimized and enhanced operations.

Data and Analytics Strategy: 1-day Workshop: RevGen Partners' one-day interactive workshop introduces success with Azure for data and analytics, a review of current capabilities, and a high-level strategy and roadmap toward maturity.

Data Estate Modernisation: 1 Day Workshop: Northdoor's initial one-day workshop for technical and business leaders will assess your existing data estate and provide a roadmap to modernize your data platform (hybrid or full Azure) and licensing model.

DevOps Assessment: 1-Week Assessment: Create DevOps pipeline best practices for Azure DevOps, walk through current DevOps environments and action items needed to move to Azure DevOps, and create and use test workloads as a POC in this assessment from Tallan.

DevOps Implementation: 3-Week Implementation: Tallan will work with you to get all your applications using the same build automation mechanisms for Azure DevOps and ultimately help you build your DevOps pipeline strategy.

Discovery Free 2 hours Workshop: In this free workshop, Cloocus will investigate your current IT operation system, gather requirements, introduce methodology and references, and propose a fitting cloud roadmap.

Employee Experience @Work: Teams Jumpstart: The Cognizant Jumpstart for Microsoft Teams helps you successfully deploy and get immediate business value from this powerful platform using Azure bots, functions, and other services.

Free 1/2 Day Cloud Economic Assessment: Blue Silver Shift will deliver a half-day workshop with your leadership team to go through digital transformation and the cloud, understanding your business, and building business goals and outcomes.

Free Azure Cost Optimization: 1-day Assessment: ProArch's one-day assessment will analyze all workloads you are using and provide a recommendation report detailing how you can reduce your cloud cost by 30–60 percent or more by moving to Microsoft Azure.

Health Content: Manage & Localize – 4-hr Assessment: Lionbridge will review your content creation and localization process, content types, linguistic needs, regulatory requirements, current pain points, and volumes to develop a custom end-to-end solution.

IBM Domino Migration to MS Azure 2-Day Assessment: The Point Alliance methodology, industry-standard migration tools, unique intellectual property, onsite and remote consultants, and proven track record combine to mitigate risk and ensure a successful Azure migration.

Launch IT Lifecycle Mgmt: 10-Week Implementation: Launch is a collection of IT lifecycle management services designed to make IT organizations more efficient through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and automation.

Legislative Management Consulting Svcs: 10-Wk Imp: This service is a great way to migrate from legacy systems to solutions on Azure. Tallan will work with IT and business users to enable disaster recovery and insightful data visualizations while reducing manual effort.

Machine Learning Discovery Study: 4-wk Assessment: The Data Analysis Bureau will guide you on your data and analytics journey through its Discovery Study, bringing industry and domain best practice and insight to your business.

Managed Services: Capgemini’s Enterprise Portfolio Modernization initiative is a suite of services that aligns application lifecycle and modernization capabilities with Microsoft Azure to offer an end-to-end approach to digital transformation with enterprise capabilities.

Microsoft Azure Cloud Migration: 1-Hour Briefing: Are you considering a cloud migration or just want a better understanding of Microsoft Azure? Utilize Plc will help you understand the capabilities of Azure, including Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and security features.

Modernization Blueprint (Small): 3 Week Assessment: The Modernization Blueprint provides expert analysis and Azure-specific recommendations across the modernization journey. Deliverables include an implementation plan, strategic vision, and a comprehensive proposal and playbook.

OneMigrate: Sogeti can reduce cloud migration efforts by 40 percent with OneMigrate, an automated platform plugged in with Azure Site Recovery for server migration and CloudBoost library for environment provisioning.

People Analytics Data Platform: 2-Wk Implementation: This People Analytics solution from Tallan offers insight into the information you likely already have about your employees so that you can identify trends in attrition, helping you retain your top talent.

Predictive Analytics, ML, AI: POC 1 week+: Quadbase Systems offers this one-week proof of concept to demonstrate use cases for predictive analytics and machine learning on Azure ML. You will learn how to apply techniques to improve your business performance.

SQL Server Migration: 3-Day Assessment: CSW offers this migration assessment to help you move your on-premises SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL Database. You will receive an assessment document, suggested cloud architecture, and migration plan.

SQL Server Migration: 4-Week Implementation: After your migration assessment, CSW can carry out the plan to move your on-premises database to Azure SQL Database. CSW engineers will ensure your SQL workload runs flawlessly in Microsoft’s cloud environment.

Telstra Cloud Sight: Telstra Cloud Sight is an automated orchestration platform that enables you to configure your cloud accounts easily and keep them compliant, secure, and optimized – all aligned to your chosen best practice blueprints and with minimal human intervention.

Telstra Managed Public Cloud: Readify will install its cloud management layer atop your cloud infrastructure, enabling its expert team to effectively perform day-to-day management, monitoring, and essential security-related activities.

Website Migration – IaaS: 4-Week Implementation: CSW will migrate your website to Microsoft Azure, allowing you to capitalize on reliable cloud hosting services and scalability. This implementation includes moving all assets, SSL certificates, domains, databases, and more.

Website Migration – PaaS: 2-Week Implementation: CSW will migrate your website to Microsoft Azure, allowing you to capitalize on reliable cloud hosting services and scalability. This implementation includes moving all assets, SSL certificates, domains, databases, and more.

Website Migration: 2-Day Assessment: This assessment from CSW will help you review your website architecture, platform, infrastructure, performance, security, backup, and recovery and then establish the necessary Microsoft Azure services for a cloud implementation.

Quelle: Azure

Petrofac transforms large-scale construction with Azure IoT

Figure 1. Petrofac is a leading oilfield services company

Petrofac unlocks value for energy customers

Petrofac, designs, builds, operates, and maintains oil, gas, and renewable energy assets. The company is committed to digital transformation. It looks to unlock value for itself and its clients using technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), automation, machine learning, predictive analytics, digital twin, and Edge computing.

“This is an exciting time for Petrofac,” explains Fady Sleiman, Chief Digital Officer, Petrofac. “We are working to incorporate digital platforms within our business and combine these with our engineering and operations know-how to underpin our competitiveness in the marketplace and improve our capability and effectiveness.”

Partnering to transform large-scale construction

When considering the impact of digital technology within its construction activities Petrofac turned to Accenture Digital’s Industry X.0 team to create a solution that would increase safety, productivity, and efficiency at its project sites during the critical construction and commissioning phases.

Petrofac’s project supervisors need to answer questions like, “Are my welders well distributed on available work-fronts today?” or “Has my concrete mixer arrived?” or ‘’Do we have adequate safety supervision at the boiler’s area?’’ on projects which can be spread out over the size of a large city involving thousands of people, hundreds of tons of materials, and heavy equipment movement. Accenture Digital worked with Petrofac to develop a Connected Construction solution using Azure IoT to provide these insights.

“Azure IoT enabled us to build out a solution with Edge analytics and PaaS cloud components. These were instrumented using a range of connectivity solutions to enable us to meet the scale requirements for the project,” said Yen-Sze Soon, Managing Director, Accenture Digital – Industry X.0.

Accenture architected a solution to collect and transmit data from tags on workers and equipment. The site data was integrated with project data like milestones, productivity, planning, permitting, weather, and documents as well as historical data, to provide a live, one-stop dashboard.  The dashboard provides operational visibility into precise details of the project, all accessed in one place (see Figure 2.)

“The live dashboard displays project KPIs, build progress, total number of people and equipment on site, and weather alerts. It even flags deviations schedule and planned production compliance,” said Daniel Atbir, Vice President, Construction, Petrofac.

Figure 2. An example of the one-stop view of a construction project

Project tracking to increase productivity

With the new dashboard, site supervisors track productivity across construction zones or within construction crews (See Figure 3.) They can pinpoint bottlenecks and deviations and take appropriate remedial action.

During the initial trial, the team observed that productivity dropped significantly before and after lunch. Looking at the worker heatmap, the team realized that productivity was slowing down because workers were leaving the construction site. They were driving a distance to get lunch. Petrofac responded by building an onsite cafeteria. Productivity and welfare increased.

Figure 3. An example of a map of manpower in construction zones

Pursuing better outcomes for worker safety

If a worker requires assistance on the job, he or she can activate an alarm signal on the digital tag each worker wears. The site supervisor and health, safety, and environment (HSE) team receives the alert and can provide immediate assistance. “With real-time alerts and knowing the worker’s exact location, our teams respond more quickly for better outcomes,” explains Daniel.

Optimizing the use of high-value equipment

Knowing the location of equipment seems simple. But on a large-scale infrastructure project, it can be a challenge. By tagging high-value equipment and having locations transmitted and known in real-time, Connected Construction is enabling Petrofac to support its subcontractors to optimize the use of equipment in a more collaborative way. Equipment is optimally allocated to increase productivity and, therefore, construction progress.

Figure 4.  Petrofac gains valuable insights from Connected Construction

Summary

Petrofac and Accenture Digital implemented the Connected Construction solution on a large scale to increase productivity, safety, and efficiency. Accenture and Avanade won the Microsoft Internet of Things Partner of the Year award based on their involvement with the  Petrofac project and commitment to Azure IoT. “Thanks to Accenture’s industry innovation and the Microsoft Azure IoT platform, our Connected Construction initiative is providing valuable insights for Petrofac,” added Fady.

Learn more about Azure IoT and Azure IoT Edge.
Quelle: Azure

Reduce disaster recovery time with Azure Site Recovery

Companies and cloud solutions teams by and large understand the need for a disaster recovery solution. One of the first steps while defining and choosing a disaster recovery plan is to perform a business impact analysis. This process helps in identifying applications that support critical business processes, the impact to the business in case of an outage, and guides in developing the right disaster recovery strategy for your business. Once you perform the analysis and identify critical applications, the next step is to chart down your disaster recovery strategy. This usually translates into:

Identifying the right employees or admins who will handle the disaster recovery segment
Setting targets for recover time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)
Identifying the right product or service based on the needs
Identifying all the required software and hardware resources needed
Frequently testing the disaster recovery strategy
Making continuous improvements to improve the RPO and RTO, identifying and rectifying failure points if any

Configuring disaster recovery of Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Site Recovery

With the best in class RTO and RPO, Azure Site Recovery is one of the leaders in the space of disaster recovery. Being a first-class solution in Azure also gives the service, the edge to enable, test, and perform disaster recovery for customers in just a few clicks. One of the key differentiators while choosing a disaster recovery solution is the availability of integrations with additional resources to achieve parity between source and target. This essentially also reduces the RTO as it reduces the number of manual steps required once the virtual machine is brought up online in the target. The failure points are also minimized with this.

Let’s take a look at a common architecture model.

As a disaster recovery administrator, there are multiple components that you would need to handle to ensure that a target disaster recovery site is activated with similar configurations in the event of a disaster. Other than the virtual machines, it also includes the internal load balancers, the network security groups, and the public IPs that are used to access the virtual machines from outside of Azure. With Azure Site Recovery, while configuring for disaster recovery for your virtual machines, you can also provide the input for corresponding network resources in the target, which will be honored at the time of failover. This takes away the complexities of having to deal with scripts or manual steps and reduces the RTO significantly. The service is also intelligent enough to allow selection of only those target resources that comply with the target virtual machine that will be created, thereby reducing the points of failover.

Azure natively provides you the high availability and reliability for your mission-critical workloads, and you can choose to improve your protection and meet compliance requirements using the disaster recovery provided by Azure Site Recovery. Getting started with Azure Site Recovery is easy, check out pricing information and sign up for a free Microsoft Azure trial. You can also visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Cost Management updates – August 2019

Whether you're a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Create targeted budgets with filters and forecast costs
What's new in Azure Cost Management Labs
Save and share customized views in cost analysis
Dark theme support in cost analysis
More flexibility for creating and managing subscriptions
Update tags for App Service environments
New videos
Documentation updates

Let's dig into the details.

 

Create targeted budgets with filters and forecast costs

Azure Cost Management budgets allow you to track and keep an eye on spending at any level of the organization. Budgets can be created on any scope above your Azure resources, from the billing account or a management group down to the resource groups where you're managing your apps. Now, with the ability to create filtered budgets in the Azure portal, you can easily monitor costs for anything from the entire organization to a single resource.

Let's say you're building out a prototype that requires a large VM for a month. You've estimated how much time you'll need and got approval for that based on prices in the Azure pricing calculator. Create a budget in the parent resource group filtered down to that resource and specify 25, 50, 75, and 100 percent thresholds to get notified as you're approaching weekly limits. And don't forget to setup auto-shutdown for nights and weekends, to ensure you don't blow that the first week.

On the other hand, you may need to track costs across multiple resource groups in multiple subscriptions, for test and production environments, for a specific app. To do this, tag all your resources with a specific tag, like Application, and ask your billing account or management group admin to create a budget filtered down to that that tag.

Of course, that's not all. You can create a budget filtered down to any property available within cost analysis, whether that's based on the resource hierarchy (e.g. resource group, subscription), meter hierarchy (e.g. service, meter category), or additional resource metadata (e.g. location, tags).

In addition to creating filtered budgets, you can also see a trend and forecast of costs based on those filters to help you plan ahead and set a realistic budget based on historical usage patterns.

If you haven't setup a budget yet, create one today and get notified before you go over your planned spending.

 

What's new in Azure Cost Management Labs

We introduced Cost Management Labs last month to give you a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management, get early feedback, and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Azure Cost Management Labs:

Save and share customized views is now available in public portal.
Save private and shared views with the Save and Save as commands in cost analysis, then use the view menu (between the scope and date pills) to switch between all private, shared, and built-in views.
Download charts as an image
Open the desired view, then click the Export command at the top, select the PNG option, and click the Download charts button.
Dark theme support in cost analysis
Support for the Azure portal dark theme was added to cost analysis in early August. We're making the last few final touches and expect this to be available from the full portal in early September.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Azure Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. We're very eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. Try Azure Cost Management Labs today.

 

Save and share customized views in cost analysis

The announcement for saving and sharing customized views in Cost Management Labs launched last month. Now, you can enjoy these same views from the Azure portal. If you missed last month’s update, here's what you missed:

Customizing a view in cost analysis is easy. Pick the date range you need, group the data to see a breakdown, choose the right visualization, and you're ready to go. Pin your view to a dashboard for one-click access, then share the dashboard with your team so everyone can track cost from a single place.

You can also share a direct link to your customized view so others can copy and personalize it for themselves:

Both sharing options offer flexibility, but you need something more convenient. Now you can save customized views and share them with others, directly from within cost analysis.

To do this, start by selecting a built-in view, customize it, and click the Save as command. You'll need Azure Cost Management Contributor access (or greater) to the scope to share views, but anyone can save private views, pin them to a dashboard, or share a URL. You can create up to 50 shared views per scope and up to 50 private views across scopes.

All views are accessible from the view menu. You'll see your private views first, then those shared across the scope, and lastly the built-in views which are always available.

Try saving your own customized views today and let us know what you'd like to see next. We're looking forward to learning about your ideas.

 

Dark theme support in cost analysis

If any Azure portal theme were to have a cult following, it'd be the dark theme. Whether you're interested in the dark theme for accessibility, power efficiency on a mobile device, or simply prefer the aesthetics, you need a consistent, end-to-end experience. Anything that takes out of that is jarring and forces you to take a second for your eyes to adjust. And there's nothing as eye-opening as switching from dark to light themes.  The good news is, cost analysis now supports the Azure portal dark theme in Azure Cost Management Labs.

 

More flexibility for creating and managing subscriptions

As your organization grows, so does your reliance on the cloud. More teams are asking for access, which leads to extra overhead for creating and managing subscriptions. You need more flexibility to build a sustainable, scalable governance strategy.

With increased requirements coming from internal teams, many organizations are creating subscriptions (instead of resource groups) for individual teams to give them more flexibility to build the Azure solutions they need. This also simplifies governance reporting scenarios, as cost and compliance naturally rolls up to subscriptions and management groups. To better support this, you can now create up to 200 subscriptions per Enterprise Agreement (EA) enrollment account (increased from 50).

You already know you can create EA and MCA subscriptions with the Microsoft.Subscription/createSubscription API. Originally, this required at least one subscription to be created from the portal. This limitation has been removed and you can now create your first subscription directly from the API without opening the portal. You can also add subscriptions to a management group from the CreateSubscription API, which will help streamline automation scenarios for organizations using management groups for organizational reporting or policy assignment.

You can also request and track billing ownership transfers for pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and MCA subscriptions from directly within the Azure portal, with an option to keep the subscription in the current directory and retaining all Azure Role-based access control (RBAC) role assignments. Previously, transferring subscriptions reset RBAC access, which required additional overhead to reconfigure access. The new options should offer additional flexibility, depending on your needs. Transferring EA subscriptions can be performed from the Enterprise portal and will be available from the Azure portal in a future update.

 

Update tags for App Service environments

In our June update, we mentioned the App Service team added support for tags in usage data for App Service environments. We've heard reports of this not working for some organizations. If you are still missing tags for your App Service environments, please update the tags on those resources. Simply add a new tag, save your tag changes, then remove it, if you don't want to keep it. That should do it. You should see tags in your usage within the next 8-12 hours.

To learn more about data refresh times, see Understand Azure Cost Management data.

 

New videos

For those visual learners out there, there are 3 new videos you should take a look at:

Azure Cost Management for Azure Gov  is a great overview for anyone, even if you're not using Azure Gov
Working with APIs
Debugging and optimizing Cosmos DB (docs) touches on cost optimization via Cosmos DB Request Units (RUs)

 

Documentation updates

Here are the latest documentation updates:

Added new create experience with filters and forecast to Create and manage budgets.
Updated note about top cost contributors in Start analyzing costs.
Minor tweaks to Manage AWS costs and usage in Azure.
Learn which cost and usage fields can be used to build a unique ID in Understand the terms in your Azure usage and charges file.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Azure Cost Management doc change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the doc and submit a quick pull request.

 

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from the last month. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. As always, share your ideas and vote up others in the Azure Cost Management feedback forum.
Quelle: Azure