The pace of change has never been as fast as it is now. Globally, the population is becoming more urban and income levels are rising. By 2050, nearly 70 percent of the global population will live in cities or urban areas—that’s six billion people.
Quelle: Azure
Co-locate your Azure resources for improved application performance
The performance of your applications is central to the success of your IT organization. Application performance can directly impact your ability to increase customer satisfaction and ultimately grow your business.
Many factors can affect the performance of your applications. One of those is network latency which is impacted, among other things, by the physical distance between the virtual machines deployed.
For example, when you place your Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines in a single Azure region, the physical distance between the virtual machines is reduced. Placing them within a single availability zone is another step you can take to deploy your virtual machines closer to each other. However, as the Azure footprint grows, a single availability zone may span multiple physical data centers resulting in network latency that can impact your overall application performance. If a region does not support availability zones or if your application does not use availability zones, the latency between the application tiers may increase as a result.
Today, we are announcing the preview of proximity placement groups. A new capability that we are making available to achieve co-location of your Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources and low network latency among them.
Azure proximity placement groups represent a new logical grouping capability for your Azure Virtual Machines, which in turn is used as a deployment constraint when selecting where to place your virtual machines. In fact, when you assign your virtual machines to a proximity placement group, the virtual machines are placed in the same data center, resulting in lower and deterministic latency for your applications.
When to use proximity placement groups
Proximity placement groups improve the overall application performance by reducing the network latency among virtual machines. You should consider using proximity placement groups for multi-tiered, IaaS-based deployments where application tiers are deployed using multiple virtual machines, availability sets and/or virtual machine scale sets.
As an example, consider the case where each tier in your application is deployed in an availability set or virtual machine scale set for high availability. Using a single proximity placement group for all the tiers of your applications, even if they use different virtual machine SKUs and sizes, will force all the deployments to follow each other and land in the same data center for best latency.
In order to get the best results with proximity placement groups, make sure you’re using accelerated networking and optimize your virtual machines for low latency.
Getting started with proximity placement groups
The easiest way to start with proximity placement groups is to use them with your Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.
To create a proximity placement group resource just add the following statement:
{
"apiVersion": "2018-04-01",
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups",
"name": "[parameters('ppgName')]",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]"
}
To use this proximity placement group later in the template with a virtual machine (or availability set or virtual machine scale set), just add the following dependency and property:
{
"name": "[parameters('virtualMachineName')]",
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines",
"apiVersion": "2018-06-01",
"location": "[parameters('location')]",
"dependsOn": [
"[concat('Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups/', parameters('ppgName'))]"
],
"properties": {
"proximityPlacementGroup": {
"id": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups',parameters('ppgName'))]"
}
}
To learn more about proximity placement groups, see the following tutorials on using proximity placement groups with PowerShell and CLI.
What to expect when using proximity placement groups
Proximity placement groups offer co-location in the same data center. However, because proximity placement groups represent an additional deployment constraint, allocation failures can occur (for example, you may not be able to place your Azure Virtual Machines in the same proximity placement group.)
When you ask for the first virtual machine in the proximity placement group, the data center is automatically selected. In some cases, a second request for a different virtual machine SKU may fail since it does not exist in the data center already selected. In this case, an OverconstrainedAllocationRequest error will be returned. To troubleshoot, please check to see which virtual machines are available in the chosen region or zone using the Azure portal or APIs. If all of the desired SKUs are available, try changing the order in which you deploy them.
In the case of elastic deployments, which scale out, having a proximity placement group constraint on your deployment may result in a failure to satisfy the request. When using proximity placement groups, we recommend that you ask for all the virtual machines at the same time.
Proximity placement groups are in preview now and are offered free of charge in all public regions.
Please refer to our documentation for additional information about proximity placement groups.
Here’s what we’ve heard from SAP, who participated in the early preview program:
“It is really great to see this feature now publicly available. We are going to make use of it in our standard deployments. My team is automating large scale deployments of SAP landscapes. To ensure best performance of the systems it is essential to ensure low-latency between the different components of the system. Especially critical is the communication between Application server and the database, as well as the latency between HANA VMs when synchronous replication has to be enabled. In the late 2018 we did some measurements in various Azure regions and found out that sometimes the latency was not as expected and not in the optimal range. While discussing this with Microsoft, we were offered to join the early preview and evaluate the Proximity Placement Groups (PPG) feature. During our evaluation we were able to bring down the latency to less than 0.3 ms between all system components, which is more than sufficient to ensure great system performance. Best deterministic results we achieved when PPGs were combined with Network acceleration of VM NICs, which additionally improved the measured latencies.”
Ventsislav Ivanov, Development Architect, SAP
Quelle: Azure
We are always looking for ways to improve the customer experience and allow our partners to complement our offerings. In support of these efforts we are sharing the Azure Networking Managed Service Provider (MSP) program along with partners that deliver value added managed cloud network services to help enterprise customers connect, operationalize, and scale their mission critical applications running in Azure.
Azure Networking MSP Partner Program enables partners such as networking focused MSPs, network carriers, and systems integrators (SIs) to use their rich networking experience to offer cloud and hybrid networking services around Azure’s growing portfolio of Azure Networking products and services.
Azure’s Networking services are fundamental building blocks critical to cloud migration, optimal connectivity, and security of applications. New networking services such as Virtual WAN, ExpressRoute, Azure Firewall, and Azure Front Door further enrich this portfolio allowing customers to deploy richer applications in the cloud. The Networking MSP partners can help customers deploy and manage Azure Networking services.
Azure Networking MSPs
Azure MSPs play a critical role in enterprise cloud transformation by bringing their deep knowledge and real-world experience to help enterprise customers migrate to Azure. Azure MSPs and the Azure Expert MSP program make it easy for customers to discover and engage specialized MSPs.
Azure Networking MSPs are a specialized set of MSPs for addressing enterprise cloud networking needs and challenges across all aspects of cloud and hybrid networking. Their managed network services and offerings include various aspects of the application lifecycle including network architecture, planning, deployment, operations, maintenance, and optimization.
Azure Lighthouse – unblocking Azure Networking MSPs
Many enterprise customers, such as banks and financial institutions want partners who can help them with managing their Azure Networking subscriptions. However, the need for individual customer management for these subscriptions introduces a lot of manual work for these service providers.
Last week, we announced Azure Lighthouse, which is a unique set of capabilities on Azure, empowering service provider partners with a single control plane to view and manage Azure at scale across all their customers with higher automation and efficiency. We also talked about how Azure Lighthouse enables management at scale for service providers.
With Azure Lighthouse, Azure Networking MSPs can seamlessly onboard customers via managed services offers on the Azure marketplace or natively via ARM templates – empowering them to deliver a rich set of managed network experiences for their end-customers.
Azure Networking MSP partners
Azure Networking partners play a big role in the Azure networking ecosystem, delivering Virtual WAN CPEs and hybrid networking services such as ExpressRoute to enterprises that are building cloud infrastructures. We welcome the following Azure Networking MSP launch partners into our Azure Networking MSP partner ecosystem.
These partners have invested in people, best practices, operations and tools to build and harness deep Azure Networking knowledge and service capabilities. They’ve trained their staff on Azure and have partnered closely with us in Azure Networking through technical workshops and design reviews.
These partners are also early adopters of Azure Lighthouse, building and delivering a new generation of managed network experiences for their end customers. We encourage all worldwide networking MSPs, network carriers, and SIs that would like to join this program to reach out via ManagedVirtualWAN@microsoft.com to join the Azure Networking MSP program and bring your unique value and services to Azure customers.
In summary, we firmly believe that Azure customers will greatly benefit from the new cloud networking focused services our partners are bringing to the market. Customers will be able to leverage these services to augment their own inhouse skills and be able to move faster and more efficiently while optimally leveraging the cloud to meet their enterprise business needs. For more information on how to engage with our Networking MSP partner, please see partner information on our MSP partners site.
Quelle: Azure
Reliance on cloud services continues to grow for industries, organizations, and people around the world. So now more than ever it is important that you can trust that the cloud solutions you rely on are secure, compliant with global standards and local regulations, keep data private and protected, and are fundamentally reliable. At Microsoft, we are committed to providing a trusted set of cloud services, giving you the confidence to unlock the potential of the cloud.
Over the past 12 months, Azure has operated core compute services at 99.995 percent average uptime across our global cloud infrastructure. However, at the scale Azure operates, we recognize that uptime alone does not tell the full story. We experienced three unique and significant incidents that impacted customers during this time period, a datacenter outage in the South Central US region in September 2018, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) challenges in November 2018, and DNS maintenance issues in May 2019.
Building and operating a global cloud infrastructure of 54 regions made up of hundreds of evolving services is a large and complex task, so we treat each incident as an important learning moment. Outages and other service incidents are a challenge for all public cloud providers, and we continue to improve our understanding of the complex ways in which factors such as operational processes, architectural designs, hardware issues, software flaws, and human factors can align to cause service incidents. All three of the incidents mentioned were the result of multiple failures that only through intricate interactions led to a customer-impacting outage. In response, we are creating better ways to mitigate incidents through steps such as redundancies in our platform, quality assurance throughout our release pipeline, and automation in our processes. The capability of continuous, real-time improvement is one of the great advantages of cloud services, and while we will never eliminate all such risks, we are deeply focused on reducing both the frequency and the impact of service issues while being transparent with our customers, partners, and the broader industry.
Ensuring reliability is a fundamental responsibility for every Azure engineer. To augment these efforts, we have formed a new Quality Engineering team within my CTO office, working alongside our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to pioneer new approaches to deliver an even more reliable platform. To keep improving our reliability, here are some of the initiatives that we already have underway:
Safe deployment practices – Azure approaches change automation through a safe deployment practice framework which aims to ensure that all code and configuration changes go through a cycle of specific stages. These stages include dev/test, staging, private previews, a hardware diversity pilot, and longer validation periods before a broader rollout to region pairs. This has dramatically reduced the risk that software changes will have negative impacts, and we are extending this mechanism to include software-defined infrastructure changes, such as networking and DNS.
Storage-account level failover – During the September 2018 datacenter outage, several storage stamps were physically damaged, requiring their immediate shut down. Because it is our policy to prioritize data retention over time-to-restore, we chose to endure a longer outage to ensure that we could restore all customer data successfully. A number of you have told us that you want more flexibility to make this decision for your own organizations, so we are empowering customers by previewing the ability to initiate your own failover at the storage-account level.
Expanding availability zones – Today, we have availability zones live in the 10 largest Azure regions, providing an additional reliability option for the majority of our customers. We are also underway to bring availability zones to the next 10 largest Azure regions between now and 2021.
Project Tardigrade – At Build last month, I discussed Project Tardigrade, a new Azure service named after the nearly indestructible microscopic animals also known as water bears. This effort will detect hardware failures or memory leaks that can lead to operating system crashes just before they occur, so that Azure can then freeze virtual machines for a few seconds so the workloads can be moved to a healthy host.
Low to zero impactful maintenance – We’re investing in improving zero-impact and low-impact update technologies including hot patching, live migration, and in-place migration. We’ve deployed dozens of security and reliability patches to host infrastructure in the past year, many of which were implemented with no customer impact or downtime. We continue to invest in these technologies to bring their benefits to even more Azure services.
Fault injection and stress testing – Validating that systems will perform as designed in the face of failures is possible only by subjecting them to those failures. We’re increasingly fault injecting our services before they go to production, both at a small scale with service-specific load stress and failures, but also at regional and AZ scale with full region and AZ failure drills in our private canary regions. Our plan is to eventually make these fault injection services available to customers so that they can perform the same validation on their own applications and services.
Look for us to share more details of our internal architecture and operations in the future. While we are taking all of these steps to improve foundational reliability, Azure also provides you with high availability, disaster recovery, and backup solutions that can enable your applications to meet business availability requirements and recovery objectives. We maintain detailed guidance on designing reliable applications, including best practices for architectural design, monitoring application health, and responding to failures and disasters.
Reliability is and continues to be a core tenet of our trusted cloud commitments, alongside compliance, security, privacy, and transparency. Across all these areas, we know that customer trust is earned and must be maintained, not just by saying the right thing but by doing the right thing. Microsoft believes that a trusted, responsible and inclusive cloud is grounded in how we engage as a business, develop our technology, our advocacy and outreach, and how we are serving the communities in which we operate. Microsoft is committed to providing a trusted set of cloud services, giving you the confidence to unlock the potential of the cloud.
Quelle: Azure
This post was co-authored by Hadas Bitran, Group Manager, Microsoft Healthcare Israel.
Every day, healthcare organizations are beginning their digital transformation journey with the Microsoft Healthcare Bot Service built on Azure. The Healthcare Bot service empowers healthcare organizations to build and deploy an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experience at scale. The service combines built-in medical intelligence with natural language capabilities, extensibility tools, and compliance constructs, allowing healthcare organizations such as providers, payers, pharma, HMOs, and telehealth to give people access to trusted and relevant healthcare services and information.
Healthcare organizations can leverage the Healthcare Bot Service on their digital transformation journey today, as we announced in our blog Microsoft Healthcare Bot brings conversational AI to healthcare. That’s why we are so happy to share more information on the Healthcare Bot Service partner program. Our Healthcare Bot certified partners empower healthcare organizations to successfully deploy virtual assistants on the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service. Working with an official partner, healthcare organizations can achieve the full potential of the Microsoft Healthcare Bot by leveraging the expertise and experience of partners who understand the business needs and challenges in healthcare.
This new program is open to existing Microsoft partners that support organizations in the healthcare domain, and delivers the training and resources required to support customers with end to end solutions using Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot Service. The program is designed to support partner success and enable partners to provide tailored solutions using the Healthcare Bot service as a foundation.
With the power of the cloud and a platform that is uniquely built for healthcare conversational intelligence, partners can quickly demonstrate value and iterate on solutions for customers. Official partners have access to partner-only resources and benefits that will enable them to provide customers with differentiated and value-added offerings such as:
Partner listing in the Healthcare Bot partner directory.
Preferential messaging tiers.
Free demonstration and proof of concept Healthcare Bot Instances.
Direct support channel from the product team.
Partner resources including sales materials, product updates and release notes.
The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service helps partners bring conversational AI to innovative healthcare organizations. Partners can support healthcare organizations to deploy customized conversational experiences at scale, reducing costs and improving outcomes for their patients with virtual assistants built to complement their healthcare services.
The Healthcare Bot provides partners with a comprehensive platform to automate healthcare engagements and provides patients with instant access to the services they need. The service facilitates multi-channel healthcare conversations such as chat bots or handoff to live nurses over Microsoft Teams. Partners can build differentiated offerings and create unique conversational healthcare experiences that support the type of digital interaction required by the patient.
Next steps
Partners interested in certification should submit a request to HealthBotSupport@microsoft.com. Healthcare organizations seeking certified Healthcare Bot partners can find more information in the official partner directory.
Quelle: Azure
Moving on-premises apps and data to the cloud is a key step in our customers’ migration journey, and we’re committed to helping simplify that process. Earlier this year, we invited customers to participate in the preview of multiple new migration capabilities. Today, I am excited to announce the latest evolution of Azure Migrate, which provides a streamlined, comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft and partner tools to meet migration needs, all in one place.
With the general availability of Azure Migrate, including the new integrated partner experience, Server Assessment, Server Migration, Database Assessment, and Database Migration capabilities, we strive to make the cloud journey even easier for customers. Azure Migrate acts as a central hub for all migration needs and tools from infrastructure to applications to data. We are truly democratizing the migration process with guidance and choice.
New Azure Migrate integrated experience
The new experience provides you access to Microsoft and ISV tools and helps identify the right tool for your migration scenario. To help with large-scale datacenter migrations and cloud transformation projects, we’ve also added end-to-end progress tracking.
New features include:
Guided experience for the most common migration scenarios such as server and database migration, data movement to Azure with Data Box, and migration of applications to Azure App Service
Feature-based grouping and choice of Microsoft and partner tools for the typical phases of the migration process—discovery, assessment, and migration
An integrated experience that ensures continuity and gives you a consistent view of your datacenter assets
Carbonite, Cloudamize, Corent, Device42, Turbonomic, and UnifyCloud are already integrated with Azure Migrate.
Powerful Server Assessment and Server Migration capabilities
With our new Azure Migrate: Server Assessment service offering, in addition to discovery and assessment of VMware servers, you will now be able to:
Perform large-scale VMware datacenter discovery and assessment for migration. Customers can now discover and assess 35,000 virtual machines (VMs). This is a tremendous scale improvement from the previous limit of 1,500 VMs.
Perform large-scale Hyper-V datacenter discovery and assessment for migration. Customers can now profile Hyper-V hosts with up to 10,000 VMs. You can also bring all your inventory from VMware and Hyper-V in the same Azure Migrate project.
Get performance-based rightsizing, application dependency analysis, migration cost planning, and readiness analysis for both VMware and Hyper-V. You don’t need any agents to perform discovery and assessment with Server Assessment.
Azure Migrate: Server Assessment is free to all Azure customers and will soon add support for physical server discovery and assessment.
Building on our current ability to perform migration of VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, the new Azure Migrate: Server Migration enables:
Agentless migration of VMware VMs to Azure in preview. When you opt to use the new agentless migration method for VMware VMs, you can use the same appliance for discovery, assessment, and migration. Onboard once and execute the entire process seamlessly. You also get OS-agnostic support to help you migrate any client or server OS, including Windows or Linux, that is supported on the Azure platform. This complements the generally available agent-based migration capability.
Agentless migration of Hyper-V VMs to Azure and agent-based migration of physical servers and VMs running on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform to Azure.
Simplified experience, similar to creating a virtual machine in Azure. The assessment recommendations automatically get applied to the VMs as you start migrating them, especially the rightsizing recommendations that help you optimize servers and save money. This feature works with assessments performed by Azure Migrate: Server Assessment or any integrated partners, such as Cloudamize and Turbonomic.
No-impact migration testing that helps you plan your migration with confidence. You also get zero data loss when you move your applications to Azure.
Azure Migrate: Server Migration is free to all Azure customers. You only pay for the compute and storage that you consume in your Azure subscription.
Geographic availability
The Azure Migrate experience, including Server Assessment, Server Migration, and our integrated set of Microsoft and partner tools, are available starting today in United States, Europe, Asia, and the United Kingdom. You can start by creating an Azure Migrate project in a geography of your choice. We will ensure that metadata associated with your Microsoft and partner scenarios is retained in an Azure datacenter in the geography that you select. Later this month, customers will be able to create their Azure Migrate projects in Australia, Canada, and Japan. You can use a project in any geography to perform migrations to any Azure region of your choice.
You can see the new Azure Migrate, Server Assessment, and Server Migration in action in the videos below.
How to get started with Azure Migrate
How to discover, assess, and migrate VMware VMs to Azure
How to discover, assess, and migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure
We are innovating faster than ever before so that you can experience the modern capabilities in Azure. Get started with Azure Migrate.
Quelle: Azure
Last July, I shared our approach to helping customers migrate to Azure. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous customer response working with organizations such as Allscripts, Chevron, J.B. Hunt, and Carlsberg Beers, and we’ve gained valuable insights about customer needs along their journey. Today, we are bringing together a best practice-based, holistic experience for migrating existing applications and systems to Azure.
Azure Migration Program
Azure Migration Program includes prescriptive advice, resources, and tools customers need for a successful path to the cloud from start to finish. Using proven cloud adoption methodologies, tools, resources, and best practices, customers can ensure their move to Azure is successful. Through the program, customers will work hand in hand with Microsoft experts and specialized migration partners to receive:
Curated, step-by-step guidance from Microsoft experts and specialized migration partners based on proven Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure methodology.
Technical skill building with foundational and role-specific courses to develop new Azure skills and ensue long-term organizational readiness.
Free Azure migration tools including Azure Migrate to assess and migrate workloads. And free Azure Cost Management to optimize costs.
Offers to reduce migration costs including Azure Hybrid Benefit, free Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
“The AMP program is going to help us get our customers through the initial stages of migration more rapidly – especially through the part where it takes us typically a more time, helping their people adjust to operating at cloud-speed, and with a set of automated processes that are quite different than a traditional on-premises operating model.”
– Alex Brown, CEO, 10th Magnitude
To learn more about the program, watch this video to see how you can benefit. You can also register for the webinar on July 24, 2019 to learn more. If you’re ready to get started now, you can submit your request to participate beginning July 15, 2019.
Why run Windows Server and SQL Server anywhere else?
SQL Server 2008 end of support was July 9, 2019 and Windows Server 2008 end of support is January 14, 2020. Most customers are choosing Azure as the destination for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads for several reasons:
Unparalleled innovation. Azure delivers innovative, fully managed capabilities across apps, data, and infrastructure. Azure App Service supports popular app frameworks with advanced DevOps capabilities, delivering a highly productive app migration experience for customers. Azure SQL Database managed instance provides evergreen SQL, which never needs to be patched or upgraded along with comprehensive SQL Server Engine compatibility so customers can migrate SQL Server workloads without changing code. Finally, Azure IaaS can meet all the infrastructure needs for your migrated workloads with global coverage across 54 regions.
Unmatched security. Azure enables a security posture that’s easier to implement and far more comprehensive than other environments, thereby enabling your migrated workloads to be secure and well managed. With Azure Security Center, customers get the built-in protections across hybrid environments. Azure Blueprints makes it easier for customers to define and apply security policies across their workloads speedily and at scale. Azure Sentinel enables advanced security threat hunting and mitigation from across the enterprise.
Unbeatable offers. AWS is 5X more expensive than Azure for Windows Server and SQL Server. Customers are realizing significant savings by taking advantage of unique offers like Azure Hybrid Benefit and free Extended Security Updates only in Azure.
Azure Migrate – Your single destination for all migration needs
Azure Migrate toolset delivers a unified, integrated experience across Azure and partner migration tools, so customers can identify the right tool for their migration scenario. Azure tools such as Server Assessment, Server Migration, Database Migration Service, and App Service Migration Assistant are now part of Azure Migrate. Azure partner tools such as Carbonite, Cloudamize, Corent, Device42, Turbonomic, and UnifyCloud are now integrated with Azure Migrate with additional integrations on the way. We have also enabled agentless migration and added support for Hyper-V assessments. Learn more and watch the new Azure Migrate video.
Get started today
I couldn’t be more excited about the collective opportunity that lies ahead of us and look forward to helping customers confidently plan and migrate to Azure.
Visit the Azure migration center to get started today.
Quelle: Azure
Extending Azure Resource Manager with delegated resource management
Today, Erin Chapple, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure, announced the general availability of Azure Lighthouse, a single control plane for service providers to view and manage Azure across all their customers. Inspired by Azure partners who continue to incorporate infrastructure-as-code and automation into their managed service practices, Azure Lighthouse introduces a new delegated resource concept that simplifies cross-tenant governance and operations.
Granular access, better automation, and simplified customer onboarding
Powering Azure Lighthouse is an Azure Resource Manager capability called delegated resource management. Delegated resource management lets customers delegate permissions to service providers over scopes, including subscriptions, resource groups, and individual resources, which enable service providers to perform management operations on their behalf. After customers delegate resources to a service provider, the provider can provide access to users or accounts in provider’s tenant within the constraints specified by the customer, using the standard role-based access control (RBAC) mechanisms. The standard RBAC mechanisms work as if customer resources were resources in provider’s own subscriptions. Finally, delegated resource management works consistently regardless of the licensing construct service providers and their customers might choose—enterprise agreement (EA), cloud solution provider (CSP), and pay-as-you-go.
“Azure delegated resource management enables Nordcloud customers to easily provide secure access. It simplifies onboarding new managed services customers, ensuring our high security and compliance standards are met.”
Ilja Summala, Group CTO, Nordcloud
Cross-tenant management at scale, with enhanced visibility and governance
Delegated management uniquely supports management-at-scale and automation patterns of service providers, whether those providers are managed services partners acting on behalf of customers or central IT teams of enterprises with multiple Azure tenants. Partners can now manage tens of thousands of resources from thousands of distinct customers from their own Azure portal or CLI context. Because customer resources are visible to service providers as Azure resources in their own tenant, service providers can easily automate status monitoring, and applying create, update, change, delete (CRUD) changes across the resources of many customers from a single location.
Everything relevant to Azure resource management, from the Azure portal to services such as Azure Policy, Resource Graph, Log Analytics feature of Azure Monitor, or Update Management, all honor delegated resource management. What’s more, both customers and service providers can see who took actions on the resources from the activity log, increasing accountability for both parties, with protection of the privacy of individual service provider identities. That’s because the newly built resource provider, Microsoft Managed Services, enables Azure services to determine if a call was made from a resource’s home tenant or from a service provider’s tenant.
Our partners have several options for how they use these new capabilities. Since the Azure Lighthouse portal experiences have corresponding APIs, PowerShell, Azure CLI, REST APIs, or client SDKs, it’s easy to integrate into other cloud management portals, ITSM tools, or monitoring tools.
How our partners use Azure Lighthouse
Examples from two of our expert partners, Rackspace and Sentia, highlight the power of Azure Lighthouse and delegated resource management:
Rackspace is enhancing security and response capabilities using Azure Lighthouse in three steps:
Utilizing Azure Resource Graph and cross-tenant queries to quickly detect which customers have impacted images or hosts deployed
Applying an in-guest audit policy across all customers’ managed estates to verify host settings relating to impact/vulnerability
Using update management to report on impacted systems and schedule targeted hot fixes
Sentia pivoted CI/CD pipeline to use declarative Azure Resource Manager templates for provisioning management artifacts across all customers who are under Azure CSP licensing construct. Sentia’s managed services offer is now 90 percent based on Resource Manager templates, which simplifies deployments dramatically, automating monitoring, governance, and management tasks at scale, across customers.
Continued Azure Resource Manager investments for our partners
Azure Lighthouse and delegated resource management are just the latest of the platform investments we continue to make for our partners. Together with Azure managed applications and custom providers, they enable comprehensive management-at-scale capability for partners and customers. To hear more, watch my demo at Microsoft Build 2019. Some of the other management innovations we’ve made include the following:
Partners can build cross-tenant experiences into their solutions with minimal development, since Azure Resource Manager APIs and Azure Resource Graph queries are now enhanced with tenant context.
Service providers and ISVs can extend and serve-up their IP natively within Azure using custom providers. Imagine end-customers raising service requests to service providers from within Azure, thanks to the ability of custom provider to integrate ITSM tools’ capabilities natively to Azure.
Customers can purchase applications developed by partners from the Azure Marketplace that come with management out of the box provided by service providers. Underlying application resources are protected from the customer while they use the new managed application UI to interact with an application safely. Service providers are given full access to the application to maintain, update, and provide application support for the customer from managed application center.
“We are delighted to see the adoption of the new Azure Lighthouse capabilities into Veeam’s Backup-as-a-Service offerings, representing a natural extension of our cloud-based business offerings. This partnership is a great opportunity for our managed services providers to easily extend Backup-as-a-Service offerings by Veeam using Azure Lighthouse, in order to manage their Azure customers at scale.”
Tim FitzGerald, Vice President, North America Cloud, Ingram Micro Inc.
When Azure as a platform does more for our partners, our partners can focus more on providing differentiated services and higher value to our joint customers. That is how partners make more possible on Azure. We look forward to hearing your feedback on Azure Lighthouse and delegated resource management.
Quelle: Azure
In a world where data volume, variety, and type are exponentially growing, organizations need to collaborate with data of any size and shape. In many cases data is at its most powerful when it can be shared and combined with data that resides outside organizational boundaries with business partners and third parties. For customers, sharing this data in a simple and governed way is challenging. Common data sharing approaches using file transfer protocol (FTP) or web APIs tend to be bespoke development and require infrastructure to manage. These tools do not provide the security or governance required to meet enterprise standards, and they often are not suitable for sharing large datasets. To enable enterprise collaboration, we are excited to unveil Azure Data Share Preview, a new data service for sharing data across organizations.
Simple and safe data sharing
Data professionals in the enterprise can now use Azure Data Share to easily and safely share big data with external organizations in Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage. New services will continue to come online. As a fully managed Azure service, Azure Data Share does not require infrastructure to set up and it scales to meet big data sharing demands. The intuitive interface makes sharing easy and productive, directly from the Azure portal. With just a few clicks data professionals choose which data to share and who to share it with. They can schedule the service to automatically share new or changed data pertaining to specific datasets, as well as stop future updates from flowing through at any time. With Azure Data Share, data professionals have greater control over each data sharing relationship and can govern use by associating term of use with each data share created. To receive the data, recipients must agree to the terms of use specified.
Alongside governance, security is fundamental in Azure Data Share and leverages core Azure security measures to help protect the data.
Enabling data collaboration
Azure Data Share maximizes access to simple and safe data sharing for organizations in many industries. For example, retailers can leverage Azure Data Share to easily share sales inventory and demographic data for demand forecasting and price optimization with their suppliers.
In the finance industry, Microsoft collaborated with Finastra, a multi-billion dollar company and provider of the broadest portfolio of financial services software in the world today that spans retail banking, transaction banking, lending, and treasury and capital markets. Finastra is fully integrating Azure Data Share with their open platform, FusionFabric.cloud, to enable seamless distribution of premium datasets to a wider ecosystem of application developers across the FinTech value chain. These datasets have been curated by Finastra over several years, and by leveraging the data distribution capabilities of Azure Data Share, ingestion by app developers and other partners requires simple wrangling, significantly reducing the go to market timeframe and unlocking net new revenue potential for Finastra.
“Our decision to integrate Azure Data Share with Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud platform is now a great way to further accelerate innovation via an expanded open ecosystem. Our partnership with Microsoft truly provides us with limitless opportunities to drive transformation in Financial Services.”
– Eli Rosner, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Finastra
Next steps
Industries of all types need a simple and safe way to share data. Azure Data Share opens up new opportunities for innovation and insights to drive greater business impact.
Watch the video about Azure Data Share.
Get started with documentation.
Start using Azure Data Share in the Azure portal.
Quelle: Azure
As we head into the global partner conference Microsoft Inspire on July 14-18, 2019, a big focus is on rethinking how we make it easier for customers to discover, try, and buy cloud-based software and services from our partners. Today, we're excited to announce new tools, commerce options, and a rewards program through the Microsoft commercial marketplace that help partners leverage this important distribution channel.
Today, we're excited to announce new tools, commerce options, and a rewards program through the Microsoft commercial marketplace that makes it easier than ever for our partners to grow their business through this important distribution channel.
Commercial marketplace as a new distribution channel
Many people think of a commercial marketplace as a simple catalog of offer listings which are often difficult to navigate. For customers, they are often linked off to a different experience for trial and purchase. Publishers and partner selling solutions are challenged by how to differentiate their solutions to stand out in the volume of offers.
We are working with our partner community to ensure the commercial marketplace experiences deliver a new distribution channel to drive their business growth. For example, Microsoft AppSource targets business decision makers while Azure Marketplace targets IT and developers. This includes having the commerce capabilities and solution supply to capture the rising customer demand in online enterprise software purchases.
Microsoft’s commercial marketplace has at its core, one product catalog, which includes both Microsoft cloud software and services as well as software and services from our partners built on top of and to connect with one or more cloud services offered by Microsoft (Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Azure) publishing as transactable offers. This is not just for independent software vendors (ISVs) creating repeatable intellectual property (IP). The commercial marketplace experiences also support offers from managed service providers (MSPs) and consulting services from systems integrators (SIs) such as one-day assessments, migration offers, and more.
Customers can discover, try, and buy solutions from the marketplace in one of three ways:
Direct from the publishers
Through our field sales teams who retire quota for selling eligible partner solutions, or
Through our global distribution channel, where we now also pay the channel a 10 percent incentive to sell marketplace publisher solutions with a transactable SaaS offer, and who participate in the IP co-sell program.
Customers are looking for quicker buying experiences where they can purchase Microsoft products AND solutions from our partners – together in one place, with one transaction, on a unified invoice, which the commercial marketplace provides.
Using the commercial marketplace as a strategic distribution channel will require partners to think about their business model in new and different ways, which can provide significant new revenue streams. For instance, any publisher can continue to list or trial their solution in Microsoft AppSource or Azure Marketplace, but the impact will likely be similar to what they face today, where the customer discovery experience is crowded due to volume of offers and the publisher struggles to differentiate their solution. However, when a publisher chooses to transact in Microsoft’s commercial marketplace, they get access to a whole new set of benefits and ways to sell:
Gain access to a global reseller channel with over 70,000 cloud solution providers (CSP) in over 140 countries who receive an incentive directly from Microsoft when they resell publisher solutions.
Provides simplified deal-making with custom contract amendments.
Centralized partnership experience via Partner Center for the commercial marketplace onboarding, lead sharing, deal registration, benefits, incentives, sales analytics, and investments.
New go-to-market (GTM) benefits via marketplace rewards that unlocks GTM benefits for publishers as they reach various transaction thresholds.
A single onboarding and management experience
Whether a customer buys direct through Microsoft field sellers or through CSP, each of these channels is accessible and managed by partners through a single ingestion point known as Partner Center. Within Partner Center, publishers can publish marketplace offers and manage their engagements, while resellers can bundle Microsoft software and services with publisher’s software and services. This simplifies customer, publisher, and reseller engagement with one transaction and one invoice.
New commerce options
To accompany this new publisher experience, we’ve released new commerce capabilities that partners of all sizes are already starting to benefit from such as ESRI with site-based SaaS, Barracuda, and Trend Micro who use custom business models for their SaaS-based applications. Approved Contact, Crossware, and MongoDB are also using the per-seat SaaS capabilities and managed services from long-time Microsoft partners like Ingram Micro.
These new commerce enhancements allow publishers to customize their offers to meet customer needs and scale through the global reach of Microsoft’s customer and channel communities.
Marketplace rewards
We’re also sharing marketplace rewards, which is a new benefits program which will enhance the success of publishers with transactable offers in the commercial marketplace. Through the program publishers can unlock sales, marketing, and technical benefits to help accelerate their success. As a publisher’s business grows they’ll continue to unlock more benefits designed to provide support at every stage of their growth. This comes with a new badging program for Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace that will quickly direct customers to partner solutions they can trust, which will work with cloud services from Microsoft. We will be publishing additional details on the program next week during Microsoft Inspire.
With these capabilities, publishers will be able to create new revenue streams, reach new customers in new markets, and grow their business faster than ever before.
Next steps
Learn more about how to onboard and publish your offers at Partner Center, how to list them on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace, and how to take advantage of the new go-to-market services and onboarding resources.
Visit the Microsoft Inspire site, which will be updated with materials, photos, and keynote replays for more highlights from the event.
Quelle: Azure
