Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

New to Azure? Follow these easy steps to get started

Today, many organizations are leveraging digital transformation to deliver their applications and services in the cloud. At Microsoft Build 2019, we announced the general availability of Azure Quickstart Center and received positive feedback from customers. Azure Quickstart Center brings together the step-by-step guidance you need to easily create cloud workloads. The power to easily set up, configure, and manage cloud workloads while being guided by best practices is now built right into the Azure portal.

How do you access Azure Quickstart Center?

There are two ways to access Azure Quickstart Center in the Azure portal. Go to the global search and type in Quickstart Center or select All services on the left nav and type Quickstart Center. Select the star button to save it under your favorites.

Get started

Azure Quickstart Center is designed with you in mind. We created setup guides, start a project, and curated online training for self-paced learning so that you can manage cloud deployment according to your business needs.

Setup guides

To help you prepare your organization for moving to the cloud, our guides Azure setup and Azure migration in the Quickstart Center give you a comprehensive view of best practices for your cloud ecosystem. The setup guides are created by our FastTrack for Azure team who has supported customers in cloud deployment and turned these valuable insights to easy reference guides for you.

The Azure setup guide walks you through how to:

Organize resources: Set up a management hierarchy to consistently apply access control, policy, and compliance to groups of resources and use tagging to track related resources.
Manage access: Use role-based access control to make sure that users have only the permissions they really need.
Manage costs: Identify your subscription type, understand how billing works, and how you can control costs.
Governance, security, and compliance: Enforce and automate policies and security settings that help you follow applicable legal requirements.
Monitoring and reporting: Get visibility across resources to help find and fix problems, optimize performance, or get insight to customer behavior.
Stay current with Azure: Track product updates so you can take a proactive approach to change management.

The Azure migration guide is focused on re-host also known as lift and shift, and gives you a detailed view of how to migrate applications and resources from your on-premises environment to Azure. Our migration guide covers:

Prerequisites: Work with your internal stakeholders to understand the business reasons for migration, determine which assets like infrastructure, apps, and data are being migrated and set the migration timeline.
Assess the digital estate: Assess the workload and each related asset such as infrastructure, apps, and data to ensure the assets are compatible with cloud platforms.
Migrate assets: Identify the appropriate tools to reach a "done state" including native tools, third-party tools, and project management tools.
Manage costs: Cost discussion is a critical step in migration. Use the guidance in this step to drive the discussion.
Optimize and transform: After migration, review the solution for possible areas of optimization. This could include reviewing the design of the solution, right-sizing the services, and analyzing costs.
Secure and manage: Enforce and set up policies to manage the environment to ensure operations efficiency and legal compliance.
Assistance: Learn how to get the right support at the right time to continue your cloud journey in Azure.

Start a project

Compare frequently used Azure services available for different solution types, and discover the best fit for your cloud project. We’ll help you quickly launch and create workloads in the cloud. Pick one of the five common scenarios shown below to compare the deployment options and evaluate high-level architecture overviews, prerequisites, and associated costs.

After you select a scenario, choose an option, and understand the requirements, select Create.

We’ll take you to the create resource page where you’ll follow the steps to create a resource.

Take an online course

Our recommended online learning options let you take a hands-on approach to building Azure skills and knowledge.

Get started today

Use the rich capabilities of the Azure Quickstart Center to create your first cloud solution like a pro.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft positioned as a leader in the Forrester WaveTM: Database-as-a-service

We’re excited to share that Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Database-as-a-service, Q2 2019. This decision is based on their evaluation of Azure relational and non-relational databases. We believe Microsoft’s position as a leader is further underscored by its standing in the recent Q1 2019 NoSQL Forrester WaveTM.

Database-as-a-service has come a long way

Microsoft provides the freedom to operate wherever you are in your digital transformation, whether modernizing on-premises, migrating to the cloud, or using a hybrid solution. Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) has evolved into a very popular option for organizations looking to reduce their operational and capital expenses, while tapping into the performance and scale benefits of the cloud. Azure database services not only automate many of the daily database chores like updates, patches, and backups, but also use built-in intelligent features. These are on by default to optimize database performance and secure your data, keeping you one step ahead of potential threats.

According to Forrester, “33 percent of global infrastructure business decision makers already support a DBaaS deployment in production, and this will likely double over the next three to four years. In addition, 61 percent of global data and analytics technology decision makers plan to increase their investment for DBaaS in the coming year by at least 5 percent, and 22 percent of them plan to increase it by more than 10 percent compared to the previous year.”

Azure databases built on choice and flexibility

According to the Forrester report, customers “like Microsoft’s automation, ease of provisioning, high availability, security, and technical support.” Microsoft has a comprehensive portfolio of database services on Azure that are grounded in choice and flexibility, providing the right tool for maximizing productivity, efficiency, and return on investment for every use case that customers encounter.

Whether migrating on-premises databases at scale, building multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) or developing new, cloud native apps, Azure databases comprise the range of relational and non-relational, community-based and proprietary engines that provide a variety of deployment options and support an array of application types. All the Azure databases are managed by Microsoft, so you can focus more on building great apps and growing your business:

Relational databases

Azure SQL Database provides broad SQL Server compatibility and is optimized for SQL Server migrations, OLTP and multi-tenant SaaS applications. Significantly expand the potential for application growth without being limited by storage size with Hyperscale.

Community-based Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure Database for MariaDB are enterprise-ready, secure, and ideal for low-latency scenarios such as online gaming and digital marketing. Bring high-performance scaling to your low latency, high-throughput PostgreSQL workloads with Hyperscale powered by Citus Data technology.

NoSQL database

Azure Cosmos DB provides turnkey global distribution and transparent multi-master replication and is great for scalable IoT applications and real-time personalization and analytics.

Forrester states in its report that “Microsoft offers a mature, scalable, secure, and hybrid DBaaS offering.” Azure databases have been tried and tested over the years, becoming more scalable, performant, secure, and intelligent in the process.

Next steps

We’re committed to making Azure the ideal destination for your data migration and the best platform to build powerful, intelligent, and modern apps upon. If you haven’t tried Azure database services, you can try them for free today without signing-up or providing a credit card.

Download the full Forrester WaveTM Database-as-a-Service Q2 2019 report for more details.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing next generation reading with Immersive Reader, a new Azure Cognitive Service

This blog post was authored by Tina Coll, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Azure Marketing.

Today, we’re unveiling the preview of Immersive Reader, a new Azure Cognitive Service in the Language category. Developers can now use this service to embed inclusive capabilities into their apps for enhancing text reading and comprehension for users regardless of age or ability. No machine learning expertise is required. Based on extensive research on inclusivity and accessibility, Immersive Reader’s features are designed to read the text aloud, translate, focus user attention, and much more. Immersive Reader helps users unlock knowledge from text and achieve gains in the classroom and office.

Over 15 million users rely on Microsoft’s immersive reading technologies across 18 apps and platforms including Microsoft Learning Tools, Word, Outlook, and Teams. Now, developers can deliver this proven literacy-enhancing experience to their users too.

People like Andrzej, a child with dyslexia, have learned to read with the Immersive Reader experience embedded into apps like Microsoft Learning Tools. His mother, Mitra, shares their story:

Literacy is key to unlocking knowledge and realizing one’s potential. Educators see this reality in the classroom every day, yet hurdles to reading are commonplace for people with dyslexia, ADHD, or visual impairment, as well as emerging readers, non-native speakers, and others. In the spirit of empowering every person to achieve more, the features of Immersive Reader help readers overcome these challenges.

Azure is the only major cloud provider that offers this type experience as an easy-to-use AI service. Skooler, an ISV on a mission “to do education technology better,” integrated Immersive Reader. As Tor Henriksen, Skooler’s CEO and CTO remarks, “In 27 years of software development, this was the easiest integration we’ve ever done.” Multiple businesses to date have already started embedding Immersive Reader into their apps, including:

With millions of users like Andrzej having discovered the power of the written word with Immersive Reader, we look forward to seeing what people can achieve with what you build.

To start embedding Immersive Reader into your apps, visit the Immersive Reader product page. The service is available for free while in preview.
Quelle: Azure

Virtual machine scale set insights from Azure Monitor

In October 2018 we announced the public preview of Azure Monitor for Virtual Machines (VMs). At that time, we included support for monitoring your virtual machine scale sets from the at scale view under Azure Monitor.

Today we are announcing the public preview of monitoring your Windows and Linux VM scale sets from within the scale set resource blade. This update includes several enhancements:

In-blade monitoring for your scale set with “Top N”, aggregate, and list views across the entire scale set.
Drill down experience to identify issues on a particular scale set instance.
Updated mapping UI to display the entire dependency diagram across your scale set while supporting drill down maps for a single instance.
UI based enablement of monitoring from the scale set resource blade.
Updated examples for enabling monitoring using Azure Resource Manager templates.
Use of policy to enable monitoring for your scale set.

Performance

The performance views are powered using log analytics queries, offering “Top N”, aggregate, and list views to quickly find outliers or issues in your scale set based on guest level metrics for CPU, available memory, bytes sent and received, and logical disk space used. 

These views will help you quickly determine if a particular instance is having an issue, and provide the means to troubleshoot the issue, specified down to the process that is having a failed connection to a backend service or a particular logical disk running out of space.

Maps

Our dependency maps and network connection data sets are powered by the service map solution and it's Azure Virtual Machine extension. Maps in this context deliver a view that is specific to your scale set, automatically discovering the processes on the instances that are accepting in bound connections and making out bound connections to backend servers. This allows you to identify surprise dependencies to third party services, monitor failed connections, see live connection counts, monitor bytes sent and received per process, and identify service level latency.

In addition to the map view, you can analyze the network connection data set in our connections overview workbook or directly in log analytics.

Workbooks

We have brought our workbooks from Azure Monitor for Virtual Machines to the scale set view. These workbooks query the monitoring data we collect and allow you to modify them to create custom reports that you can share with colleagues in the portal.

Getting started

If you’re running VM scale sets you can use the performance and map capabilities from the “Insights (preview)” menu on the scale set resource blade to find resource constraints and visualize dependencies.

To get started, go to the resource blade for your VM scale set and click on “Insights (preview)” in the monitoring section. When you click “Try now” you’ll be prompted to choose a log analytics workspace, or we can generate one for you. You can view your resources at scale in Azure Monitor under “Virtual Machines (preview)” and on-board to entire resource groups and subscriptions using Azure Policy or using Powershell.
Quelle: Azure

First Microsoft cloud regions in Middle East now available

This blog post was co-authored by Paul Lorimer, Distinguished Engineer, Office 365.

Azure and Office 365 generally available today, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform available by end of 2019

Today, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365 are taking a major step together to help support the digital transformation of our customers. Both Azure and Office 365 are now generally available from our first cloud datacenter regions in the Middle East, located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, offering the next generation of intelligent business applications and tools, are anticipated to be available from the cloud regions in UAE by the end of 2019.

The opening of the new cloud regions in Abu Dhabi and Dubai marks the first time Microsoft will deliver cloud services directly from datacenter locations in UAE and expands upon Microsoft’s existing investments in the Gulf and the wider Middle East region. By delivering the complete Microsoft cloud – Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 – from datacenters in a given geography, we offer scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud services for organizations while helping them meet their data residency, security, and compliance needs.

Our new cloud regions adhere to Microsoft’s trusted cloud principles and join one of the largest and most secure cloud infrastructures in the world, already serving more than a billion customers and 20 million businesses. Microsoft has deep expertise in data protection, security, and privacy, including the broadest set of compliance certifications in the industry, and we are the first cloud service provider in UAE to achieve the Dubai Electronic Security Center certification for its cloud services. Our continued focus on our trusted cloud principles and leadership in compliance means customers in the region can accelerate their digital transformation with confidence and with the foundation to achieve compliance for their own applications.

Local datacenter infrastructure stimulates economic development for both customers and partners alike, enabling companies, governments, and regulated industries to realize the benefits of the cloud for innovation, as well as bolstering the technology ecosystem that supports the innovation. We anticipate the cloud services delivered from UAE to have a positive impact on job creation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth across the region. The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that cloud services could bring more than half a million jobs to the Middle East, including the potential of more than 55,000 new jobs in UAE, between 2017 and 2022.

Microsoft also continues to help bridge the skills gap amongst the IT community and to enhance technical acumen for cloud services. Cloud Society, a Middle East and Africa focused program building upon Microsoft Learn, has trained over 150,000 IT professionals in MEA. The community will further benefit from the increased availability and performance of cloud services delivered from UAE to help realize enterprise benefits of cloud, upskill in migration, and more effectively manage their cloud infrastructure.

You can learn more by following these links: Microsoft Middle East and Africa News Center, Microsoft Azure United Arab Emirates, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform.
Quelle: Azure

Using Azure Search custom skills to create personalized job recommendations

This blog post was co-authored by Kabir Khan, Software Engineer II , Learning Engineering Research and Developement.

The Microsoft Worldwide Learning Innovation lab is an idea incubation lab within Microsoft that focuses on developing personalized learning and career experiences. One of the recent experiences that the lab developed focused on offering skills-based personalized job recommendations. Research shows that job search is one of the most stressful times in someone’s life. Everyone remembers at some point looking for their next career move and how stressful it was to find a job that aligns with their various skills.

Harnessing Azure Search custom skills together with our library of technical capabilities, we were able to build a feature that offers personalized job recommendations based on identified capabilities from resumes. The feature parses a resume to identify technical skills (highlighted and checkmarked in the figure below.) It then ranks jobs based on the skills most relevant to the capabilities in the resume. Another helpful ability is in the UI layout, where the user can view the gaps in their skills (non-highlighted skills in the figure below) for jobs they’re interested in and work towards building those skills.

Figure one: Worldwide Learning Personalized Jobs Search Demo UI

In this example, our user is interested in transitioning from a Software Engineering role to Program Management. Displayed in the image above you can see how the top jobs for our user are in Program Management but they are ranked based on our user’s unique capabilities in areas like AI, Machine Learning and Cloud Computing, resulting in the top ranked job on the Bing Search and AI team which deals with all three.

How we used Azure Search

Figure two: Worldwide Learning Personalized Jobs Search Architecture

The above architecture diagram shows the data flow for our application. We started with around 2000 job openings pulled directly from the Microsoft Careers website as an example. We then indexed these jobs, adding a custom Azure Search cognitive skill to extract capabilities from the descriptions of each job. This allows a user to search for a job based on a capability like “Machine Learning”. Then, when a user uploads a resume, we upload it to Azure Blob storage and run an Azure Search indexer. Leveraging a mix of cognitive skills provided by Azure and our custom skill to extract capabilities, we end up with a good representation of the user’s capabilities.

To personalize the job search, we leverage the tag boosting scoring profile built into Azure Search. Tag boosting ranks search results by the user’s search query and the number of matching “tags” (in this case capabilities) with the target index. So, in our example, we pass the user’s capabilities along with their search query and get jobs that best match our user’s unique set of capabilities.

With Azure Search skills, our team was able to make the personalization of job search, a desirable capability among job seekers and recruiters, possible through this proof of concept. You can use the same process we followed to achieve the same goal for your own careers site. We open sourced the Skills Extractor Library that we used in this example and made it available in a container.

Please be aware that before running this sample, you must have the following:

Install the Azure CLI. This article requires the Azure CLI version 2.0 or later. Run az –version to find the version you have.
You can also use the Azure Cloud Shell.

To learn more about this feature, you can view the live demo (starts at timecode 00:50:00) and read more in our GitHub repository.

Feedback and support

We’re eager to improve, so please take a couple of minutes to answer some questions about your experience using this survey. For support requests, please contact us at WWL_Skills_Service@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure

Announcing the preview of Microsoft Azure Bastion

For many customers around the world, securely connecting from the outside to workloads and virtual machines on private networks can be challenging. Exposing virtual machines to the public Internet to enable connectivity through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH), increases the perimeter, rendering your critical networks and attached virtual machines more open and harder to manage.

RDP and SSH are both a fundamental approach through which customers connect to their Azure workloads. To connect to their virtual machines, most customers either expose their virtual machines to the public Internet or deploy a bastion host, such as jump-server or jump-boxes.

So today, I'm excited to announce the preview of Azure Bastion.

Azure Bastion is a new managed PaaS service that provides seamless RDP and SSH connectivity to your virtual machines over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This is completed without any exposure of the public IPs on your virtual machines. Azure Bastion provisions directly in your Azure Virtual Network, providing bastion host or jump server as-a-service and integrated connectivity to all virtual machines in your virtual networking using RDP/SSH directly from and through your browser and the Azure portal experience. This can be executed with just two clicks and without the need to worry about managing network security policies.

Leading up to the preview, we have worked with hundreds of customers across a wide area of industries. The interest to join the preview has been immense, and similar to other unique Azure services such as Azure Firewall, the feedback has been very consistent: We need an easy and integrated way to deploy, run, and scale jump-servers or bastion hosts within our Azure infrastructure.

For example, what we heard directly from a cloud foundation team manager for a German premium car manufacturer is that they had concerns about exposing cloud virtual machines with RDP/SSH ports directly to the Internet due to the potential of experiencing a number of security and connectivity issues. During the preview of Azure Bastion, they were able to use RDP/SSH over SSL to our virtual machines which allowed them to traverse corporate firewalls effortlessly and at the same time, restrict Azure Virtual Machines to only private IPs.

Deploying a stand-alone dedicated jump-server often entails manually deploying and managing specialized IaaS based solutions and workloads, such as relational database service (RDS) gateway, the configuration and managing of authentication, security policies and access control lists (ACLs), as well as managing availability, redundancy, and scalability of the solution. Additionally, monitoring and auditing along with the ongoing requirement to remain compliant with corporate policies can quickly make the setup and management of jump servers an involving, costly, and less desirable task.

Azure Bastion is deployed in your virtual network providing RDP/SSH access for all authorized virtual machines connected to the virtual network.

Key features available with the preview include:

RDP and SSH from the Azure portal: Initiate RDP and SSH sessions directly in the Azure portal with a single-click seamless experience.
Remote session over SSL and firewall traversal for RDP/SSH: HTML5 based web clients are automatically streamed to your local device providing the RDP/SSH session over SSL on port 443. This allows easy and securely traversal of corporate firewalls.
No public IP required on Azure Virtual Machines: Azure Bastion opens the RDP/SSH connection to your Azure virtual machine using a private IP, limiting exposure of your infrastructure to the public Internet.
Simplified secure rules management: Simple one-time configuration of Network Security Groups (NSGs) to allow RDP/SSH from only Azure Bastion.
Increased protection against port scanning: The limited exposure of virtual machines to the public Internet will help protect against threats, such as external port scanning.
Hardening in one place to protect against zero-day exploits: Azure Bastion is a managed service maintained by Microsoft. It’s continuously hardened by automatically patching and keeping up to date against known vulnerabilities.

Azure Bastion–The road ahead

Like with all other Azure networking services, we look forward to building out Azure Bastion and adding more great capabilities as we march towards general availability.

The future brings Azure Active Directory integration, adding seamless single-sign-on capabilities using Azure Active Directory identities and Azure Multi-Factor Authentication, and effectively extending two-factor authentication to your RDP/SSH connections. We are also looking to add support for native RDP/SSH clients so that you can use your favorite client applications to securely connect to your Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Bastion, while at the same time enhance the auditing experience for RDP sessions with full session video recording.

We encourage you all to try out the Azure Bastion and look forward to hearing and incorporating your feedback.
Quelle: Azure