Carry out safe and reliable deployments to ensure high availability and dramatically reduce service downtime caused by regressions with healthCheck in Azure Deployment Manager.
Quelle: Azure
Starting the process of migrating to the cloud can be daunting. Legacy systems that are colossal in scale often overwhelm the average team tasked with the mission of digital transformation. How can they possibly untangle years of legacy code to start this new digital transformation initiative? Not only are these systems colossal in scale, but also colossal in terms of business importance. Enterprise applications like SAP and IBM, are integral to the daily rhythm of business. A seemingly simple mistake can result in catastrophic consequence.
Over the past year, Azure Integration Services has been reflecting on solutions to help with these challenges and we’re excited to announce new capabilities:
Developer focused – Improved the developer experience inside Logic Apps by allowing you to directly write code as a step inside a Logic App.
Enterprise ready – Added new migration and modernization scenarios with the general availability of our new-and-improved SAP connector.
Serverless first – Better integration between API Management and Azure Functions makes it even easier to create and manage serverless integrations and applications.
The challenges facing customers
Over the past year, we've had the opportunity to meet with and hear from customers in-person to discuss the biggest challenges facing their organizations, in terms of innovation. While the tools and technology customers use might be unique to their industry, the high-level challenges encountered are often universal.
Here’s a couple of the common high-level challenges :
Developing, onboarding, and scaling new apps and services within existing IT infrastructure. Vipps, the number one payment service in Norway, faced these challenges while making the move from a monolithic application structure to a microservices first architecture.
Migrating from on-premises legacy systems to the cloud without disrupting day-to-day operations. Alaska Airlines worked through this by adopting a hybrid approach.
Rolling out digital transformation efforts throughout your organization and ensuring the success of these initiative. Finastra tackled this problem by leaning into an API-first solution and created a partner program that unlocked many different new opportunities for them.
These challenges are rooted in integration. By moving to the cloud and creating new, smaller cloud-native services, customers are realizing that the true benefit lies is in how everything works together. Integration is no longer about transforming and moving data from point A to point B, it’s now about how systems of apps, microservices, databases, and on-premises infrastructure are composed to achieve results.
Azure Integration Services leverages serverless technology to remove the resource overhead of managing infrastructure and instead, focus on connecting and composing systems that are adaptable to changing demands.
Looking ahead, our focus is on two key areas:
Making the journey to the cloud as smooth and seamless as possible by improving the experience with our products, and how our products work together.
Creating an out-of-the-box solution library that provides step-by-step guidance on when and how to use our Azure services to solve business and IT problems around connectivity, integration, and application development.
We know that to achieve in these areas, we must be at the forefront of the changing technology landscape. Integration is the backbone that drives application innovation and development, the journey to the cloud, and long-term success with cloud-native innovation strategies.
To learn more about Azure Integration Services, watch the Azure Friday episode giving an overview of Integration Services.
Interested in talking with an expert? Schedule a call with one of our solutions experts to see how Azure Integration Services can help you.
Quelle: Azure
As a leader in the IoT cloud ecosystem, Microsoft enables a full stack of business applications, within different industries, across the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. The continued growth of the IoT industry is going to be a transformative force across all organizations. Microsoft and SAP have collaborated for over two decades to enable enterprise SAP solution deployments and the partnership has expanded across the Industrial Internet Consortium, the OPC Foundation, and the Platform Industrie 4.0.
At Mobile World Congress in February, SAP and Microsoft announced our extended collaboration to physical assets in the space of Internet of Things (IoT). Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of SAP Leonardo IoT integration with Azure IoT Hub.
SAP Leonardo IoT integrates with Azure IoT services providing customers with the ability to contextualize and enrich their IoT data with SAP business data to drive new business outcomes. Leveraging Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge, it provides access to secure connectivity at scale, powerful device management functionality, and industry-leading edge computing support. With the ability to intelligently combine business data to provide industrial IoT capabilities and services consumed by SAP business applications, customers now have a complete view on their data from physical assets to business processes to customer relationships, and offers a full digital feedback loop.
SAP and Microsoft’s common goal is to provide a 360 view of the data from physical assets to business processes enabling customers to remove data silos and realize a full digital feedback loop across the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. By running SAP Essential Business Functions on Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, customers will be able to extend their S4/Hana and C4/Hana business processes closest to their most valuable assets, providing the capability of business requests and governance at the edge.
Explore more on the Azure IoT and SAP Leonardo IoT Interoperability.
Quelle: Azure
Things are changing for the modern business. API-first development and microservices architecture is opening the door to new innovations. Many of these new approaches are possible in part due to the evolution of serverless technology, which eliminates the need for the management of infrastructure.
Fully managed infrastructure allows for allocating resources to solving a business problem, rather than managing the IT infrastructure. This results in more agility, reduced operating cost, and shorter time-to-market, which is important for organizations of any size.
Serverless is for all, no matter the size
The benefits serverless offers is independent of the size of the company. For example:
Startups need to quickly assess product-market fit and build prototypes to test their hypotheses.
With limited resources, startups can build, measure, and iterate their way to success with execution-based pricing models.
Unlocks a new generation of startups, all built on the idea that a small group of people with a limited budget can be disruptive.
As they evolve, they’ll benefit from serverless much in the same way as larger organizations do.
Enterprises need to adapt to constantly evolving customer requirements to stay competitive with agile, fast moving startups.
Serverless enables a business to grow without worrying about managing infrastructure and the planning associated with it.
Promotes move to architectural patterns that increase the flexibility and agility of software development.
Provides the ability to compete at the same level as more nimble players, while consistently growing the business.
Both benefit equally from a serverless approach, for different reasons.
Improved, stronger integration for API-first applications
Over the past year, API Management has collaborated with Azure Functions to build a stronger integration between the two services. Over the past year, API Management has collaborated with Azure Functions to build a stronger integration between the two services. Our goal is to increase developers’ productivity and provide better, more impactful experiences for creating serverless, API-first applications.
To achieve that goal, we are announcing that two new capabilities are now generally available:
Expose a Function App via API Management by linking it to a new or existing API.
Monitor, debug, and maintain applications built with Functions and API Management via distributed tracing in Application Insights.
Azure API Management simplifies publishing of APIs as well as their consumption by clients. It allows for abstraction of APIs from their implementation. APIs are governed through policies, managed from a unified plane, optimized through caching, and published for frictionless consumption through a developer portal.
API Management is the front door for your application. Azure Functions provide serverless compute and eliminate the initial friction associated with implementing new applications. Functions allow for agile assembly of prototypes and production-grade solutions.
Moving into the future
The proliferation of APIs and the API economy has given rise to new opportunities for businesses of all sizes. API-first development is now a necessary approach to ensure future success. This is why we are excited about the investments we've made this year and how we are making API architectures easier to adopt by leveraging serverless technology.
Jump right in and get started:
Learn how to build an API-first application with Azure Functions and API Management
Explore the Serverless Application learning path
Create an API Management instance 5-minute quickstart
Interested in talking with an expert? Schedule a call with one of our solution experts, for a more personalized approach to starting with serverless, API-first applications.
Quelle: Azure
Enterprises can now use OpenShift for their most critical production workloads and know that both Red Hat and Microsoft are standing behind the service to ensure your success.
Quelle: Azure
We’re constantly working on user experience improvements in the Azure portal. Our goal is to offer you a productive and easy-to-use platform so you can build, manage, and monitor your service from a single pane of glass.
Quelle: Azure
We’ve made it our mission to provide powerful yet simple-to-use IoT offerings across cloud and edge, so that our partners and customers can quickly move from idea, to pilot, and then production without the need for deep expertise. Azure IoT Central and IoT Plug and Play are at the center of our quest to simplify the IoT journey so that any customer, no matter where they’re starting from, can quickly and easily create trusted, connected solutions.
Quelle: Azure
The creative nature of Minecraft has made it one of the premier educational tools for the modern classroom. Teachers around the world have designed, modified, and explored collaborative Minecraft projects for all subjects, and with Minecraft: Education Edition it has become even easier for teachers to spin up multiplayer servers right from their own machines and lead their classes in collaborative building and problem solving.
We're excited to announce the new Minecraft: Education Edition virtual machine (preview) is available on the Azure Marketplace. This release allows teachers to run multi-player Minecraft: Education Edition sessions with the scalability, performance, and security of Azure. Students need only log-in with their school-issued email address to join the learning! And institutions that have a Minecraft: Education Edition license through select Microsoft 365 Education plans need only pay only what they use on the virtual machine itself.
Running Minecraft: Education Edition on Azure can provide teachers more flexibility and control over the learning experience. Many teachers may not have a personal or organized-issued devices that can host large multi-player sessions. Or they aren’t able to leave the multiplayer instance open for students to connect from home, making the environment only accessible during class hours. This is just the first step in pairing experiences in education like Minecraft: Education Edition with the Azure cloud – we invite you to share your thoughts and feedback.
Azure provides $200 credit and a free tier of services (including virtual machines) for educators and IT administrators with Azure Free Account. Students can also receive $100 credit and a free tier of services without requiring a credit card through academic verification with Azure for Students.
Learn more about Minecraft: Education Edition, Microsoft 365 Education, and Azure in Education to try out this new offering in your classroom. Or, share this information with your local schools!
In just a couple steps, teachers can start a multiplayer Minecraft: Education Edition server and students can connect from anywhere, anytime.
If you couldn’t visit us at Microsoft Build 2019 and try out the multiplayer experience for yourself, check out the DYI site for more details.
We are excited to launch a pilot with a few current Minecraft: Education Edition teachers to try out this new Azure VM experience.
If you are a teacher or school IT leader interested in partnering with us to improve this Minecraft: Education Edition experience, please message me (Sarah Guthals on LinkedIn). We look forward continuing partnerships in education!
Quelle: Azure
We’re excited to announce new Azure Cosmos DB capabilities at Microsoft Build 2019 that enable anyone to easily build intelligent globally distributed apps running at Cosmos scale:
Planet scale, operational analytics with built-in support for Apache Spark in Azure Cosmos DB
Built-in Jupyter notebooks support for all Azure Cosmos DB APIs
See the other Azure Cosmos DB announcements and hear voices of our customers.
Built-in support for Apache Spark in Azure Cosmos DB
Our customers love the fact that Azure Cosmos DB enables them to elastically scale throughput with guaranteed low latency worldwide, and they also want to run operational analytics directly against the petabytes of operational data stored in their Azure Cosmos databases. We are excited to announce the preview of native integration of Apache Spark within Azure Cosmos DB. You can now run globally distributed, low latency operational analytics and AI on transactional data stored within your Cosmos databases. This provides the following benefits:
Fast time-to-insights with globally distributed Spark. With the native Apache Spark support on your multi-mastered globally distributed Cosmos database, you can now get blazing fast time-to-insight all around the world. Since your Cosmos database is globally distributed, all the data is ingested and queries are served against the local database replica closest to both the producers and the consumers of data, all around the world.
Fully-managed experience and SLAs. Apache Spark jobs enjoy the industry leading comprehensive 99.999 SLAs offered by Azure Cosmos DB without any hassle of managing separate Apache Spark clusters. Azure Cosmos DB automatically and elastically scales the compute required to execute your Apache Spark jobs across all Azure regions associated with your Cosmos database.
Efficient execution of Spark jobs on multi-model operational data. All your Spark jobs are executed directly on the indexed multi-model data stored inside the data partitions of your Cosmos containers without requiring any unnecessary data movement.
OSS APIs for transactional and analytical data processing. Along with using the familiar OSS client drivers for Cassandra, MongoDB, and Gremlin (along with the Core SQL API) for your operational workloads, you can now use Apache Spark for your analytics – all operating on the same underlying globally distributed data stored in your Cosmos database.
We believe that the native integration of Apache Spark into Azure Cosmos DB bridges the transactional and analytic divide that has been one of the major customer pain points building cloud-native applications at global scale.
Several of Azure’s largest enterprise customers are running globally distributed operational analytics on their Cosmos databases with Apache Spark. Coca-Cola is one such customer, watch their story.
Coca-Cola using Azure Cosmos DB for globally-distributed operational analytics
“Being able to scale globally and have insights that are actually delivered within minutes at a global scale is very important for us. Putting our data in a service like Azure Cosmos DB allows us to draw insights across the world much faster, going from the hours that we used to take a couple years ago, down to minutes.”
– Neeraj Tolmare, CIO, Global Head of Digital & Innovation at The Coca-Cola Company
Explore more of the Azure Cosmos DB API for Apache Spark.
Cosmic notebooks
We are also thrilled to announce the preview of Jupyter notebooks running inside Azure Cosmos DB, made available for all APIs (including Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL, Gremlin and Apache Spark) to further enhance the developer experience on Azure Cosmos DB. With the native notebook experience support for all Azure Cosmos DB APIs and all data models, developers can now interactively run queries, execute ML models, explore and analyze the data stored in their Cosmos databases. The notebook experience also enables easy exploration with the stored data, building and training machine learning models, and performing inferencing on the data using the familiar Jupyter notebook experience, directly inside the Azure portal.
Learn more about Jupyter notebooks.
Built-in support for Jupyter notebooks in Azure Cosmos DB
We also announced a slew of new capabilities and improvements for developers, including a new API for etcd offering native support for Azure Cosmos DB backed etcd to power your self-managed Kubernetes clusters on Azure, support for OFFSET/SKIP to our SQL APIs and other SDK improvements.
We are extremely grateful to our customers, who are building amazingly cool, globally distributed apps and trusting Azure Cosmos DB with their mission critical workloads at massive scale. Their stories inspire us.
Have questions? Email us at AskCosmosDB@microsoft.com any time.
Try out Azure Cosmos DB for free. (No credit card required)
For the latest Azure Cosmos DB news and features, stay up-to-date by following us on Twitter #CosmosDB, @AzureCosmosDB.
Quelle: Azure
Web applications continue to be at the center of business-critical applications for many Azure App Service customers, whether it’s helping migrate existing applications into the cloud or innovate by adding new functionality to delight end-users.
Quelle: Azure
