Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Expanding Azure IoT certification service to support Azure IoT Edge devices

In December 2018, Microsoft launched the Azure IoT certification service, a web-based test automation workflow to streamline the certification process through self-serve tools. Azure IoT certification service (AICS) was designed to reduce the operational processes and engineering costs for hardware manufacturers to get their devices certified for Azure Certified for IoT program and be showcased on the Azure IoT device catalog.

The initial version of AICS focused on IoT device certification. Today, we are taking steps to expand the service to now also support Azure IoT Edge Device certification. Azure IoT Edge device is a device which comprised of three key components: IoT Edge modules, IoT Edge runtime and a cloud-based interface. Learn more about these three components in this blog explaining IoT Edge.

What it means to certify as Azure IoT Edge device is that the certification program validates the functionality of three key components described above. The certification program also ensures that the identity of a device is protected through validation of security components. You can review specific technical requirements for Azure IoT Edge device certification.

This expansion of AICS capabilities builds on the related expansion of the Azure Certified for IoT program to support Azure IoT Edge devices which was announced in June 2018. Since then, certified Azure IoT Edge device ecosystem has grown rapidly with additional operating system support such as Windows IoT and Edge module ecosystem which allows any partners to build containerized app to deploy modules to a range of Azure IoT Edge devices. You can also see all the certified Azure Edge IoT devices here.

With the web-based test workflow now updated to also certify Edge devices, AICS not only helps improve the overall quality of IoT deployments but also simplifies the certification processes for device manufacturers. From now on, all device manufacturers are required to run AICS to complete the certification process. To learn more about AICS and see a demo of it in action, please refer to this episode of the IoT Show on Channel 9.

Ecosystem partners have endorsed this strategy and approach as well.  One partner who recently used the tool provided this comment:

Azure IoT certification service” (AICS) simplifies the validation process for Azure IoT Edge device certification and increase our quality with consistency for Azure IoT Edge devices.

–Tomoyasu Suzuki, President of Plat'Home Co., Ltd

Azure IoT Edge flow within AICS

The workflow and user experience for Azure IoT Edge device is similar to the IoT device certification workflow. You will need to select the device’s OS, prepare your device to register to specified IoT Hub instances, and then start running. Step by step instructions are provided in this certification documentation.

There are three key differences for Azure IoT Edge from IoT device certification flow:

“Edge certified” checkbox needs to be checked to invoke the AICS workflow for Azure IoT Edge

To start AICS for Azure IoT Edge devices, first you need to ensure that you select “Edge Certified” checkbox under Azure IoT Edge section in the first page of device registration process when submitting a device for certification.

Automated tests are different. AICS workflow for IoT devices validate for IoT Hub primitives like device-to-cloud, cloud-to-device, direct method and device twin properties. AICS workflow for IoT Edge device validate the presence of EdgeAgent module on the device, and also test to ensure that a sample Edge module is successfully deployed to the device.

To learn more about this process please see our blog on streamlined IoT device certification.

Upon submission, AICS will inform the Microsoft team to follow up with you and provide guidance to package and ship the physical device to the Microsoft team. This step is not necessary for IoT device certification process. The confirmation dialog is shown below.

AICS makes the certification process easy and intuitive. We hope every device manufacturers to submit your devices for certification.

Next steps

Go to Partner Dashboard to start your submission.

If you have any questions, please contact Azure Certified for IoT.
Quelle: Azure

Spinnaker continuous delivery platform now with support for Azure

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. It is being chosen by a growing number of enterprises as the open source continuous deployment platform used to modernize their application deployments. Most of these enterprises deploy applications to multiple clouds. One of Spinnaker’s features is its ability to allow users to deploy applications to different clouds using best practices and proven deployment strategies.

Until now customers who had standardized on Spinnaker had to use custom/different tooling to deploy their applications to Azure.

With this blog post and the recent release of Spinnaker (1.13), we are excited to announce that Microsoft has worked with the core Spinnaker team to ensure Azure deployments are integrated into Spinnaker!

These integrations will strengthen our existing open source CI/CD pipeline toolchain and allow customers who have taken a dependency on Spinnaker.

Initial release (1.13)

 

In our initial release we have enabled a core Spinnaker scenario for deploying immutable VM images – the Build, Bake, Deploy scenario.

As the scenario name suggests, there are three primary stages in the Spinnaker pipeline.

Build (labeled “Configuration” above): The build stage happens outside of Spinnaker and is used as a trigger for the following stages. It can be a Jenkins job, Travis job, or Webhook, and generates a package that will be used to create a VM image.
Bake: This stage uses the package from the previous step to create an Azure managed VM image.
Deploy: Finally, the deploy stage deploys one or more Virtual Machine Scales Sets using the managed VM image from the previous step. This can be done using one of the built-in strategies like Highlander or Red/Black.

Since Spinnaker is used to deploy to multiple clouds, it has created some abstractions for common infrastructure components. In this release these abstractions map to Azure infrastructure as follows:

Server Group: Maps to an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set
Load balancer: Maps to an Azure Application Gateway
Firewall: Maps to an Azure Network Security Group

What’s next?

We are excited to be accepted as part of the Spinnaker open source community and will continue to invest in Spinnaker to enable other scenarios like container-based Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) deployments, improve performance, and flexibility in infrastructure abstractions. We will publish our roadmap so keep an eye out and let us know what you think.

If you are interested in learning more about Spinnaker, or it’s already an important component in your DevOps and you would like to help us make the integration with Azure great, please reach out to us. You can connect directly with us in any of the following venues:

Join the conversation on the Azure channel in Spinnaker Slack.
Create issues and/or contribute on GitHub.

Quelle: Azure

Device template library in IoT Central

With the new addition of a device template library into our Device Templates page, we are making it easier than ever to onboard and model your devices. Now, when you get started with creating a new template, you can choose between building one from scratch or you can quickly select from a library of existing device templates. Today you’ll be able to choose from our MXChip, Raspberry Pi, or Windows 10 IoT Core templates. We will be working to improve this library by adding more device templates which provide customer value.

The addition of the device template library helps to streamline the device modeling workflow. It saves time as you can pre-populate a model with existing details. This now opens the door for more manufacturers to create standard definitions for their devices or smart products which we’ll continue to include in this growing template library.

To get started with selecting a device template, select the Device Templates tab and click the “+ New” button. This will bring you to our library page where you can choose which template you’d like to get quickly started with. You can also choose the Custom option if you would like to begin modeling your device template from scratch.

Once you select a template, simply give it a name and click “Create” to add this template into your application. We will automatically create a simulated device for you to view simulated data coming into this new template. Once your template has been created, you can visit the “Device Explorer” page to connect other real or simulated devices into this template.

We are excited to continue simplifying your device onboarding experience. If there are particular device templates you want to use or if you have any other suggestions, please leave us feedback with the links below.

Next steps

Have ideas or suggestions for new features? Post it on UserVoice.
To explore the full set of features and capabilities and start your free trial, visit the IoT Central website.
Check out our documentation including tutorials to connect your first device.
To give us feedback about your experience with Azure IoT Central, take this survey.
To learn more about the Azure IoT portfolio including the latest news, visit the Microsoft Azure IoT page.

Quelle: Azure

Web application firewall at Azure Front Door service

You have a great web application, and users from all over the world love it. Well, so do malicious attackers. Cyber-attacks grow each year in frequency and sophistication, and being unprotected against them exposes you to the risks of service interruptions, data loss, and tarnished reputation.

We have heard from many of you that security is a top priority when moving web applications onto the cloud. Today, we are very excited to announce our public preview of the Web Application Firewall (WAF) for the Azure Front Door service.  By combining the global application and content delivery network with natively integrated WAF engine, we now offer a highly available platform helping you deliver your web applications to the world, secure and fast!

WAF with Front Door service leverages the scale of and the deep security investments we have made at the Azure edge, and it is designed to protect you from multiple attack vectors such as injection type attacks and volumetric DoS attacks. It inspects each incoming request at Azure’s network edge, stops unwanted traffic before they enter your backend servers, and offers protection at scale without sacrificing on performance. With WAF for Front Door, you have the option to fine tune access to your web application using custom rules that you define, as well as to enable a collection of security rules against common web application vulnerabilities packaged as Managed Rulesets. Furthermore, when you use WAF at Front Door, your security policy management is centralized and any changes you make are instantaneously propagated to all the Front Door edges.

A WAF policy is the building unit of WAF which defines the security posture for your web application. It can have two types of security rules: custom rules and a set of pre-configured rule groups known as a Managed Ruleset. Azure managed Default Rule Set is updated by Azure as needed to adapt to new attack signatures. If you have a cloud native, Internet-facing web application such as a web app hosted on Azure PaaS platform it is very simple to add Front Door with default WAF policy. Just a few clicks away, your web application is protected from common OWASP TOP 10 exploitations and with latency optimization offered by Front Door service.

Figure 1 Protecting your Web App with WAF at Front Door

If you are like many of our customers who have compliance and BCDR requirements for your business-critical applications, you probably have your web applications hosted in multiple regions. WAF with Front Door offers centralized policy management and global load balancing supporting many routing options to your backends.

Figure 2 Protecting your multi-region web application with WAF at Front Door

WAF with Front Door can protect backends hosted on Azure as well as these that are hosted on other clouds or on Premise. You may further lock down your backends to allow only traffic from Front Door and deny direct access from the Internet. WAF at Front Door allows granular access and rate control via custom rules. You may create custom rules along the following dimensions:

IP allow list and block list: control access to your web applications based on list of client IP addresses or IP address ranges. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported.
Geographic based access control: control access to your web applications based on a client’s country code.
HTTP parameters-based access control: control access to your web applications based on string matching of HTTP(S) request parameters such as query string, post args, request Uri, request header, and request body.
Request method-based access control: control access to your web applications based on HTTP request method such as Get, Put, and Head.
Size constraint: control access to your web applications based on the lengths of specific parts of a request such as query string, Uri, or request body.
Rate limiting rules: A rate control rule is to limit abnormal high traffic from any client IP. You may set a threshold on number of web requests allowed by a client IP during a one-minute duration. Rate can be combined with match conditions, for example, rate limit access to a specific Uri path.

WAF charges based on the number of WAF policies and rules you create, types of managed rule set you choose, and the number of web requests that you receive. During public preview, WAF at Front Door is free of charge.

As we continue to enhance Azure WAF offering, would love to hear your feedback. You can try Web Application Firewall with Front Door today using portal, ARM templates, or PowerShell. For more information, visit the detailed documentation for Web Application Firewall (WAF) for the Azure Front Door service.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Media Services: The latest Video Indexer updates from NAB Show 2019

After sweeping up multiple awards with the general availability release of Azure Media Services’ Video Indexer, including the 2018 IABM for innovation in content management and the prestigious Peter Wayne award, the team has remained focused on building a wealth of new features and models to allow any organization with a large archive of media content to unlock insights from their content; and use those insights improve searchability, enable new user scenarios and accessibility, and open new monetization opportunities.

At NAB Show 2019, we are proud to announce a wealth of new enhancements to Video indexer’s models and experiences, including:

A new AI-based editor that allows you to create new content from existing media within minutes
Enhancements to our custom people recognition, including central management of models and the ability to train models from images
Language model training based on transcript edits, allowing you to effectively improve your language model to include your industry-specific terms
New scene segmentation model (preview)
New ending rolling credits detection models
Availability in 9 different regions worldwide
ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 1,2,3, HiTRUST, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and PCI certifications
Ability to take your data and trained models with you when moving from trial to paid Video Indexer account

More about all of those great additions in this blog.

In addition, we have exciting news for customers who are using our live streaming platform for ingesting live feeds, transcoding, and dynamically packaging and encrypting it for delivery via industry-standard protocols like HLS and MPEG-DASH. Live transcriptions is a new feature in our v3 APIs, wherein you can enhance the streams delivered to your viewers with machine-generate text that is transcribed from spoken words in the video stream. This text will initially be only delivered as IMSC1.1 compatible TTML packaged in MPEG-4 Part 30 (ISO/IEC 14496-30) fragments, which can be played back via a new build of Azure Media Player. More information on this feature, and the private preview program, is available in the documentation, “Live transricption with Azure Media Services v3.”

We are also announcing two more private preview programs for multi-language transcription and animation detection, where selected customers will be able to influence the models and experiences around them. Come talk to us at NAB Show or contact your account manager to request to be added to these exciting programs!

Extracting fresh content from your media archive has never been easier

One of the ways to use deep insights from media files is to create new media from existing content. This can be to create movie highlights for trailers, use old clips of videos in news casts, create shorter content for social media, or for any other business need.

In order to facilitate this scenario with just a few clicks, we created an AI-based editor that enables you to find the right media content, locate the parts that you’re interested in, and use those to create an entirely new video, using the metadata generated by Video Indexer. Once you’re happy with the result, it can be rendered and downloaded from Video Indexer and used in your own editing applications or downstream workflows.

All these capabilities are also available through our updated REST API. This means that you can write code that creates clips automatically based on insights. The new editor API calls are currently open to public preview.

Want to give the new AI-based editor a try? Simply go to one of your indexed media files and click the “Open in editor” button to start creating new content.

More intuitive model customization and management

Video Indexer comes with a rich set of out-of-the-box models so you can upload your content and get insights immediately. However, AI technology always gets more accurate when you customize it to the specific content it’s employed for. Therefore, Video Indexer provides simple customization capabilities for selected models. One such customization is the ability to add custom persons models to the over 1 million celebrities that Video Indexer can currently identify out-of-the-box. This customization capability already existed in the form of training “unknown” people in the content of a video, but we received multiple customer requests to enhance it even more – so we did!

To accommodate an easy customization process for persons models, we added a central people recognition management page that allows you to create multiple custom persons models per account, each of which can hold up to 1 million different entries. From this location you can create new models, add new people to existing models, review, rename, and delete them if needed. On top of that, you can now train models based on your static images even before you have uploaded the first video to your account. Organizations that already have an archive of people images can now use those archives to pre-train their models. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping the relevant images to the person name, or submitting them via the Video Indexer REST API (currently in preview).

What to learn more? Read about our advanced custom face recognition options.

Another important customization is the ability to train language models to your organization’s terminologies or industry specific vocabulary. To allow you to improve the transcription for your organization faster, Video Indexer now automatically collects transcript edits done manually into a new entry in the specific language model you use. All you need to do then, is click the “Train” button to add those to your own customized model. The idea is to create a feedback loop where organizations begin with a base out-of-the-box language model and improve the accuracy of it through manual edits over a period of time until it aligns to their specific industry vertical vocabulary and terms.

New additions to the Video Indexer pipeline

One of the primary benefits of Video Indexer is having one pipeline that orchestrates multiple insights from different channels into one timeline. We regularly work to enrich this pipeline with additional insights.

One of the latest additions to Video Indexer’s set of insights is the ability to segment the video by semantic scenes (currently in preview) based on visual cues. Semantic scenes add another level of granularity to the existing shot detection and keyframes extraction models in Video Indexer and aim to depict a single event composed of a series of consecutive shots which are semantically related.

Scenes can be used to group together a set of insights and refer to them as insights of the same context in order to deduct a more complex meaning from them. For example, if a scene includes an airplane, a runway, and luggage, the customer can build logic that deducts that it is happening in an airport. Scenes can also be used as a unit to be extracted as a clip from a full video.

Another cool addition to Video Indexer is the ability to identify ending rolling credits of a movie or a TV show. This can come in handy for a broadcasters in order to identify when their viewers completed watching the video and in order to identify the right moment to recommend the new show or movie to watch before losing the audience.

Video Indexer runs on trust (and in more regions)

As Video Indexer is part of the Azure Media Services family and is built to serve organizations of all sizes and industries, it is critical to us to help our customers meet their compliance obligations across regulated industries and markets worldwide. As part of that effort, we are excited to announce that Video Indexer is now ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 1,2,3, HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI, and HITRUST certified. Learn more about the most current certifications status of Video Indexer and all other Azure services.

Additionally, we increased our service availability around the world and are now deployed to 9 regions for your convenience. Available regions now include East US, East US 2, South Central US, West US 2, North Europe, West Europe, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Australia East. More regions are coming online soon, so stay tuned. You can always find the latest regional availability of Video Indexer by visiting the products by region page.

Video Indexer continues to be fully available for trial on East US. This allows organizations to evaluate the full Video Indexer functionality on their own data before creating a paid account using their own Azure subscription. Once organizations decide to move to their Azure subscription, they can copy all of the videos and model customizations that they created on their trial account by simply checking the relevant check box in the content of the account creation wizard.

Want to be the first to try out our newest capabilities?

Today, we are excited to announce three private preview programs for features that we have been asked for by many different customers.

Live transcription – the ability to stream a live event, where spoken words in the audio is transcribed to text and delivered along with video and audio.

Mixed languages transcription – The ability to automatically identify multiple spoken languages in one video file and to create a mixed language transcription for that file.

Animation characters detection – The ability to identify characters in animated content as if they were real live people!

We will be selecting a set of customers out of a list of those who would like to be our design partners for these new capabilities. Selected customers will be able to highly influence these new capabilities and get models that are highly tuned to their data and organizational flows. Want to be a part of this? Come visit us at NAB Show or contact your account manager for more details!

Visit us at NAB Show 2019

If you are attending NAB Show 2019, please stop by booth #SL6716 to see the latest Azure Media Services innovations! We’d love to meet you, learn more about what you’re building, and walk you through the different innovations Azure Media Services and our partners are releasing at NAB Show. We will also have product presentations in the booth throughout the show.

Have questions or feedback? We would love to hear from you! Use our UserVoice to help us prioritize features, or email VISupport@Microsoft.com for any questions.
Quelle: Azure

Welcome to NAB Show 2019 from Microsoft Azure!

Putting the intelligent cloud to work for content creators, owners and storytellers.

Stories entertain us, make us laugh and cry, and are the lens through which we perceive our world. In that world, increasingly overloaded with information, they catch our attention and, if they catch our hearts, we engage. This makes stories powerful, and it’s why so many large technology companies are investing heavily in content – creating it and selling it.

At Microsoft, we’re not in the business of content creation.

Why? Our mission is to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more. So instead of creating or owning content, we want to provide platforms to help content creators and owners achieve more – from the Intelligent Cloud to the Intelligent Edge, with industry leading artificial intelligence (AI). We’re excited to see that mission come to life through customers such as Endemol Shine, Multichoice, RTL, Ericsson and partners like Avid, Akamai, Haivision, Pipeline FX and Verizon Digital Media Services. And we are excited to announce new Azure rendering, Azure Media Services, Video Indexer and Azure Networking capabilities to help you achieve more at NAB Show 2019. Cue scene.

Fix it in post: higher resolution, less time.

The arrival of HD led to an explosion of digital content. Today, not satisfied with even 4K resolution, the industry is moving inexorably toward 8K and beyond. With burgeoning immersive storytelling driving 360-degree / 3D content, high frame-rate, innumerable episodic and unscripted shows on fast release cycles and ever-more visually stunning cinematic features, data volumes are increasing exponentially.

Microsoft Azure stands ready with the storage acceleration and capacity to accept your most expansive projects. The new Azure FXT Edge Filer caching appliance delivers higher scalability and performance than ever before, with high-speed memory, SSD and support for Azure Blob storage. It’s a great fit for high-throughput, low-latency applications such as rendering where you need ultra-fast connections between on-premises storage and cloud compute capacity. We believe our Edge Filer appliances are a major differentiator for customers, and they agree – Avere vFXT for Azure has enabled visual effects studio Mr. X to recently render a feature-length film in Azure.

Azure FXT Edge Filer

And speaking of rendering, our new Azure Render Farm Manager Portal preview makes it much faster and easier for customers to set up hybrid or cloud-only rendering environments in Azure, including networking setup and Azure storage options, with support for commonly used render farm managers such as PipelineFX Qube.

Whether it’s rendering, visual effects or editing, we offer the price and performance combination you need. And, watch this space and Avid’s newsroom for exciting announcements from Avid Connect 2019 regarding how we’re partnering to ingest, manage, edit and create content in the cloud.

Got content? Get storage. Add AI.

Your petabytes of content + our Azure Data Box or Data Boxy Heavy (in preview) = secure, enterprise-grade, cost-effective ingest at scale. Just getting off a shoot and have 10’s of terabytes? Meet Data Box Disk. The same benefits in a portable form-factor for smaller content stores. For those on set there is Data Box Edge, which can pre-process media (e.g., remove blank footage) and efficiently transfer it to the cloud through partners such as Dejero or a private high-bandwidth connection with Azure ExpressRoute Direct 100Gbps. We are also making our global network available to you – through Azure ExpressRoute Global Reach, which lets you effectively build your WAN on the Azure backbone. ExpressRoute Direct 100Gbps and Global Reach will be generally available as of NAB.

Once in the cloud, you can use Video Indexer’s award-winning AI capabilities to efficiently extract deep insights. Just in time for NAB, we’ve added an AI-based editor to help you generate fresh content in minutes, improved custom face and language models and additional certifications from ISO 27001 to FedRAMP. These new capabilities, and many more, easily integrate with your existing MAMs and can be used with any application to increase accessibility or create new OTT and monetization experiences.

Video Indexer (VI) is part of Azure Media Services (AMS), our hyper-scale, enterprise grade, productive media workflow solution. From ingest and transcoding to packaging and distribution, AMS – and our partners – have you covered. You can learn more about AMS, VI and our new private previews for animation, multi-language transcription and live transcriptions here.

Video Indexer

Stream more content, more easily, to increasingly global audiences

Increasing audiences, form factors and globalization mean video workflows that are becoming more and more complex. Our partners are hard at work making this easier for you, and here are a few of the key announcements:

Akamai will directly connect its edge network with Azure through ExpressRoute to give customers higher performance and more predictable costs. It also plans to enhance the delivery of live and on-demand workflows with Azure Media Services and our mutual partners.
Verizon Digital Media Services is delivering an enterprise-grade streaming platform on Microsoft Azure to enhance video workflows.
Haivision’s new media routing cloud service, SRTHub, will help broadcasters more securely and reliably transport live video globally. SRTHub, built on Azure, will also streamline workflow orchestration using an open ecosystem of Hublets from industry-leading partners including Avid, Wowza and Epic Labs.
Telestream will bring its industry leading transcoding solution to Azure.

Delivering high-quality and highly available content and applications requires globally-scalable network solutions. To enable our customers to accelerate and deliver superior global applications, we’re announcing the GA of the Azure Front Door Service (AFD). AFD provides a global single point-of-entry that delivers optimized user experiences for web applications. AFD also includes an integrated web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection for securing those applications at the network edge.  

The next frontier

At NAB we’re showcasing how partners such as Zone TV and Nexx.TV are using Microsoft AI and Azure Cognitive Services to create more personalized content and improve monetization of existing media assets.  Stay tuned for more in this space as we work across Microsoft to put our data – and insights – to work for you.

Visit us at NAB Show 2019 – booth #SL6716 – to learn more, meet with the team and see what our partners have to offer. I hope to see you there – or out there in the real world – and look forward to hearing how we can put Azure to work for you.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Front Door Service is now generally available

Every internet facing web application, whether serving a large audience or a small set of users in a single region, is by default a global application.  Whether you are running a large news website with millions of users across the globe, running a B2B application for managing your sales channels or a local pastry shop in a city – your users are distributed/roaming across multiple locations, or your application demands deployment into multiple locations for high availability or disaster recovery scenarios.  As a global application, your distributed users and/or application deployments place demands on you to maximize performance for your end users and ensure the application is always-on across failures and attacks.

Today I am excited to announce the general availability of Azure Front Door Service (AFD) which we launched in preview last year – a scalable and secure entry point for fast delivery of your global applications. AFD is your one stop solution for your global website/application and provides:

Application and API acceleration with anycast and using Microsoft’s massive private global network to directly connect to your Azure deployed backends means your app runs with lower latency and higher throughput to your end users.
Global HTTP load balancing enables you to build your application resiliently across regions, fail-over instantly and offer your users an “always-on” web site availability experience either at a domain or microservice (URL path) level. 
SSL offload at a massive scale enables you to maintain security and scale to a rapidly growing or expanding user base, all while reducing latency.
WAF @ Edge offering application security against DDoS attacks or malicious users at the edge providing protection at scale without sacrificing on performance.

Built atop Microsoft’s massive global network, Azure Front Door currently supports Microsoft’s biggest web workloads deliver high quality, highly performant services. Global brands such as Bing, Office 365, Xbox Live, MSN, LinkedIn and Azure DevOps leverage AFD’s competitive performance, enterprise grade reliability and massive scalability to deliver consistent, low latency, high throughput user and application experiences. Today AFD provides global coverage in over 35 countries across 65 metros and quickly growing.

Figure 1: Azure Front Door’s global footprint and Microsoft's Network

Use case scenarios

Customers come to AFD today focused on their core business needs to improve performance, scale their application, enable instant failover, or enable complex application architectures like IaaS and PaaS, on-prem + cloud, or multi-cloud hybrid experiences.  AFD can be quickly and easily integrated into your application’s existing or new architecture and starts working out of the box.  Adding AFD in front of your application or API also enables your customers to gain the benefit of our constant improvements and optimizations to at the edge such as TCP Fast Open, WAN optimizations and improvements to SSL such as SSL session resumption.   This means your users get optimized connectivity experiences day 1 with Front Door.

Below is a sample reference architecture outlining how an application can be designed for improved page load times, SSL offload and API routing. AFD runs at the Edge of Microsoft’s global network, performing TCP and SSL terminations close to end user, thereby improving performance of client access to applications.  Traffic from AFD instances running at the Edge to application backends is routed on Microsoft’s private global network providing high reliability and optimized routing to the destination.

“The TCP and TLS optimizations from Azure Front Door along with their global edge footprint is perfect for our high-volume services”
– Ravi Krishnaswamy, CTO

“Azure Front Door Service allows us to manage our costs in a predictable way whilst ensuring performance for our end users”
– Colin Farrelly, DevOps SME

Figure 2: Sample architecture for accelerated and scalable web application

Another core Azure Front Door use case for building highly scalable apps is utilizing AFD’s smart load balancing algorithm to route traffic to the fastest available backend. Unlike the typical DNS-based load balancing systems, Azure Front Door delivers near instant failover across your application backends and with more granular control to even failover specific microservices. Our smart and efficient load balancing algorithms support both active-active as well as active-passive deployment configurations.

Figure 3: Sample architecture of an always-on web application

Azure Front Door Service is now generally available, providing a 99.99 percent availability SLA and a myriad of features including SSL offload, URL redirect and rewrite, HTTP/2, IPv6 support, session affinity, simple domain onboarding with free or custom SSL certs, caching, and much more. You can also read about the AFD WAF Preview which is also available now as well! Azure Front Door’s GA pricing goes into effect on May 1, 2019. Until then, you will continue to be billed based on the preview pricing.

Get started

Get started with the Azure Front Door Service today! To learn more about the service and the various features, refer to AFD documentation. If you are interested in exploring capabilities beyond the standard offering, simply file a feature request on our UserVoice page or feel free to contact us at afdfeedback@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure

Fast and optimized connectivity and delivery solutions on Azure

Azure Front Door, ExpressRoute Direct and Global Reach now generally available

Today I’m excited to announce the availability of innovative and industry leading Azure services that will help the attendees of NAB realize their future vision to deliver for their audiences – Azure Front Door Service (AFD), ExpressRoute Direct and Global Reach, as well as some cool new additions to both AFD and our Content Delivery Network (CDN).

This coming week, Microsoft will be at NAB Show 2019 in Las Vegas, bringing together an industry centered centered on the ablity to deliver richer content experiences or audienes around  the word..  The media and entertainment industry will gather together for an in-depth view of the current, as well as the future of media technology and innovation, showcasing new and innovative cloud services to optimize and scale rich content experiences.

Bringing the media industry to the cloud has a tremendous impact on the entire content workflow; from production, post, delivery and IT operations, cloud services enable companies to scale their ability to innovate, create, and bring more content to market. This transformation however starts somewhere else; it starts with the most critical piece, which is the users or consumers of services.

Fig. 1 Sample architecture of media content ingestion to delivery

With the ever-increasing granularity of data, quality, volume and size of content consumed by an enormous number of users and devices, new customer needs and demands are emerging, and we recognize the massive amount of options and choices available to our customers today.   Shouldered on top of Microsoft’s global network, Azure seeks to provide the fastest and most optimized connectivity and delivery options to our customers for all parts of the media production and delivery workflow. 

Last year, driven by customers’ demand and their passion for pushing more data to Azure, we launched ExpressRoute Direct into preview in the fall of last year. Now generally available, ExpressRoute Direct provides 100 Gbps connectivity, which is the first service of its scale in public cloud and focuses on core scenarios around large data-ingestion, R&D, media services, graphics and the like.

Similarly, and also generally available today, we announced ExpressRoute Global Reach, extending the use of ExpressRoute from on-premises or from your corporate datacenter to Azure, to now also provide connectivity between on-premises sites, using the Microsoft Global network. Building new or extending existing ExpressRoute solutions with Direct and Global Reach, is a fast and flexible way to support multi-site collaboration centered around services, data and content stored in Azure. It is also a new option to compliment your existing connectivity/WAN/MPLS provider as a backup solution or provide the primary path where your service provider may not have the reach to deliver services locally.

At the same time, driven by our customers’ needs to drive rich, online application experiences, we launched the Azure Front Door Service into preview. Now generally available, Azure Front Door extends use of the global service that enables Microsoft’s global brands like Office 365, Bing, Teams, Azure DevOps and Xbox to build high performance, high availability, secure web applications. Now with Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities in public preview, Azure Front Door accelerates and secures your applications at the edge of Microsoft’s Global network.

 

“Electrolux is a global conglomerate of brands, selling more than 60 million products across 150 markets. Azure Front Door has enabled us to easily scale our service architecture and APIs to all our global developers and partners in the Wellbeing category.

It took us 10 minutes to set up global routing for our API services, using custom domains and own SSL certs.”

Andreas Larsson, Director of Engineering – Software Products

 

These new, innovative services enable you to quickly accelerate and optimize your end-to-end workflow in Azure.  Get started with these new services and the rest of Azure’s networking portfolio today and look for more new services coming soon. I encourage you to watch our newest video on hybrid networking options with Azure, as well as additional details and links to resources.

Watch the video, "Hybrid networking in Microsoft Azure" for an architectural overview and demo of hybrid connectivity options in Azure.

Putting a rich platform of infra and app services on top of a world-class global network (WAN) with the ability to connect, ingest, store and collaborate across shared data and content assets, makes a premiere toolbox for building and delivery modern applications and content.

Azure Front Door Service (AFD) the newest member of our application delivery portfolio, is now generally available. Since we launched this sophisticated tool in preview to customers last year, the interest and feedback have been amazing.

AFD enables customers to build applications that are truly global by ensuring fast, always-on and secure delivery of your web applications to services inside or outside of Azure. It provides a one stop solution for website acceleration, global HTTP/HTTPS load balancing, API fronting, SSL offload and now also WAF running at the edge of Microsoft’s global network. Improving customers’ application experiences and quality with Azure Front Door can dramatically influence end user behavior.  

Today in preview, we are enabling a new and fully integrated web application firewall (WAF) with Azure Front Door. WAF at the edge, gives customers total control on access to media and applications. Customers can protect their web application from multiple attack vectors such as volumetric denial of service and targeted application exploits, by inspecting each incoming request at Azure’s network edge before they reach their service’s region.

WAF with Azure Front Door enables tuning access to web application using both custom rules in addition to turning on a collection of security rules, managed by Microsoft, against common web application vulnerabilities. We also allow a centralized security policy management that instantaneously propagating any changes you make to all the Front Door edges.

Launching AFD to enable our customers to build world-class web applications, is another great example of an enterprise grade service, battle-tested by years of constant support to Microsoft’s biggest businesses like Bing, Office 365, Xbox Live, MSN, and Azure DevOps, proving its mettle to deal with massive scale and high availability for business-critical applications. Get started with Azure Front Door Service for commerce sites, API routing, global websites, cloud migration scenarios. Learn more about the AFD announcement.

 

Azure CDN offers a true multi-CDN experience to deliver content to global or regional audiences, featuring 3 world class networks from Microsoft, Verizon and Akamai.

The unified platform, APIs, support and billing experience enables easy, fast setup and management of multiple CDN networks all in one place. Deep integration with Azure enables optimized experiences with Azure services and provides benefits whether your content is hosted in Azure or anywhere else.  

To further meet the increasing complexity of our customers CDN needs we’re excited to announce two new features of Azure CDN; root domain support and CDN managed certificates for Azure CDN from Akamai. Through integration with Azure DNS, root domain support is available across all providers in Azure CDN via DNS Alias records. This enables products that are using their root domain for their web sites, experiences or content to deliver that content through Azure CDN. In addition, managed custom domain certificates enable Azure CDN from Akamai customers now to turn on SSL on their custom domain with few clicks. Azure CDN also completely handles certificate management tasks such as procurement and renewal. 

With these and more upcoming improvements to Azure CDN we’re enabling our customers to customize how they leverage the combined footprint of Microsoft, Verizon, and Akamai to deliver content from our 1300+ (and growing!) points of presence around the world. Find more information on these new features and Azure CDN.

Find out more about Azure’s networking services through the links below.

Networking services overview
ExpressRoute
ExpressRoute Pricing
Front Door
Front Door Pricing
Azure CDN
Azure CDN Pricing

Quelle: Azure

Event-driven Java with Spring Cloud Stream Binder for Azure Event Hubs

Spring Cloud Stream Binder for Azure Event Hubs is now generally available. It is simple to build highly scalable event-driven Java apps using Spring Cloud Stream with Event Hubs, a fully managed, real-time data ingestion service on Azure that is resilient and reliable service for any situation. This includes emergencies, thanks to its geo-disaster recovery and geo-replication features.

Spring Cloud Stream provides a binder abstraction for popular message broker implementations. It provides a flexible programming model built on already established and familiar Spring idioms and best practices, including support for persistent pub/sub semantics, consumer groups, and stateful partitions. Now, developers can use the same patterns for building Java apps with Event Hubs.

Getting started 

Check out the tutorial, “How to create a Spring Cloud Stream Binder application with Azure Event Hubs,” and build a Java-based Spring Cloud Stream Binder application using the Spring Boot Initializer with Azure Event Hubs. Go to the Azure portal and create a new Event Hubs namespace. Add the following Maven dependency into your Java project. 

<dependency>
<groupId>com.microsoft.azure</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-azure-eventhubs-stream-binder</artifactId>
<version>1.1.0.RC4</version>
</dependency>

Publish messages

Use @EnableBinding(Source.class) to annotate a source class and publish messages to Event Hubs with Spring Cloud Stream patterns. You can customize the output channel for the Source with configurations.

Destination: Specify which Event Hub to connect with the output channel.
Sync/Async: Specify the mode to produce the messages.

Subscribe to messages 

Use @EnableBinding(Sink.class) to annotate a sink class and consume messages from Event Hubs. You can also customize the input channel with configurations. For the full list, please refer to the documentation, “How to create a Spring Cloud Stream Binder application with Azure Event Hubs.”

Destination: Specify an Event Hub to bind with the input channel.
Customer Group: Specify a Consumer Group to receive messages.

Try building event-driven Java apps using Spring Cloud Stream Binder for Event Hubs 

Try out a Java app using Spring Cloud Stream Binder on Azure Event Hubs and let us know what you think via email or comments below.

Additional resources

How to create a Spring Cloud Stream Binder application with Azure Event Hubs
Spring on Azure Developer Hub
Java on Azure Developer Hub
Spring Cloud for Azure 
Azure Event Hubs

Quelle: Azure