Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure Data Studio: An Open Source GUI Editor for Postgres

When you are working with a database, or any other kind of software, your experience is enhanced or hindered by the tools you use to interact with it. PostgreSQL has a command line tool, psql, and it’s pretty powerful, but some people much prefer a graphical editor. Even if you typically use command line, you may want to go visual sometimes. At Microsoft we've spent many years building experiences to enhance developers' day-to-day productivity. Having choices is important. It allows you to go with the tool that works for you.

Today we're excited to announce preview support for PostgreSQL in Azure Data Studio. Azure Data Studio is a cross-platform modern editor focused on data development. It's available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Plus, Azure Data Studio comes with an integrated terminal so you're never far away from psql.

We're also introducing a corresponding preview PostgreSQL extension in Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Both Azure Data Studio and VS Code are open source and extensible – two things that PostgreSQL itself is based on.

Azure Data Studio inherits a lot of VS Code functionality. It also supports most of VS Code's extensions like Python, R, and Kubernetes support. If your primary use case is data, choose Azure Data Studio. You can manage multiple database connections, explore database object hierarchy, set up dashboards, and more.

On the other hand, if you're closer to application development than you are to database administration, then go for our PostgreSQL extension in VS Code. Actually, you don't have to choose – use both, switching according to what works best for you at the time.

Connect to Postgres

Curious about what’s included? Let’s take a deeper look at the development experience for PostgreSQL in Azure Data Studio. You can connect to your Postgres server or establish a connection directly to a database. The Postgres server can be hosted on-premises, in a virtual machine (VM), or from the managed service of any cloud provider.

Organize your servers

Often you have multiple Postgres servers you’re working with. Perhaps there’s one production server, a corresponding stage server, and maybe multiple dev/test servers. Knowing which is which is key, especially being able to clearly identify your production server. In Azure Data Studio you can use server groups to categorize your servers. You can highlight your production server group in red to make it visually distinct from the others.

Track down database objects

Your Postgres server evolves as you add new functionality. It’s helpful to be able to clearly see what columns, indexes, triggers, and functions have been created for each database and table. This is especially true when you’re not the only person working on that Postgres instance. Azure Data Studio provides convenient hierarchical navigation in the sidebar. With it you can easily explore and keep track of your server's databases, tables, views, and other objects.

Write queries efficiently

As you look through the new database objects your teammates have created, it’s helpful to go beyond the name of the object to the DDL that composes it. Even if you’re the only person working on your Postgres instance, there may be objects you created a while back that you want to look up. Checking the DDL is a useful double-check to confirm that an object is doing what you expect.

Azure Data Studio provides “Peek Definition” and “Go to Definition” functionality so you can do that, and even do it as you use the object in a query. For example, let’s say you want to query pg_stat_activity, one of the built-in statistics views that comes with Postgres. You can use “Go to Definition” to see all its columns and understand what this view is based on.

Writing SQL queries is bread and butter when working with Postgres, whether you’re an expert or are just getting started with this RDBMS. Whoever you are, IntelliSense for SQL is integrated into Azure Data Studio to help you write your queries quicker. With IntelliSense’s context-aware code completion suggestions, you can use fewer keystrokes to get the job done.

If you use Postgres a lot, you probably have a few SQL queries you end up reusing over and over. Whether they are detailed CREATE statements or complex SELECTs, you can templatize each one into a SQL code snippet. That way you don’t have to retype it afresh each time. Azure Data Studio inherits its code snippet functionality from Visual Studio Code. Code snippets help you avoid errors from retyping code, and overall let you develop faster.

Customize your editor

One advantage of modern development GUIs is the ability to customize them to suit your unique preferences. For example, in this blog we’ve used the Solarized Dark theme in screenshots. Honestly, that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Well there are ten more color themes you can choose from in Azure Data Studio, not to mention a high contrast option.

The personalization options extend to key bindings as well. Don't like using the default Ctrl+N to open a new tab? You can change it. Or maybe you want a keyboard shortcut that doesn't come out of the box with Azure Data Studio. You can create and customize key bindings using the Keyboard Shortcuts editor.

How to get started

There are even more features to discover, like Git source control integration and customized dashboards and widgets. You can start using the preview for PostgreSQL in Azure Data Studio today – check out the install instructions. To start using our preview PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code, learn more on our GitHub page.

These two features are in preview and your feedback is critical to making them better and making them work for you. Share your feedback on our PostgreSQL GitHub pages for Azure Data Studio or Visual Studio Code respectively.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Backup for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines now generally available!

How do you back up your SQL Servers today? You could be using backup software that require you to manage backup servers, agents, and storage, or you could be writing elaborate custom scripts which need you to manage the backups on each server individually. With the modernization of IT infrastructure and the world rapidly moving to the cloud, do you want to continue using the legacy backup methods that are tedious, infrastructure-heavy, and difficult to scale? Azure Backup for SQL Server Virtual Machines (VMs) is the modern way of doing backup in cloud, and we are excited to announce that it is now generally available! It is an enterprise scale, zero-infrastructure solution that eliminates the need to deploy and manage backup infrastructure while providing a simple and consistent experience to centrally manage and monitor the backups on standalone SQL instances and Always On Availability Groups.

 

Built into Azure, the solution combines the core cloud promises of simplicity, scalability, security and cost effectiveness with inherent SQL backup capabilities that are leveraged by using native APIs, to yield high fidelity backups and restores. The key value propositions of this solution are:

15-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Working with uber critical data and have a low RPO? Schedule a log backup to happen every 15 minutes.
One-click, point-in-time restores: Tired of elaborate manual restore procedures? Restore databases to a point in time up to a second in one click, without having to manually apply a chain of logs over differential and full backups.
Long-term retention: Rigorous compliance and audit needs? Retain your backups for years, based on the retention duration, beyond which the recovery points will be pruned automatically by the built-in lifecycle management capability.
Protection for encrypted databases: Concerned about security of your data and backups? Back-up SQL encrypted databases and secure backups with built-in encryption at rest while controlling backup and restore operations with Role-Based Access Control.
Auto-protection: Dealing with a dynamic environment where new databases get added frequently? Auto-protect your server to automatically detect and protect the newly added databases.
Central management and monitoring: Losing too much time managing and monitoring backups for each server in isolation? Scale smartly by creating centrally managed backup policies that can be applied across databases. Monitor jobs and get alerts and emails across servers and even vaults from a single pane of glass.
Cost effective: No infrastructure and no overhead of managing the scale, seems like value for the money already? Enjoy reduced total cost of ownership and flexible pay-as-you-go option.

Get started

Customer feedback

We have been in preview for a few months now, and have seen an overwhelming response from our customers:

“Our experience with Azure SQL Server Backup has been fantastic. It’s a solution you can put in place in a couple of minutes and not have to worry about it. To restore DBs, we don’t have to deal with rolling logs and only have to choose a date and time. It gives us great peace of mind to know the data is safely stored in the Recovery Services Vaults with our other protected items.”

– Steven Hayes, Principal Architect, Acuity Brands Lighting, Inc

“We have been using Azure Backup for SQL Server for the past few months and have found it simple to use and easy to set up. The backup and restore operations are performant and reliable as well as easy to monitor. We plan to continue using it in the future."

– Celica E. Candido, Cloud Operations Analyst, Willis Towers Watson

Additional resources

Check out the public preview announcement on the Azure blog, “Azure Backup for SQL Server on Azure now in public preview.”
See different SQL backup options from Microsoft and choose the right solution based on your requirements.
Want more details about this feature? Check out Azure Backup for SQL Server documentation.
Get the pricing details for this feature.
Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support or browse Azure Backup documentation.
Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
New to Azure Backup, sign up for an Azure trial subscription.

Quelle: Azure

Azure.Source – Volume 74

Now in preview

AzCopy support in Azure Storage Explorer now available in public preview

AzCopy in Azure Storage Explorer is now in public preview. AzCopy is a popular command-line utility that provides performant data transfer into and out of a storage account. AzCopy enhances the performance and reliability through a scalable design, where concurrency is scaled up according to the number of machine’s logical cores. Azure Storage Explorer provides the UI interface for various storage tasks, and now it supports using AzCopy as a transfer engine to provide the highest throughput for transferring your files for Azure Storage. This capability is available today as a preview in Azure Storage Explorer.

Now available for preview: Workload importance for Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Announcing the preview of Workload Importance for Azure SQL Data Warehouse on the Gen2 platform. Manage resources more efficiently with Azure SQL Data Warehouse – a fast, flexible and secure analytics platform for enterprises of all sizes. Workload importance gives data engineers the ability to use importance to classify requests. Requests with higher importance are guaranteed quicker access to resources which helps meet SLAs.

Also available in preview

Public preview: Azure Log Analytics in France Central, Korea Central, North Europe
Public preview: Adaptive network hardening in Azure Security Center
Update 19.03 for Azure Sphere public preview now available for evaluation
Azure Security Center: Regulatory compliance dashboard in public preview

News and updates

Achieve more with Microsoft Game Stack

Announcing Microsoft Game Stack, a new initiative in which we commit to bringing together Microsoft tools and services that empower game developers to achieve more. Game Stack brings together all of our game-development platforms, tools, and services—such as Azure, PlayFab, DirectX, Visual Studio, Xbox Live, App Center, and Havok—into a robust ecosystem that any game developer can use. The goal of Game Stack is to help you easily discover the tools and services you need to create and operate your game.

Azure Databricks – VNet injection, DevOps Version Control and Delta availability

Azure Databricks provides a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache® Spark™-based analytics platform to accelerate and simplify the process of building big data and AI solutions that drive the business forward, all backed by industry-leading SLAs. With Azure Databricks, you can set up your Spark environment in minutes and auto-scale quickly and easily. You can also apply your existing skills and collaborate on shared projects in an interactive workspace with support for Python, Scala, R, and SQL, as well as data science frameworks and libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Hardware innovation for data growth challenges at cloud-scale

The Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit 2019 kicked off on March 14 where a vibrant and growing community shared the latest in innovation to make hardware more efficient, flexible, and scalable. This year we turned our attention to the exploding volume of data being created daily. Data is at the heart of digital transformation and companies are leveraging data to improve customer experiences, open new markets, make employees and processes more productive, and create new sources of competitive advantage as they work toward the future of tomorrow.

Azure Data Box family now enables import to Managed Disks

Announcing support for managed disks is now available across the Azure Data Box family of devices, which includes Data Box, Data Box Disk, and Data Box Heavy. The Azure Data Box offline family lets you transfer hundreds of terabytes of data to Microsoft Azure in a quick, inexpensive, and reliable manner. With managed disks support on Data Box, you can now move your on-premises virtual hard disks (VHDs) as managed disks in Azure with one simple step.

Simplify disaster recovery with Managed Disks for VMware and physical servers

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now supports disaster recovery of VMware virtual machines and physical servers by directly replicating to Managed Disks. To enable replication for a machine, you no longer need to create storage accounts because you can now write replication data directly to a type of Managed Disk. This change will not impact the machines which are already in a protected state; however, all new protections will now have this capability available on the Azure portal.

Simplifying your environment setup while meeting compliance needs with built-in Azure Blueprints

Announcing the release of our first Azure Blueprint built specifically for a compliance standard, the ISO 27001 Shared Services blueprint sample, which maps a set of foundational Azure infrastructure such as virtual networks and policies, to specific ISO controls. Azure Blueprints is a free service that helps customers deploy and update cloud environments in a repeatable manner using composable artifacts such as policies, deployment templates, and role-based access controls. This service is built to help customers set up governed Azure environments and can scale to support production implementations for large-scale migrations. The ISO 27001 Shared Services Blueprint is already available to your Azure tenant.

Microsoft Azure portal March 2019 update

This month’s updates include an improved “All services” view, Virtual Network Gateway overview updates, an improved DNS Zone and Load Balancer creation experience, Management Group integration into Activity Log, redesigned overview screens for certain services within Azure DB, an improved creation experience for Azure SQL Database, multiple changes to the Security Center, and more updates to Intune. Sign in to the Azure portal now and see for yourself everything that’s new.

Approve Azure Pipelines deployments from Slack

Approve Azure Pipelines deployments from Slack is now available. We’re making it even easier for you, with a tighter integration that lets you be more productive – even when you’re on the go. Approving release deployments in Azure Pipelines is just a click away.

Azure Service Fabric 6.4 Refresh Release

Updates to the .NET SDK, Java SDK and Service Fabric runtimes are rolling out through Web Platform Installer, NuGet packages and Maven repositories in all regions.

Azure Security Center updates

Support for virtual network peering in Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center adaptive application control updates
Azure Security Center: Secure score impact changes
Azure Security Center policy migration to Azure Policy
Azure Security Center update: Secure score for compliance metrics
Azure Security Center update: Azure App Service recommendation improvements

Additional news and updates

Azure Log Analytics is now General Available in Australia East and in Australia Central
Service Map available in Central Canada and UK South
Application Insights is now available in France Central and Korea Central
Upcoming change to Azure Monitor Application Insights Smart Detection emails
Azure Resource Manager template language additions

Technical content

Run your code and leave build to us

Getting your app to the cloud is more work than you may anticipate. We're happy to share that there is a faster way. When you need to focus on app code, you can delegate build and deployment to Azure with App Service web apps and we'll take care of building and running your code the way you expect.

Stay informed about service issues with Azure Service Health

Azure Service Health helps you stay informed and take action when Azure service issues like incidents and planned maintenance affect you by providing a personalized health dashboard, customizable alerts, and expert guidance. Read how you can use Azure Service Health’s personalized dashboard to stay informed about issues that could affect you now or in the future.

Azure Stack IaaS – part four

Deploying your IaaS VM-based applications to Azure and Azure Stack requires a comprehensive evaluation of your BC/DR strategy. “Business as usual” is not enough in the context of cloud. For Azure Stack, you need to evaluate the resiliency, availability, and recoverability requirements of the applications separate from the protection schemes for the underlying infrastructure. Learn the concepts and best practices to protect your IaaS virtual machines (VMs) on Azure Stack.

Create a transit VNet using VNet peering

Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is the fundamental building block for any customer network. VNet lets you create your own private space in Azure, or as I call it your own network bubble. VNets are crucial to your cloud network as they offer isolation, segmentation, and other key benefits. VNet peering with gateway transit works across classic Azure Service Management (ASM) and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) deployment models and works across subscriptions and subscriptions belonging to different Azure Active Directory tenants. Gateway transit has been available since September 2016 for VNet peering in all regions and will be available for global VNet peering shortly.

Commit, push, deploy — Git in the Microsoft Azure Cloud

Git is a popular Version Control option — and, instead of asking you to learn something new, this article serves as an introduction to help Git users get familiar with cloud (and Azure), including an end-to-end walkthrough. Chris covers how to download, run, and configure a sample app using Git, and from there, dives into how to deploy, manage, update, and redeploy that app inside Azure.

Azure DevOps Slack Integration

In this quick how-to video, Neil shows how easy it is to setup the Azure DevOps and Slack integration for detailed real-time notifications about your build and release notifications. You'll see how to customize what you see, and click through to Azure DevOps to dig into build failures, approve requests, and validate successful deploys.

Azure Functions With F#

This quick post from Aaron Powell walks through how to use VS Code and F# to create Azure Functions v2.

How to query Azure resources using the Azure CLI

The Azure CLI can be used to not only create, configure, and delete resources from Azure — but also to query data from Azure. Querying Azure for resource properties is handy when you're writing scripts using the Azure CLI – for instance, when you want to get an Azure Virtual Machine or Container Instance IP address to perform some action on that resource. This post is a quick exercise that demonstrates several concepts, so you're ready to query a single resource property and store the value of that property in a variable. We'll use Azure Container Instances (ACI), but you don't need to have experience with ACI to complete the steps in this article – the concepts transfer to any Azure resource.

7 things you should know when getting started with Serverless APIs

In this article—based on a talk Simona Cotin gave at Build— she walks you through an existing application with an Express back-end and porting it to a Serverless back-end by changing a single line in our front-end code. By the end of the article, you will have built an API that will scale instantly as more and more users come in and our workload increases.

Additional technical content

Identify log write limits on Azure SQL Managed Instance using QPI library
Enhance data protection and compliance with customer managed keys
Running Azure Cosmos DB queries from SQL Server using ODBC driver
Planning the future for NoSQL Cassandra DB Applications on Azure
SAP on Azure High Availability Systems with Heterogenous Windows and Linux Clustering and SAP HANA
Lesson Learned #79: Connecting to Azure SQL Database just using the port 1433 without redirection

Azure shows

Episode 270 – Hammer and Nail | The Azure Podcast

Cale Teeter and Sujit D'Mello discuss using a solutions-based approach when selecting Azure services instead of getting caught in the hype of new services.

HTML5 audio not supported

Heat Maps and Image Overlays in Azure Maps | Internet of Things Show

Heat maps are used to represent the density of data using a range of colors. They are often used to show the data "hot spots" on a map and are great to help understand data. The heat map layer also supports weighted data points to help bring the most relevant information to the surface. Learn about the heat map and image layer visualizations in side of Azure Maps.

What’s New for Visual Studio 2019 Integrations with Azure Boards | The DevOps Lab

In this episode, you see a quick walk through of a new experience in Visual Studio 2019; showing how a developer can quickly find the work they need and associate it to their pending changes.

Azure Pipelines multi-cloud support and integration with DevOps tools | Azure Friday

Learn to integrate Azure Pipelines with various 3rd-party tools to achieve full DevOps cycle with Multi-cloud support. You can continue to use you existing tools and get Azure Pipelines benefits: application release orchestration, deployment, approvals, and full traceability all the way to the code or issue.

Five Ways You Can Infuse AI into Your Applications | Five Things

Leben Things! In case you don't speak Elvish, that roughly translates to "Five Things". This week I sit down with Noelle LaCharite from the Microsoft Cognitive Services team to learn how machines can translate language, perform search on unstructured data, converse like humans and more. Even better, you can use this stuff in your applications right away; no degree in multi-dimensional calculus required. This is five ways that you can infuse AI into your applications today.

Getting Started with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | The Open Source Show

Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp CTO and co-founder, and Aaron Schlesinger walk us through the core concepts of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and how it goes beyond what people typically think when they hear "Infrastructure." They break down the what, when, how, and why IaC makes developers' lives easier, whether you're running a simple application or have a complex, multi-node system. You'll learn how you can use HashiCorp Terraform to get up and running with IaC, going from nothing to a complete carbon copy of your production environment at the click of button (read: you focus on building, testing, and deploying, not spinning up test environments and hoping they're close to what's in production).

Quick tour of Azure DevOps projects using Node.js and AKS: Part 2 | Azure Tips and Tricks

Learn what Azure DevOps projects are and how to use them with Node.js and Azure Kubernetes Service. In part 2, you’ll get to explore the rest of the resources that Azure DevOps projects has to offer.

How to create a storage account and upload a blob | Azure Portal Series

The Azure Portal enables you to create and manage storage accounts and upload a blob. In this video of the Azure Portal “How To” Series, learn how to easily create a storage account, upload a blob, and manage the storage account within Storage Explorer (preview).

Greg Leonardo on Deploying the Azure Way | Azure DevOps Podcast

Greg Leonardo is a Cloud Architect at Campus Management Corp. and Webonology. In this episode of the Azure Podcast, he discusses some of the topics from his book, Hands-On Cloud Solutions with Azure: architecting, developing, and deploying the Azure way. He also talks about working with infrastructure as code, provisioning and watching environments, and more about what developers targeting Azure need to know.

HTML5 audio not supported

Episode 2 – WTF Azure (How Do I Get Started?) | AzureABILITY

AzureABILITY host Louis Berman discusses how to get started in Azure with his fellow Cloud Solutions Architect, Srini Ambati. Listen in as Louis and Srini give you a leg up into the cloud.

HTML5 audio not supported

Read the transcript

Events

Microsoft Create – A Global Startup Event Series

Create is for startup founders, technical co-founders, and early or first engineers, with potentially a small number of business-focused attendees. The event is ideally for early stage startups looking to make technical decisions about platform and technology stack. Our agenda focuses heavily on Azure technologies and highlights Microsoft for Startups offerings and the ScaleUp program. The tour is free to attendees.

Join Microsoft at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference

The world of computing goes deep and wide on working on issues related to our environment, economy, energy, and public health systems. These needs require modern, advanced solutions that were traditionally limited to a few organizations, are hard to scale, and take a long time to deliver. Microsoft Azure delivers High Performance Computing (HPC) capability and tools to power solutions that address these challenges integrated into a global-scale cloud platform. Microsoft’s partnership with NVIDIA makes access to NVIDIA GPUs easier than ever. This week’s NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference teaches Azure customers to combine the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud with the capability of NVIDIA GPUs.

Cloud Commercial Communities webinar and podcast newsletter–March 2019

Each month the Cloud Commercial Communities team focuses on core programs, updates, trends, and technologies that Microsoft partners and customers need to know to increase success using Azure and Dynamics. Make sure you catch a live webinar and participate in live QA.

IoT in Action: A more sustainable future for farming

The future of food security and feeding an expanding global population depends upon our ability to increase food production globally—an estimated 70 percent by the year 2050, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. But challenges ranging from climate change, soil quality, pest control, and shrinking land availability, not to mention water resource constraints, must be addressed. We believe that the Internet of Things (IoT) technology and data-driven agriculture is one answer.

IoT in Action: Thriving partner ecosystem key to transformation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ongoing journey. Digital transformation requires that solutions be connected so that the data can be collected and analyzed more effectively across systems to drive exponential improvements in operations, profitability, and customer and employee loyalty. Through our partner-plus-platform-approach, we have committed $5 billion in IoT-focused investments to grow and support our partner ecosystem–specifically through unrelenting R&D innovation in critical areas, like security, new development tools and intelligent services, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies.

Customers, partners, and industries

Spinning up cloud-scale analytics is even more compelling with Talend and Microsoft

Stich Data Loader is Talend's recent addition to its portfolio for small- and mid-market customers. With Stitch Data Loader, customers can load 5 million rows/month into Azure SQL Data Warehouse for free or scale up to an unlimited number of rows with a subscription. All across the industry, there is a rapid shift to the cloud. Using a fast, flexible, and secure cloud data warehouse is an important first step in that journey. With Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Stitch Data Loader companies can get started faster than ever.

Economist study: OEMs create new revenue streams with next-gen supply chains

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) make the wheels go round for the business world. Successful OEMs are always on the lookout for opportunities to drive down costs and differentiate their brands; and the rise of IoT offers a golden opportunity to fundamentally transform the supply chain. The Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed 250 senior executives at OEMs in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific to gain insights from those customers at the center of the supply chain.

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 33

The Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs – certified and optimized to run on Azure. Find, try, purchase, and provision applications & services from hundreds of leading software providers. You can also connect with Gold and Silver Microsoft Cloud Competency partners to help your adoption of Azure. In the first half of February we published 50 new offers.

Accelerating enterprise digital transformation through DevOps

IT organizations are under more pressure than ever to do more with less, they are expected to drive competitive advantage and innovation with higher quality while managing smaller teams. Organizations must now adapt by adopting rapid and strategic transformation while simultaneously working diligently to keep the lights on, and all with the important goal of reducing costs. To address these challenges, Sirrus7, GitHub, and HashiCorp have joined together to create the DevOps Acceleration Engine.

Maximize existing vision systems in quality assurance with Cognitive AI

Quality assurance matters to manufacturers. The reputation and bottom line of a company can be adversely affected if defective products are released. If a defect is not detected, and the flawed product is not removed early in the production process, the damage can run in the hundreds of dollars per unit. To mitigate this, many manufacturers install cameras to monitor their products as they move along the production line. Mariner, with its Spyglass solution, uses AI from Azure to achieve visibility over the entire line, and to prevent product defects before they become a problem.

Azure This Week – 15 March 2019 | A Cloud Guru – Azure This Week

This time on Azure This Week, Lars covers the official release of Azure DevOps Server 2019, the public preview of Azure Premium Blob Storage and he looks at some new features in Azure Firewall.

Quelle: Azure

ONNX Runtime integration with NVIDIA TensorRT in preview

Today we are excited to open source the preview of the NVIDIA TensorRT execution provider in ONNX Runtime. With this release, we are taking another step towards open and interoperable AI by enabling developers to easily leverage industry-leading GPU acceleration regardless of their choice of framework. Developers can now tap into the power of TensorRT through ONNX Runtime to accelerate inferencing of ONNX models, which can be exported or converted from PyTorch, TensorFlow, and many other popular frameworks.

Microsoft and NVIDIA worked closely to integrate the TensorRT execution provider with ONNX Runtime and have validated support for all the ONNX Models in the model zoo. With the TensorRT execution provider, ONNX Runtime delivers better inferencing performance on the same hardware compared to generic GPU acceleration. We have seen up to 2X improved performance using the TensorRT execution provider on internal workloads from Bing MultiMedia services.

How it works

ONNX Runtime together with its TensorRT execution provider accelerates the inferencing of deep learning models by parsing the graph and allocating specific nodes for execution by the TensorRT stack in supported hardware. The TensorRT execution provider interfaces with the TensorRT libraries that are preinstalled in the platform to process the ONNX sub-graph and execute it on NVIDIA hardware. This enables developers to run ONNX models across different flavors of hardware and build applications with the flexibility to target different hardware configurations. This architecture abstracts out the details of the hardware specific libraries that are essential to optimizing the execution of deep neural networks.

How to use the TensorRT execution provider

ONNX Runtime together with the TensorRT execution provider supports the ONNX Spec v1.2 or higher, with version 9 of the Opset. TensorRT optimized models can be deployed to all N-series VMs powered by NVIDIA GPUs on Azure.

To use TensorRT, you must first build ONNX Runtime with the TensorRT execution provider (use –use_tensorrt –tensorrt_home <path to location for TensorRT libraries in your local machine> flags in the build.sh tool). You can then take advantage of TensorRT by initiating the inference session through the ONNX Runtime APIs. ONNX Runtime will automatically prioritize the appropriate sub-graphs for execution by TensorRT to maximize performance.

InferenceSession session_object{so};
session_object.RegisterExecutionProvider(std::make_unique<::onnxruntime::TensorrtExecutionProvider>());
status = session_object.Load(model_file_name);​

Detailed instructions are available on GitHub. In addition, a collection of standard tests are available through the onnx_test_runner utility in the repo to help verify the ONNX Runtime build with TensorRT execution provider.

What is ONNX and ONNX Runtime

ONNX is an open format for deep learning and traditional machine learning models that Microsoft co-developed with Facebook and AWS. ONNX allows models to be represented in a common format that can be executed across different hardware platforms using ONNX Runtime. This gives developers the freedom to choose the right framework for their task, as well as the confidence to run their models efficiently on a variety of platforms with the hardware of their choice.

ONNX Runtime is the first publicly available inference engine with full support for ONNX 1.2 and higher including the ONNX-ML profile. ONNX Runtime is lightweight and modular with an extensible architecture that allows hardware accelerators such as TensorRT to plug in as “execution providers.” These execution providers unlock low latency and high efficiency neural network computations. Today, ONNX Runtime powers core scenarios that serve billions of users in Bing, Office, and more.

Another step towards open and interoperable AI

The preview of the TensorRT execution provider for ONNX Runtime marks another milestone in our venture to create an open and interoperable ecosystem for AI. We hope this makes it easier to drive AI innovation in a world with ever-increasing latency requirements for production models. We are continuously evolving and improving ONNX Runtime, and look forward to your feedback and contributions!  

To learn more about using ONNX for accelerated inferencing on the cloud and edge, check out the ONNX session at NVIDIA GTC. Have feedback or questions about ONNX Runtime? File an issue on GitHub, and follow us on Twitter. 
Quelle: Azure

Maximize existing vision systems in quality assurance with Cognitive AI

Quality assurance matters to manufacturers. The reputation and bottom line of a company can be adversely affected if defective products are released. If a defect is not detected, and the flawed product is not removed early in the production process, the damage can run in the hundreds of dollars per unit. To mitigate this, many manufacturers install cameras to monitor their products as they move along the production line. But the data may not always be useful. For example, cameras alone often struggle with identifying defects at high volume of images moving at high speed. Now, a solution provider has developed a way to integrate such existing systems into quality assurance management. Mariner, with its Spyglass solution, uses AI from Azure to achieve visibility over the entire line, and to prevent product defects before they become a problem.

Quality assurance expenses

Quality assurance (QA) management in manufacturing is time-consuming and expensive, but critical. The effects of poor quality are substantial, as they result in:

Re-work costs
Production inefficiencies
Wasted materials
Expensive and embarrassing recalls 

And worst of all, dissatisfied customers that demand returns. 

Multiple variables across multiple facilities

Too many variables make product defect analysis and prediction difficult. Manufacturers need to perform a root cause analysis across a manufacturing process that has complex variables. They want to determine which combinations of variables create high-quality products versus those that create inferior products. But to achieve this precision, the manufacturer needs to aggregate data across multiple systems to return a comprehensive view.

Legacy vision systems lack the precision of AI-based defect detection systems. Manufacturing processes can be incredibly complex, and older vision systems are often unable to consistently and accurately identify small flaws that may have a large impact on customer satisfaction. Also, false positives can bog down production schedules.

Additionally, the inability to aggregate data from multiple production lines or factories to determine the cause of variations in quality across multiple sites prevents a holistic view of operational efficiency.

Integrating legacy systems and AI on Azure

Spyglass Visual Inspection, powered by Microsoft Azure is an easily implemented, rapid time-to-value QA solution that can reduce costs associated with product defects and increase customer satisfaction. Manufacturers work with images from any vision system so companies who already have systems in place can leverage them for additional return-on-investment (ROI).

By using cameras and other devices already in use on the production floor, the solution takes a lean approach to implementing new and emerging technologies like IoT, Cognitive AI, and computer vision. This ensures that manufacturers control costs and achieve value at every stage of production.

The figure above outlines the architecture of the solution. Data from existing systems is placed at the front. Edge computing provides on-premises processing. The data moves to storage on Azure, where it is further processed. AI can then be applied, and the results viewed using Power BI for insights into the system.

Benefits

Spyglass Visual Inspection harnesses the power of AI, IoT, and machine vision. The result is that manufacturers minimize defects and reduce costs through advanced analytics. For the manufacturer, the benefits that matter are:

Rapid ROI: Easy implementation and ramp-up enables immediate process improvements and a rapid return on your investment.
Greater visibility: Predictive analytics and root cause analysis drive quality improvements across multiple lines or sites.
Leverages existing vision systems: Extracts more value from existing industrial cameras and devices by augmenting them with AI-driven real-time insights.

Azure services

Spyglass Visual Inspection is powered by Microsoft Azure. It leverages the following Azure services:

Microsoft Deep Learning Virtual Machine, A neural network extracts rich information from images to identify defects.
Azure IoT Edge ingests images from industrial cameras on the production line and runs cloud AI algorithms locally.
Azure IoT Hub receives images, meta data from images, and results from the defect detection analysis on the Edge.
Azure Stream Analytics enables users to create dashboards that offer deep insights into the types and causes of defects that are occurring across a massive number of variables.
Azure Data Lake Storage/Blob Storage stores the data. Because heterogeneous data from multiple streams can be stored, additional data types can be added to image-based analysis.
Azure SQL Database is used to store the business rules that define what a good or bad product is and what alerts should be generated in the analytics.
Azure Functions/Service Bus generates rules that trigger alerts so you can capture the most meaningful data for business users.
Power BI provides interactive dashboards that make data easy to access and understand, so users can make analytics-driven decisions.
Power Apps creates additional applications for manufacturers to act on the data and insights they have received.

Recommended next steps

Go to the marketplace listing for Spyglass and select Contact me.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Azure portal March 2019 update

This month’s updates include an improved “All services” view, Virtual Network Gateway overview updates, an improved DNS Zone and Load Balancer creation experience, Management Group integration into Activity Log, redesigned overview screens for certain services within Azure DB, an improved creation experience for Azure SQL Database, multiple changes to the Security Center, and more updates to Intune.

Sign in to the Azure portal now and see for yourself everything that’s new. Download the Azure mobile app to stay connected to your Azure resources anytime, anywhere.

Here’s the list of March updates to the Azure portal:

Shell

Improved “All services” view

IaaS

Virtual network gateway overview updates
New full-screen DNS zone and Load Balancer create blades

Management experiences

Management Group integration into Activity Log

SQL

Redesigned overview blade for Azure Database for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB services
Improved creation experience for Azure SQL Database

Azure Security Center

Secure score added as a dashboard KPI
New regulatory compliance dashboard
Updated security policies
Updated security recommendations

Other

Updates to Microsoft Intune

Shell

Improved “All services” view

We have improved the “All services” view, the view that shows all available services and resources in Azure:

The entire screen’s real estate is now utilized to show more services.
A category index has been added at the left to help navigate the Azure offering.

IaaS

Virtual network gateway overview updates

We've made significant updates to the overview page for virtual network gateways. We've added shortcut tiles in the center of the page to make it easier to find troubleshooting tools, and we've added a tile that brings up documentation so you can quickly learn more about your resource. We've also added metric charts so you can see at a glance what the tunnel ingress and egress are for your gateway.

Go to any virtual network gateway resource to try out the changes.

Improved creation experience for DNS Zones and Load Balancer

We are continuing our efforts to bring improved and consistent instance creation experiences for our top-level resources. As part of that effort, we’ve just updated DNS Zones and Load Balancer. This updated flow eliminates horizontal scrolling during the creation workflow and follows the same UI patterns that we use in other popular services like Virtual Machine, Storage, Cosmos DB, and Azure Kubernetes Service, resulting in easier to learn and better customer experiences.

Bring up either the DNS zone or Load Balancer resource in the Azure portal
Select Add to launch the new create experience

Management experiences

Management Group integration into Activity Log

Azure Management Groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions and is being adopted across the Azure Portal.  Users had been asking to view Management Groups events in the Activity Log, and now, integration of Management Group events and filtering into the Activity Logs allows users to audit their Management Groups.  An authorized user of a Management Group can go to the Activity Log and see all actions that have happened on a Management Group such as create, edit, delete, and parent change. In addition, you can now audit Policy Assignments on Management Groups.

If you have access to Management Groups in your current tenant, simply navigate to the Activity Log.
Select what Management Group you want to filter by using the first pill on the left.

SQL

Redesigned overview blades for Azure Database for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB services

We have redesigned the overview blade for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, which provides an at-a-glance understanding of the status of your server. It is also aligned with the overview design of Azure SQL Database, Elastic Pools, Managed Instance, and Data Warehouse. In the overview, you can now see the resource usage over the last hour, common tasks, features available, and whether the features have been configured. Clicking on any of these tiles in the overview takes you to the full details and settings.

Select All Services
Search and select either Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, or Azure Database for MariaDB
Select any server from the list
Observe the overview blade

Improved creation experience for Azure SQL Database

We are continuing our efforts to bring improved and consistent creation experiences for our top-level resources. As part of that effort, we’ve just updated the SQL database create workflow. This updated flow eliminates horizontal scrolling during the creation workflow and follows the same UI patterns that we use in other popular services like VM, Storage, Cosmos DB and AKS, resulting in easier to learn and better customer experiences.

Azure Security Center

Secure score as a dashboard KPI

Secure score is now the main compliance KPI in the Azure Security Center dashboard, replacing the previous percentage-based compliance metric.

New regulatory compliance dashboard

The new Azure Security Center regulatory compliance dashboard helps streamline the process for meeting regulatory compliance requirements by providing insights into your compliance posture. The information provided is based on continuous assessments of your Azure environment.

Updated security policies

We are updating Azure Security Center policies to use Azure Policy. You will be migrated automatically, no action is required by you. For more information see our documentation, “Working with security policies.”

Updated security recommendations

Azure App Service security recommendations have been improved to provide greater accuracy and environment compatibility. For more information see out documentation, “Protecting your machines and applications in Azure Security Center.”

Other

Updates to Microsoft Intune

The Microsoft Intune team has made updates to Microsoft Intune. You can find them on the What's new in Microsoft Intune page.

Did you know?

We now have several new videos in the recently launched Azure portal “how to” video series!  This weekly series highlights specific aspects of the portal so you can be more efficient and productive while deploying your cloud workloads from the portal. Recent videos include a demonstration of how to create, share, and use dashboards, how to manage virtual machines while on the go using the Azure mobile app, and how to configure a virtual machine with the Azure portal. Keep checking in to our playlist on YouTube for a new video each week.

Next steps

The Azure portal’s large team of engineers always wants to hear from you, so please keep providing us with your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter @AzurePortal.

Don’t forget to sign in the Azure portal and download the Azure mobile app today to see everything that’s new. See you next month!
Quelle: Azure

IoT in Action: Thriving partner ecosystem key to transformation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ongoing journey. Three years ago, when I entered this business, the world of IoT was in its infancy. Traditional industry technology adopters understood the importance of innovation and implemented isolated solutions to address discrete business issues such as inventory management, loss prevention, logistics management, and other such processes that could be automated.

Digital transformation requires that these solutions be connected so that the data can be collected and analyzed more effectively across systems to drive exponential improvements in operations, profitability, and customer and employee loyalty. The advent of sensors and analytics at the edge plus advancements in cloud platforms and data analytics is enabling this. Systems and services are now connected to provide more holistic solutions that deliver value through operational or profitability improvements and in many cases, through new revenue streams.

The creation of these solutions typically requires an ecosystem of partners. This is where Microsoft provides a distinct advantage, through our partner-plus-platform-approach, that is driving change in IoT technology adoption. Microsoft has committed $5 billion in IoT-focused investments to grow and support our partner ecosystem–specifically through unrelenting R&D innovation in critical areas, like security, new development tools and intelligent services, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. Our goal is to create trusted, connected solutions that improve business and customer experiences as well as the daily lives of people all over the world.

Transformation is about reducing complexity and developing new ways of doing business

We have some excellent examples of partners who have developed business applications that leverage advanced analytics to deliver intelligent action executed on the Microsoft platform.

The retail industry is not new to technology. However, with the advancement of digital technology, customer expectations have evolved rapidly, which is impacting nearly every aspect of how retailers operate, including how they engage customers and handle their products. There is a growing need to increase connectivity across solutions, such as digital signage, interactive kiosks, smart PoS systems, and omni-channel and other key systems, that typically consist of a range of platforms and applications from multiple vendors.

The meldCX platform, powered by Microsoft Azure, makes it simpler and more cost-effective for retailers to develop, deploy, and manage the applications and IoT solutions for these connected devices. meldCX, a partner headquartered in Australia with operations in key global markets including USA, EU, and Asia, provides a single, integrated, and powerful dashboard that enables real-time data analysis as well as device and application control, empowering the retailer to focus on the job of delivering the best customer experience. Leveraging the meldCX solution, retailers and retail suppliers can improve the customer experience, significantly reduce loss prevention challenges, and enable unstaffed retail stores to become a reality.

Importance of the partner ecosystem

Microsoft is committed to the success of our partners, and this is manifested in several ways. First, we continue to build, support, and engage our rich ecosystem of partners, which connects partners with complementary capabilities to accelerate solution development and delivery for customers. Partners are connected to opportunities that they may not have otherwise been part of.

Second, we have established a core group of solution aggregator partners that have the resources, expertise, and service offerings needed to deliver holistic, end-to-end solutions for customers, thereby simplifying the procurement process.

Third, we have built a set of solution accelerators. These first-party, open-source, and preconfigured solutions are based on a common framework and address specific IoT use cases (horizontal and vertical-based). Partners can leverage these accelerators as a starting point to fast-track solution development and speed time to market. Accelerators also help them to minimize risk, reduce development costs, and focus on unique value differentiation.

Microsoft partners are also creating third-party, open-source solution accelerators, building platforms that can be used by other partners and customers to speed their solution development and time to value. WillowTwin™ epitomizes this approach.

Based on the Azure Digital Twin platform, Willow is empowering people and organizations to connect with the built world in a whole new way. Willow has created a solution that brings together data from multiple sources, including static, historical, IOT devices, and live operating data, to create actionable insights designed to transform the operation and experience of smart buildings and infrastructure networks.

Developers and owners can now make decisions around how their company is addressing energy efficiency, spatial utilization, occupant experience, and the regulatory compliance of buildings and infrastructure networks. WillowTwin goes beyond connecting and managing IoT devices. The data, managed in an open protocol software platform, is capable of modelling the relationship and interactions between people, places, and devices. The WillowTwin solution has been implemented across a range of customers including Thyssenkrupp Elevator division to optimize building usage and management.

Together with our partners, Microsoft delivers solutions that genuinely transform our customers' business.

Achieving successful transformation

Real business model transformation must be a planned outcome. Directly addressing operational efficiencies or the bottom line is not enough. In a world where people are always connected, expectations have shifted. We expect a value/information exchange, and organizations must be prepared to rise to those expectations. Organizations that reimagine their approach and transform the way their employees, customers, and constituents interact with and use their services have the highest chance of success in the digital transformation race. IoT is a great place to start.

To learn more, register for Microsoft IoT in Action event in Sydney on Tuesday, March 19, 2019. This global in-person event provides a forum for partners and customers to meet and share their experiences and to hear first-hand from Microsoft how we are delivering digital transformation solutions. I hope to meet you there. Please also visit our event series website for an upcoming event in a city near you.
Quelle: Azure

Hardware innovation for data growth challenges at cloud-scale

The Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit 2019 kicks off today in San Jose where a vibrant and growing community is sharing the latest in innovation to make hardware more efficient, flexible, and scalable.

For Microsoft, our journey with OCP began in 2014 when we joined the foundation and contributed the very same server and datacenter designs that power our global Azure cloud, but it didn’t stop there. Each year at the OCP summit, we contribute innovation that addresses the most pressing challenges for our industry, including a modular and globally compatible server design and universal motherboard with Project Olympus to enabling hardware security with Project Cerberus to a next generation specification for SSD storage with Project Denali.

This year we’re turning our attention to the exploding volume of data being created daily. Data is at the heart of digital transformation and companies are leveraging data to improve customer experiences, open new markets, make employees and processes more productive, and create new sources of competitive advantage as they work toward the future of tomorrow.

Data – the engine of Digital Transformation

The Global Datasphere* which quantifies and analyzes the amount of data created, captured, and replicated in any given year across the world is growing exponentially and the growth is seemingly never-ending. IDC predicts* that the Global Datasphere will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. To keep up with the storage demands stemming from all this data creation, IDC forecasts* that over 22 ZB o storage capacity must ship across all media types from 2018 to 2025, with nearly 59 percent of that capacity supplied from the HDD industry.

With this challenge on the horizon, the enterprise is fast becoming the world's data steward once again. In the recent past, consumers were responsible for much of their own data, but their reliance on and trust of today’s cloud services, especially from connectivity, performance, and convenience perspectives, continues to increase and the desire to store and manage data locally continues to decrease.

Moreover, businesses are looking to centralize data management and delivery (e.g., online video streaming, data analytics, data security, and privacy) as well as to leverage data to control their businesses and the user experience (e.g., machine-to-machine communication, IoT, and persistent personalization profiling). The responsibility to maintain and manage all this consumer and business data is driving the growth of cloud provider datacenters. As a result, the enterprise’s role as a data steward continues to grow, and consumers are not just allowing this, but expecting it. Beginning in 2019, more data will be stored in the enterprise core than in all the world's existing endpoints.

The demand for data storage

A few years ago, we started looking at scale challenges in the cloud regarding the growth of data and the future of data storage needs. The amount of data created in the Global Datasphere is the focus of the storage industry. Even with the amount of data that is discarded, overwritten, or sensed and never stored longer than milliseconds, there still exists a growing demand for storage capacity across industries, governments, enterprises, and consumers.

To live in a digitized world where artificial intelligence drives business processes, customer engagements, and autonomous infrastructure or where consumers' lives are hyper-personalized in nearly every aspect of behavior – including what time we'll be awakened based on the previous day's activities, overnight sleep patterns, and the next day's calendar – will require creating and storing more data than ever before.

IDC currently calculates Data Age 2025* storage capacity shipments across all media types (HDD, SSD, NVM-flash/other, tape, and optical) over the next 4 years (2018–2021) will need to exceed the 6.9 ZB shipped across all media types over the past 20 years. IDC forecasts* that over 22 ZB of storage capacity must ship across all media types from 2018 to 2025 to keep up with storage demands. Around 59 percent of the capacity will need to come from the HDD industry and 26 percent from flash technology over that same time frame, with optical storage the only medium to show signs of fatigue as consumers continue to abandon DVDs in favor of streaming video and audio.

Introducing Microsoft’s Project Zipline

The ability to store and process data extremely efficiently is core to the cloud's value proposition and Azure continues to grow dramatically as does the amount of data that Azure stores with many very data-intensive workloads. To address this, we’ve developed a cutting-edge compression algorithm and optimized the hardware implementation for the types of data we see in our cloud storage workloads. By engineering innovation at the systems level, we've been able to simultaneously achieve higher compression ratios, higher throughput, and lower latency than the other algorithms that are currently available. This enables compression without compromise, allowing always-on data processing for various industry usage models ranging from the cloud to the edge.

Microsoft’s Project Zipline compression algorithm yields dramatically better results, up to 2X high compression ratios versus the commonly used Zlib-L4 64KB model. Enhancements like this can lead to direct customer benefits in the potential for cost savings, for instance, and indirectly, access to petabytes or exabytes of capacity in a cost-effective way could enable new scenarios for our customers.

We are open sourcing Project Zipline compression algorithms, hardware design specifications, and Verilog source code for register transfer language (RTL) with initial content available today and more coming soon. This contribution will provide collateral for integration into a variety of silicon components (e.g. edge devices, networking, offload accelerators etc.) across the industry for this new high-performance compression standard. Contributing RTL at this level of detail as open source to OCP is industry leading. It sets a new precedent for driving frictionless collaboration in the OCP ecosystem for new technologies and opening the doors for hardware innovation at the silicon level. Over time, we anticipate Project Zipline compression technology will make its way into several market segments and usage models such as network data processing, smart SSDs, archival systems, cloud appliances, general purpose microprocessor, IoT, and edge devices.

Project Zipline is a cutting-edge compression technology optimized for a large variety of datasets, and our release of RTL allows hardware vendors to use the reference design to produce hardware chips to allow the highest compression, lowest cost, and lowest power out of the algorithm. It's available to the OCP ecosystem, so they can contribute to it, and create further benefit for the entire ecosystem, including Azure and our customers.

Project Zipline partners and ecosystem

As a leader in the cloud storage space, I'm particularly proud that we're able to take all the investment and innovation we've created and share it through OCP so that our partners can provide better solutions for their customers as well.

I look forward to seeing more of the industry joining OCP and collaborating so their customers can also see the benefit.

You can follow these links to learn more about Microsoft’s Project Zipline from our GitHub specification and more about our open source hardware development.

** Source: Data Age 2025, sponsored by Seagate with data from IDC Global DataSphere, Nov 2018
Quelle: Azure