Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Announcing Azure Spatial Anchors for collaborative, cross-platform mixed reality apps

It’s amazing to look back at everything we’ve learned from our customers since we first released HoloLens. Across manufacturing, education, retail, gaming, and many other industries, developers and businesses are using mixed reality in their daily workflows and giving us feedback on what they’d like to see next. When we look across all the mixed reality solutions that customers have been building over the last few years, two things really stand out: collaboration and spatial awareness. Customers want to easily share their mixed reality experiences and place applications in the context of the real world, and thereby increase their efficiency and achieve greater productivity.

Yesterday at MWC Barcelona, we announced Azure Spatial Anchors, a mixed reality service that enables you to build a new generation of mixed reality applications that are collaborative, cross-platform, and spatially aware. Today, we’re sharing two application patterns gaining momentum across industries, and how Azure Spatial Anchors can help you deliver them with greater ease and speed.

Collaborative mixed reality experiences

Mixed reality enables us, as humans, to do more and to collaborate with those around us in a more natural and intuitive way. Whether it’s architects and site workers reviewing the day’s plans for a new construction project, designers and managers collaborating on next year’s car model, or a team of surgeons planning a procedure before operating, mixed reality has changed the way that humans now design, review, and learn together. Across industries, one of the top asks from our customers is to make it easier to share such experiences in mixed reality.

As one example, Pearson Education enables nursing students and professors to practice diagnosing and treating ill patients in 3D in the real world before the pressure of a real case. Students and professors may be using HoloLens devices, or they may be using mobile phones and tablets. Until today, sharing mixed reality experiences across devices and across platforms required either environmental setup (such as QR codes) or complex coding to handle the different sensors and endpoints. Azure Spatial Anchors provides a common coordinate frame for shared mixed reality experiences across HoloLens, iOS, and Android devices without any environmental setup needed. With Azure Spatial Anchors, everyone can collaborate in mixed reality, whether they are in a heads-up, hands-free experience on HoloLens devices, or they are participating via mobile phones and tablets.

Connected devices and places

Sometimes, the best way to work on problems and find solutions isn’t in the traditional conference room; oftentimes, better, faster decisions can be made by seeing insights and data in the real-world context of the problem itself. For example, our customers in manufacturing want to be able to walk along the factory line and easily visualize the status of each machine in order to quickly navigate and focus on the equipment with issues. Until today, precisely mapping a large space and persisting that spatial understanding was not possible for most of our mixed reality customers. Azure Spatial Anchors is designed for this: connecting the right data to the right people in the right places, so people can work like they live—in 3D.

Internet of Things (IoT) can make your connected solutions even stronger. Most IoT projects today start from a things-centric approach, but with Azure Digital Twins, we’ve flipped that around. We’ve found that customers realize huge benefits by first modeling the physical environment and then connecting existing or new devices (“things”) to that model. With Azure Spatial Anchors and Azure Digital Twins, customers gain new spatial intelligence capabilities and new insights into how spaces and infrastructure are really used. By visualizing IoT data onsite and in-context on HoloLens or mobile devices, people can uncover and respond to operational issues before they impact workstreams.

Get started today!

Azure Spatial Anchors is in public preview today! We’re so excited for you to start building with us. Here are a few quick tips to get started:

Have an idea of what you want to build? Dive into our documentation.
Need some ideas on how to design and implement mixed reality solutions? Explore reference architectures for collaborative design review, facilities management, and contextual training.
Thinking about building a cross-platform mixed reality application? Start with our shared mixed reality experience quickstart.

We would love to see what you create, and we hope you share it with us via #Azure and #SpatialAnchors. We can’t wait to see what you build!
Quelle: Azure

Azure.Source – Volume 71

Now in preview

Preview: Distributed tracing support for IoT Hub

Announcing distributed tracing support for IoT Hub now in public preview. As with most IoT solutions, including our Azure IoT reference architecture, an IoT message travels from a device through a dozen or more services before it is stored or visualized. It can be very challenging to pinpoint when something has gone wrong in the flow. To completely understand the flow of messages through an IoT Hub, you must trace each message's path using unique identifiers. IoT Hub is a managed service, hosted in the cloud, that acts as a central message hub for bi-directional communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. You can use Azure IoT Hub to build IoT solutions with reliable and secure communications between millions of IoT devices and a cloud-hosted solution backend. You can connect virtually any device to IoT Hub.

Now generally available

Update to Azure DevOps Projects support for Azure Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes is gaining strength as adoption across the industry continues to grow. However, many customers coming to container orchestration for the first time are also building familiarity with Docker and containers in general. To help with container adoption, we updated our Azure Kubernetes Service (a fully managed Kubernetes container orchestration service) and released Azure DevOps Projects (a simplified experience to help you launch an app on an Azure Service of your choice) to help you deploy multiple apps to a single Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. These features are now generally available in the Azure portal.

More reliable event-driven applications in Azure with an updated Event Grid

Event-driven programming as a core building block for cloud application architecture has been on the rise. Enabling you to build more sophisticated, performant, and stable event-driven applications in Azure is important. Announcing the general availability of features previously in preview: Dead lettering, Retry policies, Storage Queues as a destination, Hybrid Connections as a destination, and Manual Validation Handshake. To take advantage of the these features, use 2019-01-01 API and SDKs. If you are using CLI or PowerShell, use versions 2.0.56 or later for CLI and 1.1.0 for PowerShell.

Class schedules on Azure Lab Services

Classroom labs in Azure Lab Services makes it easy to set up labs by handling the creation and management of virtual machines, enabling infrastructure to scale. Schedules management is one of the key features requested by classroom labs customers who also need to easily create, edit, and delete schedules. Through continuous enhancements, the latest deployment of Azure Lab Services now includes added support for class schedules.

News and updates

Modernize alerting using Azure Resource Manager storage accounts

Azure Monitor is a unified monitoring service that includes alerting and other monitoring capabilities. Classic alerts in Azure Monitor reach retirement in June, 2019. We recommend you migrate your classic alert rules defined on your storage accounts if you want to retain alerting functionality with the new alerting platform. If you have classic alert rules configured on classic storage accounts, you should upgrade your accounts to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) storage accounts before you migrate alert rules.

Technical content

Use GraphQL with Hasura and Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Azure Database for PostgreSQL provides a fully managed, enterprise-ready community PostgreSQL database as a service for easily migrating existing apps to the cloud or for developing cloud-native applications using the languages and frameworks you choose. Learn how to take advantage of the Hasura GraphQL Engine that can instantly provide a real-time GraphQL API on a PostgreSQL database.

Introduction to Linux on Azure

An introduction to running a Linux virtual machine on Azure. This workshop has been a collaboration between Researc/hers Code and Microsoft. Researc/hers Code supports women in tech and academia by running skills workshops and podcasting the talent of women in tech and research.

New Reference Architecture: Batch scoring of Spark models on Azure Databricks

Reference architectures provide a consistent approach and best practices for a given solution. Each architecture includes recommended practices, together with considerations for scalability, availability, manageability, security, and more. The full array of reference architectures is now available on the Azure Architecture Center. This reference architecture shows how to build a scalable solution for batch scoring an Apache Spark classification model.

Six tips for securing identity in the cloud

Many customers are turning to cloud services as an asset in fighting evolving cybersecurity threats. In this three-part series on Azure Government security, learn to use best practices for securing your Azure Government resources with essential steps needed to secure identities in the cloud. Also learn specific actions you can take to create more secure identity management within your agency or organization.

2018 Guidance from AzureCAT: SAP on the Microsoft Platform

Technical documentation for getting up-to-speed and staying up-to-date with features and industry trends in development is vital. This past year was a busy one for the Azure Customer Advisory Team. Stay informed with this useful reference list of all the SAP guidance that was published or refreshed in 2018.

Create a CI/CD pipeline for your Azure IoT Edge solution with Azure Pipelines

New CI/CD tools can help developers deliver value faster and more transparently, but the need for customized scripts that address different kinds of edge solutions still presents a challenge for some CI/CD pipelines. Now, with the Azure IoT Edge task in Azure Pipelines, developers have an easier way to build and push the modules in different platforms and deliver to a set of Azure IoT Edge devices continuously in the cloud.

Getting Started with Ansible on Azure

Cloud Advocate Jay Gordon discusses how to get started with Ansible on the Azure Cloud.  You'll get the easy first steps to use Ansible on the Cloud Shell and create a Linux VM!

Cross-Platform Container Builds with Azure Pipelines

Choosing distribution options aren’t just based on personal preference. There is usually a solid technical reason for wanting a CI build deployed on a particular platform. To aid in developing your CI/CD pipeline, Azure Pipelines enables virtual machines for running your own Docker images that have the exact version of the dependencies that you want as part of your CI/CD pipeline. Now you can have confidence that your deployment works correctly on whatever platform you choose.

Keep Calm, and Keep Coding with Azure Cosmos DB and Node.js

In this quick read, John Papa shows you how to get up and running – with links to docs to get started ASAP. In John's case, he wanted a list of heroes from his database ("Just give them to me without making me work so hard!") and he shares how the Azure Cosmos DB SDK delivers with a simple line of code.

John Papa’s Sketchnote of Cosmos and Node Together

Quick look at the Azure Shared Image Gallery

Shared Image Gallery is a service that helps you build structure and organization around your custom managed VM images. Using a Shared Image Gallery you can share your images to different users, service principals, or AD groups within your organization. Shared images can be replicated to multiple regions, for quicker scaling of your deployments. In this post, Thomas Maurer provides an overview and shows how to get started.

AZ-202 Microsoft Azure Developer Certification Transition Study Guide

Microsoft has published the exam guide for AZ-202 Microsoft Azure Developer Certification. This helpful study guide contains a list of resources you can use to help you study for the exam.

Azure shows

Episode 267 – What the Hack? | The Azure Podcast

Microsoft Cloud Solution Architects Gino Filicetti and Peter Laudati talk to the Azure Podcast team about an innovative approach to getting your team to learn Azure. They have developed a set of challenge-based hacks which allow for better retention of knowledge.

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Episode 267 – What the Hack? transcript

Third Party Azure IoT solution accelerators | Internet of Things Show

Several Microsoft partners have developed solutions ranging from edge video analytics, to digital signage, to remote well monitoring for oil and gas. These are published under our partner's GitHub repositories and free for anyone to use, rebrand, or even resell. Here’s how to leverage those partner built, open sourced, Solution Accelerators to expedite your IoT solution development.

Using Azure Boards with GitHub | The DevOps Lab

As your organization and projects grow, it can get challenging to stay focused on what's most important and to organize the various types of work involved to make progress. Now you can integrate Azure Boards with your code repository on GitHub to reduce the integration tax of using multiple systems by simply mentioning work items in your commits or pull requests. See how to integrate Azure Boards with your GitHub project.

An overview of Azure Integration Services | Azure Friday

Azure Integration Services brings together API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, and Event Grid as a reliable, scalable platform for integrating on-premises and cloud-based applications, data, and processes across your enterprise.

Blockchain based registries | Block Talk

Registries are used in every industry and in multiple scenarios. Blockchain-based registries that are shared, immutable and cryptographically secure serve an important need, but it's not often apparent how to write these sort of contracts. In this episode we review a blockchain devkit accelerator that can help generate the contracts from simple JSON based descriptions.

Application Insights integrations and service updates | On .NET

In this episode, Michael Milirud returns to give us updates on some new capabilities that are available Azure Application Insights. He shows us demos covering Azure DevOps, dependency tracing, Azure Functions integration, and much more.

Inception with Azure DevOps | Visual Studio Toolbox

In this episode, Donovan is joined by Gopinath Chigakkagari from the Azure DevOps team. Gopinath shows how they use Azure DevOps to build Azure DevOps! He also shows how to integrate Azure DevOps to multiple 3rd party tools and deploy to multiple clouds with a single pipeline.

How to use the Azure Virtual Machines Serial Console | Azure Tips and Tricks

In this edition of Azure Tips and Tricks, learn how to use the Azure Virtual Machines Serial Console to easily troubleshoot your virtual machines. The Azure Virtual Machine Serial Console feature is available for Windows and Linux VM images.

How to configure a new virtual machine with the Azure Portal | Azure Portal Series

Microsoft Azure provides many virtual machine configuration options for any workload or application. In this video of the Azure Portal "How To" series, learn about some of the configuration options that are available when setting up a virtual machine in the Azure Portal.

Scott Hunter on DevOps Capabilities in Azure – Episode 24 | The Azure DevOps Podcast

Learn the differences between .NET Core and .NET Framework and when and why you should move to .NET Core 3.0 in the future. In this episode of the Azure DevOps Podcast, Scott Hunter joins Jeffrey Palermo to discuss DevOps capabilities in Azure. Hear how .NET Standard bridges the gap between .NET Core and .NET Framework, where all the different architectures fit into the .NET ecosystem. The two also give an update and overview on WebAssembly and Blazor, as well as a preview of and their motivation for writing their upcoming book, .NET DevOps for Azure.

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Events

IoT in Action: New innovations making IoT faster and simpler

Several events are scheduled this week where you can learn more about IoT solutions: Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, IoT in Action global event and Embedded World in Nuremberg, and Solution Builder Conference in Houston. As the Internet of Things (IoT) disrupts global business across every industry, opportunities abound. Partners are building on Microsoft IoT innovations and expanding solution accelerators, while customers of every size are reaping the rewards through increased productivity and efficiency, new revenue streams, and broader market share. Learn how Microsoft and our partners are making IoT faster, easier, and more cost effective through innovations in Windows IoT, Azure IoT, and Azure Sphere.

Register Now: Free Hybrid Cloud Virtual Event

Join us on March 28, 2019, 8 AM-9:30 AM Pacific Time to be among the first to see new hybrid product announcements. Hear from your peers and technology leaders to gain valuable insights on ways to accelerate your hybrid cloud roadmap. Register now for free.

Azure webinar series – Migrate Your Web Applications to Azure for Scale and Agility

Thursday, February 28, 2019 10:00 AM–11:00 AM Pacific Time – Learn the simple steps for modernizing a wide variety of web apps to Azure. Esteemed Microsoft engineer Jay Schmelzer shares implementation stories of how customers scaled with Azure and solved performance and security considerations across their apps; including .NET, PHP, and Node.js. This series also features Q&A and a learning path for hosting your web apps on Azure.

Live stream analysis using Video Indexer

Video Indexer is an Azure service designed to extract deep insights from video and audio files offline. At the EBU Production Technology Seminar in Geneva last month, an end-to-end solution was demonstrated by Microsoft that uses Video Indexer in near real-time resolutions on live feeds. Several live feeds were ingested to Azure using Dejero technology or the webRTC protocol, and sent to Make.TV Live Video Cloud to switch inputs. The selected input was sent as a transcoded stream to Azure Media Services for multi bitrate transcoding and OTT delivery in low latency mode.  The same stream was also processed in near real time with Video Indexer. The full code and a step-by-step guide to deploy the results is available on GitHub.

Azure This Week – 22 February 2019 | A Cloud Guru – Azure This Week

This time on Azure This Week, Lars talks about machine learning in Stream Analytics to detect evil doings, new Azure Maps service, and Azure DevOps pipelines team have created an app for your Slack.

Quelle: Azure

IoT in Action: New innovations making IoT faster and simpler

As the Internet of Things (IoT) disrupts global business across every industry, opportunities abound. Partners are building on Microsoft IoT innovations and expanding solution accelerators, while customers of every size are reaping the rewards through increased productivity and efficiency, new revenue streams, and broader market share.

Read on to discover how Microsoft and our partners are making IoT faster, easier, and more cost effective through innovations in Windows IoT, Azure IoT, and Azure Sphere. For greater depth and inspiration, as well as some fantastic networking opportunities, be sure to attend the IoT in Action global event in Nuremberg on February 25, 2019.

 

New innovations in Azure IoT

Greater compatibility and flexibility

Azure IoT is evolving to make it more compatible with a growing list of technologies, offering far greater choice and flexibility. In 2018, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure IoT Edge. And as of February, Azure IoT Edge is now able to run on virtual machines (VM) using a supported operating system. Also announced in February: Azure IoT Hub Java SDK will now support the Android Things platform.

Further integration with artificial intelligence and machine learning

Microsoft partners and customers are driving remarkable innovation through integration of Azure IoT with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Azure IoT enables customers to build AI-based experiences in a range of applications from cloud to edge. Azure AI Services incorporates machine learning to enable deeper control and customization.

Azure Stream Analytics, now available on IoT Edge, uses machine learning for anomaly detection and substantially reduces the costs and effort required for building and training machine learning models.

Examples of innovations using these technologies range from BMW Group’s upcoming in-car Intelligent Personal Assistant to products like the QuickSet Cloud platform that powers millions of connected devices in homes through customers including Comcast, Sony, LGI, Samsung and others.

The latest in Windows IoT

Long-term support

Windows IoT offers powerful edge-computing capabilities, integrates easily with Azure, and is ideally suited for those who are already familiar with Windows. One of the biggest enhancements to Windows IoT comes in the form of support: Microsoft is now offering long-term, comprehensive support—including silicon and security updates—that provides an extra level of confidence for customers.

Azure Device Agent 2.0

From an innovation standpoint, efficiency, security, simplicity, and repeatability are some key focus areas. Recently released for public preview is Azure Device Agent 2.0 which ticks these boxes, providing everything needed to connect a solution to Azure easily, including manageability and device provisioning. Plug and play (PnP) functionality will be coming soon.

WinML

Microsoft is investing heavily in cloud connectivity and helping to accelerate customers’ journeys to the cloud and the intelligent edge. For machine learning on the edge, Microsoft has released WinML. This set of APIs allows developers to use pre-trained machine learning models for intelligent edge devices, allowing AI compute tasks to be done locally. Benefits include improved performance, reduced bandwidth demands and cloud compute costs, and real-time results delivery.

Innovative IoT security solution: Azure Sphere

Recently shortlisted as a finalist for the Embedded World awards, Azure Sphere offers watertight security for connected microcontroller (MCU) devices at the intelligent edge. Azure Sphere includes three pivotal components that work together to lock down device security. The Azure Sphere MCU provides real-time application processes with Microsoft’s secure silicon architecture. The built-in Azure Sphere OS offers multiple layers of security. And the turnkey security service affords device-to-device and device-to-cloud security, detecting threats, and ensures certificate-based authentication.

Seeed Studio, a partner specializing in hardware developing, prototyping, and manufacturing, offers an Azure Sphere Development Kit that matches the design of the Microsoft reporting database (RDB). They also created a hardware ecosystem with access to over 100 Grove sensor modules to help rapid prototyping. Meanwhile, for developers who want to jumpstart IoT solution design and accelerate development, Avnet offers an Azure Sphere Starter Kit. The kit serves as a secure, fundamental building block that makes it very easy to have a secure device.

In addition to their Starter Kit, Avnet has unveiled two fully certified modules to reduce cost and speed your time-to-market with Microsoft’s Azure Sphere. AI-Link, a subsidiary of ChangHong group, released the first Azure Sphere module that is ready for mass production. AI-Link is a top IoT module developer and manufacturer and has shipped more than 90 million units in 2018.

Microsoft partners are also finding ways to innovate and secure their solutions using Azure Sphere. For instance, LEONI has found a way to make their cable systems smarter, more secure and more reliable. Azure Sphere enables LEONI to quickly connect digital solutions and customer applications, achieve improved hardware performance, and ensure increased security around data and equipment.

Then there is qiio and Feldschlösschen Breweries, a subsidiary of the Carlsberg Group, who have an Azure-enabled beer brewer that sends device utilization, health and performance data to the cloud via the end-to-end IoT solution of qiio. Azure Sphere securely connects the brewer, protecting the device from security breaches, giving Feldschlösschen peace of mind and useful insights around their operations.

Meet these innovative Microsoft partners – LEONI, Avnet, Seeed Studio, qiio, and AI-Link – at Embedded World in Nuremberg to see how they are using Azure Sphere to build transformative solutions.

Register for IoT in Action in Nuremberg on February 25

Register for the IoT in Action global event in Nuremberg on February 25 to find out how these and other Microsoft and partner IoT innovations are driving business transformation in every industry.

For those that want more hands-on learning, join us in Houston on April 16 for a Solution Builder Conference that explores the intelligent edge, IoT cognitive services, hybrid cloud, and IoT solution accelerators. This event is also a fantastic opportunity to talk to experts and build connections in Microsoft’s thriving customer and partner ecosystem.

Visit the Microsoft booth at Embedded World & Mobile World Congress

Explore how Microsoft and its partners’ innovative IoT solutions, using Azure Sphere and Windows IoT, are fueling digital transformation across verticals when you attend one of the following events:

•    Mobile World Congress, February 25-28 (Barcelona, Spain)

•    Embedded World, February 26-28 (Nuremberg, Germany)
Quelle: Azure

Preview: Distributed tracing support for IoT Hub

Most IoT solutions, including our Azure IoT reference architecture, use several different services. An IoT message, starting from the device, could flow through a dozen or more services before it is stored or visualized. If something goes wrong in this flow, it can be very challenging to pinpoint the issue. How do you know where the message is dropped? For example, you have an IoT solution that uses five different Azure services and 1,500 active devices. Each device sends ten device-to-cloud messages/second (for a total of 15,000 messages/second), but you notice that your web app sees only 10,000 messages/second. Where is the issue? How do you find the culprit?

To completely understand the flow of messages through IoT Hub, you must trace each message's path using unique identifiers. This process is called distributed tracing. Today, we're announcing distributed tracing support for IoT Hub, in public preview.

Get started with distributed tracing support for IoT Hub

With this feature, you can:

Precisely monitor the flow of each message through IoT Hub using trace context. This trace context includes correlation IDs that allow you to correlate events from one component with events from another component. It can be applied for a subset or all IoT device messages using device twin.
Automatically log the trace context to Azure Monitor diagnostic logs.
Measure and understand message flow and latency from devices to IoT Hub and routing endpoints.
Start considering how you want to implement distributed tracing for the non-Azure services in your IoT solution.

In the public preview, the feature will be available for IoT Hubs created in select regions.

To get started:

Follow our documentation, “Trace Azure IoT device-to-cloud messages with distributed tracing (preview).”
Check out the C sample code.
Give us feedback via UserVoice.

Quelle: Azure

Modernize alerting using Azure Resource Manager storage accounts

Classic alerts in Azure Monitor will reach retirement this coming June. We recommend that you migrate your classic alert rules defined on your storage accounts, especially if you want to retain alerting functionality with the new alerting platform. If you have classic alert rules configured on classic storage accounts, you will need to upgrade your accounts to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) storage accounts before you migrate alert rules.

For more information on the new Azure Monitor service and classic alert retirement read the article, “Classic alerts in Azure Monitor to retire in June 2019.”

Identify classic alert rules

You should first find all classic alert rules before you migrate. The following screenshot shows how you can identify classic alert rules in the Azure portal. Please note, you can filter by subscription so you can find all classic alert rules without checking on each resource separately.

Migrate classic storage accounts to ARM

New alerts do not support classic storage accounts, only ARM storage accounts. If you configured classic alert rules on a classic storage account you will need to migrate to an ARM storage account.

You can use "Migrate to ARM" to migrate using the storage menu on your classic storage account. The screenshot below shows an example of this. For more information on how to perform account migration see our documentation, “Platform-supported migration of laaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager.”

Re-create alert rules in new alerting platform

After you have migrated the storage account to ARM, you then need to re-create your alert rules. The new alerting platform supports alerting on ARM storage accounts using new storage metrics. You can read more about new storage metric definitions in our documentation, “Azure Storage metrics in Azure Monitor.” In the storage blade, the menu is named "Alert" for the new alerting platform.

Before you re-create alert rules as a new alert for your storage accounts, you may want to understand the difference between classic metrics and new metrics and how they are mapped. You can find detailed mapping in our documentation, “Azure Storage metrics migration.”

The following screenshot shows how to create an alert based on “UsedCapacity.”

Some metrics include dimension, which allows you to see and use different dimension value types. For example, the transactions metric has a dimension named “ResponseType” and the values represent different type of errors and success. You can create an alert to monitor transactions on a particular error such as “ServerBusyError” or “ClientOtherError” with “ResponseType”.

The following screenshot shows how to create an alert based on Transactions with “ClientOtherError.”

In the list of dimension values, you won't see all supported values by default. You will only see values that have been triggered by actual requests. If you want to monitor conditions that have not happened, you can add a custom dimension value during alert creation. For example, when you have not had anonymous requests to your storage account yet, you can still setup alerts in advance to monitor such activity from upcoming requests.

The following screenshot shows how to add a custom dimension value to monitor upcoming anonymous transactions.

We recommend creating the new alert rules first, verify they work as intended, then remove the classic alerts.

Azure Monitor is a unified monitoring service that includes alerting and other monitor capabilities. You can read more in the “Azure Monitor documentation.”
Quelle: Azure

Live stream analysis using Video Indexer

Video Indexer is an Azure service designed to extract deep insights from video and audio files offline. This is to analyze a given media file already created in advance. However, for some use cases it's important to get the media insights from a live feed as quick as possible to unlock operational and other use cases pressed in time. For example, such rich metadata on a live stream could be used by content producers to automate TV production, like our example of EndemolShine Group, by journalists of a newsroom to search into live feeds, to build notification services based on content and more.

To that end, I joined forces with Victor Pikula a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, in order to architect and build a solution that allows customers to use Video Indexer in near real-time resolutions on live feeds. The delay in indexing can be as low as four minutes using this solution, depending on the chunks of data being indexed, the input resolution, the type of content and the compute powered used for this process.

Figure 1 – Sample player displaying the Video Indexer metadata on the live stream

The stream analysis solution at hand, uses Azure Functions and two Logic Apps to process a live program from a live channel in Azure Media Services with Video Indexer and displays the result with Azure Media Player showing the near real-time resulted stream.

In high level, it is comprised of two main steps. The first step runs every 60 seconds, and takes a sub-clip of the last 60 seconds played, creates an asset from it and indexes it via Video Indexer. Then the second step is called once indexing is complete. The insights captured are processed, sent to Azure Cosmos DB, and the sub-clip indexed is deleted.

The sample player plays the live stream and gets the insights from Azure Cosmos DB, using a dedicated Azure Function. It displays the metadata and thumbnails in sync with the live video.

Figure 2 – The two logic apps processing the live stream every minute in the cloud.

Near real-time indexing for video production

At the EBU Production Technology Seminar in Geneva last month, an end-to-end solution was demonstrated by Microsoft. Several live feeds were ingested to Azure using Dejero technology or the webRTC protocol, and sent to Make.TV Live Video Cloud to switch inputs. The selected input was sent as a transcoded stream to Azure Media Services for multi bitrate transcoding and OTT delivery in low latency mode.  The same stream was also processed in near real time with Video Indexer.

Figure 3 – Example of live stream processing in Azure

Next steps

The full code and a step-by-step guide to deploy the results can be found in this GitHub project for Live media analytics with Video Indexer. Need near real-time analytics for your content? Now you have a ready-made solution for that, go ahead and give it a try!

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

Use GraphQL with Hasura and Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Azure Database for PostgreSQL provides a fully managed, enterprise-ready community PostgreSQL database as a service. The PostgreSQL community edition helps you easily migrate existing apps to the cloud or develop cloud-native applications, using languages and frameworks of your choice. The service offers industry leading innovations such as built-in high availability, backed with 99.99 percent SLA, without the need to set up replicas and enabling customers to save over two times the cost. The capability also allows customers to scale compute up or down in seconds, helping you easily adjust to changes in workload demands.

Additionally, built-in intelligent features such as Query Performance Insight and performance recommendations help customers further lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) by providing customized recommendations and insights to optimize the performance of their Postgres databases. These benefits coupled with unparalleled security and compliance, Microsoft Azure’s industry leading global reach, and Azure IP Advantage, empower customers to focus on their business and applications rather than the database.

As part of the broader Postgres community, our aim is to contribute to and partner with others in the community to bring new features to Azure Database for PostgreSQL users. You can now take advantage of the Hasura GraphQL Engine, a lightweight, high performance open-source product that can instantly provide a real time GraphQL API on a Postgres database. This post provides an overview of how to use GraphQL with Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a server-side runtime for executing database queries. The GraphQL spec is centered around a typed schema that is available to users of the API, which are mostly front-end developers, to make any CRUD queries on the exposed fields. It’s agnostic to the underlying database or source of data. One of GraphQL’s main benefits is that clients can specify exactly what they need from the server and receive that data in a predictable way. GraphQL provides a solution to common hurdles faced when using REST APIs, and it is currently being adopted widely to speed up product development cycles.

Hasura GraphQL Engine

The Hasura GraphQL Engine is a lightweight, high performance open-source product that gives you a real time GraphQL API on a Postgres database instantly. The engine comes with an admin UI to help you explore your GraphQL APIs and manage your database schema and data.

Hasura’s GraphQL Engine also allows you to write custom resolvers with schema-stitching and to integrate serverless functions or microservice APIs that get triggered on database events. With Hasura’s GraphQL, you can easily build 3factor apps. Learn more by reading about Hasura.

Using GraphQL with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Please note, If you already have a database running on Azure and want to use GraphQL on that database, go directly to the "Working with GraphQL with an existing Azure Database for PostgreSQL" section below.

With the Hasura’s GraphQL one-click deploy, you can now get a real time GraphQL API on Azure with Azure Database for PostgreSQL server in under five minutes!

Get started by selecting Deploy to Azure below, which will open the Azure portal in preparation for using GraphQL with Azure Database for PostgreSQL. If you are prompted to log in to the Azure portal, enter your credentials to continue.

This deployment uses Azure Container Instances for deploying Hasura’s GraphQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL for provisioning a managed Postgres instance.

Working with GraphQL with an existing Azure Database for PostgreSQL

If you already have a PostgreSQL database on Azure, you can connect Hasura’s GraphSQL to that database and have GraphQL APIs without affecting any other part of your application.

Get started by selecting the Deploy to Azure graphic below, which will open the Azure portal in preparation for working with GraphQL and an existing Azure Database for PostgreSQL database. If you are prompted to log in to the Azure portal, enter your credentials to continue.

This deployment uses Azure Container Instances for deploying Hasura and connects to an existing Azure Database for PostgreSQL instance.

What else can you do with Hasura’s GraphQL engine?

Explore the ready to use real-time API

Types and/or operators such as SQL for sorting, filtering, pagination, and aggregations are supported out-of-the-box. Read more about Hasura’s powerful syntax for queries and mutations.

Hasura also has built-in live-queries called subscriptions in GraphQL, for getting real-time updates to results of a query. No need to write any code for handling websocket connections!

Add authorization

Hasura’s granular, role-based permissions system lets you configure columns and row level access control rules for data that integrates with any third party. You can also integrate with your own custom authentication services using a JWT or webhook. You can learn more about adding authorization by visiting Hasura’s documentation, “Authentication / Access control.”

Add custom business logic

GraphQL Engine can be used as a gateway for custom business logic like with Remote GraphQL schemas. You can write your own GraphQL servers in your favorite language and expose them at a single endpoint. Hasura will take care of the schema stitching.

Trigger Azure Functions on database events

Hasura can trigger serverless Azure Functions or webhooks on database events like insert, update, or delete. They can be used to execute asynchronous business logic such as sending a “welcome email” to newly registered users. Read more about triggering serverless Azure Functions and webhooks on the Hasura website, or visit Hasura’s documentation, “Event triggers.”

Next steps

Get started and create your PostgreSQL servers today! Learn more about Azure Database for PostgreSQL in the overview documentation, “What is Azure Database for PostgreSQL.”

Please continue to provide UserVoice feedback on the features and functionality that you want to see next. If you need any help or have questions please check out the, “Azure Database for PostgreSQL documentation.”

For support and feedback related to Hasura, please use Discord. You can also follow Hasura’s product updates at @HasuraHQ.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the Hasura team for their contributions to this posting.
Quelle: Azure

Update to Azure DevOps Projects support for Azure Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes is going from strength to strength as adoption across the industry continues to grow. But there are still plenty of customers coming to container orchestration for the first time while also building up their familiarity with Docker and containers in general. We see the need to help teams go from a container image, or just a git repo, and help get them to an app running in Kubernetes in as few steps as possible. It’s also important that we do this in a way that will allow them to customize afterward and build on their knowledge as they go.

At Microsoft, we are trying to make it easy for our customers to adopt Kubernetes by offering two solutions.

First is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), a fully managed Kubernetes container orchestration service. AKS simplifies the deployment and operations of Kubernetes and enables you to dynamically scale your application infrastructure with confidence and agility.

The other is Azure DevOps Projects, a simplified experience which helps you launch an app on an Azure Service of your choice in a few quick steps. For example, in just a matter of minutes, it can help you provision AKS, Azure Container Registry, and start building and deploying a container app to AKS by using Azure Pipelines. Creating a DevOps Projects provisions Azure resources and comes with a git code repository, Application Insights integration, and a continuous delivery pipeline setup to deploy to Azure. The DevOps Projects dashboard lets you monitor code commits, builds, and deployments from a single view in the Azure portal.

Key benefits of Azure DevOps Projects are:

Get up and running with a new app and a CI/CD pipeline in just a few minutes
Support for a wide range of popular frameworks such as .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, and Python
Start fresh or bring your own application from GitHub
Built-in Application Insights and Azure Monitor for containers integration for instant analytics and actionable insights
Cloud-powered CI/CD using Azure DevOps

Several customers are using Azure DevOps Projects to deploy their apps to AKS, but a clear piece of feedback we received from early adopters was to add support for reusing an existing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster in Azure DevOps Projects rather than have to create a new one each time.

Today we are happy to share that now you can use Azure DevOps Projects to deploy multiple apps to a single AKS cluster. This feature is generally available in the Azure portal. To get started create an Azure DevOps Projects now. For more information, please read our Azure DevOps Projects documentation.

Quelle: Azure