Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Get started quickly using templates in Azure Data Factory

Cloud data integration helps organizations integrate data of various forms and unify complex processes in a hybrid data environment. A number of times different organizations have similar data integration needs and require repeat business processes. Data Engineers or data developers in these organizations want to quickly get started with building data integration solutions and avoid building same workflows repeatedly. Today, we are announcing the support for templates in Azure Data Factory (ADF) to get started quickly with building data factory pipelines and improve developer productivity along with reducing development time for repeat processes. The template feature enables a ‘Template gallery’ for our customers that contains use-case based templates, data movement templates, SSIS templates or transformation templates that you can use to get hands-on with building your data factory pipelines.

Simply click Create pipeline from template on the Overview page or click +-> Pipeline from template on the Author page in your data factory UX to get started.

Select any template from the gallery and provide the necessary inputs to use the template. You can also read detailed description about the template or visualize the end to end data factory pipeline.

You can also create new connections to your data store or compute while providing the template inputs.

Once you click Use this template, you are taken to the template validation output. This guides you to fill in the required properties needed to publish and run the pipeline created from the template.

In addition to using out of box templates from the Template gallery, you might want to save your existing pipelines as templates as well. This might be required if different business units within your organization want to use the same pipeline but with different inputs. The templates feature in data factory allows you to save your existing pipelines as templates as well.

Ability to save your pipeline as a template requires you to enable GIT integration (Azure Dev Ops GIT or GitHub) in your data factory.

The template is then saved in your GIT repo under the templates folder.

The template is now visible to anyone who has access to your GIT repo. This template can be seen in the Templates section of the resource explorer.

You can also see the template under the My templates section in the template gallery.

Saving the template to the Git repository generates two files. It generates an ARM template along with a manifest file that is saved in your Git repo. The ARM template contains all information about your data factory pipeline, including pipeline activities, linked services, datasets etc. The manifest file contains information about the template description, template author, template tile icons and other metadata about the template.

All the ARM template and manifest files for the out of box official templates provided in the Template gallery can be seen in the official data factory GitHub location. In future, we will be working with our partners to come up with a certification process wherein anyone can submit a template that they want to enable in the Template gallery. The data factory team will certify the pull request corresponding to the submitted template and make the submitted template available in the Template gallery.

Find more information about the templates feature in data factory.

Our goal is to continue adding features to improve the usability of Data Factory tools. Get started building pipelines easily and quickly using Azure Data Factory. If you have any feature requests or want to provide feedback, please visit the Azure Data Factory forum.
Quelle: Azure

Azure.Source – Volume 69

Now in preview

Account failover now in public preview for Azure Storage

If you want to control storage account failover so that you can determine when storage account write access is required and the secondary replication state is understood, account failover for geo-redundant storage (GRS) enabled storage accounts is now available in preview. If the primary region for your geo-redundant storage account becomes unavailable for an extended period of time, you can force an account failover. As is the case with most previews, account failover should not be used with production workloads. There is no production SLA until the feature becomes generally available.

Azure Stream Analytics now supports Azure SQL Database as reference data input

Reference data is a dataset that is static or slow changing in nature that you can correlate with real-time data streams to augment the data. Stream Analytics leverages versioning of reference data to augment streaming data by the reference data that was valid at the time the event was generated. You can try using Azure SQL Database as a source of reference data input to your Stream Analytics job today. This feature is available for public preview in all Azure regions. This feature is also available in the latest release of Stream Analytics tools for Visual Studio.

Also in preview

Public preview: Azure Service Bus for Go
Public preview: Azure Service Bus for Python
Azure Database for PostgreSQL read replica preview
MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB online migration is in preview

Now generally available

Individually great, collectively unmatched: Announcing updates to 3 great Azure Data Services

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Azure Data Explorer are now generally available, while Azure Data Factory Mapping Data Flow is available in preview. Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) combines the scalability, cost effectiveness, security model, and rich capabilities of Azure Blob Storage with a high-performance file system that is built for analytics and is compatible with the Hadoop Distributed File System. Azure Data Explorer (ADX) is a fast, fully managed data analytics service for real-time analysis on large volumes of streaming data. ADX is capable of querying 1 billion records in under a second with no modification of the data or metadata required. ADX also includes native connectors to Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Power BI and comes with an intuitive query language so that customers can get insights in minutes. With Mapping Data Flow in Azure Data Factory, customers can visually design, build, and manage data transformation processes without learning Spark or having a deep understanding of their distributed infrastructure.

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is now generally available
General Availability: Azure Data Explorer

An overview of Azure Data Explorer (ADX) | Azure Friday

Manoj Raheja joins Lara Rubbelke to demonstrate Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and provide an overview of the service from provisioning to querying. ADX is a fast, fully managed data analytics service for real-time analysis on large volumes of streaming data. It brings together a highly performant and scalable cloud analytics service with an intuitive query language to deliver near-instant insights.

Code-free data transformation at scale using Azure Data Factory | Azure Friday

Learn about the new code-free visual data transformation capabilities in Azure Data Factory as Gaurav Malhotra joins Lara Rubbelke to demonstrate how you can visually design, build, and manage data transformation processes without learning Spark or having a deep understanding of the distributed infrastructure.

Azure Cost Management now general availability for enterprise agreements and more!

Azure Cost Management is now generally available for all our Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers from within the Azure Portal. Azure Cost Management enables you to monitor all you spend through easy to use dashboards, create budgets, and optimize your cloud spend. This post also announces the public preview for web direct Pay-As-You-Go customers and Azure Government cloud. Azure Cost Management is available for free to all customers and partners to manage Azure costs. The Cloudyn portal will continue to be available to customers while we integrate all relevant functionality into native Azure Cost Management.

Azure Cost Management preview for Azure Government
Azure Cost Management preview for pay-as-you-go

Microsoft Healthcare Bot brings conversational AI to healthcare

The Microsoft Healthcare Bot is a white-labeled cloud service that powers conversational AI for healthcare. It’s designed to empower healthcare organizations to build and deploy compliant, AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots that help them put more information in the hands of their users, enable self-service, drive better outcomes, and reduce costs. The Microsoft Healthcare Bot is now available in the Azure Marketplace.

Also generally available

QnA Maker simplifies knowledge base management for your Q&A bot
Azure Automation: Update Azure Modules runbook is open source
Language improvements in Azure Stream Analytics are now generally available
Blob output partitioning in Azure Stream Analytics
TomTom is expanding its partnership with Microsoft
New Lsv2 Azure virtual machines (VMs) for big data, databases, and data warehousing are now generally available
Logic Apps is now available in US Gov Arizona region
SQL Server Migration Assistant support for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
Support for Amazon RDS SQL Server to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance online migrations
M-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in Australia Central 2 region
Azure DevTest Labs: Configure resource group control for your lab
Azure HDInsight available in US DoD East, US DoD Central, US Gov Texas
Azure Log Analytics is available in West US 2

News and updates

Analytics in Azure is up to 14x faster and costs 94% less than other cloud providers. Why go anywhere else?

Julia White, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure covers how Azure provides the most comprehensive set of analytics services from data ingestion to storage to data warehousing to machine learning and BI. Each of these services have been finely tuned to provide industry leading performance, security and ease of use, at unmatched value. In a recent study by GigaOm, they found that Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now outperforming the competition up to 14x and up to 94% cheaper when compared with our competitors.

Configure resource group control for your Azure DevTest Lab

You now have the option to configure all your lab virtual machines (VMs) to be created in a single resource group. Learn how you can improve governance of your development and test environments by using Azure polices that you can apply at the resource group level. This enables you to use a script to either specify a new or existing resource group within your Azure subscription in which to create all your lab VMs. ARM environments created in your lab will continue to remain in their own resource groups and will not be affected by any option you select while working with this API.

Reserved instances now applicable to classic VMs, cloud services, and Dev/Test subscriptions

Two new Azure Reserved VM Instances’ (RI) features are now available that can provide you with additional savings and purchase controls. Classic VMs and Cloud Services users can now benefit from the RI discounts. In addition, Enterprise Dev/Test and Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test subscriptions can now benefit from the RI discounts.

New connectors added to Azure Data Factory empowering richer insights

Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a fully-managed data integration service for analytic workloads in Azure, that empowers you to copy data from 80 plus data sources with a simple drag-and-drop experience. Also, with its flexible control flow, rich monitoring, and CI/CD capabilities you can operationalize and manage the ETL/ELT flows to meet your SLAs. A set of eight new Azure Data Factory connectors are now available that enable more scenarios and possibilities for your analytic workloads, including the ability to ingest data from Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3.

Intelligent Edge support grows – Azure IoT Edge now available on virtual machines

Azure IoT Edge enables you to bring cloud intelligence to the edge and act immediately on real-time data. Azure IoT Edge already supports a variety of Linux and Windows operating systems as well as a spectrum of hardware from devices smaller than a Raspberry Pi to servers. Supporting IoT Edge in VMware vSphere offers you even more choice if you want to run AI on infrastructure you already own. VMware simplified the deployment process of Azure IoT Edge to VMs using VMware vSphere. Additionally, vSphere 6.7 and later provide passthrough support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM), allowing Azure IoT Edge to maintain its industry leading security framework by leveraging the hardware root of trust.

Completers in Azure PowerShell

Since version 3.0, PowerShell has supported applying argument completers to cmdlet parameters. We added argument completers to the Azure PowerShell modules that allow you to select valid parameter values without needing to make additional calls to Azure. These completers make the required calls to Azure to obtain the valid parameter values. Argument completers added include: Location, Resource Group Name, Resource Name, and Resource Id.

Simplify Always On availability group deployments on Azure VM with SQL VM CLI

Always On availability groups (AG) provide high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to your SQL Server database, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or a combination of both. Deploying an Always On Availability Group configuration for SQL Server on Azure VM is now possible with a few simple steps using the expanded capabilities enabled by SQL VM resource provider and Azure SQL VM CLI.

Help us shape new Azure migration capabilities: Sign up for early access!

We are enhancing Azure Migrate to deliver a unified and extensible migration experience with a goal of enabling customers and partners to plan, execute, and track their end to end migration journey using Azure Migrate. Delivering an integrated end-to-end migration experience that enables you to discover, assess, and migrate servers to Azure is the goal. Sign up for the private preview to try enhanced assessment and migration capabilities.

Microsoft Azure portal February 2019 update

In February, the Azure portal will bring you updates to several compute (IaaS) resources, the ability to export contents of lists of resources and resource groups as CSV files, an improvement to the layout of essential properties on overview pages, enhancements to the experience on recovery services pages, and expansions of setting options in Microsoft Intune.

Azure Monitor January 2019 updates

Azure Monitor now integrates the capabilities of Log Analytics and Application Insights for powerful, end-to-end monitoring of your applications. Learn what was added throughout the month of January to Application Insights, Log Analytics, Azure Monitor Workbooks, and Azure Metrics. In addition, Workbooks are now available in Azure Monitor for VMs.

Lighting up healthcare data with FHIR: Announcing the Azure API for FHIR

The healthcare industry is rapidly adopting the emerging standard HL7 FHIR®, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. This robust, extensible data model standardizes semantics and data exchange so all systems using FHIR can work together. Azure API for FHIR® enables rapid exchange of data in the FHIR format and is backed by a managed Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) offering in the cloud. Simplify data management with a single, consistent solution for protected health information.

Azure DevOps Projects supporting Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions

In the latest deployment of Azure DevOps Projects now available to all customers, we have added support for Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions as target destinations for your application. This builds on the existing Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support.

Find out when your virtual machine hardware is degraded with Scheduled Events

Scheduled Events will now be triggered when Azure predicts that hardware issues will require a redeployment to healthy hardware in the near future, and provide a time window when Azure will redeploy the VMs to healthy hardware if a live migration was not possible. You can initiate the redeployment of your VMs ahead of Azure automatically doing it.

Additional updates

Data Migration Assistant support for target readiness assessment for Azure SQL DB Managed Instance
NuGet, npm, and other Artifacts tasks support proxies – Sprint 147 Update
Ev3 and ESv3 series VMs are available in Azure HDInsight
Azure StorSimple 5000/7000 series will no longer be supported starting July 9, 2019

Technical content

Processing trillions of events per day with Apache Kafka on Azure

The Siphon team shares their experiences and learnings from running one of world’s largest Kafka deployments. Besides underlying infrastructure considerations, they discuss several tunable Kafka broker and client configurations that affect message throughput, latency and durability. After running hundreds of experiments, they standardized the Kafka configurations required to achieve maximum utilization for various production use cases. They also explain how to tune a Kafka cluster to configure producers, brokers and consumers for the best possible performance.

Best practices to consider before deploying a network virtual appliance

A network virtual appliance (NVA) is a virtual appliance primarily focused on network functions virtualization. A typical network virtual appliance involves various layers four to seven functions like firewall, WAN optimizer, application delivery controllers, routers, load balancers, IDS/IPS, proxies, SD-WAN edge, and more. Common best practices include: Azure-accelerated networking support, multi-NIC support, using Azure Load Balancer for a high availability (HA) port load balancing rule, and support for Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS).

Build your own deep learning models on Azure Data Science Virtual Machines

The Practical Deep Learning for Coders 2019 course from fast.ai helps software developers start building their own state-of-the-art deep learning models. Developers who complete this course will become proficient in deep learning techniques in multiple domains including computer vision, natural language processing, recommender algorithms, and tabular data. Learn how you can run this course using the Azure Data Science Virtual Machines (DSVM).

Performance best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Connection Pooling

This blog is a continuation of a series of blog posts to share best practices for improving performance and scale when using Azure Database for PostgreSQL service. This post focuses on the benefits of using connection pooling and provides recommendations to improve connection resiliency, performance, and scalability of applications running on Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Azure Event Grid: The Whole Story

As promised, Jeremy Likness, a Microsoft Cloud Advocate, takes a thorough look at the serverless backbone for all your event-driven computing needs: Azure Event Grid, a single service for managing routing of all events from any source to any destination.

Pentesting Azure — Thoughts on Security in Cloud Computing

Tanya Janca, a Microsoft Cloud Advocate, shares a list of her thoughts on penetration testing (pentesting) Azure applications as she sets out to read Pentesting Azure Applications by Matt Burrough. She promises a future post once she finishes reading the book.

Azure shows

Episode 265 – Azure DevOps Server | The Azure Podcast

Cynthia and Evan talk to Jamie Cool, Director of Program Management at Microsoft, who gives us all the details and potential use-cases for the Azure DevOps Server in your organization.

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An overview of Azure Blueprints | Azure Friday

Alex Frankel joins Scott Hanselman to discuss Azure Blueprints. Environment creation can be a long and error prone process. Azure Blueprints helps you deploy and update cloud environments in a repeatable manner using composable artifacts such as policies, role-based access control, and Azure Resource Manager templates.

Enhanced monitoring capabilities and tags/annotations in Azure Data Factory | Azure Friday

Gaurav Malhotra and Scott Hanselman explore tagging support and enhanced monitoring capabilities, including dashboards and improved debugging support in Azure Data Factory. Data integration is complex and the ability to monitor your data factory pipelines is a key requirement for dev ops personnel inside an enterprise. Now, you can tag/annotate your data factory pipelines to monitor all the pipeline executions with that particular tag. In addition, Data Factory visual tools provide dashboards to monitor your pipelines and an ability to monitor your pipeline execution by the Integration Runtime (IR) upon which the activities execute.

Logic Apps Connector to Ethereum Blockchain Networks | Block Talk

This episode provides an overview of how to use our serverless Ethereum Connector to transform smart contracts into an automated, visual workflow using the rich Azure Logic Apps Connectors ecosystem. We introduce the core concepts of Logic Apps and demonstrate a sample workflow triggered by a Solidity event, including how to read smart contract properties and write them to Azure Blob storage.

Azure IoT Device Agent for Windows | Internet of Things Show

Customers across industries, whether in an industrial setting or retail environment, are looking for ways to remotely provision and manage their IoT devices. Direct device access may not always be feasible when IoT devices are out in the field or on the factory floor. Microsoft Azure IoT Device Agent enables operators to configure, monitor and manage their devices remotely from their Azure dashboard. In this episode of the #IoTShow you will get an overview of Microsoft Azure IoT Device Agent with a demo.

Visual Studio for Mac: Publish to Azure | Visual Studio Toolbox

In this video, Cody Beyer will demonstrate how to log in and publish a web project to Azure. Join him and learn how to get the most out of Visual Studio for Mac by combining it with the power of Azure.

How to manage your Kubernetes clusters | Kubernetes Best Practices Series

Learn best practices on how to manage your Kubernetes clusters from field experts in this episode of the Kubernetes Best Practices Series. In this intermediate-level deep dive, you will learn about cluster management and multi-tenancy in Kubernetes.

How to add the Azure Cloud Shell to Visual Studio Code | Azure Tips and Tricks

In this edition of Azure Tips and Tricks, learn how to add the Azure Cloud Shell to Visual Studio Code. To add the Azure Cloud Shell, make sure you have the “Azure Account” extension installed in Visual Studio Code.

Overview of VS Code Extensions for Azure Government

In this episode of the Azure Government video series, Steve Michelotti sits down with Yujin Hong, Program Manager on the Azure Government Engineering team, to discuss many of the incredible VS Code Extensions for Azure. VS Code has quickly become the most popular editor in the world and there are numerous reasons for this, but one of the key reasons is VS Code’s extensibility. There are numerous VS Code Extensions available for Azure, and now these same extensions can be utilized for Azure Government! In this demo-heavy video, Yujin will show the unified authentication experience that enable all these cool extensions to seamlessly authenticate to Azure Government. She then walks through several demos that show how easy these extensions make it for developers to work with Storage, App Service, Cosmos DB, and Azure Functions in Azure Government. If you’re a developer who works with Azure Government, this video is for you!

Modern Data Warehouse overview | Azure SQL Data Warehouse

How do you think about building out your data pipeline in Azure? Discover how the Modern Data Warehouse solution pattern can modernize your data infrastructure in the cloud and enable new business scenarios. This is the first episode of an 8-part series on Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Paul Stovell on Octopus Deploy – Episode 22 | The Azure DevOps Podcast

Paul Stovell, the founder and CEO of Octopus Deploy, joins the podcast today. Paul is an expert on all things automated deployment and Cloud operations. He started Octopus Deploy back in 2011, but prior to that, he worked as a consultant for about five years. Octopus Deploy is a pretty major player in the market. Their mission? To do automated deployments really, really well. Today, it helps over 20,000 customers automate their deployments, and employs 40 brilliant people. It can be integrated with Azure DevOps services and many other build services. On this week’s episode, Paul talks about his career journey and what led him to create Octopus Deploy; his accomplishments, goals, and visions for Octopus Deploy; which build servers integrate best with Octopus Deploy; his tips and tricks for how to best utilize it; and his vision for the future of DevOps.

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Events

Cloud Commercial Communities webinar and podcast newsletter–February 2019

In this Cloud Commercial Communities monthly webinar and podcast update, get links to both the upcoming links for February and links to webinars and podcasts from January. Each month the team focuses on core programs, updates, trends, and technologies that Microsoft partners and customers need to know to increase success using Azure and Dynamics. While much of the content is available for on-demand consumption, attending live webinars enables you to participate in Q&A with the webinar hosts.

Customers, partners, and industries

Modernizing payment management for online merchants

Learn about Guru, which is Newgen's fully-integrated portal that enables merchants to have a complete view of their payments, generate reports, capture/void transactions, and perform refunds. Guru is a fully cloud-based solution hosted completely on Microsoft Azure. It is a fully-managed SaaS solution that comes as a value addition with Newgen's Payment Gateway—a cutting edge payment technology for merchants.

Azure IoT drives next-wave innovation in infrastructure and energy

Last week at the DistribuTECH conference in New Orleans, Azure IoT partners showcased new solutions that bring the next level of “smart” to our grids. We invited eight partners to the Microsoft booth to demonstrate their approach to modernizing infrastructure, and how Azure IoT dramatically accelerates time to results. Learn how each partner showed new use cases for utilities, infrastructure, and cities that take advantage of cloud, AI, and IoT. With solutions that take full advantage of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, we continue to demonstrate how cloud, IoT, and AI have the power to drastically transform every industry. Smart grids will drive efficiencies to power and utility companies, grid operators, and energy prosumers.

Advancing tactical edge scenarios with Dell EMC Tactical Microsoft Azure Stack and Azure Data Box family

Microsoft, working with partners like Dell EMC, shared new capabilities that continue to deliver the power of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge to government customers and their partners. Last year, we announced Azure Stack availability for Azure Government customers. With Azure Stack for Azure Government, agencies can efficiently modernize their on-premises legacy applications that are not ready or a fit for the public cloud due to cyber defense concerns, regulations, or other requirements. Data Box products help agencies to migrate large amounts of data, for example backup, archive or big data analytics, to Azure when they are limited by time, network availability, or costs.

Investing in our partners’ success

While Microsoft has long been a partner-oriented organization, some things are different with cloud. Specifically, partners need Microsoft to be more than just a great technology provider, you need us to be a trusted business partner. This requires long-term commitment and the ability to continually adapt and innovate as the market shifts. This has been, and continues to be, our commitment. Our partnership philosophy is grounded in the foundation that we can only deliver on our mission if there is a strong and successful ecosystem around us. Julia White, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure,  highlights our key partner-oriented investments and some of the resources to help our partners successfully grow their businesses.

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 31

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 January we published 67 new offers.

Colfax amplifies the power of its ESAB product portfolio with IoT

With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), Colfax saw an opportunity to transform its businesses. What was unique about Colfax’s IoT initiative – named Data Driven Advantage (DDA) –  was their vision of enabling customers to leverage the extensive ESAB portfolio. They selected PTC Thingworx for Azure and the Microsoft Azure IoT platform. With ESAB Digital Solutions, customers now have data to understand how processes, labor, and material contribute to the cost of each part.

This Week in Azure – 8 February 2019 | A Cloud Guru – This Week in Azure

This time on Azure This Week, Lars talks about Lsv2-series VMs are now in general availability, there’s a new version of the Microsoft Threat Modelling Tool out, Azure trivia is back every Monday, and come meet the team from A Cloud Guru next week at the Ignite Tour in Sydney.

Quelle: Azure

Colfax amplifies the power of its ESAB product portfolio with IoT

If you’ve welded two pieces of metal together, chances are you’ve used equipment from ESAB, a business unit of Colfax Corporation. Started in Sweden in 1904, ESAB was acquired by Colfax in 2012, and offers a broad portfolio of welding, cutting, and gas management equipment to customers in virtually every industry across the globe including agriculture, building construction, energy, light and heavy manufacturing, transportation, and even medical and hospitals. Wherever things are made, ESAB is there.

With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), Colfax saw an opportunity to transform its businesses. What was unique about Colfax’s IoT initiative – named Data Driven Advantage (DDA) –  was their vision of enabling customers to leverage the extensive ESAB portfolio.

Leveraging synergies of a broad portfolio

Many of ESAB’s customers manufacture highly configurable products like tractors, mining equipment, wind towers, and agricultural feed tanks. Imagine the complex process steps involved. First, hundreds of metal pieces are cut and placed on shelves. Then the parts move through the factory. At each step, there is labor required to set up a machine, fuse or cut parts, check for quality, and prepare for the next job. Workers grind metal, weld parts, and refill filler metal. Welds are documented extensively, often manually, for traceability in critical applications like shipbuilding where the paperwork can literally fill a shipping container.

“If customers can leverage the broad ESAB portfolio of welding equipment, power supplies, filler metals, welding tips, mechanized cutters – even helmets, gloves, and protective gear – in a connected way, they can gain incredible insights across their entire manufacturing processes,” explained Ryan Cahalane, Vice President of Digital Growth, Colfax.

Challenges on the IoT journey

Similarly to other companies, Colfax ran into challenges on its IoT journey, including educating executives, dealing with legacy products, ensuring their IoT solution integrated with existing distribution channels and sales teams, and a lack of coordination and inconsistent technology choices across business units.

After years in pilot purgatory, the company accelerated their digital growth success when they refocused on their core differentiation, gaining efficiencies from having a common technology platform across businesses, and leveraging ESAB’s deep application expertise and wide portfolio to unlock value for their customers. As part of this refocus, the company exited the business of developing a custom IoT platform. They selected PTC Thingworx for Azure and the Microsoft Azure IoT platform. “Deploying ThingWorx for Azure provides businesses like Colfax with a much more holistic offering around digital transformation,” said Ron Salvador, Senior Director at PTC.

The re-platforming started in December 2018, and by the HMI 2018 event, ESAB had a field-ready prototype of WeldCloud™ based on Thingworx and Azure that they began testing with customers. By FabTech in the fall of 2018, they had expanded the portfolio to include cutting applications with CutCloud™ and began rolling out the common Thingworx/Azure reference architecture to other business units’ products like orbital welding and gas monitoring.

Customers gain immediate benefits

Customers have seen immediate benefits. “With insights from WeldCloud™, one of our customers realized that they were using one station’s equipment less than 10 percent of the available time, yet it bottlenecked the overall process,” said Ludvig Enlund, GM and head of ESAB’s DDA initiative. “Plus, they were staffing it with expensive labor where the work didn’t require that level of expertise, meanwhile taking away from other more critical processes where higher skill was required. With this awareness, they rebalanced their processes, adjusted labor, and helped gain significant throughput on a line where every product made can be sold.”

With ESAB Digital Solutions, customers now have data to understand how processes, labor, and material contribute to the cost of each part. “In a job shop environment, customers are able to improve their quoting process, increase profit, and win even more business,” said Enlund. Not only do ESAB Digital Solutions like WeldCloud™ and CutCloud™ make otherwise impossible productivity improvements possible, they also give everyone involved in the operation the chance to elevate their performance with data. Some examples include:

•    Operations managers can identify new productivity drivers
•    Quality engineers can trace a defective weld and determine the correct repairs and how to prevent future issues
•    Service technicians can be proactively alerted if equipment has an anomaly or breaks down, allowing for preventative and even predictive maintenance
•    Welding engineers can use data to more quickly set up new test welding processes for new applications

Additionally, ESAB’s approach to digital transformation parallels their collaborative approach to customer preferences, where their broad portfolio provides value even where competitive equipment may be preferred. “Welding may be a science, but its practitioners consider good welding an art and become very attached to the tools they know,” said Enlund. “With the Universal Connector interface and Weld Quality (HKS), WeldCloud™ can easily work with other brands, and deliver most of the same value.”

Partnering to deliver customer value

As ESAB moves forward, it plans to continue focusing on partnerships that deliver customer value, having seen success from close relationships with Microsoft and PTC. “We are taking a page out of the Microsoft playbook,” said Cahalane. “The world is a different place. It’s moving fast. Competitors can become collaborators, and collaboration is key.” The company will continue to expand its Data Driven Advantage initiative across its large portfolio and is now piloting the same common technology platform in its own operations. They expect that the power of standard tools, consistent data models, and modern analytics will increase their own productivity, improve quality, and potentially enable new insights by closing the loop between products in the field and the operations that make them.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 31

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. From January 1 to January 15, 2019, 67 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Virtual machines

Akumo Software: Akumo Software's platform extends datacenter environments between virtualized or cloud-based infrastructure. It provides a consistent and simple way to cost-effectively manage an on-demand datacenter.

BlogEngine.NET on Windows Server 2016: BlogEngine.NET is a lightweight, simple, user-friendly blog engine that can be an excellent alternative to WordPress. Easy to modify and extend, it is specifically designed for .NET developers.

BlogEngine.NET on Windows Server 2019: BlogEngine.NET is a lightweight, simple, user-friendly blog engine that can be an excellent alternative to WordPress. Easy to modify and extend, it is specifically designed for .NET developers.

Conductor4SQL Central Server: This virtual machine comes with all the components required for using Conductor4SQL, including Windows Server 2016, Microsoft SQL Server 2017, Microsoft Power BI Desktop, and Conductor4SQL.

Dell EMC NetWorker Virtual Edition 18.2: Dell EMC NetWorker software provides fast, efficient backup and recovery for enterprise applications and databases.

F5 BIG-IP Cloud Edition: This edition is comprised of per-app VEs and BIG-IQ centralized management. The former provides intelligent traffic management and web application firewall security, while the latter delivers deployment automation, management, and visibility.

GnuCash on Windows Server 2016: GnuCash helps you to track your bank accounts, income, stocks, expenditures, and more. Users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. It also works on mobile operating systems.

GnuCash on Windows Server 2019: GnuCash helps you to track your bank accounts, income, stocks, expenditures, and more. Users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. It also works on mobile operating systems.

IIS on Windows Server 2019: Key features of IIS on Windows Server 2019 include wildcard host headers, IIS administration PowerShell cmdlets, and improved coalescing of connections to deliver an uninterrupted and properly encrypted browsing experience.

Incorta Free Trial: With Incorta’s Direct Data Mapping engine, you get real-time aggregation of large, complex business data without needing a data warehouse.

InterSystems IRIS Community Edition: InterSystems IRIS is a complete data platform that provides developers the freedom to choose the language and data model best suited to rapidly develop their applications.

InterSystems IRIS Express Edition: InterSystems IRIS is a complete data platform that provides developers the freedom to choose the language and data model best suited to rapidly develop their applications. See additional pricing options for this edition.

Neo4j Enterprise VM Version 3.5: Neo4j's graph database platform helps organizations make sense of their data by revealing how people, processes, locations, and systems are interrelated. This approach powers apps tackling AI, fraud detection, master data, and recommendations.

NetScaler MA Service Agent 13.0: The NetScaler MA Service agent software works as an intermediary between the NetScaler Management and Analytics Service and the NetScaler instances within Microsoft Azure.

Nginx on Windows Server 2016: Features of Nginx on Windows Server 2016 include reverse proxy with caching, IPv6, load balancing, FastCGI support with caching, WebSockets, TLS/SSL with SNI, and the handling of static files, index files, and automatic indexing.

OpenCart on Windows Server 2016: Written in PHP, OpenCart is a free, open-source e-commerce platform available under the GNU General Public License, which allows end users to modify the software.

OpenCart on Windows Server 2019: Written in PHP, OpenCart is a free, open-source e-commerce platform available under the GNU General Public License, which allows end users to modify the software.

Puppet Enterprise: Puppet Enterprise lets you automate the entire lifecycle of your Azure infrastructure simply and securely, from initial provisioning through application deployment.

Pyramid 2018 – Windows Server: Pyramid 2018 lets business users do high-end analytics and data science on any browser or device without needing IT help. It's the next generation of self-service analytics with governance.

SQL 2017 Enterprise Edition w/ ER/Builder: With the ER/Builder data modeler for SQL 2017 on Windows Server 2016, you can manage an unlimited number of tables. You can also create an index, triggers, keys, stored procedures, views, generators, and domains.

SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition w/ ER/Builder: With the ER/Builder data modeler for SQL 2017 on Windows Server 2016, you can manage an unlimited number of tables. You can also create an index, triggers, keys, stored procedures, views, generators, and domains.

SQL Server 2017 Web Edition w/ ER/Builder: With the ER/Builder data modeler for SQL 2017 on Windows Server 2016, you can manage an unlimited number of tables. You can also create an index, triggers, keys, stored procedures, views, generators, and domains.

Strokk Webservices Demo: Wherever a password is used in a web form or an internal application, that piece of knowledge-based authentication can be hardened almost transparently with a behavioral biometrics second factor called keystroke dynamics.

Untangle NG Firewall: Use NG Firewall to connect remote locations and ensure safety, reliability, and performance while providing protection for your data, applications, and users.

Varnish Enterprise 6: Varnish Enterprise (VE), previously known as Varnish Plus, is our commercial/enterprise version of the popular open-source HTTP engine/reverse HTTP proxy Varnish Cache (VC).

VyOS 1.2 LTS: VyOS is a Linux-based open-source network operating system for routers and firewalls.

Windows Virtual Desktop: With Windows Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Office and Windows can be deployed and scaled on Azure in a few moments, including compliance and built-in security.

WordPress on Windows Server 2016: Quickly deploy WordPress on Windows 2016 with built-in MySql and phpMyAdmin. Host as many websites or applications as you need.

Xeams on CentOS: Get this secure and powerful mail server with a strong junk-filtering engine on CentOS. Xeams Community Edition is available as a free software supporting multiple platforms and all mail servers with smart-host functionality.

Xeams on Ubuntu: Get this secure and powerful mail server with a strong junk-filtering engine on Ubuntu. Xeams Community Edition is available as a free software supporting multiple platforms and all mail servers with smart-host functionality.

Xeams on Windows Server 2016: Get this secure and powerful mail server with a strong junk-filtering engine on Windows Server 2016. Xeams Community Edition is available as a free software supporting multiple platforms and all mail servers with smart-host functionality.

Xeams on Windows Server 2019: Get this secure and powerful mail server with a strong junk-filtering engine on Windows Server 2019. Xeams Community Edition is available as a free software supporting multiple platforms and all mail servers with smart-host functionality.

Web applications

Aggregion Blockchain Node: Aggregion operates a blockchain ecosystem enabling major copyright holders to fully control their global end-to-end distribution networks and licensing of digital content. Microsoft Azure products enhance the Aggregion blockchain platform.

Archive One: Archive One is a document management system designed to help document administrators classify, store, secure, search for, and retrieve essential company records. Make compliance and audits easy with Archive One.

Drupal with Azure Database for MariaDB: This solution uses a virtual machine for the application front end and the Azure Database for MariaDB service for the application data. Drupal is an open-source content management system used to create websites and apps.

Lavelle Networks ScaleAon SD-WAN: Lavelle Networks ScaleAon SD-WAN is a hybrid WAN. ScaleAon SD-WAN accelerates cloud adoption for enterprises by seamlessly extending the wide area network (WAN) across physical and virtual resources.

Lightning Network for Azure: This distribution provides a virtual machine instance that runs Bitcoin (btcd), Litecoin (ltcd), and Lightning Network (lnd or c-lightning). You can also run BTCPayServer as a sample application for the node network.

MariaDB Galera Cluster: MariaDB Galera is a multi-master database cluster solution for synchronous replication and high availability. This solution uses multiple virtual machines to replicate your data in a configurable number of nodes.

Mediant VE Session Border Controller (SBC): Enable Microsoft Teams Direct Routing or connect SIP trunks to Skype for Business Server. AudioCodes’ Mediant session border controllers make deployment easier and help users set up multi-SBC network interfaces.

Spanning Backup For Office 365: Spanning Backup for Office 365 provides automatic daily backup and recovery for Office 365 mail, calendars, OneDrive, and SharePoint.

Surge Identity (SaaS): Surge Identity is a cloud-based identity solution that enables secure sign-in using trusted identity and social providers, and it secures app-to-app communication using the latest industry security standards.

Tidal Migrations -Premium Insights for Source Code: Tidal Migrations provides your team with a simple, fast, and cost-effective cloud migration management solution. This add-on empowers your team with actionable insights on the apps you plan to refactor or re-platform to Azure.

TimeXtender Discovery Hub: This virtual machine runs Windows Server 2016 and the TimeXtender Discovery Hub. The Discovery Hub application server for Azure allows customers to build, deploy, and manage an enterprise-grade analytical architecture.

Vnomic Management for SAP Workloads: Select your SAP HANA workload requirements without worrying about underlying technical details. Vnomic will automatically compute and provision a complete and validated SAP HANA workload and deliver it on Azure in minutes.

Consulting services

2008 Windows/SQL End of Support Workshop – 2 days: End of support is looming for Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008, and Piksel Group's workshop is here to help you understand your options and create an action plan.

2-Hour Azure Migration Briefing: This briefing by Flat Rock Technology will provide high-level information on what it takes to migrate to the cloud and to Microsoft Azure in particular.

Airlines ChatBot: 3 week implementation: This is a conversational AI implementation for airlines over Amadeus/Sabre supporting multiple channels and covering flight booking, status, disruption notification, check-in, boarding passes, FAQs, and more.

Azure Analytics 5-Day Readiness Assessment: Pythian Kick Analytics-as-a-Service puts the power of data analytics in the hands of your business users and solves the data silo problem. This five-day assessment is for customers in Canada.

Azure Analytics 5-Day Readiness Assessment (UK): Pythian Kick Analytics-as-a-Service puts the power of data analytics in the hands of your business users and solves the data silo problem. This five-day assessment is for U.K. customers.

Azure Analytics 5-Day Readiness Assessment (USA): Pythian Kick Analytics-as-a-Service puts the power of data analytics in the hands of your business users and solves the data silo problem. This five-day assessment is for U.S. customers.

Azure Design Assessment: 4-Day Assessment: CDW will review your Microsoft Azure environment to verify configuration and provide recommendations according to best practices.

Azure Governance Workshop: 5-Day Workshop: CDW will provide an in-depth look at the people, processes, and technology currently in place and document a governance plan that enables IT professionals to effectively support business needs.

Azure Jumpstart: 3-Day Implementation: CDW will help your organization choose and implement virtual networking technology. Learn the best approaches to deploying virtual machines, including the associated cloud services and storage accounts.

Azure migration & transformation two-day workshop: In this Azure migration and transformation workshop, Piksel Group will identify candidate cloud services and the benefits of moving to Azure.

Azure migration and transformation briefing (3h): Select from a range of Azure migration and transformation consultancy, implementation, and managed services, starting with a cloud briefing and initial cloud readiness assessment.

Azure Migration Assessment: 2-Day Assessment: CDW will work with you to deploy an assessment tool in your environment, ensure the tool is configured properly, run the tool, and help review and interpret the results.

Azure transformation five-day proof of concept: This Azure migration and transformation briefing, assessment, planning, and proof-of-concept activity by Piksel Group will identify and validate candidate services and benefits.

Cloud Operations & Monitoring: 3-day Assessment: Objektkultur Software will plot a strategy for your migration to the cloud and will support you in your change management process, enabling a conversion that integrates into your system landscape.

Connecting with ExpressRoute: 2 Day Implementation: Your organization will first need to engage with a WAN provider that supports ExpressRoute connectivity. CDW will configure the virtual network and gateway and will assist in establishing an ExpressRoute connection.

Cyber Security PEN Testing: 4 Week Assessment: Networks come under attack every day, and these attacks can disrupt business, create chaos, and cause reputational damage. A penetration test helps you understand how threat actors might penetrate your network.

Envisioning AI for IoT data: 2-day Workshop: This offer by TheDataTeam is for an AI envisioning workshop conducted at the client's site for discovering use cases that are of immense business value and solvable using Azure and TheDataTeam's Intellegion platform.

EOS Migration Pilot: 8-Wk Implementation: This is a pilot migration of legacy Windows Server workloads to Azure using both discovery and containerization tooling.

Leadership Development Solution: The Leadership Development Solution helps K-12 organizations make informed decisions. It provides strategic education services along with an Azure data warehouse and visualizations to improve the leadership placement process.

Migrate to Azure at 20% of Consumption 8-wk Impl: Migrate your workloads and apps to Azure at just 20 percent of your Azure consumption for the first year. This package by NetEnrich combines our tools expertise with our knowledge of datacenter and app migrations.

SAP on Azure / QAS Migration Service: 2-Week POC: This proof of concept involves free Azure consumption credits and a migration service offered by MSR IT Services covering SAP QAS/Sandbox landscapes.

SpotLITE Discovery for Azure MSP: 2 WKS Assessment: Green House Data’s SpotLITE discovery process is designed to determine the overall health of your IT systems and outline a plan to improve operational performance and include Azure.

SSO Using ADFS and ADConnect: 3-Day Implementation: Integrate your on-premises directories with Azure Active Directory to provide a common identity for access to both cloud and on-premises resources, simplifying things for your end users.

Quelle: Azure

Performance best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Connection Pooling

This blog is a continuation of a series of blog posts to share best practices for improving performance and scale when using Azure Database for PostgreSQL service. In this post, we will focus on the benefits of using connection pooling and share our recommendations to improve connection resiliency, performance, and scalability of applications running on Azure Database for PostgreSQL. If you have not read the previous performance best practice blogs in the series, we would highly recommend reading the following blog posts to learn, understand, and adopt the recommended best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL service.

Performance best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Performance updates and tuning best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Performance troubleshooting best practices using Azure Database for PostgreSQL features

In PostgreSQL, establishing a connection is an expensive operation. This is attributed to the fact that each new connection to the PostgreSQL requires forking of the OS process and a new memory allocation for the connection. As a result, transactional applications frequently opening and closing the connections at the end of transactions can experience higher connection latency, resulting in lower database throughput (transactions per second) and overall higher application latency. It is therefore recommended to leverage connection pooling when designing applications using Azure Database for PostgreSQL. This significantly reduces connection latency by reusing existing connections and enables higher database throughput (transactions per second) on the server. With connection pooling, a fixed set of connections are established at the startup time and maintained. This also helps reduce the memory fragmentation on the server that is caused by the dynamic new connections established on the database server.

The connection pooling can be configured on the application side if the app framework or database driver supports it. If that is not supported, the other recommended option is to leverage a proxy connection pooler service like PgBouncer or Pgpool running outside the application and connecting to the database server. Both PgBouncer and Pgpool are developed by the community and can be used with Azure Database for PostgreSQL. As we continue on, we will focus our conversation on PgBouncer in the context of real user experiences.

PgBouncer is a lightweight connection pooler that can be installed on the virtual machine (VM) running the application. The application connects to the PgBouncer proxy service running locally on the VM while PgBouncer service in-turn connects to the Azure Database for PostgreSQL service using the credentials and configuration settings specified in the pgbouncer.ini file. The maximum number of connections and default pool size can be defined in the configuration settings in pgbouncer.ini.

If your application is containerized and running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you can run PgBouncer as a sidecar proxy. As part of our commitment to provide native integration of best in class OSS databases with Azure’s industry leading ecosystem, we have published a PgBouncer sidecar proxy image in Microsoft container registry. PgBouncer sidecar runs with the application container in the same pod in AKS and provides connection pooling proxy to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. If the application container fails over or restarts, the sidecar container will follow thereby providing high availability with connection resiliency and predictable performance. Visit the docker hub page to learn more on how to access and use this image. For best practices around development with Azure Kubernetes Services, we would recommend to follow the documentation, “Connecting Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.”

To give some estimates of the performance improvement when using PgBouncer for connection pooling with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, we ran a simple performance benchmark test with pgbench. pgbench provides a configuration setting to create new connection for every transaction so we leveraged that to measure the impact of connection latency on throughput of the application. The following are the observations with A/B testing comparing throughput with standard pgbench benchmark testing with and without PgBouncer. In the test, we ran pgbench with scale factor of 5 against Azure Database for PostgreSQL running on general purpose tier with 2 vCores (GP_Gen5_2). The only variable during the tests was PgBouncer. With PgBouncer, the throughput improved 4x times as shown below while connection latency was reduced by 40 percent.

PgBouncer, with its built-in retry logic can further ensure connection resiliency, high availability, and transparent application failover during the planned (scheduled/scale-up/scale-down) or unplanned failover of the database server. The retry logic is found to be very useful for OSS applications like CKAN or Apache Airflow using SQLAlchemy. Without the use of PgBouncer, the database failover events require the application service to be restarted for connections to be re-established following a connection failure. In this scenario, it is also important to set connection timeout sufficiently higher than the retry interval to allow retry attempts to proceed before timing out.

To summarize, as new connections are an expensive operation with PostgreSQL, especially for applications which opens new connections frequently, we highly recommend using connection pooling while running applications against Azure Database for PostgreSQL. If the application is not designed to leverage connection pooling out of the box you can leverage PgBouncer as a connection pooling proxy. The benefits of running application with PgBouncer proxy are:

Improved throughput and performance
No connection leaks by defining the maximum number of connections to the database server
Improved connection resiliency against restarts
Reduced memory fragmentation

We hope that you are taking advantage of Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Please continue to provide 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.” You can also reach out to us by emailing the Ask Azure DB for PostgreSQL alias, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @AzureDBPostgres and #postgresql for the latest news and announcements.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Diana Putnam, Rachel Agyemang, Sudhakar Sannakkayala, Sunil Agrawal, Sunil Kamath, Bhavin Gandhi, Anitah Cantele, and Prabhat Tripathi for their contributions to this posting.
Quelle: Azure

Cloud Commercial Communities webinar and podcast newsletter–February 2019

Welcome to the Cloud Commercial Communities monthly webinar and podcast update. Each month the 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. If you miss a session, you can review it on demand. Also, consider subscribing to the industry podcasts to keep up to date with industry news.

Upcoming in February 2019

Webinars

Optimize Your Marketplace Listing with Featured Apps and Services – Tuesday, February 5, 2019 11:00 AM PST
Do you have an application or service listed on Azure Marketplace or AppSource? Looking to optimize your listing to be more discoverable by customers? Discoverability in Azure Marketplace and AppSource can be optimized in a variety of ways. Join this session to learn about how you can gain more visibility for your listings by optimizing content, using keywords, adding trials, and about what matters to Microsoft for Featured Apps and Featured Services on Azure Marketplace and AppSource.
Leveraging Free Azure Sponsorship to Grow Your Business on Azure – Tuesday, February 12, 2019 10:00 AM PST
Microsoft has made significant investments in our partners and customers to help them meet today’s complex business challenges and drive business growth. Through Microsoft Azure Sponsorship, partners and customers can get access to free Azure based on their deployment and technical needs. Azure Sponsorship is available to new and existing Azure customers looking to try new partner solutions, and to partners working to build their solutions on Azure.
Get the Most Out of Azure with Azure Advisor – Tuesday, February 19, 2019 10:00 AM PST
Azure Advisor is a free Azure service that analyzes your configurations and usage and provides personalized recommendations to help you optimize your resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost. In this demo-heavy webinar, you’ll learn how to review and remediate Azure Advisor recommendations so you can stay on top of Azure best practices and get the most out of your Azure investment both for your own organization and your customers.
Incidents, Maintenance, and Health Advisories: Stay Informed with Azure Service Health – Tuesday, February 26, 2019 10:00 AM PST
Azure Service Health is a free Azure service that provides personalized alerts and guidance when Azure service issues affect you. It notifies you, helps you understand the impact to your resources, and keeps you updated as the issue is resolved. It can also help you prepare for planned maintenance and changes that could affect the availability of your resources. In this demo-heavy webinar, you’ll learn how to use Azure Service Health keep both your organization and your customers informed about Azure service incidents.
Introducing a New Approach to Learning: Microsoft Learn – Wednesday, February 27, 2019 11:00 AM PST
At Microsoft Ignite 2019, Microsoft launched an exciting new learning platform called Microsoft Learn. During this session, we will provide a demo and overview of the platform, the inspiration and vision of its design, and how we have adapted training to modern learning styles.

Podcasts

The full lifecycle of implementing IoT with PTC – Thursday, Feb 7, 2019
Applying Artificial Intelligence in retail – Thursday, Feb 21, 2019

Recap for January 2019

Webinars

Grow, Build, and Connect with Microsoft for Startups – January 23, 2019 at 11am PST
Microsoft for Startups is a unique program designed to help startups become a Microsoft business partner, through access to technology, channels, markets and customers. Tune into this session to learn more about the Microsoft for Startups program, a $500 million initiative to provide startups access to both the technology and customer base needed to build and grow their business.
Transform Data into Dollars by Enabling Intelligent Retail with Microsoft – January 29, 2019 at 10am PST
Microsoft is enabling retailers to deliver personalized customer experiences by empowering employees, driving digital transformation, and capturing data-based insights to accelerate growth for our partners and customers.  This 30-minute session will arm partners with real case studies and actionable solutions for each Intelligent Retail scenario with an opportunity for live Q&A with our Retail expert.
Azure Marketplace and AppSource Publisher Payouts and Seller Insights – January 30, 2019 at 11am PST
Azure Marketplace and AppSource is your launchpad to Go-To-Market with Microsoft and promote your offerings to customers. Join this exciting session to learn more about how Azure Marketplace and AppSource Publisher payouts work and gain exposure to the Seller Insights tool within Cloud Partner Portal.

Podcasts

Evolving actuarial risk compute and modeling on Azure
Nick Leimer shares changes occurring in the insurance industry and how companies are dealing with it. Specifically, we look at computing risk for regulatory compliance and how it might be a good match for Azure services, like Azure Batch or Azure High-Performance Computing.
Reduce healthcare costs with digital transformation: security, compliance and backup on Azure
Healthcare IT veteran, David Houlding, chats with us about reducing costs in healthcare as part of an organization’s digital transformation and specifically, outlines the tools and techniques needed for these transformations to succeed.
Adopting Azure for real-time payments
In this episode, Howard Bush talks with us about enabling real-time transactions instead of the customary batch transactions that financial institutions use today.
The full lifecycle of implementing IoT with PTC
From planning to streaming analytics, this episode looks at all phases of introducing IoT to a company. Just having the data is often not enough to make decisions. Insights must be gleaned from that data.
Joel Neidig of SIMBA Chain talks with us about Blockchain as a service
The podcast focuses on blockchain as a service and how it can be leveraged in manufacturing. With very real use cases and stories of success, we'll see how blockchain is affecting manufacturing in various ways today.
Using Cognitive Services with Containers
Container support in Azure Cognitive Services allows developers to use the same rich APIs that are available in Azure and enables flexibility in where to deploy and host the services that come with Docker containers.

Check out recent podcast episodes at the Microsoft industry experiences team podcast page.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Monitor January 2019 updates

Azure Monitor, which now includes Log Analytics and Application Insights, provides sophisticated tools for collecting and analyzing telemetry. It allows you to maximize the performance and availability of your cloud, on-premises resources, and applications. It helps you understand how your applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources on which they depend.

Learn more about how you can get started with Azure Monitor. Now let’s check out what’s new from the past month.

Acknowledgements

First, a huge thank you to our customers for once again naming Microsoft a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Application Performance Monitoring Suites for its System Center Operations Manager, Microsoft Azure Application Insights, and System Center Global Service Monitor applications.

Application Insights

Application Insights is the application performance monitoring (APM) service of Azure Monitor, providing observability for Java, .NET, and Node.js web services, plus client-side JavaScript apps.

End-to-end transactions

The end-to-end transactions view now supports time scrubbing. Click and drag over a period of time to filter the view to that time range and analyze it in more detail.

Performance and failures

We’ve squashed a handful of bugs in the performance and failures tools:

The Roles tab now preserves role selection while navigating from the application map
The Roles tab no longer shows duplicated role instances with empty role names
The details pane no longer shows "…" beside items like event times that shouldn't have had this button

Availability

In the availability tool, we fixed a bug where navigating from the availability scatter plot wouldn’t show the closest result with a web test available in the end-to-end transactions view.

Application map

We’ve made the application map even easier to read and navigate:

Added a “Zoom to fit” button
Grouped nodes are now shown as a stack to make them easier to distinguish
Added “expand” and “collapse” buttons for the insights cards in the flyout menu
Nodes without incoming connections are now shown closer to their first outbound connection on the map, which should make many maps easier to read
Better support for proxies (multiple services called through the same host name) by removing the proxy dependency node and directly linking the services
Maps with many complex grouped edges will now show statistics

Pricing calculator

We updated the Azure pricing calculator to make it easier to estimate your Application Insights bills. Now, you can enter an estimate of traffic to your app and we’ll show prices for apps that have received similar levels of traffic.

Application Insights SDK

We released v2.9.0 of the .NET SDK and v2.6.0 of the ASP.NET Core SDK, each with several performance improvements and bug fixes.

We also shipped a standalone version of the Application Insights Provider for ILogger, which adds scopes support, the most requested feature from our GitHub community.

OpenCensus SDK

We released an alpha version of our C# OpenCensus SDK. OpenCensus is a cross-industry open source project, working towards a single distribution of libraries for metrics and distributed tracing with minimal overhead.

Log Analytics

Log Analytics blade renamed

The Log Analytics blade in the Azure portal has been renamed Log Analytics workspaces. This change clarifies that this blade is intended to manage your workspaces by connecting data sources, installing solutions, measuring cost, and more. You can also use the logs tool to query logs of a selected workspace, but remember logs is also available through other paths such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, virtual machines, and many others.

Log Analytics data encryption

Log Analytics uses Azure Data Explorer to manage its data. The data is stored in Azure Storage, and it is encrypted using a Microsoft managed encryption key. Azure Data Explorer also uses an SSD-backed hot cache that typically stores the last two weeks of data. Starting in January, the data in the SSD caches have also been encrypted in all regions, except for West Central US which will be completed in February.

Protection from losing queries on page refresh

Have you ever worked for a long time on a query and just when you got it right you accidently selected refresh page and lost all your work? Don’t worry, we got you covered. Log Analytics now automatically saves your queries, so they don’t get lost. This feature requires third-party cookies to be enabled in your browser.

Schema updates – Table preview, a new table icon, and featured tables

Log Analytics users love our schema display, so we made it even better. New icons indicate table items in the schema view, making it easier to read. When hovering a table, a new preview item enables a quick execution of a query to view a table’s contents. When you’re in a virtual machine context, the new featured view allows you to see commonly queried tables to allow quicker insights.

Select filters

The Log Analytics filter pane (preview) is a great way to refine query results without in-depth KQL knowledge. The filter pane suggests fields to query based on our algorithms. However, in some cases the field you need to filter on is not included in the initial list of filter fields. To address this, we allow the customization of filter fields right from the filter pane. Simple select the new Select filter icon and add the field you need:

Then select the field you’d like to see filters for:

Set a title for your charts

Add more context to your charts by using the title keyword to add a title. This is especially useful when pining a chart to dashboards:

Support made easier with your request ID

If a query fails and you’d like to contact support, you can now provide the request ID of the failed query and we’ll be able to investigate what failed this specific run.

To get the request ID select the right-most button on the results status bar and it will be copied to your clipboard.

Workbooks

Azure Monitor Workbooks are rich, interactive reports that combine text, analytics queries, Azure metrics, and parameters. We’ve made two additions this month:

You can now take a workbook and pin all its sections as tiles to an Azure dashboard. To give this a try, select the Pin button in the toolbar of a workbook.
Workbooks created from the Troubleshooting Guides tab or from Azure Monitor for Resource Groups now allow you choose in which subscription, resource group, and location to save them.

Azure Metrics

From the metrics page, you can now pick to which Azure dashboard you pin your metric charts. You can even create a new dashboard right from the same place.

You can also now lock y-axis boundaries for metrics charts.

Finally, we’ve removed the classic metric explorer tool from the Azure portal now that the transition to the new metrics tool is complete.

Azure Monitor for Virtual Machines (VMs)

Workbooks are now available in Azure Monitor for VMs. Select the View workbooks link to open the gallery and then try out one of the reports. Feel free to customize the report as needed, or duplicate it to start making a new report.

Microsoft was named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Application Performance Monitoring Suites in both June 2018 and January 2019.

 

The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.
Quelle: Azure

Azure DevOps Projects supporting Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions

With Azure DevOps Projects we want to make it is easy for you to set up a fully functional DevOps pipeline tailored to the development language and application platform you want to leverage.

We have been making continuous enhancements to Azure DevOps Projects and in the latest deployment now available to all customers, we have added support for Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions as target destinations for your application. This builds on the existing Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support.

The support of Azure Cosmos DB in Azure DevOps Projects means that you will now be able to create a skeleton two tier Node.js application backed by Azure Cosmos DB in just a few clicks. Azure DevOps Projects creates all the scaffolding for your pipeline to give you everything you need to develop, deploy, and monitor your application including:

A Git code repository hosted in Azure Repos with a skeleton Node.js application
A CI/CD pipeline in Azure Pipelines for deploying the database tier to Azure Cosmos DB and the web-tier on Azure
Web Apps for containers, Azure Kubernetes Service, or as a Windows Web App in Azure
Provisioning all the Azure resources in your subscription required for the application
Application Insights integration for monitoring your application

After using Azure DevOps Projects to scaffold your application from the Azure portal you can then access the code and the CI/CD pipeline using Azure Repos and Azure Pipelines respectively.

With support for Azure Functions in Azure DevOps Projects, you will be able to create a skeleton .Net or a sample Node.js serverless application in just a few clicks. Like Azure Cosmos DB, with this workflow you will have everything you need to develop, deploy, and monitor your application including the Git Code repo, CI/CD pipeline, Application Insights, and necessary Azure resources.

These features are now available in the Azure portal. Get started by creating Azure DevOps Projects now. To learn more, please take a look at the documentation, “Azure DevOps Projects.”
Quelle: Azure

Analytics in Azure is up to 14x faster and costs 94% less than other cloud providers. Why go anywhere else?

It’s true. With the volume and complexity of data rapidly increasing, performance and security are critical requirements for analytics. But not all analytics services are built equal. And not all cloud storage is built for analytics.

Only Azure provides the most comprehensive set of analytics services from data ingestion to storage to data warehousing to machine learning and BI. Each of these services have been finely tuned to provide industry leading performance, security and ease of use, at unmatched value. In short, Azure has you covered.

Unparalleled price-performance

When it comes to analytics, price-performance is key. In July 2018, GigaOm published a study that showed that Azure SQL Data Warehouse was 67 percent faster and 23 percent cheaper than Amazon Web Service RedShift.

That was then. Today, we’re even better!

In the most recent study by GigaOm, they found that Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now outperforming the competition up to a whopping 14x times. No one else has produced independent, industry-accepted benchmarks like these. Not AWS Redshift or Google BigQuery. And the best part? Azure is up to 94 percent cheaper.

This industry leading price-performance extends to the rest of our analytics stack. This includes Azure Data Lake Storage, our cloud data storage service, and Azure Databricks, our big data processing service. Customers like Newell Brands – worldwide marketer of consumer and commercial products such as Rubbermaid, Mr. Coffee and Oster – recently moved their workload to Azure and realized significant improvements.

“Azure Data Lake Storage will streamline our analytics process and deliver better end to end performance with lower cost.” 

– Danny Siegel, Vice President of Information Delivery Systems, Newell Brands

Secure cloud analytics

All the price-performance in the world means nothing without security. Make the comparison and you will see Azure is the most trusted cloud in the market. Azure has the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings, including more certifications than any other cloud vendor combined with advanced identity governance and access management with Active Directory integration.

For analytics, we have developed additional capabilities to meet customers’ most stringent security requirements. Azure Data Lake Storage provides multi-layered security including POSIX compliant file and folder permissions and at-rest encryption. Similarly, Azure SQL Data Warehouse utilizes machine learning to provide the most comprehensive set of security capabilities across data protection, access control, authentication, network security, and automatic threat detection.

Insights for all

What’s the best compliment to Azure Analytics’ unmatched price-performance and security? The answer is Microsoft Power BI.

Power BI’s ease of use enables everyone in your organization to benefit from our analytics stack. Employees can get their insights in seconds from all enterprise data stored in Azure. And without limitations on concurrency, Power BI can be used across teams to create the most beautiful visualizations that deliver powerful insights.

Leveraging Microsoft’s Common Data Model, Power BI users can easily access and analyze enterprise data using a common data schema without needing complex data transformation. Customers looking for petabyte-scale analytics can leverage Power BI Aggregations with Azure SQL Data Warehouse for rapid query. Better yet, Power BI users can easily apply sophisticated AI models built with Azure. Powerful insights easily accessible to all.

Customers like Heathrow Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world, are empowering their employees with powerful insights:

“With Power BI, we can very quickly connect to a wide range of data sources with very little effort and use this data to run Heathrow more smoothly than ever before. Every day, we experience a huge amount of variability in our business. With Azure, we’re getting to the point where we can anticipate passenger flow and stay ahead of disruption that causes stress for passengers and employee.”

– Stuart Birrell, Chief Information Officer, Heathrow Airport

Future-proof

We continue to focus on making Azure the best place for your data and analytics. Our priority is to meet your needs for today and tomorrow.

So, we are excited to make the following announcements:

General availability of Azure Data Lake Storage: The first cloud storage that combines the best of hierarchical files system and blob storage.
General availability of Azure Data Explorer: A fast, fully managed service that simplifies ad hoc and interactive analysis over telemetry, time-series, and log data. This service, powering other Azure services like Log Analytics, App Insights, Time Series Insights, is useful to query streaming data to identify trends, detect anomalies, and diagnose problems.
Preview of new Mapping Data Flow capability in Azure Data Factory: Visual Flow provides a visual, zero-code experience to help data engineers to easily build data transformations. This complements the Azure Data Factory’s code-first experience to enable data engineers of all skill levels to collaborate and build powerful hybrid data transformation pipelines.

Azure provides the most comprehensive platform for analytics. With these updates, Azure solidifies its leadership in analytics.

Watch this space. There’s more to come!

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Quelle: Azure