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Hybrid Cloud just got easier: New Azure Migration resources and tools available

Most customers we talk with are using a Hybrid Cloud approach to take advantage of the cloud and their existing applications and infrastructure. Whether you’re considering migrating some or all your applications to the cloud, the transition from on-premises requires careful planning. You need to understand how much it will cost, how to size your environment, what virtual machine options to choose, and more – and you want to do all this in the smartest and most cost-effective way possible.

With this in mind, today we are offering new tools and resources to help you tap into the power of the hybrid cloud to optimize your business:

A free Cloud Migration Assessment, which helps you discover the servers across your IT environment, analyze their hardware configurations, and provides a detailed report including the estimated cost benefits of moving to Microsoft Azure.
Starting today, you can activate your Azure Hybrid Use Benefit directly in the Azure Management Portal, simplifying your path to the cloud in the most cost effective way possible. With the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit you can save up to 40% with Windows Server licenses that include Software Assurance. All customers can use this easy provisioning experience to save money on Windows Server virtual machines in Azure.
Azure Site Recovery is another tool to make the journey to the cloud as easy as possible. This is a tool you can use to migrate virtual machines to Azure, and it’s a great way to move applications whether they are running on AWS, VMware, Hyper-V or on physical servers. You can already configure ASR to use your Hybrid Use Benefit with PowerShell, and today we’re announcing a new experience that will be available in Azure Site Recovery in the coming weeks that will allow you to tag virtual machines within the Azure portal itself. This capability will make it easier than ever to migrate your Windows Server virtual machines. 

With Azure, you get truly consistent hybrid capabilities across cloud and on-premises environments, offering you the flexibility to choose the optimal location for each application, based on your business requirements and reducing the complexity of moving to the cloud. Migrating virtual machines to the cloud is often one of the first steps organizations take in their cloud journey and is a natural part of any hybrid cloud strategy.

Learn more about the tools and resources available today by visiting the Azure Migration page. We’d love to hear from you on how we can continue making your path to the cloud easy and effective.
Quelle: Azure

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Announcing Azure SDK for Node.js 2.0 preview

Today we're excited to announce the 2.0 preview of the Azure SDK for Node.js. This update is packed with features to help you be more productive and we&039;ve added 20 new modules for services such as SQL and DocumentDB management.

As usage of the Azure SDK for Node.js continues to grow, we&039;ve received a lot of feedback from the community on how the SDK helps Node.js developers build on Azure and how some changes could make them more productive. With that feedback in mind, we set out to make some significant improvements to the developer experience, which includes enhancements to the modules themselves as well as some updates to make working in Visual Studio Code better.

Keep in mind that, as this is a preview release, it&039;s incredibly important to share your feedback with us on any issues or delightful experiences you face. Please open an issue on GitHub or connect with us directly on the Azure Developers Slack team with any questions or feedback.

Promises

With the way the module is being used, we&039;ve seen a lot of opportunities to improve the code that people are writing and maintaining.

This also makes it possible to use async and await in TypeScript or ES2017 environments.

Updated typings

Visual Studio Code&039;s rich Intellisense support makes building apps much quicker and more intuitive. Building with the Azure SDK is no exception and the typings have been updated and improved to provide you with the best possible experience.

New modules

Aside from the updates to the existing modules, this update includes the preview release of 20 new modules.

Advisor Management (azure-arm-advisor)
Automation Management (azure-arm-automation)
Billing Management (azure-arm-billing)
Cognitive Services Management (azure-arm-cognitiveservices)
Container Registry Management (azure-arm-containerregistry)
Customer Insights Management (azure-arm-customerinsights)
DocumentDB Management (azure-arm-documentdb)
Logic Management (azure-arm-logic)
Machine Learning Management (azure-arm-machinelearning)
Media Services Management (azure-arm-mediaservices)
Operational Insights Management (azure-arm-operationalinsights)
Recovery Services Backup Management (azure-arm-recoveryservicesbackup)
Recovery Services Management (azure-arm-recoveryservices)
Relay Management (azure-arm-relay)
Scheduler Management (azure-arm-scheduler)
Search Management (azure-arm-search)
ServiceFabric Management (azure-arm-servicefabric)
ServiceMap Management (azure-arm-servicemap)
SQL Management (azure-arm-sql)
Storage Import Export Management (azure-arm-storageimportexport)

Moving to the preview

Migrating to the preview is low in complexity and should be a direct replacement without changes to your code. When migrating to the preview it&039;s important to note that because of new implementation, using ES6 features, Node.js version 6.x is required. All of the existing callback-based methods will continue to work; however, omitting the final parameter will result in the method returning a promise.

Sending custom requests

With new updates to the runtime ms-rest and ms-rest-azure, you can make generic requests to Azure with the authenticated client. This is useful when debugging an issue or for making custom requests to the Azure API.

The following example makes a custom, long running request to get all resource groups in a subscriptions then writes the result to standard out. Detailed documentation is available on GitHub.

const msrest = require(&039;ms-rest&039;);
const msRestAzure = require(&039;ms-rest-azure&039;);

const clientId = process.env[&039;CLIENT_ID&039;];
const secret = process.env[&039;APPLICATION_SECRET&039;];
const domain = process.env[&039;DOMAIN&039;]; // Also known as tenantId.
const subscriptionId = process.env[&039;AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID&039;];

msRestAzure.loginWithServicePrincipalSecret(clientId, secret, domain).then((creds) => {
let client = new msRestAzure.AzureServiceClient(creds);

let options = {
method: &039;GET&039;,
url: `https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/${subscriptionId}/resourcegroups?api-version=2016-09-01`,
headers: {
&039;user-agent&039;: &039;MyTestApp/1.0&039;
}
};

return client.sendLongRunningRequest(options);
})
.then(console.dir.bind(console))
.catch(console.error.bind(console));
Quelle: Azure

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Networking to and within the Azure Cloud, part 1

Hybrid networking is a nice thing, but the question then is how do we define hybrid networking? For me, in the context of the connectivity to virtual networks, ExpressRoute’s private peering or VPN connectivity, it is the ability to connect cross-premises resources to one or more Virtual Networks (VNets). While this all works nicely, and we know how to connect to the cloud, how do we network within the cloud? There are at least 3 Azure built-in ways of doing this. In this series of 3 blog posts, my intent is to briefly explain: Hybrid networking connectivity options Intra-cloud connectivity options Putting all these concepts together Hybrid Networking Connectivity Options What are the options? Basically, there are 4 options: Internet connectivity Point-to-site VPN (P2S VPN) Site-to-Site VPN (S2S VPN) ExpressRoute Internet Connectivity As its name suggests, internet connectivity makes your workloads accessible from the internet, by having you expose different public endpoints to workloads that live inside of the virtual network. These workloads could be exposed using internet-facing Load Balancer or simply assigning a public IP address to the ipconfig object, child of the NIC which is a child of the VM. This way, it becomes possible for anything on the internet to be able to reach that virtual machine, provided host firewall if applicable, network security groups (NSG), and User Defined Routes allows that to happen. So in that scenario, you could expose an application that needs to be public to the internet and be able to connect to it from anywhere, or from specific locations depending on the configuration of your workloads (NSGs, etc.). Point-to-Site VPN or Site-to-Site VPN These two, fall into the same category. They both need your VNet to have an VPN Gateway, and you can connect to it using either a VPN Client for your workstation as part of the Point-to-Site configuration or make sure you configure your on-premises VPN device to be able to terminate a Site-to-Site VPN. This way, on-premises devices are able to connect to resources within the VNet. The next blog post in the series will touch on intra-cloud connectivity options. ExpressRoute This connectivity is well described in the ExressRoute technical overview. Suffice to say that as with the Site-to-Site VPN options, ExpressRoute also allows you to connect to resources that are not necessarily in only one VNet. In fact, depending on the SKU, it can allow the connection to more than 1 VNet, up to 10 or, having the premium add-on, up to 100 depending on bandwidth. This is also going to be described in greater details in the next section, Intra-Cloud Connectivity Options.
Quelle: Azure

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Announcing public preview of Instance Metadata Service

We are excited to announce the public preview of Instance Metadata Service in Azure’s West Central US region. Instance Metadata Service is a RESTful endpoint that allows virtual machines instances to get information regarding its compute, network and upcoming maintenance events. The endpoint is available at a well-known non-routable IP address (169.254.169.254) that can be accessed only from within the VM. The data from Instance Metadata Service can help with your cluster setup, replica placement, supportability, telemetry, or other cluster bootstrap or runtime needs. 

Previews are made available to you on the condition that you agree to the terms of use. For more information, see Microsoft Azure Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

Service Availability

Service is available to all Azure Resource Manager created VMs currently in West Central US region. As we add more regions we will update this post and the documentation with the details.

Regions where Instance Metadata Service is available

West Central US

Detailed documentation

Learn more about Azure Instance Metadata Service

Retrieving instance metadata

Instance Metadata Service is available for running VMs created/managed using Azure Resource Manager. To access all data categories for an instance, use the following sample code for Linux or Windows

Linux

curl -H Metadata:true http://169.254.169.254/metadata/instance?api-version=2017-03-01

Windows

curl –H @{‘Metadata’=’true’} http://169.254.169.254/metadata/instance?api-version=2017-03-01

The default output for all instance metadata is of json format (content type Application/JSON)

Instance Metadata data categories

Following table has a list of all data categories available via Instance Metadata

Data
Description

location

Azure Region the VM is running

name
Name of the VM

offer
Offer information for the VM image, these values are present only for images deployed from Azure image gallery

publisher
Publisher of the VM image

sku
Specific SKU for the VM image

version
Version of the VM Image

osType
Linux or Windows

platformUpdateDomain
Update domain the VM is running in.

platformFaultDomain
Fault domain the VM is running in.

vmId
Unique identifier for the VM, more info here

vmSize
VM size

ipv4/Ipaddress
Local IP address of the VM

ipv4/publicip
Public IP address for the Instance

subnet/address
Address for subnet

subnet/dnsservers/ipaddress1
Primary DNS server

subnet/dnsservers/ipaddress2
Secondary DNS server

subnet/prefix
Subnet prefix , example 24

ipv6/ipaddress
IPv6 address for the VM

mac
VM mac address

scheduledevents
see scheduledevents

 

FAQs

I am getting Bad request, Required metadata header not specified. What does this mean?
Metadata Service requires header of Metadata:true to be passed in the request. Passing header will allow access

Why  am I not getting compute information for my VM?
Currently Instance Metadata Service supports Azure Resource Manager created instances only, in future we will add support for Cloud Services VMs

I created my Virtual Machine through ARM a while back, Why am I not seeing compute metadata information?
For any VMs created after Sep 2016 you can simply add a new Tag to start seeing compute metadata. For older VMs (created before Sep 2016) you would have to add/remove extensions to the VM to refresh metadata

Why am I getting error 500 – Internal server error?
Currently Instance Metadata Preview is available only in West US Central Region, please deploy your VMs there.

Where do I share Additional questions/comments?
Send your comments on http://feedback.azure.com

Quelle: Azure

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Azure #DocumentDB Service Level Agreements

Why enterprises trust us for their globally distributed applications.

Enterprise applications and massive scale applications need a data store that is globally distributed, offers limitless scale, geographical reach, and is fast and performant. Along with enterprise grade security and compliance, a major criterion is the level of service guarantees the database provides in terms of availability, performance, and durability. Azure DocumentDB is Microsoft’s globally distributed database service designed to enable you to build planet-scale applications, enabling you to elastically scale both throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions. The service offers guaranteed single-digit millisecond low latency at the 99th percentile, 99.99% high availability, predictable throughput, and multiple well-defined consistency models.

We recently updated our Service Level Agreements (SLA) to make them comprehensive to include latency, availability, throughput, and consistency. By virtue of its schema-agnostic and write-optimized database engine, DocumentDB, by default, is capable of automatically indexing all the data it ingests and serves across SQL, MongoDB, and JavaScript language-integrated queries in a scale-independent manner. As one of the foundational services of Azure, DocumentDB has been used virtually ubiquitously as a backend for first-party Microsoft services for many years. Since its general availability in 2015, DocumentDB is one of the fastest growing services on Azure.

Industry leading comprehensive SLA

Since its inception, Azure DocumentDB always offered the best SLA in the industry with 99.99% guarantees for availability. Now, we are the only cloud service offering a comprehensive SLA for:

Availability: The most classical SLA. Your system will be available for more than 99.99% of the time or you get refund.
Throughput: At a collection level, we guarantee the throughput for your database collection is always executed according to the maximum throughput you provisioned.
Latency: Since speed is important, we guarantee that 99% of your requests will have a latency below 10ms for document read or 15ms for document write operations.
Consistency: We ensure that we will honor the consistency guarantees in accordance with the consistency levels chosen for your requests.

While everyone is familiar with the notion of SLA on availability or uptime, providing financial guarantees on throughput, latency, and consistency is a first and industry leading initiative. This is not only difficult to implement but also hard to provide transparency to users. Thanks to the Azure portal, we provide full transparency on uptime, latency, throughput, and the number of requests and failures. In the rare case that we are unable to honor any of these SLA, we will provide credits from 10% to 25% of your monthly bill as a refund.

Availability SLA – 99.99%

The following equation shows the SLA formula for availability, given a month with 744 hours:

A failed request has the HTTP code 5xx or 408 (for document Read/Write/Query operations) as shown in the portal.

Throughput SLA – 99.99%

The following equation shows the SLA formula for throughput, given a month with 744 hours:

What defines "Throughput Failed Requests", are requests that are throttled by the DocumentDB collection resulting in an error code, but before consumed RUs have exceeded the provisioned RUs for a partition in the collection for a given second. To avoid being throttled due to a misuse, we highly recommend you to look into the best practice in partitioning and scaling DocumentDB.

Consistency SLA – 99.99%

"Consistency Level" is the setting for a particular read request that supports consistency guarantees. You can monitor the consistency SLA through Azure portal:

Note: In this screenshot SLA = Actual

The following table captures the guarantees associated with the Consistency Levels. Please note:

"K" is the number of versions of a given document for which the reads lag behind the writes.
"T" is a given time interval.

 

CONSISTENCY LEVEL
CONSISTENCY GUARANTEES

Strong
Strong

Session
Read Your Own Write

 
Monotonic Read

 
Consistent Prefix

CONSISTENCY LEVEL
CONSISTENCY GUARANTEES

Bounded Staleness
Read Your Own Write (Within Write Region)

 
Monotonic Read (Within a Region)

 
Consistent Prefix

 
Staleness Bound < K,T

Consistent Prefix
Consistent Prefix

Eventual
Eventual

If a month has 744 hours, the SLA formula for consistency is:

Latency SLA – P99

For a given application deployed within a local Azure Region, in a month, we sum the number of one-hour intervals during which Successful Requests submitted by an Application resulted in a P99 latency greater than or equal to 10ms for document read or 15ms for document write operations. We call these hours “Excessive Latency Hours.”

If Monthly P99 Latency Attainment % is below 99%, we consider it a violation of the SLA and we will refund you up to 25% of your monthly bill.

We hope that this short blog helped you understand the large coverage of our Enterprise SLAs.

Azure DocumentDB, home for Mission Critical Applications

Azure DocumentDB hosts a growing number of customer mission critical apps. Our customers come from diverse verticals such as banking and capital markets, professional services, discrete manufacturers, startups, and health solutions. However, they share a common characteristic, the need to scale out globally while not compromising on speed and availability. Thanks to one of the best architectures, Azure DocumentDB can deliver on these promises and at a very low cost.

Build your first globally distributed application

Our vision is to be the database for all modern applications. We want to enable developers to truly transform the world we are living in through the apps they are building, which is even more important than the individual features we are putting into DocumentDB. Developing applications is hard, developing distributed applications at planet scale that are fast, scalable, elastic, always available, and yet simple, is even harder. Yet it is a fundamental pre-requisite in reaching people globally in our modern world. We spend limitless hours talking to customers every day and adapting DocumentDB to make the experience truly stellar and fluid.

So what are the next steps you should take? Here are a few that come to mind:

First, understand the core concepts of Azure DocumentDB.
Download the emulator and start developing locally!
Build a web/mobile app easily (you have a lot of choices):

.Net web app
.Net web app for MongoDB API
Build a mobile application with Xamarin and DocumentDB
Node.js web app
Java web app
Python Flask web app

If you need any help or have questions or feedback, please reach out to us on the developer forums on Stack Overflow. Stay up-to-date on the latest DocumentDB news and features by following us on Twitter (@DocumentDB) and join our LinkedIn Group.
Quelle: Azure

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Use Azure Media Services with PowerApps

You can now build PowerApps with media hosted on Azure Media Services. In this walkthrough, Contoso Corp. wants to build an online learning app for its employees with videos of their products and services.

Create a new Azure Media Services account, if you don’t have one already

From your Azure Media Services account, locate and publish your video assets from Settings > Assets.

Encode your videos. After the videos are published, copy the manifest URLs. Start the streaming endpoint of your service, if not already.

If you haven’t tried PowerApps, you can always sign-up for a trial using your work or school account. Download PowerApps Studio from the Windows Store. Alternatively, login to the PowerApps portal and choose New app.
Choose the Blank app > Tablet layout.

We want to build a gallery of all the available AMS videos and have the user pick a video to play. An Excel spreadsheet is a quick way to load the data to the app. Here is the Excel Table we will use with the links to the AMS video URLs:

From PowerApps, choose Content > Data sources. From the right panel, choose Add data source and Add static data to your app. Browse and load the Excel file.
From PowerApps, add a Horizontal Gallery control from Insert > Gallery > Custom gallery. Choose Add an item from Insert tab and add the Video control from Media.
Bind the Gallery to the Excel table by setting the Items property of the gallery to the name of the table.

Set the Media property of the first video control in the gallery to ThisItem.VideoURL. You should see the list of the AMS videos load in the gallery. Set the Disabled property for the video control to true.

Add a Video control from Insert > Media for the main video. Bind its Media property to Gallery1.Selected.VideoURL

You can also add text fields for the Title and description from the Excel file and show them in the app. The complete app is shown in the picture below:

You can learn more about building apps from the PowerApps documentation. For feedback and questions on AMS videos in PowerApps, please post them on our forums.

 

Happy app building!
Quelle: Azure

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Infuse some AI into your Azure apps at hands-on Seattle workshop

If you’re an Azure developer interested to incorporate the very latest AI and machine learning techniques into your apps and enterprise solutions, here’s a free in-person workshop you’ll want to register for.

Microsoft is running an all-day AI Immersion Workshop on Tuesday, May 9th, at the W Hotel in Seattle. We’ll provide an overview of Microsoft’s extensive AI investments and offerings at this event, followed by deep technical tutorials, specifically designed for hands-on developers such as yourself. The tutorials being featured at this event include:

Applied Machine Learning for Developers.
Big AI – Applying Artificial Intelligence at Scale.
Weaving Cognitive and Azure Services to Provide Next-Generation Intelligence.
Deep Learning and the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.
Building Intelligent SaaS Applications.

Seasoned Microsoft engineers and data scientists are running the tutorials, and they will there to guide and help you along the way, as you complete your apps through the day.

Spots are filling up rapidly, so be sure to register now and reserve your spot:

For more details, including session abstracts and instructor names, be sure to check out our event agenda page here. See you in Seattle next month!

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Availability of migration of ExpressRoute for Classic to Resource Manager IaaS Migration

Azure Resource Manager provides a lot of benefits with support for tagging, RBAC, and infrastructure orchestration using templates. As part of Azure Resource Manager, Virtual Machines gain these new capabilities plus additional compute specific capabilities such as:

Ability to resize to any VM size without having to delete and recreate the VM
Ability to migrate to managed disks which provide a simplified management experience while also providing higher availability by leveraging multiple storage controllers for availability sets with multiple instances
Support for 3 fault domains and 20 update domains

Learn more about Resource Manager and understand the differences between Classic and Resource Manager deployment models.

To allow our customers to benefit from these additional capabilities, we introduced a service that enables customers to bring their classic VMs over into the Resource Manager world without downtime!

Today, we are pleased to announce that customers using ExpressRoute can also migrate their Virtual Networks, including all the VMs in the VNET, to Azure Resource Manager without downtime. Learn more by reading the instructions on how to Migrate ExpressRoute circuits and associated virtual networks from the classic to the Resource Manager deployment model.

There are some edge cases for ExpressRoute migration you should be aware of. Please review the unsupported features and configurations to make sure your environment is supported.

As part of this release, we’re also announcing a revamped documentation set for migration. Based on customer recommendations and migrations, we’ve added additional planning docs and answers for the most frequently asked questions. Existing documents have also been restructured to be easier to understand as part of this effort.

Overview of platform-supported migration of IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
Technical deep dive on platform-supported migration from classic to Azure Resource Manager
Planning for migration of IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
Use PowerShell to migrate IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
Use CLI to migrate IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
VPN Gateway classic to Resource Manager migration
Migrate ExpressRoute circuits and associated virtual networks from the classic to the Resource Manager deployment model
Community tools for assisting with migration of IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
Review most common migration errors
Review the most frequently asked questions about migrating IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager

For a great video overview of the migration process please check out Corey Sanders in the below Microsoft Mechanics episode, Azure Classic to Azure Resource Manager Migration.

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Get started tile now live on Azure Stack

We recently announced the release of Azure Stack Technical Preview 3 refresh with Azure PaaS Services. Coming as a part of this release is the Get Started tile that you have grown to love in public Azure.

As of this release the tile will only contain content related to Azure Stack administration. We are currently working on bringing you separate experiences for the tenant and admin portals. You will be able to see those changes in future releases.

On the admin portal, the Get Started tile will give you an insight into experiences that are "Azure Stack" specific and do not necessarily apply to public Azure. These tutorial videos, created by Program Managers working hard on delivering these experiences to you, will introduce you to new concepts and ideas in Azure Stack and will quickly bring you up to speed on various components of Azure Stack administration.

In these tutorials, you will learn how to make VM images available to your tenants, offer tenant services, add content to your Marketplace, monitor your infrastructure, and how to work with the Azure Stack portal.

The content is hosted online with the videos being hosted on Channel 9, hence you will require an active internet connection to access it.

We are really excited to bring these experiences to you and are looking forward to getting your feedback. Please let us know if you have suggestions on improving the content or if you&#039;d like to see tutorials on new topics!
Quelle: Azure

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Global customer access and additional services now available for Azure in India

Since the launch of the Microsoft Cloud in India, we have seen tremendous growth of our customers’ cloud usage. For example, we’re collaborating with Tata Motors, India’s leading auto manufacturer, to provide connected driving experiences powered by Azure. Flipkart has adopted Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform to enable its continued growth and expansion, and to scale quickly and stay resilient. Kotak Mahindra Bank partnered with Zing HR and turned to Azure for an integrated and flexible mobile HR solution.

Today, I’m excited to share that global companies can now benefit from access to the three Azure regions in India: West India (Mumbai), Central India (Pune) and South India (Chennai). These regions provide world-class reliability and performance combined with data residency in India to support the digital transformation of organizations. Customers gain the benefit of data replication across these locations, ensuring business continuity in both pure cloud and hybrid scenarios.

Selected noteworthy services deployed in India regions since my last update include Power BI and HDInsight, with full features across Windows and Linux. Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights to monitor a business and get answers quickly with rich dashboards available on every device. With HDInsight, you can easily spin up enterprise-grade, open source cluster types, guaranteed with the industry’s best 99.9% SLA and 24/7 support.

I’m proud about these expansions, and to see Azure in India enabling our users to deploy dev, test and production workloads closest to their employees, partners and customers anywhere in the world.
Quelle: Azure