Microsoft Azure News, Entwicklungen, Updates, HowTos - Seite 228 von 259

Today we are pleased to announce that partitioned collections have an entry point 75% cheaper than before. Instead of provisioning 10,100 RU/sec as a minimum, you can now provision a partitioned collection at 2,500 RU/sec and scale in increments of 100 RU/sec. Partitioned collections enable you to dynamically scale your provisioning from as low as 2,500 RU/sec to millions of RU/sec with no limit on storage consumption.

DocumentDB billing model

The current Azure DocumentDB billing model gives far more granularity, elasticity, and scale than what S1, S2, and S3 performance levels provided. You no longer need to jump your throughput provisioning from 1,000 RU/sec to 2,500 RU/sec when you just need 1,200 RU/sec. Our goal is to make sure you have full flexibility in optimizing the utilization of your provisioned capacity.

The Azure DocumentDB billing model is very simple:

You pay for the provisioned capacity in increments of 100 request units/second (RU/sec). Each provisioned capacity of 100 RU/sec is billed at an hourly rate.
You pay a flat rate for the storage you consume.
The entry point for DocumentDB is at 400 RU/sec for a single partition. For a free use in a dev/test environment, we recommend the use of the DocumentDB emulator.

Single Partition or Partitioned Collection

You can start with a single partition if you expect your storage needs to be below 10 GB or your throughput needs not to exceed 10K RU/sec. Later on, you can always change to partitioned collections by using the migration tool. For more information about migrating from single-partition to partitioned collections, see Migrating from single-partition to partitioned collections.

However, if you expect a large amount of volume or performance needs, you should start with a partitioned collection. The following table provides an overview of single partition versus partitioned collections.

Performance type

Details

Throughput

Storage

Single partition

User sets throughput in units of 100 RU/sec

400 – 10,000 RU/sec

10 GB

Partitioned collection

User sets throughput in units of 100 RU/sec

2,500 RU/sec – Unlimited

Unlimited

Decreasing your provisioned throughput for partitioned collections

If you already have a partitioned collection, but don’t need the 10,100 RU/sec throughput, you can lower your provisioning through the Azure portal or the SDK. Here is an example to adjust the provisioning level to 2,500 RU/sec.

Through the Azure portal

From your DocumentDB account, click Scale, choose your collection, and then adjust your throughput value.

Through the SDK

//Fetch the resource to be updated

Offer offer = client.CreateOfferQuery()

.Where(r => r.ResourceLink == collection.SelfLink)

.AsEnumerable()

.SingleOrDefault();

// Set the throughput to 2,500 request units per second

offer = new OfferV2(offer, 2500);

//Now persist these changes to the database by replacing the original resource

await client.ReplaceOfferAsync(offer);

If you have additional questions about partitioned collections or going planet-scale with DocumentDB, please reach out to us on the developer forums on Stack Overflow. Also, stay up-to-date on the latest DocumentDB news and features by following us on Twitter @DocumentDB.
Quelle: Azure

9. Februar 20179. Februar 2017

da Agency

Instant File Recovery from Cloud using Azure Backup

Since its inception, Azure Backup has empowered enterprises to embark on the digital transformation to cloud by providing a cloud-first approach to backup enterprise data both on-premises and in the cloud. Today, we are excited to go beyond providing Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and introduce Restore-as-a-Service (RaaS) in the form of Azure Backup instant restore!

With Instant Restore, you can restore files and folders instantly from cloud based recovery points without provisioning any additional infrastructure, and at no additional cost. Instant Restore provides a writeable snapshot of a recovery point that you can quickly mount as one or more iSCSI based recovery volumes. Once the snapshot is mounted, you can browse through it and recover items by simply copying them from the recovery volumes to a destination of your choice.

Value proposition

One restore mechanism for all backup sources – The Restore-as-a-Service model of Azure Backup unifies the approach for recovering individual files and folders backed up from sources in the cloud or on-premises. You can use instant restore, whether you are backing up on-premises data to cloud using Azure Backup agent or protecting Azure VMs using Azure VM backup.
Instant recovery of files – Instantly recover files from the cloud backups of Azure VMs or on-premises file-servers. Whether it’s a case of accidental file deletion or simply validating the backup, instant restore drastically reduces the time taken to recover your first file.
Open and review files in the recovery volumes before restoring them – Our Restore-as-a-Service approach allows you to open application files such as SQL, Oracle directly from cloud recovery point snapshots as if they are present locally, without having to restore them, and attach them to live application instances.
Recover any combination of files to any target – Since Azure Backup provides the entire snapshot of the recovery point and relies on copy of items for recovery, you can restore multiple files from multiple folders to a local server or even to a network-share of your choice.

Availability

Azure Backup Instant Recovery of files is available in preview for customers of Azure Backup agent and Azure VM backup (Windows VMs).

Learn how to instantly recover files using Azure Backup Agent

Watch the video below to start using Instant Restore for recovering files backed up with Azure Backup Agent for files and folders.

The supported regions for this preview are available here and will be updated as new regions are included in the preview.

Learn how to instantly recover files from Azure Virtual Machine Backups

Watch the video below to instantly recover files from an Azure VM (Windows) backup.

Visit this document to know more about how to instantly recover files from Windows Azure VM backups.

The instant file restore capability will be available soon for users who are protecting their Linux VMs using Azure VM backup. If you are interested in being an early adopter and provide valuable feedback, please let us know at linuxazurebackupteam@service.microsoft.com. Watch the video below to know more.

SQL Data Warehouse now supports seamless integration with Azure Data Lake Store

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a SQL-based fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud solution for data warehousing. SQL Data Warehouse is highly elastic, enabling you to provision in minutes and scale capacity in seconds. You can scale compute and storage independently, allowing you to burst compute for complex analytical workloads or scale down your warehouse for archival scenarios, and pay based off what you're using instead of being locked into predefined cluster configurations.

We are pleased to announce that you can now directly import or export your data from Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) into Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW) using External Tables.

ADLS is a purpose-built, no-limits store and is optimized for massively parallel processing. With SQL DW PolyBase support for ADLS, you can now load data directly into your SQL DW instance at nearly 3 TB per hour. Because SQL DW can now ingest data directly from Windows Azure Storage Blob and ADLS, you can now load data from any storage service in Azure. This provides you with the flexibility to choose what is right for your application.

A common use case for ADLS and SQL DW is the following. Raw data is ingested into ADLS from a variety of sources. Then ADL Analytics is used to clean and process the data into a loading ready format. From there, the high value data can be imported into Azure SQL DW via PolyBase.

ADLS has a variety of built-in security features that PolyBase uses to ensure your data remains secure, such as always-on encryption, ACL-based authorization, and Azure Active Directory (AAD) integration. To load data from ADLS via PolyBase, you need to create an AAD application. Read and write privileges are managed for the AAD application on either a per directory, subdirectory, or file basis. This allows you to provide fine-grained access control of what data can be loaded into SQL DW from ADLS resulting in an easy to manage security model.

You can import data stored in ORC, RC, Parquet, or Delimited Text file formats directly into SQL DW using the Create Table As Select (CTAS) statement over an external table.

How to Set Up the Connection to Azure Data Lake Store

When you connect to your SQL DW from your favorite client (SSMS or SSDT), you can use the script below to get started. You will need to know your AAD Application’s client ID, OAuth2.0TokenEndpoint, and Key to create a Database Scoped Credential in SQL DW. This key is encrypted with your Database Master Key and is stored within the SQL DW. This is the credential used to authenticate against ADLS.

It’s just that simple to load data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse from ADLS.

Best Practices for loading data into SQL DW from Azure Data Lake Store

For the best experience, please look at the following guidelines:

Co-locate the services in the same data center for better performance and no data egress charges.
Split large compressed files into at least 60 smaller compressed files.
Use a large resource class in SQL DW to load the data.
Ensure that your AAD Application has read access from your chosen ADLS Directory.
Scale up your DW SLO when importing a large data set.
Use a medium resource class for loading data into SQL DW.

Learn more about best practices for loading data into SQL DW from Azure Data Lake Store.

Next steps

If you already have an Azure Data Lake Store, you can try loading your data into SQL Data Warehouse.

Additionally, there are great tutorials specific to ADLS to get you up and running.

Learn more

What is Azure SQL Data Warehouse?

What is Azure Data Lake Store?

SQL Data Warehouse best practices

Load Data into SQL Data Warehouse

MSDN forum

Stack Overflow forum
Quelle: Azure

7. Februar 20177. Februar 2017

da Agency

New Lower Prices on Azure Virtual Machines and Blob Storage

We strive hard at Azure to offer you the best value in one of the most cost effective ways in the public cloud. We believe in providing a comprehensive cloud platform that not only enables customers to innovate rapidly, but to also do so at the best possible prices. To that end, today we are happy to announce significant price reductions on several Azure Virtual Machine families and Storage types. We hope this will further lower the barrier to entry for our customers and accelerate cloud transformation.

Azure Virtual Machines:

We have reduced prices on Compute optimized instances – F Series, General purpose instances – A1 Basic by up to 24% and 61% respectively.

The table below shows an example of the VM price reductions in UK South. Please refer to the VM pricing page for all the regions and details.

Azure VMs
Price reductions (Linux VM)
Price reductions (Windows VM)

F1 to F16
-23%
-18%

A1 Basic
-42%
-51%

We will also be announcing price reductions specifically for our D-series General-purpose instances in the near future.

Azure Blob Storage:

We have reduced prices on Azure Storage offerings – Hot Block Blob Storage, Cool Block Blob Storage by up to 31% and 38% respectively. These new prices are only available to customers using Azure Blob Storage Accounts. Customers who are on the General Purpose Blob Storage can take advantage of these prices by moving data from General Purpose Blob to Azure Blob Storage account using tools such as AZ copy.

The table below shows an example of the Storage price reductions in UK South. Please refer to the Storage pricing page for all the regions and details.

Azure Storage
Price reductions

Hot Block Blob
-26%

Cool Block Blob
-38%

All of the new reduced prices take effect today. We are excited about these new lower prices and how it helps our customers accomplish a lot more. For more details, please visit Linux Virtual Machines Pricing.
Quelle: Azure

3. Februar 20173. Februar 2017

da Agency

Event Hubs .NET Standard client is now generally available

After several months of testing, both internally and by our users (thank you), we are releasing our newest Event Hubs clients to general availability. This means that these new libraries are production ready and fully supported by Microsoft.

What new libraries are available?

Consistent with our past design decisions, we are releasing two new NuGet packages:

Microsoft.Azure.EventHubs – This library comprises the Event Hubs specific functionality that is currently found in the WindowsAzure.ServiceBus library. In here you will be able to do things like send and receive events from an Event Hub.
Microsoft.Azure.EventHubs.Processor – Replaces functionality of the Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus.EventProcessorHost library. This is the easiest way to receive events from an Event Hub, and keeps you from having to remember things such as offsets and partition information between receivers.

What does this mean for you?

Releasing these new libraries provides three major benefits:

Runtime portability – Using .NET Standard, we now have the ability to write a single code base that is portable across different .NET runtimes, including .NET Core, .NET framework, and the Universal Windows Platform. You can take this library and run it on Windows Server with .NET Framework 4.6, or on a Mac/Linux machine using .NET Core.
Open source – Yes! We are very excited that these new libraries are open source and available on GitHub. We love the interactions that we have with our customers, whether it be an issue or pull request.
Event Hubs now has its own library – while Event Hubs and Service Bus have been seemingly joined in the past, the use cases between these two products are often times different. Previously, you needed to download a Service Bus library in order to use Event Hubs. These new libraries are specific to Event Hubs, so we hope that they will make things more clear for our new users.

What's next?

For those of you currently using the WindowsAzure.ServiceBus library, we will continue to support Event Hubs workloads on this library for the foreseeable future. With that said, we currently have a .NET Standard Service Bus library in preview!

For more information on getting started with these new libraries , check out our updated getting started documentation.

So take the new libraries for a spin, and let us know what you think!
Quelle: Azure

3. Februar 20173. Februar 2017

da Agency

Enhanced Automated Backup for SQL Server 2016 in Azure Virtual Machines

We are excited to announce some great enhancements to our Automated Backup feature, which greatly extends your control over backups when running SQL Server 2016 in Azure Virtual Machines. You can now control the schedule of your backups and backup system databases. You can easily enable this feature through the Azure Portal or PowerShell on Azure Virtual Machines running SQL Server 2016 Enterprise, Standard, or Developer.

For those of you not familiar with Automated Backup, this feature allows you to automatically backup all the databases in a SQL Server VM running in Azure to one of your storage accounts. Automated Backup ensures a consistent backup chain at all times, so you can always recover your databases to any point in time. Even better, it manages the desired retention for the backups, keeping them only for the time you specify. If you’re curious, Automated Backup is implemented on top of the SQL Server IaaS Agent Extension and the SQL Server Managed Backup feature.

New capabilities

Backup system databases

Automated Backup now gives you the option to schedule backups for System databases in addition to User databases. If you choose to enable this option, your System databases, and all their important instance-level objects, will be backed up on the same schedule as your User databases.

Scheduling backups

Automated Backup now allows you to schedule a time window and frequency, daily or weekly, for full backups so that these don’t impact performance during business hours. In addition, you can specify how often to take log backups.

Remember that Azure Storage keeps 3 copies of every VM disk to guarantees no data loss, thus the purpose of these backups is to recover from human errors (e.g. deleting a table).

For disaster recovery purposes or compliance reasons, consider storing these backups in a geo-replicated storage account, preferably readable. This will make the backups available also in a remote Azure region.

How to find Automated Backup v2

For new SQL Server VMs

When creating a new virtual machine running SQL Server 2016 in the Azure portal, you will be presented with several SQL Server configuration options. Here you can enable and configure Automated Backup according to your requirements.

For existing SQL Server VMs

If you have an existing virtual machine running SQL Server 2016, you can enable and configure Automated backup v2 from the Azure Portal or PowerShell. If you find your SQL Server virtual machine in the Azure Portal, you can find Automated Backup under SQL Server configuration.

To learn more, check out the documentation for this feature.

Try out this feature today in the Azure Portal!

If you do not have an Azure subscription, you can easily sign up for a free trial!
Quelle: Azure