Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

New Azure Government Documentation

We are happy to announce Azure Government documentation! This documentation provides guidance that is tailored to our Azure Government customers. We highlight common solutions and guidance on building government specific implementations, as well as information that you need to know about using services, Marketplace, Portal and PowerShell in Azure Government. This is just the start! Many more updates are planned as we continually expand our offerings for Azure Government. As new services come online, we will update the corresponding documentation. Over the coming months we will add additional content on how to build solutions and onboard successfully. We encourage and welcome feedback and documentation requests you have. Please comment on this blog post with any questions, recommendations, or comments in relation to our new documentation site. Accessing the Documentation The content can be accessed via three easy ways: Navigate to the new Azure Government Landing Page through the secondary navigation bar.      2. Access the page directly at Azure Government documentation.      3. Select “Azure Government” from the Microsoft Documentation Articles cloud filter drop down menu. To stay up to date on all things Azure Government, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed or receive emails by clicking “Subscribe by Email!” on the Azure Government Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft reimagines open source cloud hardware

Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at Zettastructure: The European Digital Infrastructure Summit hosted by Datacenter Dynamics in London. In collaboration with the Open Compute Project (OCP), we are introducing Project Olympus – our next generation hyperscale cloud hardware design and a new model for open source hardware development with the OCP community. This is a significant moment as we usher in a new era of open source hardware development at cloud speed.

Microsoft has been a significant and growing contributor to open source projects for the past decade, particularly with Microsoft Azure. In 2014, we began reimagining our Azure hardware through the lens of open source innovation and joined OCP. Our initial contributions were server and datacenter designs that power the Azure hyperscale cloud. We’ve also contributed technologies that showcase the software-defined networking (SDN) principles of speed and scale-out that serve as Azure’s backbone.

We’ve learned a tremendous amount from our deep collaboration with the OCP Foundation and the open source community over the past few years. An important realization is that open source hardware development is currently not as agile and iterative as open source software. The current process for open hardware development is to contribute designs that are production-ready. At that stage, the design is essentially finalized – almost 100% complete – and this late contribution delays the development of derivative designs, limits interactive community engagement and adoption, and slows down overall delivery.

To address these challenges, we’ve set out in collaboration with the OCP to introduce a new hardware development model for community based open collaboration. Project Olympus applies a model of open source collaboration that has been embraced for software but has historically been at odds with the physical demands of developing hardware. We’re taking a very different approach by contributing our next generation cloud hardware designs when they are approx. 50% complete – much earlier in the cycle than any previous OCP project. By sharing designs that are actively in development, Project Olympus will allow the community to contribute to the ecosystem by downloading, modifying, and forking the hardware design just like open source software.

“Microsoft is opening the door to a new era of open source hardware development. Project Olympus, the re-imagined collaboration model and the way they’re bringing it to market, is unprecedented in the history of OCP and open source datacenter hardware,” said Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer, Open Compute Project Foundation.

The community can play a significant role in expanding the Project Olympus ecosystem by taking advantage of the early access and contributing additional building blocks to enable a new common hardware design portfolio. OCP Solution Providers will benefit by being able to rapidly assemble hardware solutions specific to product offerings, and the broader community benefits from proven base hardware designs on which they can build value added services. This should decrease the time to market for new product offerings and lower investment costs. The net result will be increased productivity in the industry and faster delivery of new capabilities via the cloud.

Over the past several years, we’ve also learned from deploying OCP hardware at scale in our datacenters – over 90% of the servers we currently purchase are based on OCP contributed specifications. As we look to the future, we know we need to keep pace with tremendous growth in the cloud, support a broad spectrum of workloads including emerging cloud services, and enable easy scaling across global datacenter regions.

The building blocks that Project Olympus will contribute consist of a new universal motherboard, high-availability power supply with included batteries, 1U/2U server chassis, high-density storage expansion, a new universal rack power distribution unit (PDU) for global datacenter interoperability, and a standards compliant rack management card. To enable customer choice and flexibility, these modular building blocks can be used independently to meet specific customer datacenter configurations. We believe Project Olympus is the most modular and flexible cloud hardware design in the datacenter industry. We intend for it to become the foundation for a broad ecosystem of compliant hardware products developed by the OCP community.

We have already released the server chassis interfaces (mechanical and power) and the universal motherboard and PDU specifications on the OCP GitHub branch, and in the coming weeks, we’ll also open source the entire rack system as well.

Over the next two days at Datacenter Dynamics: Zettastructure in London, we’ll share more about Project Olympus through a keynote, OCP workshop and in the Microsoft booth where we’ll have the hardware on display. The team and I are looking forward to working with the OCP community to establish the next generation of open source cloud hardware.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Certified for IoT expands to help customers choose the right IoT device

For businesses, choosing the best device for a new IoT solution can be one of the most challenging tasks in early deployment. There are a lot of things to consider: from how the device will connect to the internet and which sensors may work with it to the industry protocols it is capable of processing.

One year ago, we launched the Azure Certified for IoT program to help customers ensure their device of choice was tested to work with Azure IoT technology. Since then, our customers and partners have embraced the benefits of bridging the cloud with IoT devices together. With their enthusiasm, we have grown Azure Certified for IoT into one of the largest device ecosystems in the industry, with more than 100 partners and 175 different devices already in the program.

Today, we’re announcing the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog, a step forward in helping customers on their IoT journey. The device catalog is available to anyone looking for the best device for their needs from any Azure Certified for IoT partner.

If you’re currently an IoT customer, the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog will facilitate the search of the right device or family of devices. You can now refine device search by multiple criteria, get instructions on how to connect to Azure IoT Suite and Azure IoT Hub, and even request a demo of the device from the manufacturer. For example, looking for gateways that connect to the Azure cloud via Wi-Fi using Java code over MQTT will be a matter of a few clicks. And, if you are looking for something you can’t find, you can submit a request through the portal and our team will do our best to include it.

If you are an IoT device manufacturer, the device catalog provides an opportunity to give your technology global exposure, opening new markets with customers already using Azure IoT solutions. Microsoft will also provide metrics on your device’s interest and performance so you can grow your business. In addition, to help you differentiate and showcase your device, we are offering $3,000 of Azure credit to the first 25 partners that enroll 10 devices or more in the catalog. You can start enrolling your device on the catalog by visiting www.catalog.azureiotsuite.com/partner.

We are excited about the possibilities that this community will unlock and can’t wait to see the solutions that our customers and device manufacturers build together with the power of Azure IoT.

Get started finding your IoT device today by visiting www.catalog.azureiotsuite.com.
Quelle: Azure

Announcing Azure Analysis Services preview

We are pleased to announce the public preview of Microsoft Azure Analysis Services, the latest addition to our data platform in the cloud. Based on the proven analytics engine in SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services is an enterprise grade OLAP engine and BI modeling platform, offered as a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Azure Analysis Services enables developers and BI professionals to create BI Semantic Models that can power highly interactive and rich analytical experiences in BI tools (such as Power BI and Excel) and custom applications.

Why Azure Analysis Services?

The success of any modern data-driven organization requires that information is available at the fingertips of every business user (not just IT professionals and data scientists) to guide their day-to-day decisions. Self-service BI tools have made huge strides in making data accessible to business users. However, most business users don’t have the expertise or desire to do the heavy lifting that is typically required to find the right sources of data, consume the raw data and transform it into the right shape, add business logic and metrics, and finally explore the data to derive insights. With Azure Analysis Services, a BI professional can create a semantic model over the raw data and share it with business users so that all they need to do is connect to the model and immediately explore the data and gain insights. Azure Analysis Services uses a highly optimized in-memory engine to provide responses to user queries at the "speed of thought".

Fully managed platform-as-a-service

Developers can create a server in seconds, choosing from the Developer (D1) or Standard (S1, S2, S4) service tiers. Each tier comes with fixed capacity in terms of query processing units and model cache. The developer tier (D1) supports up to 3GB model cache and the largest tier (S4) supports up to 100GB.
The Standard tiers offer dedicated capacity for predictable performance and are recommended for production workloads. The Developer tier is recommended for proof-of-concept, development, and test workloads.
Administrators can pause and resume the server at any time. No charges are incurred when the server is paused. We also plan to offer administrators the ability to scale up and down a server between the Standard tiers (not available currently).
Developers can use Azure Active Directory to manage user identity and role based security for their models.
The service is currently available in the South-Central US and West Europe regions. More regions will be added during the preview.

Compatible with SQL Server Analysis Services

Developers can use SQL Server Data Tools in Visual Studio for creating models and deploying them to the service. Administrators can manage the models using SQL Server Management Studio and investigate issues using SQL Server Profiler.
Business users can consume the models in any major BI tool. Supported Microsoft tools include Power BI, Excel, and SQL Server Reporting Services. Other MDX compliant BI tools can also be used, after downloading and installing the latest drivers.
The service currently supports tabular models (compatibility level 1200 only). Support for multidimensional models will be considered for a future release, based on customer demand.
Models can consume data from a variety of sources in Azure (e.g. Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse) and on-premises (e.g. SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata). Access to on-premises sources is made available through the on-premises data gateway.
Models can be cached in a highly optimized in-memory engine to provide fast responses to interactive BI tools. Alternatively, models can query the source directly using DirectQuery, thereby leveraging the performance and scalability of the underlying database or big data engine.

Get started with the Azure Analysis Services preview by imply provisioning a resource in the Azure Portal or using Azure Resource Manager templates, and using that server name in your Visual Studio project. Use Azure Active Directory user names (UPNs) or groups in the role memberships for securing access to your models. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Learn more about Azure Analysis Services.
Quelle: Azure