Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure N-Series: General availability on December 1

We’re excited today to announce general availability of the Azure N-Series of Azure Virtual Machines as of December 1, 2016. Azure N-Series virtual machines—powered by NVIDIA GPUs—provide customers and developers around the globe access to industry-leading accelerated computing and visualization experiences via the Azure public cloud. We’re additionally excited to announce availability in East US, West Europe, and South East Asia at GA joining the current South Central US region that will be available at GA. We’ve had thousands of customers participate in the N-Series preview since we launched it back in August. We’ve received fantastic feedback, especially around the enhanced performance, and the work Microsoft and NVIDIA have done together to make this a turnkey experience for cloud adopters. During the preview, customers exercised these unique capabilities on a wide range of potential breakthrough scenarios including artificial intelligence (AI), 3D visualization and interactivity, highly computational medical research, and beyond. Azure NC virtual machines—GPU compute Azure NC-based instances are powered by NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs and provide the compute power required to accelerate the most demanding high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. Customers can now use these instances to run deep learning training jobs, HPC simulations, rendering, real-time data analytics, DNA sequencing, and many more CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)–accelerated tasks. Additionally, customers have the option to utilize RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over InfiniBand for scaling jobs across multiple instances. Using InfiniBand between instances provides close to bare-metal performance when scaling out to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of GPUs across hundreds of nodes—allowing customers to submit tightly coupled jobs like Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK)–based training for natural language processing, image recognition, and object detection. City of Hope is an independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases and is currently ranked as one of “America’s Best Hospitals.” City of Hope is using HPC to bring together physical and computer sciences, and mathematics, to develop new and ground-breaking methods to model biological processes. Further, these methods are used to predict and analyze large-scale data from their high-throughput instrumentation. Using Azure NC24 instances, Dr. Vaidehi and her team are able to rapidly scale their GPU cluster footprint to study the dynamics of proteins in a few days—as opposed to a month using traditional CPU-based machines. The addition of K80 GPUs greatly accelerates the team’s research output, thereby making drug design much more efficient. Algorithmia is an open marketplace for algorithms and algorithm development, making state-of-the-art algorithms accessible and discoverable by anyone. Algorithmia is the largest marketplace for algorithms in the world, with more than 30,000 developers leveraging more than 2,500 custom algorithms. The Algorithmia Marketplace includes research contributions from MIT, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California-Berkeley, Caltech, the University of Texas at Austin, University of Tokyo, and University of Toronto, among others. “With Azure’s new on-demand GPU instances, we’re able to provide teams and organizations with access to GPU-accelerated deep learning models and algorithms,” Diego Oppenheimer, Algorithmia CEO, says. “The flexibility of the Azure infrastructure allows us to scale to meet our users needs.” Azure NV virtual machines—GPU visualization Azure NV-based instances are powered by NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs and provide NVIDIA GRID capabilities on demand. Scientists, designers, and engineers can now utilize these new instances for running hardware-accelerated workstation applications, designing the next concept car, or creating the next blockbuster movie. These instances support applications utilizing both DirectX and OpenGL. Frame is an enterprise cloud platform that allows any Windows software to be run in the cloud and delivered to any browser. Enterprises and educational institutions use Frame to deliver graphics-intensive 2D and 3D applications as software as a service (SaaS) to any device, anywhere. Azure N-Series virtual machines enable Frame to deliver a high-end workstation class experience to users on any connected device. For example, a designer can create a 3D CAD model from a laptop using a single NV6 instance and instantly switch to an NV24;quad-GPU instance, dramatically speeding up the time it takes to run a complex simulation. Catering to some of the most demanding computer users on the planet, Frame knows that every extra ounce of performance translates to increased productivity and higher quality. The new Azure N-Series brings fast cutting edge NVIDIA GPUs, the latest CPUs, and more memory per instance than anything previously available in the cloud. And with on-demand access, users don’t have to wait for the next hardware refresh of their local workstation. They can even access this performance from their laptop or mobile device for a seamless and performant on-the-road experience. “Azure N-Series powered by NVIDIA’s cutting edge GPUs couldn’t come at a better time,” said Nikola Bozinovic, CEO, Frame. “We’re seeing an incredible interest in virtualization of workstation-class workloads. The combination of Frame and the new N-Series instances on Azure provides our customers with today’s most advanced graphics platform in the cloud.” Pricing for general availability of Azure N-Series takes effect on December 1, 2016, in supported regions in North America, Europe, and Asia. Here is the current pricing.   NC6 NC12 NC24 NC24r Cores 6 12 24 24 GPU 1 x K80 GPU 2 x K80 GPUs 4 x K80 GPUs 4 x K80 GPUs Memory 56 GB 112 GB 224 GB 224 GB Disk 380 GB SSD 680 GB SSD 1.44 TB SSD 1.44TB SSD Network Azure Network Azure Network Azure Network InfiniBand     NV6 NV12 NV24 Cores 6 12 24 GPU 1 x M60 GPU 2 x M60 GPUs 4 x M60 GPUs Memory 56 GB 112 GB 224 GB Disk 380 GB SSD 680 GB SSD 1.44 TB SSD Network Azure Network Azure Network Azure Network NVIDIA GRID Yes Yes Yes With today’s announcements, we’re taking a major step forward in our mission to make every organization and individual more productive via access to high performance and accelerated computing in the cloud. -The Azure Big Compute Team Learn more: Microsoft and OpenAI partnership announcement Azure Virtual Machines pricing page VM documentation
Quelle: Azure

Choose Azure, like OpenAI did, to power your compute intensive workloads and add intelligent interactions to all your apps

Today, Microsoft announced a new partnership with OpenAI, a nonprofit AI research organization co-founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever. Together we hope to make significant contributions to advance the field of AI, and make it more accessible to every developer and every organization. Read more about the partnership and why OpenAI chose Microsoft Azure as the primary cloud platform from Harry Shum, Microsoft Executive Vice President of AI and Research and Sam Altman, co-founder, OpenAI.

Extending our commitment to AI, and to help developers and organizations run high performance workloads and build intelligent applications using the power of the cloud, here’s a drill down into a few of the Azure innovations we announced today:

Azure N-Series Virtual Machines will be generally available starting in December. Organizations like OpenAI, Esri, City of Hope and Frame are already using the industry-leading accelerated computing and visualization experiences offered by Azure N-Series VMs. These virtual machines powered by NVIDIA® GPUs are designed for the most intensive compute workloads, including deep learning, simulations, rendering and the training of neural networks. They also enable high-end visualization capabilities to allow for workstation and streaming scenarios by utilizing the NVIDIA GRID in Azure.
Azure Bot Service, the first public cloud bot service, is now available in preview. Azure Bot Service is powered by the Microsoft Bot Framework and serverless compute in Azure. Starting today you can build, connect, deploy and manage intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking – from your app or website to text/sms, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Teams, Kik, Office 365 mail and other popular services. Bots run on Azure Functions, a serverless environment, so that they scale based on demand and you pay only for the resources your bots consume.
Azure Functions offers serverless compute on Azure and is generally available today. Azure Functions allows developers to implement code triggered by events occurring in Azure or third party services as well as on-premises systems. Developers can use Azure Functions to build HTTP-based API endpoints accessible by a wide range of applications, mobile and IoT devices. Functions can scale on-demand so you pay only for the resources you consume. Azure Functions uniquely offers integrated Visual Studio tooling support, out of the box Azure and third-party service bindings and continuous deployment to improve developer productivity.

These investments and innovations on Azure are designed to bring you the power of the most intelligent cloud so you can address the evolving needs of your customers.  We look forward to hearing your feedback on these latest releases.

To learn more about how to build intelligent apps, tune into Connect (); on Wednesday.
Quelle: Azure

App Service on Linux now supports Containers and ASP.NET Core

In September, 2016 we announced the preview of Azure App Service on Linux making it easier for PHP and Node.js developers to run their web applications natively on Linux and thus making it easier to work directly with .htaccess files or avoid using modified extensions or code.

App Service provides a fully managed experience for web and mobile developers so they can quickly create applications and services for their business without having to focus resources on the day to day management of the web server and operating system. This includes streamlined deployment abilities with deployment slots, custom domains, SSL configuration, continuous deployment and horizontal and vertical scaling.

Today, we are building on the management ease and agility of App Service on Linux by enabling developers to bring their own Docker formatted container images and extending support to ASP.NET Core.

Bring your own Docker formatted container

App Service provides default Linux containers for versions of Node.js, PHP and ASP.NET Core that make it easy to quickly get up and running on the service.  With our new container support, developers can now create customized containers based on the defaults.  For example, developers could create a container with specific builds of Node.js and pm2 that differ from the default versions provided by the service.  This enables developers to use new or experimental framework versions that are not available in the default containers.  Developers can upload their containers to the Azure Container Registry, Docker Hub, or a private container registry.

ASP.NET Core Support

ASP.NET Core is a lean and composable framework for building web and cloud applications. ASP.NET Core is fully open source and available on GitHub. ASP.NET Core is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. App Service today introduces a new base container image to support ASP.NET core. This now gives developers the flexibility to run ASP.NET core on App Service on Windows and Linux. The main advantage of running it on the Linux option is that you can deploy to App Service using containers.

deploy them in containers to Azure App Service.

Getting started

To get started, sign in or start a free trial and create an App Service instance. More information available in the App Service documentation. We would love to hear your feedback on this preview so please visit https://feedback.azure.com/ to get it in the hands of our team.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Azure Announces Industry’s First Cloud Bot-as-a-Service

We are thrilled by the surprisingly large number of bots, tools, channels and the overall vibrancy and excitement within the developer community since our launch of Bot Framework on Github in March. The democratization of AI and the advancement of conversational canvasses are well underway.

For software developers, creating a conversational experience requires a shift in the way we design and build software. It turns out, it’s pretty difficult to do well. Conversation is inherently fluid and tangents are the norm. This isn’t the case for a traditional app, where the design center has (mostly) been about task completion accomplished through a graphical user interface (GUI).

In order to make it easier to get started creating a bot, today we are excited to announce a new service which is built using the Bot Framework and Azure Functions: Azure Bot Service.

Azure Bot Service is the first public cloud bot-service powered by the Microsoft Bot Framework and serverless compute in Microsoft Azure. With this cloud service, you can build, connect, deploy and manage intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking – from your app or website to text/sms, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Teams, Kik, Office 365 mail and other popular services. Bots run on Azure Functions, a serverless environment, so they scale based on demand and you pay only for the resources your bots consume.

Accelerate development cycles

With the Azure Bot Service, developers can accelerate building intelligent bots using Microsoft Cognitive Services by working in an integrated developer experience designed for bot development. You can get started quickly with out-of-the-box templates such as the basic bot, Language Understanding Intelligent Service bot, form bot, and proactive bot. You can build bots in C# or Node.js directly in the browser and try it out with the companion Web Chat control. Or you can use the IDE and code editor of your choice under the covers;  the Azure Bot Service uses an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template to create an Azure Function App for easy deployment and automatically registers your bot in the Microsoft Bot Framework, which provides a public bot directory to increase the exposure of your bot.

Enrich your bots

The Azure Bot Service includes built-in configurable channels to improve your customer interactions and increase your reach to more customers. You can easily build bots that work from your apps or websites and across popular channels such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Teams, Web chat, Email, GroupMe, Kik, Telegram and Twilio. Through the Direct Line support you can interact with Microsoft Bot Framework features through a REST API, so you can bring the conversation experience to your app or website, provide control over your branded experience and reach  the many channels Bot Framework supports. 

Plug in Microsoft Cognitive Services to enable your bots to see, hear, interpret and interact in more human ways. You  can enhance the capabilities of your bots with a just few lines of code using many other Azure services, too. For example, Azure Search makes it easy to add powerful and sophisticated search capabilities to your bots. Check out this GitHub sample to see it in action.

Boost operational efficiency

Azure Bot Service uses Azure Functions to give you the operational agility to run and handle scale as your bots grow in popularity and you only pay for what you use. Moreover, you also don’t need to worry about provisioning or managing servers that run your bots. Patching and infrastructure maintenance is handled for you – you focus on writing code.

Integrated continuous deployment support means that you can use your preferred DevOps tool chain and commit code to source control systems such as Visual Studio Team System, GitHub, and BitBucket and then automatically publish the code into Azure to continuously improve your bot.

Get started

Get started today by signing up for an Azure Trial and creating your first bot! Please give your feedback at UserVoice and visit our documentation.
Quelle: Azure

Announcing general availability of Azure Functions

Today organizations are turning to the cloud not only to accelerate – but to transform – their business. Platform as a Service (PaaS) enables businesses to innovate at a scale that fuels their business transformation – with a focus on application innovation rather than infrastructure management and maintenance. Microsoft Azure has led the way with PaaS in alignment with our decades long commitment to enable developers with world class tools and services. Part of the Azure PaaS portfolio, Azure Functions, offers a serverless compute experience for rapid application development and operational agility. Released in preview in March 2016, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Azure Functions today.

Functions supports the development of event driven solutions on a serverless architecture, enabling on demand scaling and you pay only for the resources you consume. Today, Functions support for both C# and JavaScript is generally available and F#, PowerShell, PHP, Python and Bash are in preview. Functions uniquely offers integrated tooling support, out of the box Azure and third-party service bindings and continuous deployment to improve developer productivity.

Building with the community

Azure Functions is built in the open with the community on GitHub. The Functions team has actively engaged in customer discussions as feedback has been shared. In the preview period, over 900 GitHub issues were raised and addressed helping us deliver a high quality, production-ready service. We want to continue this dialogue with our customers and we maintain a backlog of features in UserVoice where you can provide suggestions.

Integrated tooling support

We now have support for creating, running, and debugging Functions locally on Windows, with the beta Azure Functions CLI. For JavaScript Functions on NodeJS, the CLI integrates with Visual Studio Code and sets up debug targets automatically. While the CLI currently only works on Windows, we’re working on support on Mac and Linux.

Our top UserVoice suggestion is for Visual Studio 2015 tooling support, which will be available as a preview shortly. (We’ll update this post with a download link when it’s ready). This preview tooling will enable developers to create and develop new Function Apps, debug them locally or remotely, and publish them to Azure.

Bind to services

Unlike other comparable services in the market, Azure Functions enables developers to configure bindings to services with just a few clicks. Bindings can be set for services to trigger a function and the object is passed into the function at runtime. There is support for Azure services such as Blob Storage, Event Hub, Service Bus, Storage Tables and external services like OneDrive and DropBox. For example, a binding configured to Azure Storage could trigger a function when a new file is uploaded. This results in less code for developers to maintain as the binding implementations are managed by the service. Developers who use their own tool chain can also edit the functions.json file directly to configure bindings.

The SendGrid, Twillio, Box, DropBox and Google Drive preview bindings were built in-house based on a binding extensibility framework that we will launch in preview early next year. This framework will allow developers to create their own service bindings and allow ISVs to contribute to the extension ecosystem.

Pay only for what you use

With Azure Functions, there is no need to reserve resources and you will only be charged for the time your function runs and memory consumed. Azure Functions pricing includes a permanent free grant of 400,000 Gigabyte Seconds (GB-s) execution time and one million total executions each month.  For usage exceeding the monthly free grant, customers are billed based on GB-s and executions consumed. Azure Functions charges execution per msec, with a 100 msec minimum. For existing Azure App Service Basic/Standard/Premium customers, Functions consumption is incorporated into the cost of the plan. Azure Functions is currently available in 12 Azure Regions with more on the way and the full price billing will start January 1, 2017. For more information check out the pricing page.

Increased operational efficiency

Azure Functions can scale up and down on demand so you don’t need to build infrastructure for the largest scale scenario and pay for resources you don’t use. You can also set a maximum daily spending cap to prevent runaway functions. There is also no more worrying about patching and maintaining frameworks, the operating system or infrastructure. Functions takes care of the underlying infrastructure for you.

Our customers

The true power of Azure Functions is realized through the application innovations of our early adopter customers like Accuweather and Plexure. Both customers are using Azure Functions in their production applications.

Accuweather: “Azure Functions has allowed us to move CRON workloads to the Cloud in an easy and efficient way. They provide powerful functionality without complicated setup, and allow us to quickly and easily implement event driven processes and workflows that are critical to our business.” Chris Patti, CTO at Accuweather.
Plexure: “As a software vendor it can be hard to completely solve a client problem where the software only meets ninety percent of their needs. Functions lets the team rapidly release small auto scaling units of logic that fill these gaps and unlocking significant value in our product to our customers. By building this into our software architecture it allows the teams to rapidly evolve the software to fill gaps unique to a customer but still keeping product standardization.” David Inggs, CTO at Plexure

What next?

So, what are you waiting for? Try Azure Functions for FREE for one hour without the need for a credit card today. Please visit UserVoice to give us your thoughts on Azure Functions.
Quelle: Azure