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Resource health exposes historical health

Today we are pleased to announce the public preview of the Azure Resource health history blade, a new feature that exposes up to 14 days of historical health information.

Up until now, Resource health has helped customers reduce the time spent on troubleshooting ongoing problems, in particular reducing the time spent determining if the problem is caused by an event inside the Azure platform or by a problem in the application. This new feature makes it easier to investigate problems occurred during the last 14 days.

Getting the current and historical health of a resource

The easiest way to open the Resource health blade is to navigate to the resource blade and click on Resource Health.  This blade will show the current health of the resource, as well as recommended troubleshooting steps that are customized based on the current health status. It is important to highlight that since entering Public Preview, we have made a number of improvements to help with troubleshooting, including tighter integration with the troubleshooting experience in the portal.

To access the historical health data, click on the View History link located under the current health state.

The history blade shows any changes in the health of the resource during the last 14 days, including the staring time, the end time and a summary of the text customers would have seen if they had visited the Resource health blade during this time. In the screenshot above you can see that the virtual machine was available until September 19th at 4:19PM when due to a disk failure, it became unavailable until 4:39PM when it was recovered.

New ways to access resource health

As mentioned above, the easiest way is to click on Resource health in the resource blade. Keep in mind that Resource health will only be displayed for resource types available in Resource health. 

Another way is by browsing to the Resource Health List Blade which displays the health of all resources in all your subscriptions. Open this blade by clicking on the Resource health tile located in the Help + Support blade. Once in the Resource Health List blade you can filter by subscription or by resource type.

Resource heath is a key data point when troubleshooting problems, so during the past few weeks we incorporated the Resource health signal in the Troubleshooting and the Case submission blades.

You can access the Troubleshooting blade by clicking on Diagnose and solve problems in the resource blade. Once the troubleshooting blade opens, Resource health will be displayed at the top. Clicking on More Details will take you to the Resource health blade.

In the case submission workflow, you will see the health once you have selected a resource.

Moving forward

Exposing the historical health of a resource is a big step forward on our journey to provide you with the data and the tools you need to troubleshoot problems. During the upcoming months, stay tune for additional improvements to Resource health and for more services to become available through it.
Quelle: Azure

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Improving Developer / IT Collaboration with Application Insights Connector for OMS Log Analytics

Now IT Pros can see the health of applications monitored by Visual Studio Application Insights. Application Insights can now send app data to Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), enabling the app developer and their IT Pro counterpart to each monitor the health of critical applications in the tool they are most experienced with.  Views of the same application telemetry you see in Application Insights will be available in OMS, facilitating more effective collaboration between developers and IT Pros, and thus reducing the time to detect and resolve both application and platform issues.

Information about your application’s health and usage is surfaced in OMS by the Public Preview of the Application Insights Connector for OMS Log Analytics. Telemetry streams from web tests, page views, server requests, exceptions, and custom events are included.

With this facility, OMS users can correlate any infrastructure issues with the impact on applications running in that environment. IT staff can contribute more fully to monitoring the whole stack from the infrastructure and configuration management provided by other OMS solutions, to the application layer data provided by Application Insights.

Drill into different applications

The solution provides a summary of the Application Insights resources that have been integrated with OMS:

Click any of the rows from the summary to show  data from a particular application:

From here, the visualization can be changed to the OMS list or table view:

Then fine tune a query to a time range or other property of interest:

One click to diagnosis in Application Insights

The solution makes it easy to dive deeply into problems, leveraging Application Insights powerful developer-focused diagnostics and analysis tools to get to the bottom of application issues.

It’s a one-click pivot from the OMS solution to this application’s telemetry overview in the Azure portal:

Get started

Want to get started? Check out this blog post by Cigdem Kontaci from the OMS team with the details of how an OMS workspace administrator can configure this solution and dramatically enhance the collaboration between your organization’s developers and IT pros.

To use this solution your app must be in either the Standard or Premium pricing tier of Application Insights.

As you get this integration enabled in your organization, feel free to leave feedback about this integration at UserVoice.

Quelle: Azure

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Microsoft Cloud is first CSP behind the Privacy Shield

Microsoft was proud to become the first global cloud service provider to appear on the Department of Commerce’s list of Privacy Shield certified entities as of August 12th 2016. The European Commission adopted The EU-US Privacy Shield Framework on July 12th 2016, replacing the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles as the mechanism for allowing companies in the EU and the US to transfer personal data across the Atlantic in a manner compliant with the EU data protection requirements. As stated on PrivacyShield.gov,

“The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework was designed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and European Commission to provide companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States in support of transatlantic commerce.”

Adherence to this framework underscores the importance and priority we at Microsoft put on privacy, compliance, security, and protection of customer data around the globe.  A link to Microsoft’s statement of compliance can be found here.  The Microsoft Cloud offers an array of integrated tools which can enhance an IT professional’s productivity, supports a broad spectrum of operating systems, is highly scalable, and can integrate with existing customer IT environments.  These highly competitive attributes attract a globally diverse customer population whose compliance needs and regulations we are ready and able to support.  Check out the Microsoft Trust Center to learn more about our expansive compliance capabilities including our commitment and compliance with the Privacy Shield Framework.
Quelle: Azure

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Announcing Azure Command-Line Interface (Azure CLI) 2.0 Preview

With the continued growth of Azure, we’ve seen a lot of customers using our command-line tools, particularly the Windows PowerShell tools and our Azure XPlat command-line interface (CLI).  We’ve received a lot of feedback on the great productivity provided by command-line tools, but have also heard, especially from customers working with Linux, about our XPlat CLI and its poor integration with popular Linux command-line tools as well as difficulties with installing and maintaining the Node environment (on which it was based).

Based on this feedback – along with the growth in the Azure Resource Manager-based configuration model – we improved the CLI experience and now provide a great experience for Azure. Starting today, we’re making this new CLI available. We’re calling it the Azure Command-Line Interface (Azure CLI) 2.0 Preview, now available as a beta on GitHub. Please try it out and give us your feedback!

Now, if you’re interested in how we approached this project and what it means for you, read on!

What Makes a Great, Modern CLI?

As we set out to develop our next generation of command-line tools, we quickly settled on some guiding principles:

It must be natural and easy to install: Regardless of your platform, our CLI should be installed from where you expect it, be it from “brew install azure-cli” on a MacBook, or from “apt-get install azure-cli” for BASH on Windows (coming soon).

It must be consistent with POSIX tools: Success with command-line tools is the result of the ease and predictability that comes with the implementation of well-understood standards.

It must be part of the open source ecosystem: The value of open source comes from the community and the amazing features and integrations they develop, from DevOps (Chef, Ansible) solutions to query languages (JMESPath).

It must be evergreen and current with Azure: In an age of continuous delivery, it's not enough to simply deploy a service. We must have up-to-date tools that let our customers immediately take advantage of that service. 

As we applied these principles, we realized that the scope of improvements went beyond a few breaking changes, and when combined with the feedback we’ve received about our XPlat CLI, it made sense to start from the ground up. This choice allowed us to focus exclusively on our ARM management and address another common point of feedback: the ASM/ARM “config mode” switch of our XPlat CLI.

Introducing the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview

While we are building out support for core Azure services at this time, we would like to introduce you to the next generation of our command-line tool: Azure CLI 2.0 Preview.

Get Started without delay with a quick and easy install, regardless of platform

Your tools should always be easy to access and install, whether you work in operations or development. Soon, Azure CLI 2.0 Preview will be available on all popular platform package services.

Love using command-line tools such as GREP, AWK, JQ?  So do we!

Command-line tools are the most productive when they work together well. The Azure CLI 2.0 Preview provides clean and pipe-able outputs for interacting with popular command-line tools, such as grep, cut, and jq.

Feel like an Azure Ninja with consistent patterns and help at your fingertips

Getting started in the cloud can feel overwhelming, given all the tools and options available, but the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview can help you on your journey, guiding you with examples and educational content for common commands.  We&039;ve completely redesigned our help system with improved in-tool help.

In future releases, we will expand our documentation to include detailed man-pages and online documentation in popular repositories.

The less you type, the more productive you are

We offer &039;tab completion&039; for commands and parameter names. This makes it easy to find the right command or parameter without interrupting your flow. For parameters that include known choices, as well as resource groups and resource names, you can use tab completion to look-up appropriate values.

Moving to the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview

What does this mean to existing users of the XPlat CLI? We&039;re glad you asked! Here are a few key answers to some questions we&039;ve anticipated:

You don&039;t need to change anything: The XPlat CLI will continue to work and scripts will continue to function. We are continuing to support and add new features to the CLI.

You can install and use both CLIs side-by-side: Credentials and some defaults, such as default subscriptions, are shared between CLIs. This allows you to try out the CLI 2.0 Preview while leaving your existing Azure XPlat CLI installation untouched. 

No, ASM/Classic mode is not supported in the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview: We&039;ve designed around ARM primitives, such as resource groups and templates. ASM/Classic mode will continue to be supported by the XPlat CLI.

Yes, we&039;ll help you along the way: While we can&039;t convert scripts for you, we&039;ve created an online conversion guide, including a conversion table that maps commands between the CLIs.

Please note: credential sharing with the Azure XPlat CLI requires version 0.10.5 or later.

Interested in trying us out?

We&039;re on GitHub, but we also publish on Docker: get the latest release by running "$ docker run -it azuresdk/azure-cli-python".

If you have any feedback, please type "az feedback" into the CLI and let us know!

Attending the Microsoft Ignite conference (September 26-30, 2016, Atlanta, GA)? Come visit us at the Azure Tools booth for a demo or attend our session titled:  Build cloud-ready apps that rock with open and flexible tools for Azure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this mean to existing users of the XPlat CLI?

The XPlat CLI will continue to work and scripts will continue to function. Both of them support a different top level command (‘azure’ vs ‘az’), and you can use them together for specific scenarios. Credentials and some defaults (such as default subscription) are shared between CLIs allowing you to try out Azure CLI 2.0 Preview while leaving your existing CLI installation untouched. We are continuing to support and add new features the XPlat CLI.

I have scripts that call the “azure” command – will those work with the new tool?

Existing scripts built against the Azure XPlat CLI ("azure" command) will not work with the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview. While most commands have similar naming conventions, the structure of the input and output have changed. For most customers, this means changing scripts to &039;workarounds&039; required by the Azure XPlat CLI, or relying on the co-existence of both tools.

Are you going to discontinue the Azure XPlat CLI? When will you take Azure CLI 2.0 out of preview?

The current XPlat CLI will continue to be available and supported, as it is needed for all ASM/Classic based services. The new Azure CLI 2.0 will stay in preview for now as we collect early user feedback to drive improvements up until the final release (date TBD).

Is .NET Core and PowerShell support changing on this release?

Support for .NET Core and PowerShell is not changing with this release. They will continue to be available and fully supported. We feel that PowerShell and POSIX-based CLIs serve different sets of users and provides the best choice for automation/scripting scenarios from the command-line. Both of these options are available on multiple platforms.  Both are open source now and we are investing in both of them.
Quelle: Azure

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ISO 22301 highlights Azure's unmatched business continuity & disaster recovery preparedness

Many of you have asked us about how we plan and prepare in Azure so that you can learn from our best practices as well as have the peace of mind that your applications, and data, are safe and available in Azure. Today we are pleased to announce that Microsoft Azure has achieved ISO 22301 certification. Microsoft is the first hyper-scale cloud provider to achieve this important certification that ensures your Azure applications are backed by the highest standard for business continuity and disaster preparedness.

For years, we’ve heard from organizations about the importance of disaster preparedness and continuous improvement in their operations to ensure their IT systems can survive, and be restored, in the aftermath of major incidents (such as natural disasters, power outages, or cyber-attacks). As of today, we are the only major cloud provider to prove our commitment of being fully prepared for all eventualities through this internationally recognized standard for business continuity, ISO 22301. Our ISO 22301 certification is applicable across both our Azure public and Azure Government clouds. 

What does Azure achieving ISO 22301 provide? It gives you the assurance that you can trust Microsoft Azure with your mission critical applications by providing an extensive independent 3rd party audit of all aspects of Azure’s business continuity. This includes the following:

how backups are validated
how recovery is tested
the competency/training of critical staff
the level of resources available
buy-in by senior management
how risks are assessed/mitigated
adherence to legal/regularly requirements
the process for response to incidents
the process for learning from incidents

Being prepared for whatever happens is not easy, but it’s something that we in Azure take seriously. We test at all levels of our infrastructure to ensure that every day we are working to improve the cloud experience for you. We do tests as small as fault injections at the individual service layer, all the way up to entire region fail-over tests. We’ve been doing these tests for years and this work has helped us continuously improve the Azure infrastructure and services you use every day. ISO 22301 reviews and validates that we are selecting the right tests of our cloud services, that we’ve created programs to continuously run those tests, and that we implement improvements based on those test results.

Achieving the ISO 22301 certification demonstrates the seriousness of our commitment to providing you the highest quality of service, and our achievement of this rigorous third party attestation is part of our promise to provide you the most robust infrastructure possible for deploying your applications in the cloud. To learn more about Microsoft Azure’s ISO 22301 certification and download a copy of the certification, please visit https://aka.ms/iso22301cert.
Quelle: Azure

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Availability of H-series VMs in Microsoft Azure

We are excited to announce availability of the new H-series virtual machines in Azure.   With the availability of these new VM sizes we continue our mission to deliver great performance for HPC applications in Azure.  H-series VM sizes is an excellent fit for any compute-intensive workload.  They are designed to deliver cutting edge performance for complex engineering and scientific workloads like computational fluid dynamics, crash simulations, seismic exploration, and weather forecasting simulations. 

The new H-series sizes are initially available in the South Central US Azure region and will be rolled out across other regions in the near future. 

The H-series VMs will be available in six different sizes, all based on Intel E5-2667 V3 3.2 GHz (with turbo up to 3.5 GHz) processor technology, utilizing DDR4 memory and SSD-based local storage.  The new H-series VMs furthermore features a dedicated RDMA backend network enabled by FDR InfiniBand network, capable of delivering ultra-low latency.  RDMA networking is dedicated for MPI (Message Passing Interface) traffic when running tightly coupled applications.

*m: High Memory, r: RDMA network

We see a large number of enterprise customers embracing Microsoft Azure for their enterprise HPC workloads. Enterprise customers bursting their HPC jobs to Azure for additional compute power helping to solve complex design of experiments (DOE), optimizations, and other critical projects.  One of our premier partners, Altair Engineering Inc., with its suite of enterprise computing products is an excellent and current example of integration between customers' on-premises environment and H-series VMs in Azure.

“We are excited about the introduction of new non hyper-threaded compute and network optimized H-series VMs in Azure, we worked closely with the Microsoft Team to test our solutions for performance and scaling on the H Series VMs. Based on the testing we are confident not only to deliver high performance to our customers but also provide deep integration with the Azure environment to enable HPC cloud environments”  Sam Mahalingam, CTO Altair Engineering Inc

H-series VMs can deliver great performance running a variety of applications, helping businesses around the world reducing their product development cycle and bring products faster to market.

"We are pleased to see the launch of the new Azure high performance H series VMs with InfiniBand and Linux RDMA technology. This performance accelerates the pace of product design cycles using simulation and helps engineers discover better designs, faster." – Keith Foston, Product Manager, CD-adapco, a Siemens Business

H-series virtual machines provide on demand compute capacity for our customers that want to solve complex automotive crash simulation problems.  Through partners like d3View we can bring large scale computing capabilities to our customers when needed.

“We see a great need for the best-in-class compute power and capacity. With the introduction of Azure’s new H-Series with E5-2667 processor and RDMA InfiniBand network, running large-scale simulations across hundreds of cores will offer reduced turn-around time for simulation engineers and scientists. Multi-physics simulation software like LS-DYNA is designed to scale to thousands of processors and with the H-Series, we look forward to helping our customers in evaluating designs quickly” Suri Bala, CEO d3View

The low-latency RDMA network enabled by FDR InfiniBand in the H-series VMs, particularly using the H16r and H16mr sizes, make up an ideal combination for delivering the necessary scale and performance for very large CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations.

“The RDMA technology in the new H series VMs is critical when running large scale-out jobs on the cloud.  With clock frequencies flattening out the last few years, RDMA technology enables jobs to scale out to large number of nodes. Our testing of CFD codes with the TotalCAE Portal enabled us to achieve reduced runtimes at large core counts that would not be possible without RDMA technology in Azure.”  Rod Mach, CEO TotalCAE

Non-RDMA-enabled H-series sizes can be deployed with various Linux distributions and Windows Server OS images available in the Azure Marketplace.  RDMA-enabled H-series VM sizes can be deployed using Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, and CentOS-based 7.1 HPC and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP1 HPC images.  For more information and a quick guide on how to get started, see the Linux and Windows documentation.

With this milestone in our HPC journey in the cloud, we’d like to re-emphasize our excitement in bringing world-class High Performance Computing infrastructure capabilities through the Cloud to every engineer and scientist in the world. 
Quelle: Azure

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Cloud innovations empowering IT for business transformation

Leading the Azure engineering organization over the past several years has been an incredible experience, and one that has taught me a great deal. My discussions with enterprise customers has given me an intimate understanding of the challenges IT teams (including our own) are facing today – How do I innovate with greater agility and faster time to market? How do I modernize our app portfolio? How do I maintain and optimize what I have? How do I manage and secure it all? Amidst all these challenges, however, lies a unique opportunity to align IT with business strategy. And the cloud is the enabling technology that makes this more possible than ever.

Azure is the cloud platform designed for enterprises with the fundamental tenets of global, trusted and hybrid. With Azure infrastructure spanning 34 global regions, we provide twice the choice of regions than AWS to run your applications, as well as offering unique data sovereignty capabilities. With 47 compliance certifications and attestations, Azure is the most compliant hyper scale cloud on the planet. Our hybrid IT depth means ensuring your on-premises investments work consistently with Azure, because hybrid IT means true consistency across your entire environment, not just connectivity between your datacenter and the cloud. But what’s exciting and humbling is to see the tremendous value customers are getting by betting on Azure. From Fortune 500 organizations like Wal-Mart, BMW and EcoLab to startups like Soluto and Linukury, our customers save on costs, are more agile and can transform their businesses.

This week at Ignite, we’re unveiling many new Azure capabilities and you’ll see a common meme across these – enabling IT with cloud infrastructure, security capabilities, holistic management, and world-class support for open source.

Infrastructure for IT innovation

In Azure’s global datacenters lies incredible compute capacity that you can tap into. We want to ensure you can run every workload – meaning all the performance and scale you need, regardless of what you are running. To that end, we are making several announcements today.

New compute offerings – storage optimized, fastest CPU, SAP HANA

We are introducing new Virtual Machine and compute offerings to address your unique application needs – the L-series, H-series and general availability of special-purpose large instances for SAP HANA. This expands upon the recently released N-series, available in preview and offering best-in-class GPU compute VMs.

L-Series – L-series are storage-optimized VMs specially designed for applications requiring low latency, high throughput, large local disk storage such as NoSQL databases (e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera and Redis), and data warehousing. Built on Intel Haswell processors (Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3), L-series supports up to 6 TB of local SSD and offers unmatched storage performance. We will be rolling out L-series in the coming weeks.
H-series – Aligned with our commitment to deliver the best performing technology to market, H-series sports the fastest CPUs in public cloud as well as RDMA with InfiniBand, so you can run high performance computing (HPC) applications like computational fluid dynamics, automotive crash testing, genome and molecular research. H-Series VMs provides customers the ability to easily get on-demand HPC infrastructure and use it for faster insight.
Large Instances for SAP HANA – Continuing our commitment to be able to run the largest enterprise applications, I am delighted to announce the general availability of large instances specifically designed for SAP HANA workloads. These purpose-built hardware configurations can run the largest SAP HANA workloads in the public cloud. They accommodate SAP HANA OLTP scenarios for up to 3 TB, and for large scale-out OLAP deployments for up to 32 TB of RAM.
N-series – Earlier in August, we announced the preview release of our new GPU-powered N-series VM sizes. With both a visualization SKU and a compute-focused SKU, these VM sizes offer unparalleled performance for desktop graphical modeling/rendering and deep learning computational models.

More openness options

Azure is an open platform, deeply committed to leading open source support. Today, nearly one in three VMs deployed on Azure run Linux. The strong momentum for Linux and open source on Azure is driven by our ongoing innovation and demonstrated commitment. Customers like Johnson Controls and KPMG are using Azure for open source workloads and building modern application architectures, including containers and big data solutions. Two weeks ago, we released a preview of our microservices platform, Service Fabric on Linux, for creating highly scalable, cloud-native applications. Customers can now also provision Service Fabric clusters in Azure using Linux as the host OS and deploy Java applications in these clusters.

This week, we are expanding our open source support with further regional availability of Linux and open source solutions, including on-demand Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in Azure Government. We are also adding RHEL support for SAP applications (NetWeaver and HANA). We are committed to great experiences for developers and system admins and to meet customers where they are, from platform stacks to management tools.

New networking capabilities

Azure provides a rich set of networking features so you have the most performant network and diverse set of options for your applications. To that end, we are introducing several new capabilities today.

IPv6 support – With the explosive growth of devices powered by Internet of Things (IoT), compliance regulations and the need for future proofing applications, the need for IPv6 has become more real than ever before. Today, we’re introducing support for IPv6 for applications within virtual machines on Azure.
Azure DNS – We introduced Azure DNS to provide you the speed, reliability, and convenience of having your DNS services hosted close to your applications and cloud infrastructure. We are excited to make this networking service generally available today.
Accelerated Networking – As applications demand faster performance than ever before, we are previewing the ability for VMs to tap into incredible network performance (up to 25 Gbps). Powered by FPGAs, the network throughput and low latency offered by this capability is unparalleled in the public cloud today.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) – With the addition of WAF capabilities to the Application Gateway service, we’re significantly enhancing your ability to manage application security.
New Virtual Network capabilities like peering, active-active VPN gateways and a new ultra-performance gateway for ExpressRoute, all significantly improve the way in which you define network topologies and connect different network environments in powerful ways.

Hybrid cloud enablement

Over 80% of enterprises today have a hybrid cloud strategy – this is the real world for organizations. With decades of experience partnering closely with enterprises, we understand the importance of true hybrid that provides a consistent and comprehensive approach for your entire IT estate. Today, we announced the next step in delivering the power of Azure in your datacenter with the release of Azure Stack Technical Preview 2, bringing more proven cloud innovation such as the Azure Marketplace and security capabilities like Key Vault directly to your datacenter.

We are also bringing cloud-first innovation to your on-premises datacenters and other clouds with General Availability of Service Fabric for Windows Server. With this release, we enable microservice-based Service Fabric applications to have portability and flexibility. This standalone offering provides you a runtime that can be installed on Windows Server on-premises or even in other clouds.

Many of our customers turn to Azure for backup and disaster recovery across the enterprise. In addition to Azure integration with offerings from our rich storage partner ecosystem, we now have the Azure StorSimple Virtual Array for remote and branch offices and the existing Azure StorSimple 8000 series hybrid cloud storage offerings for the datacenter. We are also providing data transformation services that make data backed up using StorSimple available in native Azure formats like blobs and disks. This makes it easy for customers to address business needs with services such as Media Services, Search, Analytics and even custom applications.

New Azure SQL database enhancement

We are announcing general availability of Temporal Tables feature of Azure SQL Database. Temporal Tables are designed to improve your productivity when you develop applications. It lets you focus data analysis on a specific point in time and use a declarative cleanup policy to control retention of historical data. It also enables you to track the full history of data changes in Azure SQL DB, without custom coding.

Securing infrastructure

Security is a primary adoption concern for customers embracing the cloud. We know that staying ahead of sophisticated and ever-evolving cyber threats is a challenging and an ongoing process. We can firmly say that trust and security are cornerstones of the Azure platform. We have the largest compliance portfolio and with it, organizations in even highly regulated industries like Financial Services can use Azure; nearly 85 percent of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers. We are investing heavily in building a cloud that you can trust and today we are announcing key enhancements that further bolster the security of our platform.

Compliance portfolio expansion

We are further strengthening our robust compliance portfolio with these new additions.

ISO 22301 Certification – Azure is the only hyper scale cloud service provider to receive a formal certification for business continuity management, demonstrating comprehensive internal guidelines for the prevention, response, and recovery from disruptive incidents.
EU-US Privacy Shield Framework – Microsoft is also the first cloud vendor to get certified under the new EU-US Privacy Shield Framework for the protection of personal data of EU citizens and is the latest example of the company’s commitment to privacy.
IT-Grundschutz Workbook – Azure has also made available a new security and compliance workbook, IT-Grundschutz, for Azure for who are subject to the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) information protection standards.

Azure Security Center enhancements

We continue to enhance Azure Security Center, offering unmatched security monitoring and management for your cloud resources, since its general availability earlier this year.

Using Security Center, customers benefit from ongoing security research resulting in new analytics released today that are designed to detect insider threats, attempts to persist within a compromised system, and use of compromised systems to mount additional attacks, such as DDoS and Brute Force.
Security Incidents, currently available in preview, have been enriched to correlate alerts from different sources, including alerts from connected partner solutions.
Threat attribute reports are now built-in to provide valuable information about attackers, which can be used to remediate threats more quickly.
Security Center also released support for integrated vulnerability assessment from partners like Qualys, along with security assessment of Web Apps and Storage accounts.

Azure Key Vault support for certificates

To better secure your cloud resources and data, Azure Key Vault now extends support for certificates helping simplify tasks associated with SSL/TLS certificates. This service helps customers enroll and automatically renew certificates from supported 3rd party Certificate Authorities while providing auditing trails within the same environment. Aligning with our approach to work with industry partners, the following Certificate Authorities are supported at GA: Digicert, Globalsign and WoSign.

General Availability of Encryption Services

With the general availability of following encryption services, we help customers protect and safeguard their data and meet their organizational security and compliance requirements.

With the availability of Azure Disk Encryption for both Windows and Linux Standard VMs, customers can protect and safeguard their OS disk and data disks at REST using industry standard encryption technology.
Two weeks ago, we announced the general availability of Storage service encryption for Azure Blob Storage. For accounts that have encryption enabled, data will be encrypted using Microsoft managed keys using the industry leading Encryption algorithm, 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256).

Management from the cloud

Cloud intelligence and cloud scale, gives you new options when it comes to management. As you take advantage of the agility of Azure, you need to closely monitor and analyze the utilization and performance of your Azure resources. Today, we announced the preview of Azure Monitor, which provides better insights by enabling you to collect performance and utilization data, activity and diagnostics logs, and notifications from your Azure resources. With workloads on-premises, in Azure or spanning both, you need a unified view and the tools to drill down deep when required. Delivered from Azure, Operations Management Suite gives you a comprehensive hybrid cloud management platform. With Azure Monitor and Operations Management Suite Insight & Analytics, all data from your workloads and applications in Azure, on-premises, in AWS, and on VMware is now at your fingertips.

Empowering the IT cloud journey

While we’re committed to continuous innovation to deliver the world leading cloud platform, staying abreast of rapidly changing technologies can be difficult. Microsoft is therefore providing free resources to help IT Professionals through your cloud career journey, from planning your career path to getting started with Azure to hands-on practice with the latest cloud technology.

Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials program will help you get started with $300 Azure credits, a free support incident, free Pluralsight courses and certification discounts. Today we are expanding availability of the Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials and IT Pro Career Center programs to 25 languages.
Microsoft IT Pro Career Center can help you navigate the skills needed to transition to a cloud role. 
Microsoft Tech Community provides a modern digital community where you can ask questions, exchange ideas, and build connections with Microsoft Valued Professionals (MVPs), Microsoft engineers and peers.  Finally, to stay current with the latest Microsoft cloud technologies subscribe to the Microsoft Mechanics YouTube channel for weekly IT focused videos.

I strongly believe that these investments and innovations on Azure are contributing in a significant way to business transformation. I thank you for being a part of Azure’s incredible growth and am very interested in hearing your feedback on the new releases we have on Azure!
Quelle: Azure

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Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server now GA

Enterprises today need to walk a fine line between innovation and delivering reliable services. Firms need to be able to rapidly create and run mission critical enterprise applications that have the potential to capture new areas of growth for the organization, creating the opportunity to increase their exposure in the market and meeting changing customer needs. At the same time, system reliability is equally important since application downtime has a real cost to a business’s reputation, finances, and customer loyalty. For example, customers expect an online banking or e-commerce site to be up and running any time of day across any browser, device, or app. A company that doesn’t meet these 24/7 availability expectations and needs is at risk of losing customers to their competitors. Increasingly, businesses are turning to the cloud to develop and manage their applications at scale and with high availability.

Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric, our microservices application platform for developing and managing cloud-scale applications, was released last year to help developers build and manage cloud-scale applications.

I am excited to announce today that Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server will be generally available for download at no cost. With today’s announcement, customers can now provision Service Fabric clusters in their own data centers or other cloud providers and run production workloads with the option to purchase support for ultimate confidence. One such customer is Owners.com, an online platform that gives consumers a convenient and cost-effective way to buy or sell a home.

"Our on-premise installation of Azure Service Fabric is a robust and highly scalable platform on which we've been able to build very complex software as a collection of easily manageable modules.  This new paradigm of service development allows us to rapidly develop, test, and deploy (with zero downtime), all while meeting tight SLAs for our production environment." Marion Denny, Director of Engineering at Owners.com

We unveiled Service Fabric preview on Linux earlier this month, furthering our vision to enable developers to build Service Fabric applications on the OS of their choice and run them wherever they want. Battle-hardened internally at Microsoft for almost a decade, Service Fabric has been powering highly scalable services like Cortana, Intune, Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, and Azure’s infrastructure. We’ve seen tremendous response from our customers and great momentum since our recent GA at Build 2016.

Azure Service Fabric allows the creation of clusters on any machine running Windows Server or Linux which means that you can deploy and run Service Fabric applications in any environment that contains a set of interconnected computers, be it on-premises or with any cloud provider. Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server enables you to create clusters on Windows Server machines, particularly focused on running Service Fabric in your data centers. This means you get benefits such as:

Using data center resources you already own and developing microservice architectures on premise before moving to the cloud.
You can choose to create clusters on other cloud providers.
Service Fabric applications, can be deployed to any cluster with minimal to no changes. This can provider an added layer of reliability because you can move your applications to another deployment environment.
Developer knowledge of building Service Fabric applications and the operational experience of running and managing Service Fabric clusters carries over from one hosting environment to another.

We’re excited that with our continuous updates to Service Fabric, more businesses can take advantage of our innovations to develop and power their applications. Learn more about how to get started with Service Fabric.
Quelle: Azure

da Agency

Announcing the public preview of Azure Monitor

Today we are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Monitor, a new service making inbuilt monitoring available to all Azure users. This preview release builds on some of the monitoring capabilities that already exist for Azure resources. With Azure Monitor, you can consume metrics and logs within the portal and via APIs to gain more visibility into the state and performance of your resources. Azure Monitor provides you the ability to configure alert rules to get notified or to take automated actions on issues impacting your resources. Azure Monitor enables analytics, troubleshooting, and a unified dashboarding experience within the portal, in addition to enabling a wide range of product integrations via APIs and data export options. In this blog post, we will take a quick tour of Azure Monitor and discuss some of the product integrations.

Quick access to all monitoring tasks

With Azure Monitor, you can explore and manage all your common monitoring tasks from a single place in the portal. To access Azure Monitor, click on the Monitor tab in the Azure portal. You can find Activity logs, metrics, diagnostics logs, and alert rules as well as quick links to the advanced monitoring and analytics tools. Azure Monitor provides these three types of data – Activity Log, Metrics, and Diagnostics Logs.

Activity Log

Operational issues are often caused by a change in the underlying resource. Activity Log keeps track of all the operations performed on your Azure resources. You can use the Activity Log section in the portal to quickly search and identify operations that may impact your application. Another valuable feature of the portal is the ability to pin Activity log queries on your dashboard to keep a tab on the operations you are interested in. For example, you can pin a query that filters Error level events and keep track of their count in the dashboard. You can also perform instant analytics on Activity Log via Log Analytics, part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS).

Metrics

With the new Metrics tab, you can browse all the available metrics for any resource and plot them on charts. When you find a metric that you are interested in, creating an alert rule is just a single click away. Most Azure services now provide out-of-the-box, platform-level metrics at 1-minute granularity and 30-day data retention, without the need for any diagnostics setup. The list of supported resources and metrics is available here. These metrics can be accessed via the new REST API for direct integration with 3rd party monitoring tools.

Diagnostics logs

Many Azure services provide diagnostics logs, which contain rich information about operations and errors that are important for auditing as well as troubleshooting purposes. In the new Diagnostic logs tab, you can manage diagnostics configuration for your resources and select your preferred method of consuming this data.

Alerts & automated actions

Azure Monitor provides you the data to quickly troubleshoot issues. But you want to be proactive and fix issues before it impacts your customers. With Alert rules, you can get notified whenever a metric crosses a threshold. You can receive email notifications or kick off an Automation-runbook script or webhook to fix the issue automatically. You can also configure your own metrics using custom metrics and events APIs to send data to Azure Monitor pipeline and create alert rules on them. With the ability to create alerts rules on platform, custom and app-level metrics, you now have more control on your resources. You can learn more about alert rules here.

Single monitoring dashboard

Azure provides you a unique single dashboard experience to visualize all your platform telemetry, application telemetry, analytics charts and security monitoring. You can share these dashboards with others on your team or clone a dashboard to build new ones.

Extensibility

The portal is a convenient way to get started with Azure Monitor. However, if you have a lot of Azure resources and want to automate the Azure Monitor setup you may want to use a Resource Manager template, PowerShell, CLI, or REST API. Also, if you want to manage access permissions to your monitoring settings and data look at the monitoring roles.

Product integrations

You may have the need to consume Azure Monitor data but want to analyze it in in your favorite monitoring tool. This is where the product integrations come into play – you can route the Azure Monitor data to the tool of your choice in near real-time. Azure Monitor enables you to easily stream metrics and diagnostic logs to OMS Log Analytics to perform custom log search and advanced alerting on the data across resources and subscriptions. Azure Monitor metrics and logs for Web Sites and VMs can be easily routed to Visual Studio Application Insights, unlocking deep application performance management within the Azure portal.

The product integrations go beyond what you see in the portal. Our partners bring additional monitoring experiences, which you may wish to take advantage of. We are excited to share that there is a growing list of partner services available on Azure to best serve your needs. Please visit the supported product integrations list and give us feedback.

To wrap up, Azure Monitor helps you bring together the monitoring data from all your Azure resources and combine it with the monitoring tool of your choice to get a holistic view of your application. Here is a snapshot of a sample dashboard that we use to monitor one of our applications running on Azure. We are excited to launch Azure Monitor and looking forward to the dashboards that you build. Review the Azure Monitor documentation to get started and please keep the feedback coming.

Quelle: Azure