Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

JSON support is generally available in Azure SQL Database

We are happy to announce that you can now query and store both relational and textual data formatted in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) using Azure SQL Database. Azure SQL Database provides simple built-in functions that read data from JSON text, transform JSON text into table, and format data from SQL tables as JSON.

You can use JSON functions that enable you to extract value from JSON text (JSON_VALUE), extract object from JSON (JSON_QUERY), update some value in JSON text (JSON_MODIFY), and verify that JSON text is properly formatted (ISJSON). OPENJSON function enables you to convert JSON text into a table structure. Finally, JSON functionalities enable you to easily format results of any SQL query as JSON text using the FOR JSON clause.

What can you do with JSON?

JSON in Azure SQL Database enables you to build and exchange data with modern web, mobile, and HTM5/JavaScript single-page applications, NoSql stores such as Azure DocumentDB that contain data formatted as JSON, and to analyze logs and messages collected from different systems and services. Now you can easily integrate your Azure SQL Database with any service that uses JSON.

Easily expose your data to modern frameworks and services

Do you use services that exchange data in JSON format, such as REST services or Azure App Services? Do you have components or frameworks that use JSON, such as Angular JS, ReactJS, D3, or JQuery? With new JSON functionalities, you can easily format data stored in Azure SQL Database as JSON and expose it to any modern service or application.

Easy ingestion of JSON data

Are you working with mobile devices or sensors, services that produce JSON such as Azure Stream Analytics or Application Insight, or systems that store data in JSON format such as Azure DocumentDB or MongoDB? Do you need to query and analyze JSON data using well-known SQL language or tools that work with Azure SQL Database? Now, you can easily ingest JSON data and store it into Azure SQL Database, and use any language or tool that works with Azure SQL Database to query and analyze loaded information.

Simplify your data models

Do you need to store and query both relational and semi-structured data in your database? Do you need to simplify your data models like in NoSQL data platforms? Now you can combine structured relational data with schema-less data stored as JSON text in the same table. In Azure SQL Database you can use the best approaches both from relational and NoSQL worlds to tune your data model. Azure SQL Database enables you to query both relational and JSON data with the standard Transact-SQL language. Applications and tools would not see any difference between values taken from table columns and the values extracted from JSON text.

Next steps

To learn how to integrate JSON in your application, check out our Getting Started page or Channel 9 video. To learn about various scenarios that show how to integrate JSON in your application, see demos in this Channel 9 video or find some scenario that might be interesting for your use case in these JSON Blog posts.

Stay tuned because we will constantly add new JSON features and make JSON support even better.
Quelle: Azure

Why enterprises trust Azure with their apps and data

It takes a lot to earn the trust of enterprise IT, and rightly so: software runs the operations of almost every business around the world. For Microsoft, earning your trust has been a multi-decade investment, not something we started after we got into the cloud business. Everything we’ve done to earn your trust over the years we have applied to Azure.

At Microsoft, security, privacy, and compliance considerations have been baked into the development process for a very long time – it’s core to our culture. The Secure Development Lifecycle, an open methodology which developers can use to help them build more secure software, was invented at Microsoft over a decade ago and has been adopted broadly, across industries: safer software helps everybody.

Of the nearly $12 billion Microsoft spent on research and development last year, $1 billion was focused on our cybersecurity efforts. Because so many individuals and businesses rely on Microsoft, we feel a great responsibility here; and we have a distinct vantage point. As Ann Johnson, VP of our enterprise cybersecurity team, writes, “Microsoft has a unique position in cybersecurity. Because of the massive scale of information that Microsoft processes, for example, billions of device updates and hundreds of billions of emails and authentications, we’re able to synthesize threat data far faster than your organization could ever do it alone.”

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (pictured) works with attorneys and law enforcement around the globe to catch digital criminals. They use sophisticated analytics and visualization tools, running in Azure, of course.

Thinking about regulatory compliance like HIPAA, PCI, FedRamp, and hundreds of other standards in other countries, Microsoft has more certifications than any other cloud provider, and is continually adding more. Check out my colleague Alice Rison’s frequent updates on the Azure blog.

We’re continually researching new technologies to further advance the state of the art in digital security and privacy. For example, with homomorphic encryption, it’s possible to perform operations on data while never decrypting it, and you can download open-source code from Microsoft Research to try it today. And Microsoft’s work in post-quantum cryptography helps ensure that security can be maintained even when, in the future, quantum computers are able to break the RSA cryptosystem, the standard today.

The point? Microsoft has your back.

Is it any wonder then that enterprises increasingly are turning to Azure? Two important studies, one from infrastructure security firm Hytrust and another from Cowen & Company, both show the majority of you are thinking about Azure. In particular, Cowen’s showed that seventy-three percent of you are expecting to adopt Azure in the next year to 18 months.

We appreciate your confidence! We’ll have a lot more to say about security, and a wide array of other topics, at Ignite on September 24-26 in Atlanta. If you can’t make it, be sure to save the date and watch online.
Quelle: Azure

PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

Today’s customers live in a multi-platform, multi-cloud, multi-OS world – that’s just reality. This world brings new challenges and customers need tools to make everything work together. Microsoft is working company-wide to deliver management tools that empower customers to manage any platform, from anywhere, on any device, using Linux or Windows. This shift to a more open, customer-obsessed approach to deliver innovation is one of the things that makes me most excited to come to work every day.

You’ve heard Satya Nadella say “Microsoft loves Linux” and that’s never been more true than now. Nearly one in three VMs on Azure are Linux. Nearly 60 percent of third-party IaaS offers in the Azure Marketplace are open source software (OSS). We have forged strong industry partners to extend choice to our customers. We’ve announced SQL Server on Linux, as well as open sourced .NET. We added Bash to Windows 10 to make it a great platform for developing OSS. And, we’re active contributors and participants to numerous open source projects (e.g. OpenSSH, FreeBS, Mesos, Docker, Linux and many more) across the industry.

Today, we are taking the next step in our journey. I am extremely excited to share that PowerShell is open sourced and available on Linux. (For those of you who need a refresher, PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language built on the .NET Framework to help IT professionals control and automate the administration of the Windows, and now Linux, operating systems and the applications that run on them.) I’m going to share a bit more about our journey getting here, and will tell you how Microsoft Operations Management Suite can enhance the PowerShell experience.

The journey to opening up PowerShell

Let’s start the journey to PowerShell on Linux, and an open sourced version with a story…

My customer was upset.

Early in the days of Monad (before it was PowerShell), I gave a demo to an executive of a large customer. He loved it but now he was angry with me.

He had asked me in what language it was implemented and was unhappy with my answer: C#. Confused, I asked why that was a problem. “Because” he told me, “Monad is exactly the right approach and I want to standardize my entire company on it, but I can’t because .NET is not available on Linux!”

In the past, Microsoft’s business focus meant that .NET, and thus PowerShell, were only available on Windows. But this is a new Microsoft. Satya’s leadership and Azure have shifted us to a more open, customer-centric, mindset captured perfectly in this photo:

Microsoft wants to earn customers’ preference as the platform for running all their workloads – Linux as well as Windows. This new thinking empowered the .NET team to port .NET Core to Linux and that in turn, enabled PowerShell to port to Linux as well. PowerShell on Linux is now designed to enable customers to use the same tools, and the same people, to manage everything from anywhere. It is initially available on Ubuntu, Centos, as well as Red Hat, and also runs on Mac OS X. More platforms will be added in the future. You can download Alpha builds and check out the source code from GitHub.

Now, users across Windows and Linux, current and new PowerShell users, even application developers can experience a rich interactive scripting language as well as a heterogeneous automation and configuration management that works well with your existing tools. Your PowerShell skills are now even more marketable, and your Windows and Linux teams, who may have had to work separately, can now work together more easily.

So, where are we in this journey? We are in the beginning stages and in learning mode. We started by open sourcing small portions of PowerShell and talking to a number of our partners who were experienced with open source to understand what it took to succeed. What we learned, is that it is critical that individual users can use Git to checkout code, make changes, compile everything on their machines and run all the tests to verify that their change didn’t break anything. This required a large investment in our engineering/build/test systems. We also worked to define a governance model so we had clear roles, responsibilities, and processes so that community contributions could be smoothly incorporated into the product.

The PowerShell team has always prided itself on being a very community focused team but this announcement takes it to the next level by making the source code available and by adopting an open source development model where we can enjoy a deeper connection with the community in RFCs, issues and accept contributions directly. We also needed to extend our community since open source, like so many things, takes a village and that village is key to a great experience! We are partnering with third party companies – Chef, Amazon Web Services, VMware, and Google to name a few – to create a rich, seamless experience across the platforms you know and use.

As we port PowerShell to Linux, we are making sure that we are a first class citizen on that platform. We fit in well with the architecture, idioms and existing tools. This was pretty easy as most of the original PowerShell team had deep Unix backgrounds and that shows in our design. There were a number of little changes that we made and two big things:

We created a PowerShell Editor Service. This allow users to choose from a range of editors (VS Code and Sublime with others to follow) and get a great PowerShell authoring experience with Intellisense, debugging, etc.
We will be extending the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (MS-PSRP) to use OpenSSH as a native transport. Users will have the option to use SSH or WINRM as a transport.

The initial release is an “alpha” and is community supported. In the future, we will deliver an official Microsoft released version of PowerShell based on open source to anyone running a supported version of Windows or *nix. The timing of the official Microsoft version will be based upon community input and business needs. We hope all of you will help us get it right!

Extending the PowerShell experience with Microsoft Operations Management Suite

I also want to tell you more about how today’s PowerShell news extends what you can do with our cloud management solution, Operations Management Suite (OMS). OMS gives you visibility and control of your applications and workloads across Azure and other clouds. Integral to this, it enables customers to transform their cloud experience when using PowerShell on both Linux and Windows Server. OMS Automation elevates PowerShell and Desired State Configuration (DSC) with a highly available and scalable management service from Azure. You can graphically author and manage all PowerShell resources including runbooks, DSC configurations and DSC node configurations from one place.

With OMS hybrid runbook worker, you can extend your OMS Automation capability and apply, monitor and update configurations anywhere, including on-premises. Today we also made the OMS monitoring agent for Linux generally available. Together, customers can gain rich insights and real-time visibility into their Linux workloads, and the power to quickly remediate any issues that may arise.

We hope that all of you will take the time to test drive PowerShell on Linux and let us know what you think! You can also learn more about OMS Automation here. And, be sure to check us out at LinuxCon next week. Wim Coekaerts will be giving a keynote address, we’ll have a booth where we’ll be showing PowerShell, and I’ll be doing a session that will be packed with demos.

If you are new to PowerShell, a great way to start learning is with our Learning PowerShell repository on GitHub. We also offer a free Microsoft Virtual Academy online course: Getting Started with PowerShell 3.0 Jump Start. You’ll want to join/participate in the PowerShell Community at powershell.org/ and follow the PowerShell Team blog. We’ll be updating these to meet the needs of the Linux community (e.g. examples) in the near future.

This has been a long time coming and it is going to be a lot of fun so please join us so that together we can produce a tool that knocks our socks off every time we use it.

Quelle: Azure

Cloud-first, mobile-first: Microsoft moves to a fully wireless network

Supporting a network in transition: Q&A blog series with David Lef

In a series of blog posts, this being the third, David Lef, Principal Network Architect at Microsoft IT, chats with us about supporting a network as it transitions from a traditional infrastructure to a fully wireless #cloud computing platform. Microsoft IT is responsible for supporting 900 locations and 220,000 users around the world. David is helping to define the evolution of the network topology to a cloud-based model in Azure that supports changing customer demands and modern application designs.

David Lef explains the planning and processes behind migrating to a wireless networking environment, including primary drivers, planning considerations, and challenges.

Q: Can you explain your role and the environment you support?

A: My role at Microsoft is Principal Network Architect with Microsoft IT. My team supports almost 900 sites around the world and the networking components that connect those sites, which are used by a combination of over 220,000 Microsoft employees and vendors that work on our behalf. Our network supports over 2,500 individual applications and business processes. We are responsible for providing wired, wireless, and remote network access for the organization, implementing network security across our network, including our network edges. We make sure that the nuts and bolts of network functionality work as they should: IP addressing, name resolution, traffic management, switching, routing, and so on.

Q: What is driving the shift toward a wireless environment?

A: For Microsoft, it’s two main things: first, our employees want flexibility in the way they get their work done. Our users don’t simply use a workstation at a desk to do their jobs anymore. They’re using their phone, their tablet, their laptop, and their desktop computer, if they have one. It’s evolved into a devices ecosystem rather than a single productivity device, and most of those devices support wireless. In fact, most of them support only wireless. The second motivator is simple cost effectiveness. It’s cheaper and simpler to set up and install a wireless environment than it is to do the same with wired infrastructure. It also makes upgrades and additions to the networking environment easier and cheaper. With wireless, there are no switch stacks to add and no cables to run.

Q: How did you begin planning for this?

A: When Microsoft started accepting and supporting mobile devices connecting to the corporate network, it was clear that the way our network was accessed was going to change. We initially planned to provide wireless support to the physical locations that needed it the most as a support for our wired infrastructure. However, traffic and use analysis showed that the wireless network was very quickly becoming our main network infrastructure, from a user’s perspective. We knew that wireless needed to be there to support mobile devices, and we knew we had to plan for the wireless network to support most of our end-user connectivity, eventually. We looked at the device profiles across our information worker roles to assess what was necessary, and we built out a network to meet that demand and make sure that it scales well with future growth.

We had, and still have, a lot of wired infrastructure that simply isn’t being used to its potential. At many of our information worker sites, wired port utilization is less than 10 percent. If you average it out across all of our user sites, it’s closer to thirty percent, but when you do the math, it still ends up being a lot of investment in network infrastructure that simply isn’t necessary. Over seventy-five percent of our sites are targeted for wireless-first, and we’ve been going through the process of removing dependencies on the wired network infrastructure from a user perspective. In some cases, that means putting wireless network adapters into desktop computers that don’t natively support wireless, and simply making sure wireless connectivity is enabled and configured on those devices that do support it. The more complete we can make the transition to wireless in terms of number of devices, the sooner we can retire the existing wired infrastructure and realize the cost savings from it. We estimate that our wireless-first strategy will result in a reduction in network equipment of more than fifty percent.

Q: What are your key considerations in this project?

A: It’s driven primarily from the high-level goal of cloud first, mobile first. Wireless networking simply complements both of these strategies; it’s a logical and necessary part of the larger puzzle. We are a business, of course, so cost and capital cost savings are important. Migration to wireless as our primary network infrastructure means long-term cost avoidance, less equipment to buy, and decreased maintenance requirements.

We also want the transition to be as non-intrusive as possible to our users. We’re going on-site to make sure they’re ready for the transition to wireless. This might mean helping users install or configure wireless adapters and showing them how to perform tasks, such as installing an operating system, differently. We also want to educate them about using the network and get them comfortable with being their own first level of support and solving basic issues they might encounter.

Q: What have been or will be the biggest challenges in making this work?

A: We’ve run into some challenges in a few different areas. Different devices and their drivers have their peculiarities and issues, whether that’s with a new wireless adapter we’re putting into an existing computer or access and authentication mechanisms for devices that use older wireless network hardware. We also have a lot of wireless access points around the globe, so standardization of those access points has been a challenge. With the advent of bring your own device (BYOD) and the emergence of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), many more wirelessly networked devices are showing up in our environment, and bandwidth is always a concern. A big part of managing this trend is realizing that not all IoT devices need to be included in our corporate network—only those that will benefit from the functionality that the corporate network enables. We’re providing the highest level of wireless bandwidth that we can, as far as supporting devices and meeting transmission standards, but we’re still closely monitoring bandwidth availability to ensure that we’re eliminating any unnecessary bottlenecks.

We’ve also had to address some changes in processes and conceptions. In some cases, older technology that’s in use doesn’t work with wireless, so we have to show users how to do tasks differently, or give them an alternative method.

Q: Is the technology available today to make this successful?

A: Yes, and we’re in the process of rolling out 802.11ac, which gives us more capabilities and bandwidth across our wireless infrastructure. We’ve also committed to having 802.11ac fully implemented before we begin any mandated removal of our existing wired infrastructure. We want to ensure that our wireless network can provide our users a satisfactory level of reliability and performance before we start removing the old way of connecting.

We’re continually rolling out upgrades and changes to our infrastructure to implement 802.11ac, but it also means making sure that existing equipment that our users employ isn’t being removed from the network inadvertently. Whether we provide an 802.11ac-compatible solution or simply replace the device itself, we’re very conscious of reducing the negative impact of the change on our users.

Q: What is the roadmap for pilot and implementation of this project?

A: It’s already in place and underway. The pilot project has been closed and we have 660 sites targeted for wireless infrastructure updates and conversion in the next 24 months. The other 200 or so will retain wired functionality—these are datacenters, engineering centers, or locations where our customers or users might still require wired connectivity. In the grand scheme of things, we’ll be cutting over 90 percent of our end-user network infrastructure. Wired ports will still be available where they are needed, but our footprint and associated resources needed to support it will be massively reduced.

Learn more

Other blog posts in this series:

Supporting network architecture that enables modern work styles
Engineering the move to cloud-based services

Learn how Microsoft IT is evolving its network architecture.
Quelle: Azure