Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Microsoft named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide MLOps Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment

We’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment. Microsoft holds a deep understanding of MLOps market trends, strong customer adoption, broad partner ecosystem, and continued product investments in building a differentiated MLOps platform.

The report cited several key strengths including product and business capabilities across the entire machine learning (ML) lifecycle as well as an expansive customer footprint and partner network. 

"Microsoft provides a wide array of enterprise-grade MLOps tools for quality and compliance that can augment any ML development environment on-premises, across clouds, or in a hybrid cloud environment." —IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Machine Learning Operations Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment

Source: "IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Machine Learning Operations Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment", By: Kathy Lange, Raghunandhan Kuppuswamy, and David Schubmehl, December 2022, IDC #US48325822.

Do more with less with MLOps on Azure

While machine learning becomes more mainstream across industries, there are many challenges like data governance, security, data compliance, and auditability that companies need to consider when productionizing machine learning models. These organizations look to a unified machine learning platform to manage the entire ML lifecycle to bring models to production faster and at scale, improving operational efficiencies of data science teams with MLOps. At Microsoft, we consider MLOps as a philosophy rather than a product and, as such, our approach incorporates people, processes, and platform to deliver continuous value with fewer resources for machine learning. MLOps bring benefits to organizations by automating repeatable actions, facilitating collaboration across teams, and ensuring full visibility and reproducibility into the end-to-end ML lifecycle.

Azure Machine Learning helps data scientists and ML engineers streamline training, deployment, and management of thousands of models across on-premises, multicloud, and even at the edge using native MLOps capabilities such as model registry, CI/CD pipelines with deep integration with Azure DevOps and GitHub, managed online endpoints for real-time inference, and experiment tracking and lineage with MLflow. PepsiCo has been using MLOps capabilities in Azure Machine Learning to automate model creation and deployment and analyze store customer data to respond to customer demand more efficiently. In fact, they have succeeded in eliminating 4,300 days of manual work a year.

Enhance collaboration across the organization

We believe machine learning is a team sport that requires collaboration across people with a different range of skill sets, such as data scientists, machine learning engineers, and IT admins. One of the key features mentioned in the report is that Azure Machine Learning enables greater collaboration across multiple data science teams through registries. Registries in Azure Machine Learning are organization-wide repositories of machine learning assets: models, environments, and components. Registries make multi-environment MLOps easier by helping teams share and reuse models developed in a different workspace, by a different team without manually copying them over.

Another feature that fosters collaboration between data scientists and business professionals is the Responsible AI dashboard and scorecard, a single interface to help organizations implement Responsible AI in practice effectively and efficiently. The Responsible AI scorecard helps contextualize the model and data health insights with both technical and non-technical audiences, bringing stakeholders along as well as assisting in compliance reviews. Microsoft is committed to accelerating our innovations in Responsible AI.

Microsoft is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide MLOps Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment, and we are excited by innovations happening at Microsoft and across the industry that empower data scientists and machine learning engineers to fully operationalize the ML lifecycle. You can read and learn from the report excerpt.

Learn more

Explore other analyst reports for Azure AI.
Read the latest feature announcements from Azure Machine Learning on the Tech Community blog.
Download an excerpt of the IDC Marketscape Worldwide MLOps Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment to learn why Microsoft is named a Leader.

 

 

About the graphic:

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market, and business execution in the short term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral, or minus next to the vendor name.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Native NGINXaas makes traffic management secure and simple—now generally available

Continuing Microsoft Azure’s commitment to empower our ISV partners and customers to adopt and modernize their application of choice and run in the cloud, we are excited to announce general availability (GA) of the NGINXaaS offering on Azure.

In facilitating the cloud transformation journey for cloud architects, developers, IT professionals, and business decision makers who are all working towards their digital transformations, we are expanding on our more than a decade of partnership with F5, the company behind NGINX to provide a deeper integration of NGINX into the Azure ecosystem.

NGINX provides load balancing, traffic management, and security tools for users to configure and manage the incredibly complex make-up of the architectures traffic patterns on their cloud and on-premises environments.

“We are excited to expand our Azure ecosystem with the General availability of NGINX for Azure. This strategic partnership with F5 immediately brings together the power of Azure and NGINX’s application delivery expertise to give our developers and customers more native options on Azure.”—Julia Liuson President, Microsoft Developer Division.

Do more with less

Based on inputs from customers in the Open Source world and other users of the NGINX offering, we worked with F5 to simplify the infrastructure management and provide a seamless experience by integrating the deployment, billing, and support of the NGINX solution on the Azure cloud platform, available via the Azure Marketplace.

By taking the management burden away from the user as part of the managed offering, the customer can now focus on the core elements of their business while the custodians of the NGINX and Azure offering bring our strengths to provide a fully managed, secure, and reliable NGINX offering on Azure.

The deep integration into the Azure Control plane also provides another layer of optimization by promoting all the latest relevant features from the Azure Platform to be automatically available to this service.

Deploying and managing load balancer and traffic manager on Azure

The service integrates the NGINX offering into the Azure Control plane. Through this integration, customers can provision a new NGINX service and configure their Azure resources to seamlessly extend workloads to the cloud and deliver secure and high-performance applications using the familiar and trusted load balancing solution. This gives the user consistency in performance and security across their ecosystem via a one-click deployment. In addition, the customers can manage all of the advanced traffic management features they demand, including JSON Web Token authentication and integrated security, to name a few.

Lift and shift from existing deployments

The integrated offering makes it very easy to migrate application delivery from on-premises to Azure cloud. Enterprises and users can now lift and shift apps to Azure cloud seamlessly by bringing their own or existing configurations of NGINX and deploying them from the Azure portal or Marketplace. Users can then configure advanced traffic management and security, leverage state-of-the-art monitoring capabilities, and port custom configurations.

Unified experience

Build end-to-end traffic management solutions with a unified experience. This service gives the user consistency in performance and security across their portfolio of on-premises and Azure cloud apps by using the same load balancing solution and configurations everywhere via the one-click step deployment.

Secure deployments

The ability to control traffic via virtual networks is a critical consideration for our customers. With this integration, users can seamlessly manage configurations between their own virtual network and the NGINX Cloud virtual network via a custom solution leveraging service, Injection. This is further complemented with unified billing for the NGINX service through Azure subscription invoicing.

Getting started with Azure Native NGINX Service:

Discovery and procuring: Azure customers can find the service listed on Azure Marketplace and review the different purchasing plans offered, and purchase it directly with single billing enabled.

Provisioning the NGINX resources: Within several clicks, you can deploy NGINX service in your desired subscription and datacenter regions with your preferred plan.

In Azure Portal experience: Configure the NGINX Networking components:

Configuring logs and metrics: Customers can determine which Azure resource logs and metrics are sent to the NGINX resource.

Learn more

Introducing F5 NGINX for Azure: An Azure Native SaaS Solution for Modern App Delivery.
A Comprehensive Guide to F5 NGINX for Azure: How to get the most out of Azure Native SaaS Solution for Modern App Delivery.
Introducing F5 NGINX for Azure.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Azure Load Testing is now generally available

This blog has been coauthored by Ashish Shah, Partner Director of Engineering, Azure Developer Experience.

We are announcing the general availability of Azure Load Testing. Azure Load Testing is a fully managed load-testing service that enables you to generate high-scale load, gain-actionable insights, and ensure the resiliency of your applications and services regardless of where they're hosted. Developers, testers, and engineering teams can use it to optimize application performance, scalability, or capacity.

Get started with Azure Load Testing now, by quickly creating a load test for your web application by using a URL. If you already have load tests leveraging JMeter, you can easily get started by reusing existing Apache JMeter test scripts.

Building resiliency testing into developer workflows

Our goal at Microsoft is to help developers do more with less effort. When performance, scalability, or resiliency issues are identified in production or even close to production they can be extremely difficult and costly to resolve. With Azure Load Testing developers can catch issues closer to code authoring time as part of their developer workflows saving them valuable time and energy.

“As part of our quality shift left initiatives, the Cloud Ecosystem Security teams were able to prevent multiple unique load related bugs from reaching production by gating production builds using Azure Load Testing as part of our CI/CD pipeline. The service teams have also combined the load from Azure Load Testing with fault injection scenarios from Azure Chaos Studio to replicate, root cause and prevent non happy path scenarios that are hard to catch using regular testing frameworks. Along with service resiliency validation, Azure Load Testing has helped uncover the bounds of the distributed system and saved us costs by eliminating unused resources and frameworks.”—Microsoft Cloud Ecosystem Security engineering team

“The Azure Synapse team uses Azure Load Testing to generate different levels of workloads from high concurrency to large input data sequential execution targeting Synapse SQL Serverless endpoints. With the flexibility of JMeter we can start/stop other services within a cluster that can inject different failures, thus truly testing the resiliency of our service.”—Microsoft Azure Synapse engineering team

Pay only for what you need

Optimize your infrastructure while ensuring your application and services are resilient to severe spikes in customer traffic. Leverage Azure Load Testing to optimize your infrastructure before production, planning for the customer traffic you are expecting, paying only for what you need. Then leverage Azure Load Testing to test for unplanned increases in load.

Figure 1: Easily scale load in Azure Load Testing to check the resiliency of your applications and services.

Regression testing

For Azure-based applications, Azure Load Testing collects detailed resource metrics to help you identify performance bottlenecks across your Azure application components. You can automate regression testing by running load tests as part of your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow.

 

Figure 2: Build Load Testing into your developer workflow with pass/fail criteria.

Azure-specific insights can help you understand how different load scenarios impact all the parts of your application, and you can compare test results across different load tests to understand behavior changes over time.

Azure Load Testing creates monitoring data using Azure Monitor, including Application insights and Container insights, to capture details from the Azure services. Depending on the type of service, different metrics are available. For example, the number of database reads, the type of HTTP responses, or container resource consumption. Both client-side and server-side metrics are available in the Azure Load Testing dashboard.

Figure 3: Get performance insights across client and Azure service side metrics with Azure Load Testing.

Enable advanced load testing scenarios

For more advanced load testing scenarios, you can create a JMeter-based load test, a popular open-source load and performance tool. For example, your test plan might consist of multiple application requests, or input data and parameters to make the test more dynamic. And if you already have existing JMeter test scripts you can reuse them to create load tests with Azure Load Testing.

Figure 4: Azure Load Testing architecture overview.

What has changed since preview?

Since we debuted Azure Load Testing, we have enabled several new capabilities based on customer feedback.

Quick test creation

Quick test creation of Azure Load Testing with URL. Quick test creation lets you create a load test without a JMeter script, enabling you to set up, run, and test your URL in less than five minutes.

Azure SDK Load Testing Libraries

.NET Azure Load Testing Library
Java Azure Load Testing Library
JavaScript Azure Load Testing Library
Python Azure Load Testing Library

JMeter capabilities

Support for user specified JMeter properties. Support for user-specified JMeter properties, making load tests more configurable.
Splitting input data across multiple test engines. If you're using CSV data in your JMeter script, you can process the input data in parallel across multiple test engines. Azure Load Testing enables you to configure a test to split the data evenly across all engine instances.

Authentication, user-managed identities, and customer-managed keys

Authenticate with Client Certificates. Azure Load Testing now enables you to authenticate application endpoints which require a client certificate.
Test Private Endpoints or applications hosted on-premises. Azure Load Testing enables you to test private application endpoints or applications that you host on-premises.
System assigned and user-assigned managed identities. Azure Load Testing now supports both system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities.
Customer managed keys. Azure Load Testing support for customer-managed keys.

Additional metrics

Additional Client-side metrics for pass/fail criteria. Azure Load Testing enables you to leverage pass/fail criteria metrics including additional client-side metrics of requests per second and latency.
View load engine metrics. Ability to view engine health metrics to understand the performance of the test engine during the run, enabling confidence in the test results and improve test configuration.

Compliance and regional availability

Azure Load Testing is HITRUST certified.
Azure Load Testing Regional availability. Azure Load Testing is now available in 11 regions; Australia East, East Asia, East US, East US2, North Europe, South Central US, Sweden Central, UK South, West Europe, West US2, and West US3.

Get started with Azure Load Testing

You can get started with Azure Load Testing by creating an Azure Load Testing resource in the Azure portal. Check out the Azure Load Testing documentation and create your first load test.

Learn more about pricing details on the Azure Load Testing pricing page.

Watch the new DevOps Lab episode, "What's new in Azure Load Testing?"

Azure Load Testing on DevOps Lab

​

Figure 5: What’s new in Azure Load Testing with April Edwards and Nikita Nallamothu.

Share your feedback

We’d love to hear from you through our feedback forum.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Cost Management updates—January 2023

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you're spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal.
Recent and pinned views in the Cost analysis preview.
Consistent global pricing for the Microsoft Cloud.
Help shape the future of invoice experiences.
Help shape the future of cost management for cloud services.
What's new in Cost Management Labs.
New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.

Let's dig into the details.

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal

In March, we announced the general availability of the Enterprise Agreement (EA) billing experience in the Azure portal for direct customers working with Microsoft. Now that same experience is generally available for our indirect customers working with partners. All the same EA tools are available from Cost Management and Billing in the Azure portal:

Seamlessly create and manage departments, accounts, and subscriptions.
Manage access to departments, accounts, and subscriptions.
View properties and manage policies, like the ability to view charges and purchase reservations.
View notification contacts for enrollment emails.
View your monthly Azure usage and charges.
Generate and manage API access keys.

Looking beyond account management, you’ll also see new tools to help you monitor and manage costs:

View and download consolidated usage and charges, including options for amortized reservation charges.
Analyze and drill into your costs in the portal or schedule automated exports.
Enable tag inheritance to streamline tag-based cost analysis within your account.
Split shared costs to drive more visibility and accountability throughout the organization with cost allocation.
Configure budgets to get alerted before costs exceed predefined thresholds.

With these updates, EA billing account administrators should start to use the Azure portal for all account management needs. Account management from the EA portal will no longer be available for indirect customers starting on February 20, 2023.

Stay tuned for more updates, including support for indirect partners. To learn more, see EA billing administration on the Azure portal or check out the EA billing administration video series.

Recent and pinned views in the Cost analysis preview

Cost analysis is your tool for interactive analytics and insights. It should be your first stop when you need to explore or get quick answers about your costs. Over the past year, you've seen the addition of new smart views and capabilities, like anomaly detection, that offer more insights and help you understand costs more easily in the Cost analysis preview, but many of you have asked where you should start–in Cost analysis or the Cost analysis preview? Now, you don’t have to choose. The Cost analysis preview lets you decide where to start and remembers which views you use most, helping you jump back in and get the answers you need quicker than ever.

Cost analysis comes with various built-in views that summarize:

Cost of your resources at various levels.
Overarching services spanning all your resources.
Amortized reservation usage.
Cost trends over time.

Cost analysis has two types of views: smart views that offer intelligent insights and more details by default and customizable views you can edit, save, and share to meet your needs. The first time you open the Cost analysis preview, you start with a list of all available cost views.

Smart views open in tabs within the Cost analysis preview, allowing you to switch between views as you investigate issues. To open a second view, select the + to the right of the list of tabs. Customizable views open outside of the tabs in Cost analysis, a customizable view editor.

As you explore the different views, you’ll notice that the Cost analysis preview remembers which views you’ve used in the Recent section. Switch to the All views section to explore all built-in and saved views. If there’s a specific view you’d like quick access to, select Pin to recent from the All views list. You also have quick access rename, subscribe, copy a link to, or delete views from this list.

We encourage you to check out these updates and let us know what you’d like to see next. We’re eager to get your feedback as we continue to evolve the experience for you.

Consistent global pricing for the Microsoft Cloud

Earlier this month, we announced that we are taking several steps to align the pricing of our Microsoft Cloud products (such as, Azure, Microsoft 365) globally, meaning organizations will have consistent pricing reflecting the exchange rate of the local currency to the US dollar (USD). Starting April 1, 2023, pricing for Microsoft Cloud products will be adjusted in the following currencies:

GBP: +9%
DKK, EUR and NOK: +11%
SEK: +15%

In the future, we will assess pricing in local currency as part of a regular twice-a-year cadence, taking into consideration currency fluctuations relative to USD. This will provide increased transparency and predictability globally and move to a pricing model that is most common in our industry.

The Microsoft Cloud continues to be priced competitively, and Microsoft remains deeply committed to the success of its customers and partners. We will continue to invest to enable customers to innovate, consolidate and eliminate operating costs, optimize business performance and efficiency, and provide the foundation for a strong security strategy that customers around the world have come to rely on.

Help shape the future of invoice experiences

Do you view, manage, or pay invoices within the Azure portal or Microsoft 365 admin center? We're exploring new capabilities to improve your invoice experience and would love to get your feedback.

If you are interested in chatting about your experience, please sign up here.

Help shape the future of cost management for cloud services

Are you responsible for purchasing, managing, and optimizing cloud solutions and software for your organization? Does your daily job role involve understanding and monitoring cloud spending, discovering services, acquiring or updating licenses and subscriptions, analyzing resource utilization, or paying invoices?

If so, we’d love to talk to you and learn more about your job role in a 60-minute discussion. Please send an email to CE_UXR@microsoft.com and we will get back to you.

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Microsoft Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

New: Remember preview features across sessions.
Select the preview features you're interested in from the Try preview menu and you'll see them enabled by default the next time you visit the portal. No need to enable this option—preview features will be remembered automatically in the preview portal.
New: Customers view for Cloud Solution Provider partners.
View a breakdown of costs by customer and subscription in the Cost analysis preview. Note this view is only available for CSP billing accounts and billing profiles. You can enable this option from the Try preview menu.
New: Total KPI tooltip.
View additional details about what costs are included in the Cost analysis preview. You can enable this option from the Try Preview menu.
Update: Recent and pinned views in the cost analysis preview—Now available in the public portal.
Show all classic and preview views in the cost analysis preview and streamline navigation by prioritizing recently used and pinned views. You can see this in the Cost Management Labs or by opting in using Try Preview.
Recommendations view.
View a summary of cost recommendations that help you optimize your Azure resources in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Forecast in the cost analysis preview.
Show your forecast cost for the period at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try preview.
Group related resources in the cost analysis preview.
Group related resources, like disks under VMs or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID.
Charts in the cost analysis preview.
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
View cost for your resources.
The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that resource.
Change scope from the menu.
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Microsoft Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal or Microsoft 365 admin center. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud

This month I’ll share a few updates spread across the Microsoft Cloud:

General availability: DR secondary free with SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.
General availability: Arm-based VMs now available in four additional Azure regions.
Preview: License Geo-redundant Disaster Recovery for SQL Managed Instance for free.
Forrester study finds 228 percent ROI when modernizing applications on Azure PaaS.
Microsoft 365 Basic and more.
Microsoft 365 expands data residency offerings.
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform help you do more with less.

New videos and learning opportunities

Sharing a recent Azure Friday video that does a good job of providing an overview of cost management and optimization for Azure:

Managing, reporting, and reducing your costs in Azure (26 minutes).

Follow the Microsoft Cost Management YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Microsoft Cost Management.

Documentation updates

As usual, there were plenty of documentation updates since our last update. Here are a few documents that were updated that you might be interested in:

Group and allocate costs using tag inheritance.
Buy an Azure savings plan.
Microsoft Customer Agreement Azure usage and charges file terms.
Assign roles to Azure Enterprise Agreement service principal names.
Troubleshoot a declined card.
Troubleshoot common Cost Management errors.
30 updates based on your feedback.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from the last couple of months. Don't forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @MSCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Microsoft Cost Management.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Computer Vision AI Software Platform 2022 Vendor Assessment

I am thrilled to announce that Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-purpose Computer Vision AI Software Platform 2022 Vendor Assessment (doc #US49776422, November 2022).

The IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market, and business execution in the short term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3–5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.

Built on a foundation of deep learning and AI research, Azure Cognitive Services for Vision are designed to be flexible and scalable to meet the needs of a wide range of customers. Our Vision services offer a collection of prebuilt and custom APIs for image and video analysis, text recognition, facial recognition, image captioning, model customization, and more, that developers can easily integrate into their applications. We have been actively contributing to the computer vision research community, further advancing the field and encouraging democratization access to cutting-edge computer vision technology.

Where we excelled

The IDC MarketScape report evaluated Microsoft’s strategies and capabilities and positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Category. I believe this recognition is a testament to Microsoft's commitment to deliver cutting-edge, responsible, and customer-centric AI products to organizations of all sizes and across all verticals.

1) Enabling customers with cutting-edge technology

I believe one of the key strengths that sets us apart is our ability to help customers commercialize cutting-edge technology. For example,

Uber uses vision service’s facial recognition to support security.
H&R Block uses text recognition to transform tax returns.
KPMG uses text, image, and video analysis to help banking customers identify financial risks. 
Territorium to build and deliver a remote proctoring platform and verify student identity.

Recent advancements, such as Dall-E and Florence, have solidified Microsoft’s position as a leader in the industry. Additionally, our OCR and Azure Form Recognizer capabilities have been significantly enhanced, supporting over 300 languages and a broad set of pre-built and custom form models including contracts, invoices, W2s, ID documents, receipts, business cards and upgraded handwriting and customization capabilities. We’ll continue to integrate the latest OpenAI language models with our Vision services to enable deep knowledge queries, further advancing our solutions for customers.

2) Responsible AI

I believe responsible AI is another area where we excel. Microsoft is committed to ethical and transparent AI and has implemented robust processes to ensure our products and services align with industry standards and regulations. Our AI principles, which include fairness, reliability, and safety, guide our development and deployment of AI solutions. We recognize that responsible AI is a journey and are not afraid to make changes based on findings and customer feedback. For example, in June 2022, we announced and implemented the new Responsible AI Standard with additional safeguards and fairness testing and tooling, including a new API that helps developers determine whether an image is suitable for facial recognition, and we shared our plan to phase out emotion detection AI to protect sensitive attributes from being misused—including subjecting people to stereotyping, discrimination, and unfair denial of services.

3) Customer and partner ecosystem

I believe our strong customer and partner ecosystem is also a major differentiator. We have a global network of, partners, service providers, and ISVs that trust and rely on our technology to power their businesses. We work closely with them to understand their unique needs and develop tailored solutions that drive measurable results while supporting their ability to experiment, adopt, and scale Vision service offerings.

As computer vision and AI continue to play an increasingly important role in the digital era, we are well-positioned to help organizations of all sizes and across all verticals leverage the power of computer vision to improve productivity, efficiency, safety, sustainability, and inclusivity. From search engine optimization with image captioning to anomaly detection, facial recognition for identity verification, radiology, or autonomous driving, our platform can support a wide range of use cases and deliver insights that drive business value.

I believe being recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape validates our team's efforts to deliver cutting-edge, responsible, and customer-centric solutions. We will continue to invest in R&D and work closely with our customers and partners to drive the next generation of AI-powered innovation.

Learn more about how Azure AI and Computer Vision lead the way

For more information, please review the IDC MarketScape: General-Purpose Computer Vision AI Software Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment and discover how our platform can help your organization unleash the power of computer vision. 
Quelle: Azure

Lessons learned optimizing Microsoft’s internal use of Azure

At Microsoft, we learned a lot from moving our internal operations to Microsoft Azure, lessons we use to make our cloud products work better for our customers. As a top user of Azure, we understand our customers’ obstacles and constraints. Just like them, we’re under pressure to "do more with less" in these challenging fiscal times. As such, we're sharing our story of first migrating to Azure, and then optimizing our usage to bring our costs down. Our goal is to help our customers do the same—help them migrate to the cloud, optimize their cloud costs, and strategically invest in projects to boost their growth.

“It’s exciting to talk about our own IT journey, our migration, our optimization, [and] how we’re reinvesting in the different types of solutions that are possible within the cloud, compared to how we did things before." —Pete Apple, Principal TPM Architect at Microsoft

After helping Microsoft migrate to Azure, Apple is now spending his time helping the company get more out of being on the cloud. "We continue to shift [how] we think about the technology, the processes, the ways that we enable our internal customers and our employees to be successful in their day-to-day work and have less friction," Apple says.

Being Microsoft’s customer zero

Many people think we get all our Microsoft technology and solutions for free, but that’s not the case when it comes to Microsoft Azure—we pay full price for it, just like any customer.

“When I talk to customers, they’re always a little bit surprised to hear that we pay the same rates for Azure that they do. We operate with the same licensing, the same pricing, which is really, really important. This informs the role we play as customer zero, when we’re having our own experiences with Azure. We work on improvements with the product group—before our customers can possibly have a bad experience." — Heather Pfluger, General Manager of Infrastructure & Engineering in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience.

Paying full price keeps the pressure on Pfluger’s team to be as efficient as possible with the company’s internal use of Azure. “Like any customer, we must consider competing timelines, optimization goals, and all relevant budgets,” she says. “As customer zero, we not only use Azure cloud services for our business needs—like any other enterprise—but also, we constantly harness our knowledge and insights to envision the right experience in the first place.”

Being Microsoft’s customer zero gives Pfluger and her team the opportunity to give feedback to our product teams, which they use to make improvements that benefit our external customers. We evaluate our solutions to help make sure they meet various global requirements relating to security, privacy, and overall compliance.

Optimizing our cloud costs

Like our customers, we’re feeling pressure to reduce our costs during these challenging economic times. One way we’re doing that is by being efficient with our internal use of Microsoft Azure.

Pfluger was looking for ways to cut costs and says, “The first place we went to was Azure.” The information needed to find ways to trim was easily accessible within her team’s Azure dashboards.

“All of the data was there,” Pfluger says, explaining that there are many optimization levers within Azure that customers can pull. “We saved a tremendous amount of money just by reviewing our Azure spend and by using the tools available to us.”

Our Azure product team is trying to help us, and all our customers get more out of their Azure subscriptions. They’re focused on helping customers understand and forecast their costs, use data to optimize their workloads, use proactive cost-management practices to deploy fixes as quickly as possible, and leverage auditing to identify opportunities to fine-tune their operations even more.

Learn more about optimizing your Azure migration

Read this Azure optimization blog post to get more detail on our internal cloud journey here at Microsoft.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide

We are excited that for the fifth consecutive time Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide. We believe this placement is a testament to our continued investments in customers' integration needs.

An integration solution for all developers

Enterprise business depends on all kinds of applications—packaged, software as a service (SaaS), and custom-built. Business value is realized when these applications integrate with each other. Microsoft’s enterprise integration offering, Azure Integration Services, brings these varied applications together—empowering organizations to create differentiated customer and partner experiences. What’s more, this integration extends beyond the traditional organization boundaries—encompassing applications from suppliers, customers, and business partners.

Every enterprise integration use case is different. Azure Integration Services provides a comprehensive set of services that can be used standalone or in combination to build an integration solution that meets our customers' unique needs.

Both professional and citizen developers can leverage the power and flexibility of Azure Integration Services to create business value. With support for Azure Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, App Insights, and Azure Monitor, we bring an intuitive user experience to professional developers on the platform of their choice. When used in conjunction with Microsoft Power Platform, citizen developers can also build a breadth of integration solutions for low-code application development.

As a part of the larger Azure platform, we provide seamless integration and access to all the additional Azure services. The flexibility to only pay for what you need makes Azure Integration Services a cost-effective and agile solution. Customers can get started without any license commitment or upfront purchasing and scale seamlessly with their integration needs and usage.

Powering our customers’ digital transformation initiatives

Enterprise integration is the cornerstone of digital transformation initiatives. Azure Integration Services is on a mission to bring your technology investments together, be it on-premises or in the cloud. It enables businesses to embrace new applications while still maintaining connectivity with their legacy systems via hybrid app integration and full lifecycle API management.

Cargolux, Europe’s biggest all-cargo airline, accelerated its digital transformation using Azure Integration Services. Our integration solution has enabled Cargolux to build a digital ecosystem and generate value for both their internal teams and their customers. Cargolux now exposes services supporting flight operations, airplane maintenance, and cargo management programmatically using Azure API Management offering secure customer access for fast, automated transactions.

“Through Azure API Management, we can provide direct API connection to our environment for customer systems so that they can do direct bookings on the spot. It’s opened up a new world in helping customers get their cargo onto our planes.”—Alfons Seesink, Chief Technology Officer, Cargolux

Modernize workflows with low or no code

Many enterprises customers like Manulife and DHL have chosen Azure Logic Apps to boost their developer productivity by automating their business-critical workflows. This was all made possible by over 600 out-of-the-box Azure Logic Apps connectors to Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SAP, Twitter, and more that help seamlessly connect data, events, and resources across applications and systems—without writing any code. Additionally, the solution also provides the extensibility to write custom connectors.

“With Logic Apps, everything communicates without errors. It took me just a few hours to get the first proof of concept out. Now we use it to automate so many of our business processes.” —Rohit Mistry, Infrastructure Analyst, Manulife

“With the integration capabilities we’ve gained through Azure, employees can now simplify or eliminate the most tedious parts of their jobs and contribute in more valuable ways.” —Fekko Roelofs, Program Manager Robotics Hub & Resource Orchestration at DHL Supply Chain, DHL

Coca-Cola used custom-built Azure Logic Apps connectors to automate their bottling operations, internal and external order processing, and connecting data across systems, accelerating its time-to-market.

“We also value the extensibility of the platform, enabling us to build and integrate custom connectors.” —Jared Simmons, Systems Analyst, Coca-Cola

Succeeding together

The exponential rise in the data, applications, and systems in use at enterprises can make enterprise integration a daunting undertaking. Azure Integration Services is here to help. Our battle-hardened solution coupled with our enterprise-wide expertise makes us a unique partner on your digital transformation journey. Learn how organizations like yours use Azure Integration Services to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.

Download a complimentary copy of the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide to learn why Microsoft is named a Leader.

 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, Keith Guttridge, Andrew Comes, Saikat Ray, 24 January 2023 . The report was earlier named as Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service.

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Gartner Reprint.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Native New Relic Service: Full stack observability in minutes

Digital transformation across organizations has led to workloads shifting to multicloud and hybrid-cloud environments. Modern organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-native technologies including containers, microservices, serverless, and more.

With the growing complexity of distributed applications deployed on a cloud-native landscape, can organizations survive without the right observability in place?

It would be like flying an airplane blindfolded.

Businesses are in acute need of observability capabilities like Application Performance Management (APM), infrastructure monitoring, logs management, error tracing, and more to monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot their applications and infrastructure.

At the same time, organizations continue to prefer using software and services which they are familiar with and trust. To meet customers where they are, Microsoft partners closely with market-leading software as a service (SaaS) offerings and enables their use as part of the overall customer solution on our globally trusted cloud platform—Microsoft Azure.

Partnering with New Relic

New Relic, a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for 10 consecutive years in Application Performance Management and Observability, is one such partner on Azure.

"Observability is essential in today's modern, multicloud world. Whether our customers are running applications on data centers, embracing the public cloud, or running things at the edge, they need observability to take a look across all those systems. Today's news brings together more than a decade of innovation between New Relic and Microsoft, to bring the power of full stack observability to Microsoft developers, so they can accelerate enterprise cloud migration and multi-cloud initiatives.” —Bill Staples, New Relic CEO

Modern cloud-native environments warrant that organizations adopt a data-driven approach for their incident and threat response. When failures occur, identification, understanding, and resolution of the root cause of the issue is extremely time-critical for development teams.

Currently, to leverage New Relic for observability, you go through a complex multistep process to set up credentials, event hubs, and custom code, thus impacting your productivity and efficiency. To alleviate this challenge, we partnered with New Relic to create a seamlessly integrated solution on Azure that’s now available on the Azure marketplace.

Azure Native New Relic Service makes it effortless for developers and IT administrators to monitor their cloud applications. With this new offering, you can:

Create a New Relic account in the cloud with just a few clicks. Azure Native New Relic Service is a fully managed offering that enables easy onboarding and removes the need to set up and operate monitoring for your infrastructure.
Seamlessly ship logs and metrics to New Relic. Integrated right within the create experience, and also a part of the configuration, you can set up auto discovery of resources within an Azure subscription to monitor logs and metrics. You no longer need to go through the tedious process of setting up event hubs and writing custom code.
Bulk install New Relic Agent on virtual machines (VMs) and App Services through a single click. This then ships logs and metrics from your host infrastructure and processes to New Relic.
Get unified billing for all the resources you consume on Azure including New Relic, from the Azure marketplace.

"Application performance monitoring and full stack observability are mission critical for cloud transformation of enterprises of all sizes. With the Azure Native New Relic Service, Microsoft and New Relic have together, enabled a thoughtfully integrated, seamless, first-class experience for these enterprises everywhere. In just a few clicks, developers and admins can now effortlessly set up and monitor their cloud applications leveraging the power of New Relic on Azure.” —Balan Subramanian, Partner Director of Product Management, Azure Developer Experiences

Get started with Azure Native New Relic Service:

Let’s now look at how you can set up and configure Azure Native New Relic Service.

Subscribe to the Azure Native New Relic Service: You can easily find and subscribe to the offering in the Azure marketplace:

Create a New Relic resource on Azure: Once the New Relic offer is subscribed, you can easily create a New Relic resource in a few simple steps from the Azure portal. Using this, you can configure and manage your New Relic accounts within the Azure portal.

Configure Metrics and Logs Monitoring: Configure which Azure resources send metrics and logs to New Relic using simple include/exclude resource tag rules.

Install New Relic Agent on VMs: Once the New Relic resource is created, you can manage bulk install and uninstall of New Relic agent on multiple Linux or Windows VMs with a single click.

Install New Relic Agent on App Services: Similarly, you can install New Relic agent on multiple Windows App Services in one go.

Besides creating a New Relic resource, you can also link with existing New Relic accounts for monitoring resources across multiple Azure subscriptions. Not only that, you can also set up multiple resources under a single organization to unify billing and user management. To learn more, refer to the Azure Native New Relic Service documentation.

Learn more about Azure Native New Relic Service

Subscribe to the preview of Azure Native New Relic Service available in the Azure Marketplace.
Learn more about the New Relic integration with Azure.

Quelle: Azure