Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Enhanced Azure Arc integration with Datadog simplifies hybrid and multicloud observability

Businesses today are managing complex, distributed environments and need a ubiquitous computing platform for all workloads that can meet them where they are. We’ve seen an increasing need for customers to not only deploy, manage, and operate across on-premises and one or more clouds, but also to have better visibility and insights across all IT investments spanning cloud to edge.

Today, we’re delivering improved observability and management with the general availability of our enhanced Microsoft Azure Arc integration with Datadog. Building on our established collaboration, we are natively integrating Datadog with Azure Arc to meet customers where they are and provide rich insights from Azure Arc–enabled resources directly into Datadog dashboards. Customers can monitor real-time data during cloud migrations and performance of applications running both in the public cloud and in hybrid or multicloud environments.

Benefits of Azure Arc integration with Datadog

With the Azure Arc integration with Datadog, customers can:

Monitor the connection status and agent version of Azure Arc–enabled servers, wherever they are running.
Automatically add Azure tags to associated hosts in Datadog for additional context.
Identify which Azure Arc–enabled servers have the Datadog Agent installed.
Deploy the Datadog Agent onto your Azure Arc–enabled servers as an extension.
Get unified billing for the Datadog service through Azure subscription invoicing.

Datadog is a cloud-scale monitoring and security platform for large-scale applications that aggregates data across your entire stack with more than 600 integrations for centralized visibility and faster troubleshooting on dynamic architectures. This provides developers and operations teams observability into every layer of their applications on Azure, so they diagnose performance issues quickly.

When Datadog first became an Azure Native ISV Service, it allowed customers to streamline their experience for purchasing, configuring, and managing Datadog directly inside the Azure portal. It reduced the learning curve for using Datadog to monitor the health and performance of your applications in Azure and sets customers up for a successful cloud migration or modernization.

For many customers, hybrid deployments are a durable and long-term strategy due to factors such as latency and compliance requirements, and we are committed to meeting customers wherever they are. With Azure Arc, we provide a consistent set of tools and services for customers to extend cloud technology across your distributed infrastructure. More than 12,000 customers are using Azure Arc, double the number a year ago. By partnering with organizations like Datadog, we are unlocking even more innovation and bringing Azure services into the tools our customers are already using.

Enhanced Azure Arc integration features

Features available with today’s general availability include:

Monitor the Arc connection status and agent version

Customers can easily identify any Azure Arc–enabled resources that are not in a connected state. You can also set up Datadog monitors to alert you immediately if the connection is unhealthy. Before this new integration, Azure Arc resources would look like any other virtual machine on-premises or in Azure. Now, you can access critical metadata to ensure your Azure Arc–enabled Windows and Linux servers, SQL servers, and Kubernetes clusters are secured and connected. IT operators will be able to troubleshoot much faster if a resource is disconnected and can quickly restore the connectivity to Azure Arc.

Datadog can also show which hosts are running an older version of Azure Arc. It then becomes easy to update the agent using Azure Update Management and utilize Azure Automation for latest updates to the Azure Arc agent whenever there is a new version.

 

Automatically add Azure tags for easy management and compliance tracking

A popular benefit of Azure Arc is using tags in Azure Resource Manager. Many organizations tag on-premises resources by cost center or datacenter server groups that are subject to specific regulations or requirements. Tags also create an audit trail to help trace the history of a particular resource and identify potential security issues when performing audits.

With the Azure Arc integration, Datadog can build rich visualizations and actionable alerts using the tags you have already created for Azure Arc–enabled resources. Now, when you perform patching or updates for Azure Arc–enabled servers, you get much richer insights to help validate software patches and troubleshoot application issues.

Easily identify which Azure Arc–enabled servers have the Datadog Agent

Azure Arc brings your hybrid and multicloud servers, Kubernetes clusters, and data services into a single dashboard for seamless management between environments. Aside from grouping resources with Azure Resource Manager, Azure Arc–enabled resources benefit from Azure role-based access control (RBAC), so different IT and developer teams can easily delegate access to their applications. For a centralized IT monitoring team, you can now ensure your Azure Arc–enabled resources have the Datadog Agent by cross-referencing these servers with agent data to get a real-time view of which Arc resources have Datadog Agent reporting.

Learn more about integrating Datadog and Azure Arc

Read more about the integration between Datadog and Azure Arc and access the Datadog’s Azure native integration service on Azure Marketplace.

Azure Marketplace offers thousands of industry-leading apps and services—all certified and optimized to run on Azure—so you can find, try, buy, and deploy the solutions you need quickly and confidently.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Cost Management updates—March 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:

Scheduled alerts for built-in views in Cost analysis.
Details about included costs in the Cost analysis preview.
Enable preview features and share your feedback.
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.

Scheduled alerts for built-in views in Cost analysis

Cost Management offers numerous ways to stay on top of your costs and catch unexpected charges, like defining budgets to get notified as costs approach or exceed predefined thresholds, or configuring anomaly alerts to get notified when we detect atypical spending patterns in your subscription costs. But sometimes you’re looking for something a little simpler. Wouldn’t it be nice to just get a quick email letting you know how things have been going over the last week? Maybe you want to see how you’re trending against your budget or what you’re forecasted to spend for the month or maybe you want to see what your daily run rate has been over the last 30 days. Perhaps you simply want to check in once a month to see how your usage trends have changed compared to the previous months. These are exactly the types of reasons why you might want to use scheduled alerts in Cost analysis. You’ve been able to save a custom view and schedule alerts for a while. Now, you can also schedule alerts using the built-in chart views available in Cost analysis:

Accumulated costs

Daily costs

Cost by service

To get started, open Cost analysis, choose one of the built-in (or saved) chart views from the view menu, and select the Subscribe command at the top of the page.

To learn more, see Save and share customized views, and stay tuned for even more opportunities to monitor your costs.

Details about included costs in the Cost analysis preview

Knowing what’s included in your costs is a critical part of understanding what you’re spending and where. While this is covered in documentation, there’s nothing better than surfacing these details directly in the experiences you use. To that end, you can now view additional details about your cost in the Cost analysis preview, including:

The total (non-abbreviated) cost.
Dates the change in cost is referring to.
What costs are included or not included.
Additional notes about usage processing.

Let us know what you’d like to see next. There are a lot of great things on the horizon in the Cost analysis space. If you haven’t tried the latest changes, check out the Cost analysis preview today.

Enable preview features and share your feedback

Getting feedback has always been a critical part of the Cost Management experience. We introduced Cost Management Labs for that exact purpose—to get your early feedback on the latest features and enhancements that are in development. The earlier we get your feedback, the more we can improve the experience for you. This is your chance to drive the direction and impact the future of Cost Management.

Participating in Cost Management Labs is as easy as selecting Try preview from the Cost Management overview. You’ll see a list of preview features with links to share ideas or report any bugs that may pop up. Reporting a bug is a direct line back to the Cost Management engineering team, where we'll work with you to understand and resolve the issue. Of course, you may have seen all this before. Try preview isn’t new. What is new this month is the fact that your preview features are remembered across portal sessions. When you enable a feature, we’ll keep that enabled when you come back to the portal, making it easier than ever to get the most out of each preview.

We hope you find this update useful. Let us know what you’d like to see next and don’t forget to share your feedback about each preview. To learn more, see Enable preview features in Cost Management Labs.

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:

Update: Remember preview features across sessions—Now available in the public portal.
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.
Update: Total KPI tooltip—Now available in the public portal.
View additional details about what costs are included in the Cost analysis preview.
Merge cost analysis menu items.
Only show one cost analysis item in the Cost Management menu. All classic and saved views are one-click away, making them easier than ever to find and access. You can enable this option from the Try preview menu.
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.
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 the Try preview menu.
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

Lots of updates over the last month! Here are new and updated offers you might be interested in:

General availability: Spot Priority Mix for Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
General availability: Azure Firewall Basic.
General availability: More transactions at no additional cost for Azure Standard SSD.
General availability: Larger SKUs for App Service Environment v3.
General availability: Leading price-performance for SQL Server.
Preview: Incremental snapshots for Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage.
Preview: Azure NetApp Files support for 2TiB capacity pools.
Preview: Azure Managed Lustre, a file system designed for HPC and AI workloads.
Preview: Announcing a renaissance in computer vision AI with Microsoft's Florence foundation model.

New videos and learning opportunities

Here’s a new video about cost optimization for web apps you might be interested in:

The reliable web app pattern for .NET part 4: Cost Optimization (twelve 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

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

New: Download your savings plan price sheet.
New: Optimize costs in Azure Monitor.
Updated: Start using Cost analysis—Now covers the Cost analysis preview.
Updated: Save and share customized views—Added FAQs for scheduled alerts.
Updated: Group and filter options in Cost analysis and budgets—Expanded to include budgets.
Updated: Self-service trade-in for Azure savings plans—Updated note about reservation exchanges.
Updated: View Azure savings plan cost and usage—Added details about calculating savings.
Updated: Choose an Azure saving plan commitment amount—Added details about management group recommendations.
Updated: View your Azure usage summary details and download reports for EA enrollments—Added refunded credits section.
Seven 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 last month. 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.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team. Stay safe and stay healthy.
Quelle: Azure

Modernize your apps and accelerate business growth with AI

AI has exploded in popularity in recent years, to the point where it’s no longer considered a luxury in the business world, but a necessity. A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study revealed that the adoption of AI will fuel a 14 percent increase in the global GDP by 2030, representing an additional $15.7 trillion surge to the global economy.1

Businesses using AI solutions are discovering new ways to tap into vast amounts of data to get clear insights and accelerate innovation. Thanks to advancements in graphics processing unit (GPU) computational power and the availability of tech services through cloud marketplaces, AI is now more accessible than ever.

As companies look to do more with less, AI will play an increasingly critical role—particularly generative AI, a category of AI algorithms that generate new outputs based on data. Unlike traditional AI systems that are designed to recognize patterns and make predictions, generative AI can analyze large data sets and create entirely new content in a variety of media formats—including text, images, audio, and data—based on what’s described in the input. Generative AI is used in systems like ChatGPT, the powerful natural and language model developed by OpenAI—a global leader in AI research and development.

At Microsoft, we’re committed to democratizing AI and giving you access to advanced generative AI models. As part of that commitment, in 2019, we started a long-term partnership with OpenAI. In January 2023, we announced the third phase of this partnership, including the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service.

With Azure OpenAI Service, businesses can access cutting-edge AI models, including GPT-3.5 and DALL•E 2. This service is backed by built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade security. Azure OpenAI Service customers also will have access to ChatGPT—a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure.

Add the power of generative AI to your apps—now available through the ISV Success program

We’re excited to announce that ISV Success program members will now be eligible to apply for access to Azure OpenAI Service. In today’s highly competitive market, ISVs are under intense pressure to differentiate and elevate their app offerings. To gain an edge, many software vendors are tapping into generative AI to modernize their applications.

With AI-optimized infrastructure and tools, Azure OpenAI Service empowers developers to build and modernize apps through direct access to OpenAI models. These generative AI models offer a deep understanding of language and code to enable apps with new reasoning and comprehension capabilities, which can be applied to a variety of use cases, such as code generation, content summarization, semantic search, and natural language-to-code translation.

As a participant in the program, you will also get access to advanced AI services like custom neural voice, speaker recognition, and content filters.

Drive application modernization with the ISV Success program

Learn more about the ISV Success program.

Join the ISV Success program to get access to best-in-class developer tools, cloud credits, one-to-one technical consultations, training resources, and now Azure OpenAI Service.

Apply to use Azure OpenAI service for your solutions.

 

1 PwC, Global Artificial Intelligence Study: Sizing the prize.
Quelle: Azure

Connect, secure, and simplify your network resources with Azure Virtual Network Manager

Enterprise-scale management and configuration of your network resources in Azure are key to keeping costs down, reducing operational overhead, and properly connecting and securing your network presence in the cloud. We are happy to announce Azure Virtual Network Manager (AVNM), your one-stop shop for managing the connectivity and security of your network resources at scale, is generally available.

What is Azure Virtual Network Manager?

AVNM works through a main process of group, configure, and deploy. You’ll group your network resources across subscriptions, regions, and even tenants; configure the kind of connectivity and security you want among your grouped network resources; and finally, deploy those configurations onto those network groups in whichever and however many regions you’d like.

Common use cases

Common use cases for AVNM include the following and can be addressed by deploying AVNM’s connectivity and security admin configurations onto your defined network groups:

Interconnected virtual networks (VNets) that communicate directly with each other.
Central infrastructure services in a hub VNet that are shared by other VNets.

Establishing direct connectivity between spoke VNets to reduce latency.

Automatic maintenance of connectivity at scale, even with the addition of new network resources.
Enforced standard security rules on all existing and new VNets without risk of change.

Keeping flexibility for VNet owners to configure network security groups (NSGs) as needed for more specific traffic dictation.

Application of default security rules across an entire organization to mitigate the risk of misconfiguration and security holes.
Force-allowance of services’ traffic, such as monitoring services and program updates, to prevent accidental blocking through security rules.

Connectivity configuration

Hub and spoke topology

When you have some services in a hub VNet, such as an Azure Firewall or ExpressRoute, and you need to connect several other VNets to that hub to share those services, that means you’ll have to establish connectivity between each of those spoke VNets and the hub. In the future, if you provision new VNets, you’ll also need to make sure those new VNets are correctly connected to the hub VNet.

With AVNM, you can create groups of VNets and select those groups to be connected to your desired hub VNet, and AVNM will establish all the necessary connectivity between your hub VNet and each VNet in your selected groups behind the scenes. On top of the simplicity of creating a hub and spoke topology, new VNets that match your desired conditions can be automatically added to this topology, reducing manual interference from your part.

For the time being, establishing direct connectivity between the VNets within a spoke network group is still in preview and will become generally available (GA) at a later date.

Mesh

If you want all of your VNets to be able to communicate with each other regionally or globally, you can build a mesh topology with AVNM’s connectivity configuration. You’ll select your desired network groups and AVNM will establish connectivity between every VNet that is a part of your selected network groups. The mesh connectivity configuration feature is still in preview and will become generally available at a later date.

How to implement connectivity configurations with existing environments

Let’s say you have a cross-region hub and spoke topology in Azure that you’ve set up through manual peerings. Your hub VNet has an ExpressRoute gateway and your dozens of spoke VNets are owned by various application teams.

Here are the steps you would take to implement and automate this topology using AVNM:

Create your network manager.
Create a network group for each application team’s respective VNets using Azure Policy definitions that can be conditionally based on parameters including (but not limited to) subscription, VNet tag, and VNet name.
Create a connectivity configuration with hub and spoke selected. Select your desired hub VNet and your network groups as the spokes.
By default, all connectivity established with AVNM is additive after the connectivity configuration’s deployment. If you’d like AVNM to clean up existing peerings for you, this is an option you can select; otherwise, existing connectivity can be manually cleaned up later if desired.
Deploy your hub and spoke connectivity configuration to your desired regions.

In just a few clicks, you’ve set up a hub and spoke topology among dozens of VNets from all application teams globally through AVNM. By defining the conditions of VNet membership for your network groups representing each application team, you’ve ensured that any newly created VNet matching those conditions will automatically be added to the corresponding network group and receive the same connectivity configuration applied onto it. Whether you choose to have AVNM delete existing peerings or not, there is no downtime to connectivity between your spoke VNets and hub VNet.

Security feature

AVNM currently provides you with the ability to protect your VNets at scale with security admin configurations. This type of configuration consists of security admin rules, which are high-priority security rules defined similarly to, but with precedence over NSG rules.

The security admin configuration feature is still in preview and will GA at a later date.

Enforcement and flexibility

With NSGs alone, widespread enforcement on VNets across several applications, teams, or even entire organizations can be tricky. Often there’s a balancing act between attempts at centralized enforcement across an organization and handing over granular, flexible control to teams. The cost of hard enforcement is higher operational overhead as admins need to manage an increasing number of NSGs. The cost of individual teams tailoring their own security rules is the risk of vulnerability as misconfiguration or opened unsafe ports is possible. Security admin rules aim to eliminate this sliding scale of choosing between enforcement and flexibility altogether by providing central governance teams with the ability to establish guardrails, while intentionally allowing traffic for individual teams to flexibly pinpoint security as needed through NSG rules.

Difference from NSGs

Security admin rules are similar to NSG rules in structure and input parameters, but they are not the exact same construct. Let’s boil down these differences and similarities:

 

Target audience

Applied on

Evaluation order

Action types

Parameters

Security admin rules

Network admins, central governance team

Virtual networks

Higher priority

Allow, Deny, Always Allow

Priority, protocol, action, source, destination

NSG rules

Individual teams

Subnets, NICs

Lower priority, after security admin rules

Allow, Deny

One key difference is the security admin rule’s Allow type. Unlike its other action types of Deny and Always Allow, if you create a security admin rule to Allow a certain type of traffic, then that traffic will be further evaluated by NSG rules matching that traffic. However, Deny and Always Allow security admin rules will stop the evaluation of traffic, meaning NSGs down the line will not see or handle this traffic. As a result, regardless of NSG presence, administrators can use security admin rules to protect an organization by default.

Key Scenarios

Providing exceptions

Being able to enforce security rules throughout an organization is useful, to say the least. But one of the benefits of security admin rules that we’ve mentioned is its allowance for flexibility by teams within the organization to handle traffic differently as needed. Let’s say you’re a network administrator and you’ve enforced security admin rules to block all high-risk ports across your entire organization, but an application team 1 needs SSH traffic for a few of their resources and has requested an exception for their VNets. You’d create a network group specifically for application team 1’s VNets and create a security admin rule collection targeting only that network group—inside that rule collection, you’d create a security admin rule of action type Allow for inbound SSH traffic (port 22). The priority of this rule would need to be higher than the original rule you created that blocked this port across all of your organization’s resources. Effectively, you’ve now established an exception to the blocking of SSH traffic just for application team 1’s VNets, while still protecting your organization from that traffic by default.

Force-allowing traffic to and from monitoring services or domain controllers

Security admin rules are handy for blocking risky traffic across your organization, but they’re also useful for force-allowing traffic needed for certain services to continue running as expected. If you know that your application teams need software updates for their virtual machines, then you can create a rule collection targeting the appropriate network groups consisting of Always Allow security admin rules for the ports where the updates come through. This way, even if an application team misconfigures an NSG to deny traffic on a port necessary for updates, the security admin rule will ensure the traffic is delivered and doesn’t hit that conflicting NSG.

How to implement security admin configurations with existing environments

Let’s say you have an NSG-based security model consisting of hundreds of NSGs that are modifiable by both the central governance team and individual application teams. Your organization implemented this model originally to allow for flexibility, but there have been security vulnerabilities due to missing security rules and constant NSG modification.

Here are the steps you would take to implement and enforce organization-wide security using AVNM:

Create your network manager.
Create a network group for each application team’s respective VNets using Azure Policy definitions that can be conditionally based on parameters including (but not limited to) subscription, VNet tag, and VNet name.
Create a security admin configuration with a rule collection targeting all network groups. This rule collection represents the standard security rules that you’re enforcing across your entire organization.
Create security admin rules blocking high-risk ports. These security admin rules take precedence over NSG rules, so Deny security admin rules have no possibility of conflict with existing NSGs. Redundant or now-circumvented NSGs can be manually cleaned up if desired.
Deploy your security admin configuration to your desired regions.

You’ve now set up an organization-wide set of security guardrails among all of your application teams’ VNets globally through AVNM. You’ve established enforcement without sacrificing flexibility, as you’re able to create exceptions for any application team’s set of VNets. Your old NSGs still exist, but all traffic will hit your security admin rules first. You can clean up redundant or avoided NSGs, and your network resources are still protected by your security admin rules, so there is no downtime from a security standpoint.

Learn more about Azure Virtual Network Manager

Check out the AVNM overview, read more about AVNM in our public documentation set, and deep-dive into AVNM’s security offering through our security blog.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service

At Microsoft, we are constantly discovering new ways to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills so that more people can benefit from using AI. This is allowing our customers to build the future faster and more responsibly by powering their apps using large-scale AI models. Our collaboration with OpenAI, along with the power of Azure have been core to our journey.

Today, we are excited to announce that GPT-4 is available in preview in Azure OpenAI Service. Customers and partners already using Azure OpenAI Service can apply for access to GPT-4 and start building with OpenAI’s most advanced model yet. With this milestone, we are proud to bring the world’s most advanced AI models—including GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and DALL•E 2—to Azure customers, backed by Azure AI-optimized infrastructure, enterprise-readiness, compliance, data security, and privacy controls, along with many integrations with other Azure services.

Customers can begin applying for access to GPT-4 today. Billing for all GPT-4 usage begins April 1, 2023, at the following prices:

GPT-4

Prompt

Completion

8k context

$0.03 per 1,000 tokens

$0.06 per 1,000 tokens

32k context

$0.06 per 1,000 tokens

$0.12 per 1,000 tokens

GPT-4 for every business

While the recently announced new Bing and Microsoft 365 Copilot products are already powered by GPT-4, today’s announcement allows businesses to take advantage of the same underlying advanced models to build their own applications leveraging Azure OpenAI Service.

With generative AI technologies, we are unlocking new efficiencies for businesses in every industry. For instance, see how Azure OpenAI Service can allow bot developers to create virtual assistants in minutes using natural language with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents.

GPT-4 has the potential to take this experience to a whole new level using its broader knowledge, problem-solving abilities, and domain expertise. With GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service, businesses can streamline communications internally as well as with their customers, using a model with additional safety investments to reduce harmful outputs.

Companies of all sizes are putting Azure AI to work for them, many deploying language models into production using Azure OpenAI Service, and knowing that the service is backed by the unique supercomputing and enterprise capabilities of Azure. Solutions include improving customer experiences end-to-end, summarizing long-form content, helping write software, and even reducing risk by predicting the right tax data.

Customers are accelerating the adoption of language models

We are just scratching the surface with generative AI technologies and are working to enable our customers to responsibly adopt Azure OpenAI Service to bring real impact. With GPT-4, Epic Healthcare, Coursera, and Coca-Cola plan to use this advancement in unique ways:

"Our investigation of GPT-4 has shown tremendous potential for its use in healthcare. We'll use it to help physicians and nurses spend less time at the keyboard and to help them investigate data in more conversational, easy-to-use ways."—Seth Hain, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Epic

"Coursera is using Azure OpenAI Service to create a new AI-powered learning experience on its platform, enabling learners to get high-quality and personalized support throughout their learning journeys. Together, Azure OpenAI Service and the new GPT-4 model will help millions around the world learn even more effectively on Coursera."—Mustafa Furniturewala, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Coursera

"Words cannot express the excitement and gratitude we feel as a consumer package goods company for the boundless opportunities that Azure OpenAI has presented us. With Azure Cognitive Services at the heart of our digital services framework, we have harnessed the transformative power of OpenAI's text and image generation models to solve business problems and build a knowledge hub. But it is the sheer potential of OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4 multimodal capabilities that truly fills us with awe and wonder. The possibilities for marketing, advertising, public relations, and customer relations are endless, and we cannot wait to be at the forefront of this revolutionary technology. We know that our success is not just about technology but also about having the right enterprise features in place. That's why we're proud to have a long-standing partnership with Microsoft Azure, ensuring that we have all the tools we need to deliver exceptional experiences to our customers. Azure OpenAI is more than just cutting-edge technology—it's a true game-changer, and we're honored to be a part of this incredible journey."—Lokesh Reddy Vangala, Senior Director of Engineering, Data and AI, The Coca-Cola Company

Our commitment to responsible AI

As we described in my previous blog, Microsoft has a layered approach for generative models, guided by Microsoft’s Responsible AI Principles. In Azure OpenAI, an integrated safety system provides protection from undesirable inputs and outputs and monitors for misuse. On top of that, we provide guidance and best practices for customers to responsibly build applications using these models, and we expect customers to comply with the Azure OpenAI Code of Conduct. With GPT-4, new research advances from OpenAI have enabled an additional layer of protection. Guided by human feedback, safety is built directly into the GPT-4 model, which enables the model to be more effective at handling harmful inputs, thereby reducing the likelihood that the model will generate a harmful response.

Getting started with GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service

Apply for access to GPT-4 by completing this form.
Learn more about Azure OpenAI Service and more about all the latest enhancements.
Get started with GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service in Microsoft Learn.
Read our Partner announcement blog, Empowering partners to develop AI-powered apps and experiences with ChatGPT in Azure OpenAI Service.
Learn how to use the new Chat Completions API (preview) and model versions for ChatGPT and GPT-4 models in Azure OpenAI Service.

Quelle: Azure

Azure Data Manager for Energy: Achieve interoperability with Petrel

Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy is the first fully managed OSDU™ Data Platform built for the energy industry. This solution is the first step in unraveling the challenge of data—moving from disparate systems and disconnected applications to a holistic approach. The product’s ideation directly reflects the partnership between Microsoft and SLB, capitalizing on each organization’s unique expertise.

As the energy industry works to achieve a sustainable low carbon future, organizations are taking advantage of the cloud to optimize existing assets and de-risk new ventures. Universally, data is at the core of their digital transformation strategies—yet only a small fraction of energy company data is properly tagged and labeled to be searchable. This leads engineers and geoscientists to spend significant time outside of their expertise trying to discover and analyze data. Azure Data Manager for Energy customers can seamlessly connect to an open ecosystem of interoperable applications from other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and the Microsoft ecosystem of productivity tools. Ultimately, the open Microsoft platform enables developers, data managers, and geoscientists alike to innovate the next generation of digital solutions for the energy industry.

Enhanced data openness and liberation in Petrel

“We all benefit from making the world more open. As an industry, our shared goal is that openness in data will enable a fully liberated and connected data landscape. This is the natural next step towards data-driven workflows that integrate technologies seamlessly and leverage AI for diverse and creative solutions that take business performance to the next level.”—Trygve Randen, Director, Data & Subsurface at Digital & Integration, SLB.

The co-build partnership between Microsoft and SLB improves customers’ journey and performance, by unlocking data through interoperable applications. Delfi™ digital platform from SLB on Azure features a broad portfolio of applications, including the Petrel E&P Software Platform. The Petrel E&P Software Platform enhanced with AI enables workflows in Petrel to run with significantly faster compute times and include access to new tools, increasing the flexibility and productivity of geoscientists and engineers.

Microsoft and SLB rearchitected Petrel Data Services to allow Petrel Projects and data to be permanently stored in the customer’s instance. Petrel Data Services leverages core services found in OSDU™, such as partition and entitlement services. This change further aligns Petrel Data Services with the OSDU™ Technical Standard schemas and directly integrates with storage as the system of record. Now when geoscientists or engineers create new Petrel projects or domain data, each is liberated from Petrel into its respective Domain Data Management Service (DDMS) provided by OSDU™, like seismic or wellbore, in Azure Data Manager for Energy. These Petrel liberated projects or data become immediately discoverable in Petrel on Delfi™ Digital Platform or any third-party application developed in alignment with the emerging requirements of the OSDU™ Technical Standard such as INT’s IVAAP.

By splitting Petrel and Project Explorer software as a service (SaaS) applications from the data infrastructure, data resides in Azure Data Manager for Energy without any dependencies on an external app to access that data. Users can access and manage Petrel liberated Project Explorer and data in Azure Data Manager for Energy independent of any prerequisite application or license. Microsoft provides a secure, scalable infrastructure that governs data safely in the customer tenant while SLB focuses on delivering continuous updates to Petrel and Project Explorer on Delfi™ Digital Platform which expedites feature delivery.

Petrel and Project Explorer on Azure Data Manager for Energy

1.    Search for and Discover Petrel Projects: Petrel Project Explorer shows all Petrel Project versions liberated from all users and allows the viewing of data associated with each project based on corresponding data entitlements. This includes images of the windows that are created in the project, metadata (coordinate reference systems, time zone, and more), and all data stored in the project. Using Project Explorer allows to preserve every single change throughout the lifetime of a Petrel project and preserve every critical milestone required by regulations or for historical purposes. Data and decisions can be easily shared and connected to other cloud native solutions on Delfi™ Digital Platform, and automatic, full data lineage and project versioning is always available.

2.    Connect Petrel to domain data: Petrel users can consume seismic and wellbore OSDU™ domain data directly from Azure Data Manager for Energy. Furthermore, Petrel Data Services enables the development of diverse and creative solutions for the exploration and production value chain which includes liberated data consumption in other applications like Microsoft Power BI for data analytics.

3.    Data liberation: Petrel Data Services empowers Petrel users to liberate Petrel Project data into Azure Data Manager for Energy where data and project content can be accessed without opening Petrel, providing simpler data overview and in-context access. Data liberation allows for direct consumption into other data analytics applications, generating new data insights into Petrel projects, breaking down data silos, and improving user and corporate data-driven workflows. It relieves users from Petrel project management and improves the focus on domain workflows for value creation.

Figure 1: Project Explorer on Azure Data Manager for Energy: View all Petrel projects within an organization in one place through an intuitive and performant User Interface (UI).

Interoperable workflows that de-risk and drive efficiency

Both traditional and new energy technical workflows are optimized when data and application interoperability are delivered. Geoscientists and engineers, therefore, want to incorporate as much diverse domain data as possible. Customers want to run more scenarios in different applications, compare results with their colleagues, and ultimately liberate the best data and the knowledge associated with it to a data platform for others to discover and consume. With Petrel and Petrel Data Services powered by Azure Data Manager for Energy, customers achieve this interoperability.

Companies can liberate wellbore and seismic data for discovery in any application developed in alignment with the emerging requirements of the OSDU™ Technical Standard. As Petrel and Petrel Data Services use the standard schemas, all data is automatically preserved and indexed for search, discovery, and consumption. This extensibility model enables geoscientists and engineers as well as data managers to seamlessly access data in their own internal applications. SLB apps on Delfi™ Digital Platform such as Techlog, as well as Microsoft productivity tools including Power BI and an extensive ecosystem of partner apps are all available in this model. Additionally, developers can refocus their efforts on innovating and building new apps—taking advantage of Microsoft Power Platform to build low-code or no-code solutions. This creates the full data-driven loop and ultimately enables integrated workflows for any interoperable apps.

Figure 2: Azure Data Manager for Energy Data Flow connects seamlessly to a broad ecosystem of interoperable applications across Delfi™, Azure Synapse, Microsoft Power Platform, and the ISV ecosystem.

Get started today

Azure Data Manager for Energy helps energy companies gain actionable insights, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate time to market on the enterprise-grade, cloud-based OSDU™ Data Platform. Visit the website to get started.
Quelle: Azure

Protect against cyberattacks with the new Azure Firewall Basic

Cyberattacks continue to rise across businesses of all sizes as attackers are adapting their techniques and increasing the complexity of their operations.1 The risk of these attacks is significant for small and medium businesses (SMBs) as they usually don’t have the specialized knowledge or resources to protect against emerging threats and face more challenges when recovering from an attack. In a recent Microsoft survey,2 70 percent of SMBs think cyberthreats are becoming more of a business risk and nearly one in four SMBs stated that they had a security breach in the last year.

SMBs need solutions that are tailored to their unique needs and challenges. Microsoft is committed to delivering security solutions to meet the needs of all our customers. We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Firewall Basic, a new SKU of Azure Firewall built for SMBs.

Since public preview, we have seen a wide adoption of the Azure Firewall Basic. Customers stated the simplicity and ease of use of the Azure Firewall as one of the key benefits for choosing Azure Firewall Basic.  We have also added the capability to deploy Azure Firewall inside a virtual hub in addition to a virtual network. This gives businesses the flexibility to choose the deployment option that best meets their needs.

Deploying Azure Firewall in a virtual network is recommended for customers who plan to use traditional hub-and-spoke network topology with a Firewall on the hub. Whereas, deploying on a virtual hub is recommended for customers with large or global network deployments in Azure where global transit connectivity across Azure regions and on-premises locations is needed.

Providing SMBs with a highly available Firewall at an affordable price point

Azure Firewall Basic brings the simplicity & security of Azure Firewall to SMBs at a cost-effective price point

It offers Layer 3–Layer 7 filtering and alerts on malicious traffic with built-in threat intelligence from Microsoft threat intelligence. As a cloud-native service, Azure Firewall Basic is simple to deploy with a few clicks and seamlessly integrates with other Azure services, including Microsoft Azure Firewall Manager, Azure Monitor, Azure Events Hub, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Key features of Azure Firewall Basic

Comprehensive, cloud-native network firewall security

Network and application traffic filtering—Centrally create, allow, or deny network filtering rules by source and destination IP address, port, and protocol. Azure Firewall is fully stateful, so it can distinguish legitimate packets for different types of connections. Rules are enforced and logged across multiple subscriptions and virtual networks.
Threat intelligence to alert on malicious traffic—Enable threat intelligence-based filtering to alert on traffic from or to known malicious IP addresses and domains. The IP addresses and domains are sourced from the Microsoft threat intelligence feed.
Built-in high availability—Azure Firewall Basic provides built-in high availability to ensure that your network traffic is always protected. Azure Firewall Basic can replicate your firewall instance across two availability zones, ensuring that your traffic is always filtered even if one of the zones goes down.

Simple setup and easy to use

Set up in just a few minutes—Use the Quickstart deployment Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to easily deploy Azure Firewall Basic directly to your Azure environment.
Automate deployment (deploy as code)—Azure Firewall Basic provides native support for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Teams can define declarative ARM templates that specify the infrastructure required to deploy solutions. Third-party platforms like Terraform also support IaC to manage automated infrastructure.
Zero maintenance with automatic updates—Azure Firewall is automatically updated with the latest threat intelligence and security updates to ensure that it stays up-to-date and protected against the latest threats.
Centralized management via Azure Firewall Manager—Azure Firewall Manager is a central management solution that allows you to manage multiple Azure Firewall instances and policies across your organization from a single location, ensuring that your security policies are consistent and up to date across your organization.

Cost-effective

Designed to deliver essential, cost-effective protection of your Azure resources within your virtual networks.

Choose the right Azure Firewall SKU for your business

Azure Firewall is offered in three SKUs to meet a wide range of use cases and needs:

Azure Firewall Premium is recommended for customers looking to secure highly sensitive applications, such as payment processing. In addition to all features of the Azure Firewall standard, it also supports advanced threat protection capabilities like malware and Transport Layer System (TLS) inspection.
Azure Firewall Standard is recommended for customers looking for Layer 3–Layer 7 firewall and require auto-scaling to handle peak traffic periods of up to 30 gigabits per second (Gbps). It supports enterprise features like threat intelligence, Domain Name System (DNS) proxy, custom DNS, and web categories.
Azure Firewall Basic is recommended for SMB customers with throughput needs of less than 250 megabits per second (Mbps).

Let’s take a closer look at the features across the three Azure Firewall SKUs.

Azure Firewall Basic pricing

 

Azure Firewall Basic pricing includes both deployment and data processing charges for both virtual network and virtual hub scenarios. Pricing and billing for Azure Firewall Basic with virtual hub will be effective starting May 1, 2023.

For more details, visit the Azure Firewall pricing page.

Next steps

For more information on everything we covered in this blog post, see the following resources:

Azure Firewall documentation.
Azure Firewall Manager documentation.
Deploy and configure Azure Firewall Basic.

1Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022

2April 2022: Microsoft Small and Medium Business quantitative survey research: Security in the new environment
Quelle: Azure

Announcing Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture: Accelerating innovation across the agriculture value chain

The agriculture industry is at a turning point. While food may seem plentiful in many global regions, the number of people going hungry has continued to increase over the last nine years. To feed growing populations sustainably and efficiently, the way we produce food must change. From the soil—where improvements to farming practices can help mitigate climate change to the shelf—where customers look for products with minimal carbon footprint—the agriculture and food value chain is primed for innovation.

That's why we’re thrilled to announce that Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is now available in preview. At Microsoft, we’ve long recognized that scaling innovation across the industry starts with data. What began with Project FarmBeats, an ambitious initiative to collect and transform agricultural data, has now evolved into a timely commercial solution.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture extends the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform with industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to connect farm data from disparate sources, enabling organizations to leverage high-quality datasets and accelerate the development of digital agriculture solutions. Instead of devoting resources to managing unstructured data, customers and partners can focus on product innovation with the ability to reason over readily available and abundant data. Furthermore, organizations can use in-house, third-party, or Intelligent Data Platform services to speed the path to analytics and business intelligence solutions. With a connected ecosystem of partners building solutions on top of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, this is another step towards a connected and collaborative agriculture industry.

Accelerate innovation through data

With so much agriculture-relevant data generated across the farm—from sensors in the soil to satellites orbiting the earth—many organizations don’t have the resources to harness it effectively. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture helps break down data silos, allowing organizations to build solutions that provide predictive and prescriptive insights on soil health, changing weather patterns, waste tracking, carbon sequestration, and more.

For example, Bayer used Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to shift from a self-managed data estate to a managed model with Microsoft. Bayer's FieldView platform harnesses data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture’s satellite and weather pipelines to enable insights on potential yield-limiting factors in growers’ fields. In addition, Bayer is making their industry-leading expertise available to enterprise customers in the form of AgPowered Services—a set of solutions that ingest data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to provide timely insights on crop health, weather forecast, crop growth tracking, and more.

Not only is Bayer running their solutions on Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, but they’re also bringing decades of agriculture expertise to help develop a robust Azure Data Manager. Thanks to our strategic partnership, we’re leveraging Bayer’s industry knowledge—as well as data connectors, models, transformations, and workflows—to inform how we strengthen Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and empower organizations to address the challenges in agriculture today.

“Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is an important step towards accelerating the impact of big data and agriculture. With high-quality data fueling insights, we expect to see a value chain that is more predictable, more transparent, and importantly, where the value is shared all the way back to producers.”—Jeremy Williams, Head of Climate and Digital Farming, Bayer Crop Science.

Enable a more sustainable future

Feeding a growing global population and building a healthier world is only possible if sustainability is practiced from farm to fork. With Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, agriculture input providers can accelerate solutions that empower farmers to adopt more sustainable practices. For example, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is a foundational component for Land O’Lakes’ digital offerings, including the Truterra sustainability tool. Truterra provides insight into how different agricultural practices impact water, nitrogen, and carbon on a farm, and it enables farmers to track their soil’s carbon sequestration and participate in carbon markets.

“Through our collaboration [with Microsoft], we are enabling farmers with new services to improve their operations and to quantify data for their customers that tells a story of sustainability.”—Teddy Bekele, Chief Technology Officer, Land O’Lakes, Inc.

Cultivate trust rooted in transparency

Consumers and investors alike are putting pressure on companies to be transparent about their agricultural and sustainability practices. With a clearer view into farm operations, companies can take an important step to establish trust with investors and customers. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture enables organizations to replace self-reported data with high-quality farm data to provide more accurate information to stakeholders—helping companies build brand trust through ethically and sustainably produced products. And as security and privacy concerns grow, organizations can rest assured knowing their data is stored in the most trusted cloud, built to meet stringent security and compliance requirements.

The Microsoft commitment to sustainability

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is only one part of the Microsoft commitment to accelerating progress toward a more sustainable planet. With their next initiative, Project FarmVibes, Microsoft Research is building toolkits and AI models that are available in Microsoft Open Source to advance agriculture innovation in the scientific community across academia and business.

Microsoft has also launched Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, which empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress and business growth by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft and our global ecosystem of partners. Together, we are keeping sustainability at the core of our offerings, and we seek to empower organizations to adopt more regenerative and sustainable farming practices.

Learn more and transform your operations today

If you’re interested in using Azure Data Manager for Agriculture for your business, you can sign up here. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture requires registration and is currently only available to approved customers and partners during the preview period.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft to showcase purpose-built AI infrastructure at NVIDIA GTC

Join Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC, a free online global technology conference (GTC), March 20 to 23 to learn how organizations of any size can power AI innovation with purpose-built cloud infrastructure from Microsoft.

Microsoft's Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure is uniquely designed for AI workloads and helps build and train some of the industry’s most advanced AI solutions. From data preparation to model and infrastructure performance management, Azure’s comprehensive portfolio of powerful and massively scalable GPU-accelerated virtual machines (VMs) and seamless integration with services like Azure Batch and open-source solutions helps streamline management and automation of large AI models and infrastructure.

Attend NVIDIA GTC to discover how Azure AI infrastructure optimized for AI performance can deliver speed and scale in the cloud and help you reduce the complexity of building, training, and bringing AI models into production.

Don’t miss session S52469 featuring Nidhi Chappell, a recipient of the 2023 People to Watch, recognized as a high-performance computing (HPC) luminary by HPCwire. Nidhi plays a leading role in driving HPC and AI innovation, accelerating the development of science and adoption of AI by enabling access to the best infrastructure and services for Microsoft customers.

Register for NVIDIA GTC today. 

Microsoft sessions at NVIDIA GTC

Add the below Microsoft sessions at GTC to your conference schedule to learn about the latest Azure AI infrastructure and dive deep into a variety of use cases and technologies. 

Featured sessions

Accelerate AI Innovation with Unmatched Cloud Scale and Performance

Thursday, March 23, 2023 | 7:00 to 7:50 AM PT

Nidhi Chappell, General Manager, Azure HPC, AI, SAP and Confidential Computing, Microsoft

Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Azure Marketing, Microsoft

Manuvir Das, Vice President of Enterprise Computing, NVIDIA

Alex Kendall, CEO and Co-Founder, Wayve

Azure’s purpose-built AI infrastructure is enabling leading organizations in AI to build a new era of innovative applications and services. The convergence of cloud flexibility and economics, with advances in cloud performance, is paving the way to accelerate AI initiatives across simulations, science, and industry. Whether you need to scale to 80,000 cores for MPI workloads, or you're looking for AI supercomputing capabilities, Azure can support your needs. Learn more about Azures AI platform, our latest updates, and hear about customer experiences.

Azure's Purpose-Built AI Infrastructure Using the Latest NVIDIA GPU Accelerators

On-demand

Matt Vegas, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft

Microsoft offers some of the most powerful and massively scalable Virtual Machines, optimized for AI workloads. Join us for an in-depth look at the latest updates for Azure’s ND-series based on NVIDIA GPUs, engineered to deliver a combination of high-performance, interconnected GPUs, working in parallel that can help you reduce complexity, minimize operational bottlenecks operations, and can deliver reliability at scale. 

Talks and panel sessions

Session ID

Session Title

Speakers

Primary Topic

S51226

Accelerating Large Language Models via Low-Bit Quantization

Young Jin Kim, Principal Researcher, Microsoft

Rawn Henry, Senior AI Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA

Deep Learning-Inference

S51204

Transforming Clouds to Cloud-Native Supercomputing: Best Practices with Microsoft Azure

Jithin Jose, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft Azure

Gilad Shainer, SVP Networking, NVIDIA

HPC- Supercomputing

S51756

Accelerating AI in Federal Cloud Environments

Bill Chappel, Vice President of Mission Systems in Strategic Missions and Technology, Microsoft

Steven H. Walker, Chief Technology Officer, Lockheed Martin

Matthew Benigni, Chief Data Officer, Army Futures Command

Christi DeCuir, Director, Cloud Go-to-Market, NVIDIA

Data Center/ Cloud-Business Strategy

S51703

Accelerating Disentangled Attention Mechanism in Language Models

Pengcheng He, Principal Researcher, Microsoft

Haohang Huang, Senior AI Engineer, NVIDIA

Conversational AI NLP

S51422

SwinTransformer and its Training Acceleration

Han Hu, Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research Asia

Li Tao, Tech Software Engineer, NVIDIA

Deep Learning– Training+

S51260

Multimodal Deep Learning for Protein Engineering

Kevin Yang, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research New England

Healthcare- Drug Discovery

S51945

Improving Dense Text Retrieval Accuracy with Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Menghao Li, Software Engineer, Microsoft

Akira Naruse, Senior Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA

Data Science

S51709

Hopper Confidential Computing: How it Works under the Hood

Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research, Microsoft

Phil Rogers, VP of System Software, NVIDIA

Data Center/ Cloud Infrastructure- Technical

S51447

Data-Driven Approaches to Language Diversity

Kalika Bali, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India

Caroline Gottlieb, Product Manager, Data Strategy, NVIDIA

Damian Blasi, Harvard Data Science Fellow, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

Bonaventure Dossou, Ph.D. Student, McGill University and Mila Quebec AI Institute

EM Lewis-Jong, Common Voice – Product Lead, Mozilla Foundation

Conversational AI/NLP

S51756a

Accelerating AI in Federal Cloud Environments, with Q&A from EMEA Region

Bill Chappel, Vice President of Mission Systems in Strategic Missions and Technology, Microsoft

Steven H. Walker, Chief Technology Officer, Lockheed Martin

Larry Brown, SA Manager, NVIDIA

Christi DeCuir, Director, Cloud Go-to-Market, NVIDIA

Data Center/ CloudBusiness Strategy

S51589

Accelerating Wind Energy Forecasts with AceCast

Amirreza Rastegari, Senior Program Manager, Azure Specialized Compute, Microsoft

Gene Pache, TempoQuest

HPC-Climate/ Weather/ Ocean Modeling

S51278

Next-Generation AI for Improving Building Security and Safety

Adina Trufinescu, Senior Program Manager, Azure Specialized Compute, Microsoft

Computer Vision -AI Video Analytics

Deep Learning Institute workshops and labs

We are proud to host NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI) training at NVIDIA GTC. Attend full-day, hands-on, instructor-led workshops or two-hour free training labs to get up to speed on the latest technology and breakthroughs. Hosted on Microsoft Azure, these sessions enable and empower you to leverage NVIDIA GPUs on the Azure platform to solve the world’s most interesting and relevant problems. 

Register for a Deep Learning Institute workshop or lab today.

Learn more about Azure AI infrastructure

Whether your project is big or small, local or global, Microsoft Azure is empowering companies worldwide to push the boundaries of AI innovation. Learn how you can make AI your reality by exploring the following resources. 

Azure AI Infrastructure
Azure AI Solutions 
Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud
AI-first Infrastructure and Toolchain at Any Scale
The case for AI in the Azure Cloud
AI Infrastructure for Smart Manufacturing
AI Infrastructure for Smart Retail

Quelle: Azure