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Unlocking innovative at-home patient care solutions with Azure

This post was co-authored by Stuart Bailey, Product Director, Capita Healthcare Decisions

This blog is part of a series in collaboration with our partners and customers leveraging the newly announced Azure Health Data Services. Azure Health Data Services, a platform as a service (PaaS) offering designed exclusively to support Protected Health Information (PHI) in the cloud is a new way of working with unified data—providing care teams with a platform to support both transactional and analytical workloads from the same data store and enabling cloud computing to transform how we develop and deliver AI across the healthcare ecosystem.  

As pressures on the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom continue to grow, so does the need for safe and effective home health care. Head Home is a remote patient monitoring (RPM) solution that looks to streamline current at-home care for patients and their health and care professionals.

The NHS is currently experiencing the most severe pressures it has in its 70-year history, with an already strained system being stretched beyond its limits by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.1 In hospitals, the number of general and acute beds available has been declining since 20102, and it has been estimated that up to 15 percent of beds are being used by people waiting for care3. Finding innovative ways to relieve these pressures remain critical in supporting the NHS’ recovery.

To find solutions to this challenge, a key area to address is facilitating more efficient patient discharge and at-home care. Patient surveys have long shown that most older people prefer to receive care at home, and recent research by the University of Oxford has found that this may improve patient outcomes and satisfaction, while simultaneously helping to reduce hospital pressures.4  This approach is known as “hospital-at-home” and its use has been accelerated by the pandemic. Hospital-at-home aims to allow health and care professionals to provide remote monitoring and communication for patients from their own homes, whilst helping healthcare facilities to free up vital resources. However, while wearable devices such as temperature monitors, pulse monitors, blood pressure monitors, and even heart monitors are readily available, solutions that enable them to be monitored remotely are less common and the hospital-a-home approach is currently reliant on expensive, hard to maintain devices and bespoke manufacturer software.

This is largely due to data still being stored on-premises in a siloed healthcare industry, and a lack of interoperability among these on-premises systems. Disparate datasets are collected from a variety of wearables without a unified solution to manage them, making it difficult for providers to access patient data collected from wearable devices at home in a timely fashion. This results in delays in patient monitoring and formulating treatment plans when patients are out of the hospital, making monitoring and treating patients remotely unachievable.

To help solve this problem, Microsoft released Azure Health Data Services, a suite of purpose-built technologies for protected health information (PHI) in the cloud built on the global open standards Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)® and Digital Imaging Communications in Medicine (DICOM). This solution enables providers to unify and manage data on a trusted cloud, making it possible to standardize diverse data streams such as clinical, imaging, device, and unstructured data using FHIR, DICOM, and MedTech services. Data collected from various wearables and in different formats can be ingested and persisted in Azure Health Data Services, allowing data to be managed in one place, and therefore reducing the need for numerous manufacturers’ software. It enables providers to view the standardized data in context with other clinical datasets, supporting the goal of moving from reactive care to proactive care while reducing cost, empowering a more effective and personalized approach to at-home care.

Expanding healthcare support with Azure Health Data Services

Aiming to enable the hospital-at-home approach to better support patients and help to relieve existing pressures on the NHS, Capita Healthcare Decisions leverages Microsoft Azure Health Data Services which enables healthcare professionals and patients to manage patient data in the cloud. Head Home by Capita is a remote patient monitoring (RPM) solution that enables the health indicators of patients to be monitored by health and care professionals from within their own homes. Through Head Home, personalized health indicator thresholds can be set, ensuring that if there is a change in the condition of a patient, then their care team is notified over the preferred interface by the provider  (SMS, push notification). This allows health and care professionals to react in an appropriate and timely manner, whilst reassuring patients that, should their wellbeing change, they will be cared for. Head Home can currently support the monitoring of blood oxygen level, heart rate, body temperature, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and single-lead ECG, ensuring a range of key health indicators can be effectively monitored in a hospital-at-home.

In addition to the indicator monitoring and warning system, Head Home enables patients to talk to a personal assistant via voice interface to communicate with their care team, ensuring a greater connection for patients receiving care at home. This type of communication between a patient and their health and care professionals has been shown to be critical for recovery, helping to develop trust and transparency during the care process. This verbal communication is being recorded in the Head Home dashboard, alongside notes from patient appointments and check-ins, helping to improve clinical documentation and efficiency.

The hospital-at-home model sees the provision of faster access to appropriate and targeted care in people’s homes and introduces the right digital infrastructure to deliver the system benefits, as well as helping to tackle the elective care backlog. With Head Home, Capita Healthcare Decisions has pioneered a digital solution to enable clinicians to support patient recovery at home by providing a better-connected real-time monitoring solution whilst reducing the need for healthcare delivery resources.

As existing providers of clinical decision support software, Capita Healthcare Decisions utilizes the Azure Health Data Services to persist health data in the cloud. This enables rapid exchange of data backed by a PaaS offering on a trusted cloud. In addition, Azure Health Data Services allows Capita Healthcare Decisions to ingest the patient data from wearables providers (HealthKit and Google Fit) and device aggregators for persistence and analysis, enabling new opportunities to gain new insights in research and improve patient care. By integrating this with a variety of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices and making use of personal assistant voice interfaces, Capita Healthcare Decisions aims to deliver an accessible and easy-to-use service that can provide the monitoring required to keep patients safe during their care at home. By using the FHIR standard, Capita Healthcare Decisions is leveraging the power of an open-source standard that will evolve with the science of healthcare and enable interoperability with data flows in existing healthcare systems. The interfaces that sit between the monitoring devices themselves and Capita Healthcare Decisions’ intuitive monitoring platform enables these readily available, relatively low-cost devices to be easily deployed at scale. By providing these complementary functions, Head Home is helping to deliver a more viable hospital-at-home environment.    

At a time when NHS resources are being stretched to new levels, innovative technology platforms such as Head Home offer a much-needed solution. Leveraging Microsoft Azure Health Data Services, Capital Healthcare Decisions offers an agile way to monitor the health of patients remotely, ensuring that at-home care can be delivered safely and effectively, all with the associated potential to improve outcomes, patient satisfaction, and reduce healthcare delivery costs.

Do more with your data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With Azure Health Data Services, health organizations can transform their patient experience, discover new insights with the power of machine learning and AI, and manage PHI data with confidence. Enable your data for the future of healthcare innovation with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

We look forward to being your partner as you build the future of health.

Learn more about Azure Health Data Services.
Learn more about Capital Health Decisions, or email healthcaredecisions@capita.com.
Read our recent blog, “Microsoft launches Azure Health Data Services to unify health data and power AI in the cloud.”
Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

References

®FHIR is a registered trademark of Health Level Seven International, registered in the U.S. Trademark Office and is used with their permission.

1An NHS under pressure. (2021). The British Medical Association Is the Trade Union and Professional Body for Doctors in the UK.

2The number of hospital beds. (2021, November 5). The King’s Fund.

3NHS: Up to 15 percent of hospital beds used by people waiting for care. Pollock, B. I. (2021, November 18). BBC News.

4 Study finds that caring for older people at home can be just as good—or even better—than hospital care. The University of Oxford. (n.d.). www.ox.ac.uk.
Quelle: Azure

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Virtual desktop infrastructure security best practices

It’s no longer a matter of organizations deciding whether to embrace remote and hybrid work but finding the best way to do so. A recent study showed most employees are happier having the option to work from home, and 80 percent say they’re as productive or more productive when they do. One of the most popular options for organizations who want to offer remote work options is virtual desktop infrastructure or VDI.

What is VDI?

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is an IT infrastructure that virtualizes desktops—to give employees access to enterprise data and applications from anywhere and from most personal and professional devices. Organizations host applications and data on servers, and through VDI, enable their employees to work remotely via remote desktops. VDI is popular for enabling remote work because, with the right configuration, it’s highly secure and relatively inexpensive compared to on-premises options.

What are some of the security benefits of cloud-based VDI migration?

Migrating to a cloud-based VDI solution allows organizations to take advantage of built-in security features that mitigate and eliminate the risks associated with traditional desktop virtualization. Azure Virtual Desktop in combination with the Azure public cloud, for example, offers comprehensive security features, like Azure Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, that are built-in before deployment. This helps enable an organization to follow critical VDI security best practices from the start of their virtualization journey.

What are some VDI security best practices?

Conditional access applies access controls based on signals like group membership, type of device, and IP address to enforce policies.
Multifactor authentication requires that users consistently verify their identities to access sensitive data.
Audit logs are used to gain insight into user and admin activities.
Endpoint security like Microsoft Defender for Endpoints offers built-in protection against malware and other advanced threats for all your endpoints.
Application restriction mitigates security threats by limiting what applications certain users are allowed to access using software like Windows Defender Application Control.

Following these VDI security practices helps organizations secure user identities, data, and access to their VDI. They’re the reason a comprehensive VDI solution, like Azure Virtual Desktop, doesn’t just mitigate security risks associated with virtualization, but increases overall security.

Of course, there are numerous factors and potential issues for an organization to consider in choosing to implement a VDI solution. Most of these issues stem from hosting virtual desktops on-premises, as traditional VDIs do.

What are some concerns for an organization considering a traditional VDI?

First, there’s the cost. Traditionally, implementing VDI is an involved, complicated process. It often requires employees with specialized roles to deploy, manage, and scale an organization’s VDI as needed. Cloud-based VDI solutions like Azure Virtual Desktop are managed and scaled by the cloud VDI solution provider themselves, which lowers cost considerably.

Second and most importantly, there are the security concerns that come with adopting a hybrid model through traditional VDI. After the deployment of a VDI, IT managers must consider the security of home and corporate networks when developing security protocols. Employees using different types of devices to access data also opens networks to new vulnerabilities, as these new devices can be more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Most of these vulnerabilities are eliminated when you use a cloud-based VDI with built-in security features and endpoint protection.

How do you choose a secure VDI for your organization?

Meeting these implementation and security challenges often poses a barrier to organizations fully embracing a hybrid work model. IT decision makers must consider the challenges along with the benefits of enabling remote work when choosing a VDI solution for their organization. Adopting a comprehensive, cloud-based virtual desktop solution, like Azure Virtual Desktop, mitigates and eliminates many of these security concerns.

Also referred to as desktop-as-a-service, cloud-based VDI solutions host their virtual desktops on the cloud using a subscription model instead of on-premises, locally operated and maintained servers. Not only does this lower the cost and time of implementing VDI by decreasing the amount of labor needed to maintain it, it also ensures that the cloud-based virtual desktop solution provider shares responsibility with its customers for security. With the right provider, this can prove to be an enormous benefit.

Learn more

To explore the possibility of implementing Azure Virtual Desktop at your organization, read the 17-page e-book, Delivering Secure Remote and Hybrid Work with Azure Virtual Desktop, to learn more about how to:

Increase your end-to-end security through VDI migration.
Implement and maintain VDI security best practices.
Scale resources on demand for your employees without the limitations of on-premises data centers using Azure Virtual Desktop.
Lower your costs by running multiple virtual desktop user sessions on a single virtual machine.

Quelle: Azure

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Start skilling on Azure with these helpful guides

We are excited to introduce Azure Skills Navigator, a new learning resource designed especially for those that are new to Azure and want to learn more. Azure Skills Navigator is our very own ramp-up guide intended to help you develop a strong foundation on cloud technologies as you begin to explore Azure.

These downloadable Azure Skills Navigator guides offer a variety of resources to help build your skills and knowledge of Azure. Each guide features carefully selected digital training, learning courses, videos, documents, certifications, and more. We understand how important it is in today’s market to stay ahead of the tech curve. There is a high demand for professionals skilled in cloud technologies. Azure Skills Navigator guides ensure that you have a solid foundation as you begin exploring Azure. We have hand-picked a selection of resources that will help you develop a strong foundation of Microsoft Azure, allowing you to build and explore today. After you’ve mastered the content, we will help you navigate our intermediate and advanced level content.

We have guides tailored for a number of roles—System Administrators, Solution Architects, Developers, Data Engineers, and Data Scientists. Given the high demand for these guides, we will be launching more for a number of new roles in the coming months. These role-based guides map out your itinerary for deepening your knowledge of Azure, helping you build a strong foundation for cloud computing in a way that is tailored and personalized for you. You can travel at your own pace, and then continue your Azure exploration with ongoing learning resources ranging from blog updates, videos, and events to connect with technical communities. These guides are just the beginning; Microsoft Learn will be your trusted partner as you progress through your learning journey. There are numerous options for continuing your training and certification beyond these guides as well.

Explore the guides by role below to get started

Azure Skills Navigator for System Administrators: A guide for deepening your knowledge of fundamental concepts of cloud computing and Azure core infrastructure services, management, monitoring, security, and compliance.
Azure Skills Navigator for Solution Architects: A guide for deepening your knowledge of fundamental concepts of Microsoft Azure, core solutions, solution design principles, including security and compliance, and deployment tools and methods to help bring your solution architectures to life.
Azure Skills Navigator for Developers: A guide to build your skills around knowing how to architect and deploy apps in the Cloud and how to maintain and instrument those apps once deployed. Our guide provides an overview of key concepts across Java, .NET, Node.js, and Python, crucial topics to establishing a strong foundation on Microsoft Azure.
Azure AI Learning Journey for Developers: A guide to achieving artificial intelligence expertise on Azure AI, creating the next generation of applications, and preparing for Azure AI Fundamental certification.
Azure Data Engineer Learning Journey for Data Engineers: A guide to achieving expertise in data engineering; explore how Azure Synapse enables you to leverage all your data to unlock powerful insights.
Azure Data Scientist Learning Journey for Data Scientists: A guide to achieving Machine Learning expertise on Azure; learn how to collaborate and build models faster with the latest machine learning tools and frameworks.

Learn more

On-demand Intro to Tech session at Microsoft Build: The New Developer’s Guide to the Cloud hosted by Christoffer Noring, Nitya Narasimhan, and Someleze Diko.
GitHub repo containing all the resources and space for you to share suggestions for improvement.
Blog announcement for Azure Infrastructure guides.
Blog announcement for developers on Azure.
Blog announcement for Azure Data and AI.

Quelle: Azure

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Power hybrid and multicloud environments with Azure Arc data solutions

We know we are in the middle of a transformative time. At the heart of this transformation is the digitization of data. Data is the most strategic asset for organizations across all industries, and a new level of data agility is required to deal with dynamic changes in our world. Organizations that have embraced their data as a strategic asset are at a competitive advantage. In fact, a recent Gartner® Predict report estimates that 90 percent of data management tools and platforms that fail to support multicloud and hybrid capabilities will be set for decommissioning through 2026.1

But for all the powerful capabilities the cloud offers to help organizations on their transformation journey, not all data is created equal. The myriad of regulations to navigate, the need for data sovereignty, the low tolerance for any form of disruption keeps data from living in a single public cloud, expanding your data estate and complexity. Managing the vast amounts of data that exists across siloed, disparate systems, applications, and locations, while also getting the most from existing investments is not a balance many solutions can achieve.

This is why, back in November 2019, we debuted Azure Arc, a set of technologies that extends Azure innovations and cloud benefits to any infrastructure. Cloud-native databases like Azure SQL and PostgreSQL have been enabled by Azure Arc, delivering the much-needed consistency and cloud automation for all data workloads. We want you to focus less on managing data, and more on creating value and unlocking insights. Because true innovation starts at the data layer.

Innovate anywhere with Azure Arc

With Azure Arc-enabled data services, we can bring cloud data management to any infrastructure, across customer on-premises data centers, other third-party clouds, and the edge. Here’s how Azure Arc is delivering on that promise:

Always up to date with full automation. Benefit from an evergreen SQL with the latest features using automated updates so there is no more end-of-support. Those in-place, rolling updates ensure close to zero downtime, so you can maximize efficiencies and minimize disruptions
Get industry-leading, multi-layered security with built-in capabilities. With comprehensive encryption including Transparent Data Encryption and Always Encrypted, as well as Azure Role-Based Access Control and Policy, your data is protected both at the powerful database engine-level and by Azure Security capabilities from the cloud.
With elastic scale, you can scale up or down based on your resource needs without application downtime to optimize performance. You can also realize cost efficiencies by paying only for what you use without the need to overprovision.
Deliver a vastly simplified DevOps experience through full automation with built-in capabilities like rapid deploy, high availability, and disaster recovery. You can deploy a 3 replica SQL MI with full high availability (HA) in two minutes with a single command, and gain a unified view into your query performance, storage capacity, and error logs using dashboards directly from the built-in monitoring. Use the tools you are already familiar with.

All these capabilities can run in any environment regardless of the connectivity to Azure. You can run Arc-enabled data services without a connection to Azure. If you can be fully connected to Azure, the user experience is richer and in real-time, but it is not required, data services can keep running even without a connection to Azure. Azure portal deployment and other value-added management services are fully integrated under direct connection.

Built for mission-critical

And now, we’re making that solution available in an even more powerful way. We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Arc-enabled data services Business Critical (BC) tier, designed to support the most demanding mission-critical data workloads.

With feature parity with SQL Server Enterprise Edition, it delivers all the proven capabilities customers have trusted for decades. It runs online transaction processing (OLTP) and hybrid transaction/analytics processing (HTAP) with record-setting performance, advanced high availability, and top-rated security.
It meets the most demanding business continuity requirements using Always On Availability Groups, so your app will have close to zero downtime in case of an automated failover.
Failover to another instance within the same Kubernetes cluster for local high availability, or to a different cluster in a different datacenter or even a public cloud, delivering “cloud-level redundancy”.
We also provide a free passive instance to run in your disaster recovery for even greater value
Choose the configuration that best suits your workloads, with no set limits on CPU and memory configuration. To further maximize the performance, we provide one free read-scale replica to offload any read-heavy workloads.

Our partner, Dell Technologies, conducted a series of OLTP benchmarks, using Intel technology, which took a closer look at the kind of performance possible with this new service tier. The results were remarkable. Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance was proven to provide the same performance as SQL Server on Windows Server, so customers can run their workloads with confidence. The speed of provisioning and deprovisioning will massively speed up your continuous integration (CI) test runs. SQL instances can now be deployed very easily via automation and be available in 60 seconds, and Business Critical cuts multi-replica HA deployment time from hours or days to minutes with a single command! Those out-of-the-box experiences allow you to realize time efficiencies and redirect resources to where they matter most.

Broad partner ecosystem

Our ambition to help you digitally transform your business with the cloud and edge is boundless, we know we can’t do it alone. No single cloud provider can deliver all the infrastructure and as-a-service solutions you’ll need. That’s why we’re building an ecosystem of partners across service providers, platform providers including OS and Container platforms, and independent software vendors (ISVs) to help you envision, plan, and deploy the full stack of hybrid and multicloud solutions. Our history in both productivity and the datacenter is unique among cloud providers. Microsoft is at our best when our platforms fuel the growth of others, and I’m thrilled to see how energized the ecosystem is to evolve with us.

Get started

Review Azure Arc documentation on data services and trial the new Business Critical tier in the Azure portal.
Sign up for the Azure Hybrid, Multicloud, and Edge Day digital event to learn about the latest innovation from Azure Arc.

12021 Gartner, Predicts 2022: Data Management Solutions Embrace Automation and Unification

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

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Find out why your SQL Server data belongs on Azure

The global events of the last couple of years have introduced significant changes to how companies operate and the way we work, accelerating digital transformation for many as they seek the additional flexibility, scale, and cost savings of the cloud. More companies are choosing Azure SQL for their SQL Server workloads and it’s easy to see why. Azure SQL provides a full range of deployment options ranging from edge to cloud and a consistent unified experience that makes the most of your on-premises skills and experience. It’s very cost-effective, too, when you use the Azure Hybrid Benefit to maximize your on-premises licensing investments.

Customers moving SQL Server workloads to the cloud have choices. Whether simply migrating to virtual machines (VMs) to offload infrastructure costs or modernizing on fully-managed database services that do more on your behalf, every choice on Azure is a great one.

SQL Managed Instance leads in price-performance for mission-critical workloads

More companies are choosing managed services because of the benefits they provide like lower total cost of ownership, productivity gains, and even accelerated time to market.

According to a study by Enterprise Strategy Group, customers who migrated their SQL Server data from on-premises to Azure Virtual Machines reduced their costs by up to 47 percent. Customers who continued to modernize their data from virtual machines to managed database services realized an additional 17 percent cost savings and an expected incremental $30M in new revenue due to faster release cycles. When it comes to modernizing your SQL Server data at scale, Azure SQL Managed Instance is your best choice.

It’s also a price-performance leader. Principled Technologies, an independent research firm, recently published a study where they benchmarked SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) RDS across three different workloads. SQL Managed Instance emerged as the leader across each of these workloads, with up to five times faster performance while costing up to 93 percent less than AWS RDS.1

SQL Managed Instance combines the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility back to SQL Server 2008, with all the benefits of a fully managed and always up-to-date platform-as-a-service (PaaS). You can use it to quickly and confidently modernize your custom and vendor-provided apps to Azure and further unlock the benefits of Azure’s integrated service platform. When a hybrid approach is required, you can run Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance on the infrastructure of your choice.

“We wanted an easy transition from on-premises SQL Server, and Azure SQL Managed Instance looks just like SQL Server—with all the operational benefits of a platform as a service.”—Hardayal Singh, Senior Principal Enterprise Architect, City National Rochdale

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines leads SQL Server on AWS EC2 

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines saves money and simplifies management of security and high availability at no additional cost. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines not only saves money, is flexible at scale, meets peaks in demands, and accelerates innovation, but leads SQL Server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) in overall speed and price performance.

In a recent study from GigaOm, performance was tested between Microsoft SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines versus SQL Server on AWS EC2 instances across transactional and analytical workloads. Microsoft SQL Server came out on top meeting customers’ mission-critical requirements with up to 42 percent faster transactional performance while costing up to 31 percent less than AWS EC2.2

With SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines you can shift your SQL workloads with ease and maintain 100 percent SQL Server compatibility and operating system-level access. In addition, when you register your self-installed VMs with SQL Server IaaS Agent extension, you can save money and simplify management of security, high availability, and storage administration. With SQL Server IaaS Agent extension, you get built-in security and management benefits, including automated backups, for free and pay only for what you use by converting licenses between pay-as-you-go, Azure Hybrid Benefit, and HA/DR license types.

H&R Block made plans to stay ahead of the changes, providing seamless multichannel experiences and unifying its disparate data sources to better serve its customers. By moving its various workloads to Microsoft SQL Server the tax provider has been able to enhance service delivery, scale to meet its peaks in demand, and accelerate innovation. The company was able to move its customer-facing systems—including a DIY online tax-filing app and an appointment application used by 10,000 offices—to SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines with minimal issues before, during, and after migration.

“Investing in Azure data services and data platforms has really set up an amazing foundation for us to continue to deliver and accelerate new products and services to our clients.”—Aditya Thadani, Vice President of Architecture and Information Management, H&R Block

Get started today

Read the reports from Principled Technologies and GigaOm.
Ready for that next step? Use Azure Migrate to assess your data’s readiness for the cloud and use the provided tools to start your journey today.

1Price-performance claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by Principled Technologies in April 2022. The study compared performance and price performance between a 16 vCore, 64 vCore and 80 vCore Azure SQL Managed Instance using premium-series hardware on the business-critical service tier and the db.m6i.32xlarge, db.r5b.4xlarge and db.r5b.16xlarge offerings for Amazon Web Services Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) on SQL Server. Benchmark data is taken from a Principled Technologies report using recognized standards, HammerDB TPROC-C, HammerDB TPROC-H and Microsoft MSOLTPE, a workload derived from TPC-E. The MSOLTPE is derived from the TPC-E benchmark and as such is not comparable to published TPC-E results, as MSOLTPE results do not comply with the TPC-E Specification. The results are based on a mixture of read-only and update intensive transactions that simulate activities found in complex OLTP and analytics application environments. Price-performance is calculated by Principled Technologies as the cost of running the cloud platform continuously divided by transactions per minute or per second throughput, based upon the standard. Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in South Central US for Azure SQL Managed Instance and US East for AWS RDS as of April 2022 and incorporates Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server, excluding Software Assurance and support costs. Performance and price-performance results are based upon the configurations detailed in the Principled Technologies report. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.

2Price-performance claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by GigaOm in April 2022. The study compared price performance between SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2022 in Azure E32bds_v5 instance type with P30 Premium SSD disks and SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2022 in Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute instance type r5b.8xlarge with General Purpose (gp3) volumes. Benchmark data is taken from a GigaOm Transactional Field Test derived from a recognized industry standard, TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E) The Field Test does not implement the full TPC-E and as such is not comparable to any published TPC-E benchmarks. Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in North Central US for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and Oregon for AWS EC2 as of April 2022. The pricing incorporates three-year reservations for Azure and AWS compute pricing, and Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server and Windows Server, and License Mobility for SQL Server in AWS, excluding Software Assurance and support costs. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.
Quelle: Azure

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Azure NC A100 v4 VMs for AI now generally available

AI is revolutionizing the world we live in—from the way we entertain ourselves, to the products and services that we consume, to the way we care for our bodies, and how we go about our daily work. Organizations are leveraging the power of AI to transform our lives by accelerating superior product innovations, increasing organization competitiveness no matter their size or available resources, and immersing us into more amazing, photo-realistic virtual worlds in movies and games.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. With the power and scalability available through Microsoft Azure, we provide the compute tools and capabilities for all organizations no matter their size or resources to do more, faster. AI is a key tool to help organizations innovate and create new capabilities, discover new insights and deliver superior products and services. 

At Microsoft, our NC series virtual machines (VMs) allow our customers and partners access to almost limitless AI hardware infrastructure with Microsoft tools and services so that they can be productive quickly and more easily.

Here are some examples of what our customers are doing with the power of Azure AI:

“As scale complexity of advanced node integrated circuits increases, we are committed to provide our customers with innovative simulation technologies to reduce design and signoff cycles. Synopsys PrimeSim Continuum Solution delivers 10 times faster simulation with signoff accuracy using Azure’s NC A100 v4 virtual machines. The flexible form factor of NC A100 v4 VMs allow our customers to choose one, two, or four GPUs to fit the circuit size with the expected speedup of running on GPU.”—Hany Elhak, Sr. Director, Circuit Simulation Solutions, Synopsys

“In the era of large language models that often require tens to hundreds of Petaflops of GPU resources, how can a research lab in academia stay competitive? I think the answer is in cloud computing. Recently our strategy has been rigorously testing each new idea in a small scale until we have clear evidence that it works. And once we are sufficiently confident with it, we can radically scale it up with Azure’s high-end GPU virtual machines such as NC A100 v4 equipped with NVIDIA A100 80GB Tensor Core GPUs. This strategy has allowed us to become an active player in research areas that were formerly deemed to be only for industry labs.”—Minjoon Seo, Assistant Professor and Director of Language and Knowledge Lab, KAIST

“For our MCity initiative, Touchcast leverages cloud-based rendering on Microsoft Azure GPU-optimized virtual machines. In our "Metaverse City", Touchcast delivers photorealistic 3D environments that bring organizations, employees, and customers together in a brand-new digital world. Best of all, MCity transports any Microsoft Teams user into stunning and immersive metaverse venues for meetings, presentations, workshop sessions, shopping experiences, and more."—Edo Segal, CEO and Founder, Touchcast

Introducing the new NC A100 v4 series virtual machine, now generally available

We are excited to announce that Azure NC A100 v4 series virtual machines are now generally available. These VMs, powered by NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe Tensor Core GPUs and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors, improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of a variety of GPU performance-bound real-world AI training and inferencing workloads. Use the NC A100 v4 series for workloads like object detection, video processing, image classification, speech recognition, recommender, autonomous driving reinforcement learning, oil and gas reservoir simulation, finance document parsing, web inferencing, and more.

For AI training workloads, customers will experience between 1.5 to 3.5 times the performance boost compared to the previous NC generation (NCv3) with NVIDIA Volta architecture-based GPUs. Similar performance applies to AI Inference workloads.  Moreover, customers will experience between 1.5 to five times performance boost with seven independent GPU instances on a single A100 GPU through the multi-instance GPU (MIG) feature. Customers will experience increased performance gains with smaller batch sizes.

Increased GPU VM performance instances and more importantly, greater control over the GPU resources, means our customers can gain insights faster, innovate faster, and better utilize their available resources to do more with less. This means companies can diagnose cancer faster to save more lives, provide richer, more realistic virtual worlds for people to explore, and accelerate discoveries of cures for future potential communicable diseases.

The NC A100 v4-series offers three classes of virtual machines, ranging from one to four NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe Tensor Core GPUs. It is more cost-effective than ever before, while still giving customers the options and flexibility they need for their workloads. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build, analyze, and discover with the new Azure NC A100 v4 platform.

Learn more

Take a look at our Azure Documentation on NC A100 v4-series virtual machines.   
See additional information on performance.
Find out more about high-performance computing in Azure.
Learn why you should use an AI-first infrastructure for AI workloads.
Read about our most recent MLPerf inferencing v2.0 results.

Quelle: Azure

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How developers can benefit from the new 5G paradigm

5G is not an upgrade, it’s a new paradigm

Fueled by the rapid expansion of the cloud, 5G is much more than a network upgrade—it will help create a new application paradigm and pave the way for the emergence of a new breed of network-intelligent applications that enable developers to solve problems previously out of reach. These modern connected apps will use software-defined 5G technology to communicate and interact with the network, leveraging APIs to deliver a high-performance, optimized user experience.

For developers, 5G will unlock use cases across many sectors of industry and society. It will enable massive machine-type communications (MMTC) for billions of devices in complex pipeline monitoring scenarios. It will help solve for mission-critical use cases requiring ultra-reliable low latency (URLLC) such as smart cities, where AR and VR-enabled video devices help people improve safety and security. And it will leverage enhanced mobile broadband (EMBB) to allow thousands of sports fans in a packed stadium to enjoy the on-field action live on their devices, all at the same time.

Imagine the kind of applications you could create if you turned the network from a bottleneck into an asset. If you could manage and control networking functions through software instead of hardware and leverage the cloud everywhere. If you could deploy an enterprise solution globally with the ability to solve problems locally. To manage company assets that react in near real time to conditions as different as a coal mine in Indonesia and a busy highway in the Netherlands.

The 5G opportunity for developers

With this new breed of application, forward-thinking developers will be at the forefront of change. The opportunity lies in bringing together ubiquitous computing and 5G leading to a new class of applications.

Analysys Mason, a management consulting firm, forecasts cumulative six-year enterprise spending on business applications that require 5G totaling $20 billion USD over the 2022-2027 timeframe, growing at a 75 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

This is the future of the cloud, and it not only changes how we experience apps but the way they’re built. Developers can now take advantage of new 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) capabilities to bring computing closer to the problems they’re trying to solve. Network APIs will play a fundamental role in this change. Developers will be able to leverage network APIs as a control plane to make the best use of available infrastructure and the network. This will give developers more control over application performance and help improve the user experience—and help them move from a single use case model to a write-once, run anywhere ability to scale.

But developing applications for 5G is still an emerging area and accessing the opportunity is like trying to enter a building with no door. Anyone trying to enter confronts a host of complexities including a wide range of standards, multiple vendors and operators, and numerous network configurations.

How Microsoft enables the opportunity for developers

At Microsoft, we’re opening the door to the power of 5G to help developers take full advantage of the opportunity. We recognize the challenges developers face when forced to build on multiple networks or work within walled gardens that restrict data usage across outside platforms. Microsoft is committed to helping developers create on their own terms with a distributed, open-source environment and to build on a consistent, carrier-agnostic platform. And we are at the forefront of an effort to help standardize APIs, coordinating work across technology and communications providers.

Microsoft covers the full app development lifecycle with multi-cloud support, so solution components can be run on multiple clouds and on all Azure and Azure edge-based services from public and private MEC, Azure Stack HCI, Azure Sphere, and space. New networking capabilities will help developers optimize app performance cross-network (for example, private MEC to public MEC) and cross-layer, where information can be shared among layers for more efficient use of network resources and to achieve high adaptivity. Developers will have the freedom to choose their preferred development framework and language while taking advantage of familiar Microsoft tools such as GitHub, Power Platform, Azure DevOps, and more.

An Azure-based portal will give developers all the resources they need to build 5G apps, from installation to testing to management. Azure Arc will help developers build apps and services with flexibility to run across Azure, multiple clouds, data centers, and edge environments through a unified management platform built for multi-cloud and hybrid. And as the cloud everywhere enables ubiquitous connectivity, our focus on security remains with built-in zero trust for the security issues of the future.

Last, we know as a developer you are always considering how to push your applications to do more. By taking advantage of ubiquitous compute and 5G, you can run complex AI workloads with confidence thanks to ultra-reliable connectivity. Imagine taking these network-intelligent apps to market and the opportunities to expand your reach by uploading your apps to Azure Marketplace—where your work can be discovered by Microsoft’s wide network of enterprises, systems integrators (SIs), and operators.

Microsoft’s vision for 5G, brought to life with Ferrovial

We’re opening the door for developers to seize the 5G opportunity and recently shared a great real-world example at Build, showcasing a partnership between Microsoft and a Spanish multinational company using 5G to build smart highways.

As highways become more digitized to improve safety, Ferrovial has created a digital smart roads solution called AIVIA, where the road is “exposed as an API,” enabling infrastructure to automatically adjust in real-time to changing situations and information gathered from cameras and sensors placed along the highway. In this way, Ferrovial can create a digital twin of the highway in real-time to mirror road conditions.

In another scenario, Ferrovial built an AI solution for object recognition to identify safety hazards such as debris or broken-down vehicles. Ferrovial can offer these services to drivers or expose the information as APIs to connected vehicles or autonomous cars. For example, they can identify traffic congestion and automatically respond by updating digital highway signs.

Powering the intelligent video analysis is an accelerator called Edge Video Services (EVS), a Microsoft platform for developing video analytics solutions that can be deployed on Azure public MEC. It provides intelligent, real-time video analytics for the Ferrovial use case, including vehicle counting. EVS splits computation across private and public MEC or regular Azure regions and is optimized to work with 5G networks to make the best use of the underlying infrastructure.

The ultra-reliability and intelligence collected by these devices demonstrate how 5G can help developers achieve mission-critical workload results in highly complex, real-world scenarios. For Ferrovial, it’s literally solving safety problems at the roadside. And because Azure is virtually everywhere, it can be managed all through one unified and flexible platform.

Paving the way for developers to build modern connected apps at the edge with 5G

The new paradigm is here. Microsoft is committed to helping developers act on the 5G opportunity and build the next generation of network-intelligent applications on an open-source platform with proven building blocks for 5G app innovation.

We believe now is the ideal time for developers to benefit from the coming transformation and we’re proving our commitment to 5G by investing heavily in a platform designed to unlock the possibilities.

Our goal is to pave the way for you to innovate from the cloud to the edge to space—Microsoft offers developers a platform and ecosystem strong enough to support the vision, and the vast potential of 5G. The cloud is expanding into a ubiquitous, highly distributed fabric that’s bringing faster computing closer to the problems developers are trying to solve. And unlocking new scenarios only limited by our imaginations.

Learn more about how Microsoft is helping developers embrace 5G. Sign up for news and updates delivered to your inbox.
Quelle: Azure

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Microsoft Cost Management updates – May 2022

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, 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:

Azure Cost Management and Billing is now Microsoft Cost Management.
Anomaly detection alerts and accuracy improvements.
Viewing cost for child resources in the cost analysis preview.
Reviewing cost for Azure Lab Services.
Help shape the future of Cost Management and Billing.
What's new in Cost Management Labs.
New ways to save money with Azure.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.
Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team.

Let's dig into the details.

Azure Cost Management and Billing is now Microsoft Cost Management

In October, we announced that Azure Cost Management started covering select Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Windows 365, and Power Platform seat-based offers as part of Microsoft Customer Agreement billing accounts. In January, we added Cost Management to the Microsoft 365 admin center to offer a lightweight cost analysis experience for Microsoft 365 billing admins. As more seat-based offers are added to Microsoft Customer Agreement, you’ll see Azure Cost Management and Billing expand to cover all your Microsoft Cloud costs. To that end, we are re-introducing Azure Cost Management and Billing as Microsoft Cost Management – an integrated tool to monitor, manage, and optimize your Microsoft Cloud costs.

Microsoft Cost Management will continue to focus on the same core tenets of driving transparency and visibility into your costs throughout the organization, increasing organizational accountability, and optimizing cloud efficiency across all your Microsoft Cloud services. And going forward, you can expect to see deeper integration across services and better tooling to support their diverse needs.

We’re excited to make this pivot towards a single, holistic solution for organizations to monitor, manage, and optimize their cloud costs under a single, more flexible billing account.

Anomaly detection alerts and accuracy improvements

In February, we announced the Cost Management anomaly detection preview for subscriptions. The feedback we’ve heard has been great. Keep it coming! This month, we have two exciting updates for anomaly detection.

First, the anomaly detection model has been significantly improved to predict and detect anomalies more accurately. Hopefully, you won’t even notice this silent improvement, but we’re excited to see the results and wanted to at least share that with you. Improving detection accuracy is critical and we’ll continue to invest in that going forward.

Second, you probably won’t be surprised that the top request we’ve heard has been that you want to get notified when an anomaly is detected. This month, we’ve fully rolled out anomaly detection alerts and are already seeing broad adoption. If you haven’t seen it yet, getting setup is easy:

Start on a subscription scope.
Open the Cost alerts page.
Select +Add > Add anomaly alert.
Add your desired recipients and submit.

It's that simple. All email recipients will be notified when a subscription cost anomaly has been detected.

Your anomaly alert email will include a summary of changes in resource group count and cost as well as the top resource group changes for the day compared to the previous 60 days with a direct link to the portal so you can review the cost and dig in further.

Coupled with scheduled emails and budget alerts, anomaly detection is just one more weapon in your arsenal when it comes to staying informed about cost changes across your subscriptions. Learn more about anomaly detection and start setting up anomaly alerts today.

Viewing cost for child resources in the cost analysis preview

Understanding what you're being charged for can be complicated. The best place to start for many people is the Resources view in the cost analysis preview, which shows resources that are incurring cost. But even a straightforward list of resources can be hard to follow when a single deployment includes multiple, related resources. To help summarize your resource costs, we're investigating ways to group related resources together. Today, I’ll cover how we’re changing cost analysis to show child resources.

Many Azure services use nested or child resources. SQL servers have databases, storage accounts have containers, and virtual networks have subnets, just to name a few. Most of these child resources are only used to configure services, but sometimes these resources have their own usage and charges. SQL databases are perhaps the most common example.

SQL databases are deployed as part of a SQL server instance, but usage is tracked at the database level. In addition to this, you may also have charges on the parent server, like for Microsoft Defender for SQL. To get the total cost for you SQL deployment in classic cost analysis, you need to find the server and each database and then manually sum up their total cost. As an example, you can see the aepool elastic pool at the top of the list below and the treyanalyticsengine server lower down on the first page. What you don’t see is another database even lower in the list. You can imagine how troubling this would be when you need the total cost of a large server instance with many databases.

Now, in the cost analysis preview, these child resources are grouped together under their parent resource, giving you a quick, at-a-glance view of your deployment and its total cost. Using the same subscription, you can now see all three charges grouped together under the server, offering a nice one-line summary for your total server costs.

For those paying close attention, you may also notice the change in row count. Classic cost analysis shows 53 rows where every resource is broken out on its own and the cost analysis preview only shows 25 rows. This comes down to the different resources that are being grouped together, making it easier than ever to get that at-a-glance summary of your costs.

In addition to SQL servers, you’ll also see other services with child resources, like App Service, Synapse, VNet gateways, and more. Each of these will similarly be shown grouped together in the cost analysis preview.

You can see this today in the cost analysis preview. Try it out and let us know what you’d like to see next.

Reviewing cost for Azure Lab Services

Azure Lab Services is an offering that helps easily set up and provide on-demand access to preconfigured VMs to support your scenarios. Teach a class, train professionals, run a hackathon or a hands-on lab, and more. Simply define your needs and the service will roll the lab out to your audience. Users access all their lab VMs from a single place. If you’re using Lab Services, you might be interested in some new improvements around how you review and monitor your costs. Specifically, here’s what you’ll see after the latest update:

Charges are broken down by lab VM, not the lab plan.
Resources are tagged with lab VM and lab plan, which you can use to filter or group by in classic cost analysis.
You can set custom tags on labs to organize and analyze cost.

Learn more about Cost management guide for Azure Lab Services.

Help shape the future of Cost Management and Billing

Do you report on or manage cost for your team or organization? We're exploring new alert capabilities to improve your cost monitoring experience and would love to get your feedback in a brief, 10-minute survey.

Please share this with others within your organization – we’re looking for as much feedback as we can get!

Take the survey.

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure 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: Configuration renamed to “Manage subscription” – Now available in the public portal
“Configuration” is a central hub for all settings you can use to monitor, manage, and optimize costs. To improve discoverability and ease of access, we tested a few variations of the name. Results are in and we’ve found that “Manage subscription” (or appropriate name for your scope) leads to more engagement. Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see change in the central configuration management experience.
New: Product column experiment in the cost analysis preview
We’re testing new columns in the Resources and Services views in the cost analysis preview for Microsoft Customer Agreement. You may see a single Product column instead of the Service, Tier, and Meter columns. Please leave feedback to let us know which you prefer.
New: 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 “costanalysis-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID. Wait 24 hours for tags to be available in usage and your resources will be grouped. Leave feedback to let us know how we can improve this experience further for you.
Update: Anomaly detection alerts – Now available in the public portal
Subscribe to automatic email alerts when a new anomaly has been detected. Anomaly detection is only available for subscriptions in the cost analysis preview. You can opt into this preview using Try Preview and then configure anomaly alerts from the Alerts page.
Update: Grouping SQL databases and elastic pools – Now available in the public portal
Get an at-a-glance view of your total SQL costs by grouping SQL databases and elastic pools under their parent server in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
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.
Cost Management tutorials
Whether you’re just getting started or looking to learn more about specific features, tutorials are now a click away from the Cost Management overview in Cost Management Labs.
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 particular 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 Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. 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 with Azure

Here are five new and updated offers you might be interested in:

Generally available: Scale-down mode in AKS.
Generally available: Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server higher burstable compute.
Generally available: Windows Server guest licensing offer for Azure Stack HCI.
Generally available: Azure Archive Storage now available in Switzerland North.
Preview: Azure Virtual Machines DCsv3 in Australia, Japan, US, and Asia.

New videos and learning opportunities

Here are a couple new videos you might be interested in:

Azure Cost Management for ISVs (26 minutes).
Cost Savings with Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server (8 minutes).

Follow the Azure Cost Management and Billing 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 Azure Cost Management and Billing.

Documentation updates

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

New: Troubleshoot common Cost Management errors.
Added anomaly detection to Identify anomalies and unexpected changes in cost.
Updated AWS configuration steps in Set up AWS integration.
Added note about how daily exports will have two runs at the beginning of the month in Create and manage exported data.

Want to keep an eye on all of the 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.

Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We're looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you'll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Azure Cost Management and Billing team:

Join our team.

What's next?

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

Follow @AzureCostMgmt 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 Azure Cost Management and Billing.

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

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Meta selects Azure as strategic cloud provider to advance AI innovation and deepen PyTorch collaboration

Microsoft is committed to the responsible advancement of AI to enable every person and organization to achieve more. Over the last few months, we have talked about advancements in our Azure infrastructure, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Machine Learning to make Azure better at supporting the AI needs of all our customers, regardless of their scale. Meanwhile, we also work closely with some of the leading research organizations around the world to empower them to build great AI.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce an expansion of our ongoing collaboration with Meta: Meta has selected Azure as a strategic cloud provider to help accelerate AI research and development. 

As part of this deeper relationship, Meta will expand its use of Azure’s supercomputing power to accelerate AI research and development for its Meta AI group. Meta will utilize a dedicated Azure cluster of 5400 GPUs using the latest virtual machine (VM) series in Azure (NDm A100 v4 series, featuring NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core 80GB GPUs) for some of their large-scale AI research workloads. In 2021, Meta began using Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (NVIDIA A100 80GB GPUs) for some of its large-scale AI research after experiencing Azure’s impressive performance and scale. With four times the GPU-to-GPU bandwidth between virtual machines compared to other public cloud offerings, the Azure platform enables faster distributed AI training. Meta used this, for example, to train their recent OPT-175B language model. The NDm A100 v4 VM series on Azure also gives customers the flexibility to configure clusters of any size automatically and dynamically from a few GPUs to thousands, and the ability to pause and resume during experimentation. Now, the Meta AI team is expanding their usage and bringing more cutting-edge machine learning training workloads to Azure to help further advance their leading AI research.

In addition, Meta and Microsoft will collaborate to scale PyTorch adoption on Azure and accelerate developers' journey from experimentation to production. Azure provides a comprehensive top to bottom stack for PyTorch users with best-in-class hardware (NDv4s and Infiniband). In the coming months, Microsoft will build new PyTorch development accelerators to facilitate rapid implementation of PyTorch-based solutions on Azure. Microsoft will also continue providing enterprise-grade support for PyTorch to enable customers and partners to deploy PyTorch models in production on both cloud and edge.

“We are excited to deepen our collaboration with Azure to advance Meta’s AI research, innovation, and open-source efforts in a way that benefits more developers around the world,” Jerome Pesenti, Vice President of AI, Meta. “With Azure’s compute power and 1.6 TB/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM we are able to accelerate our ever-growing training demands to better accommodate larger and more innovative AI models. Additionally, we’re happy to work with Microsoft in extending our experience to their customers using PyTorch in their journey from research to production.”

By scaling Azure’s supercomputing power to train large AI models for the world’s leading research organizations, and by expanding tools and resources for open source collaboration and experimentation, we can help unlock new opportunities for developers and the broader tech community, and further our mission to empower every person and organization around the world.
Quelle: Azure

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Introducing the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

We are moving to a world where every application needs to be intelligent and adaptive to real-time model learning. As businesses build modern data capabilities, they must make decisions at the speed of human thought. Developers are challenged by this, given the huge silos that exist between databases and analytic products, and the complexity of a fragmented data estate can hamper the speed of agility and innovation. Data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts struggle with the complexity of making data integration, data warehousing, machine learning operations (MLOps), and business intelligence (BI) work together. What is needed is a consistent data ecosystem.

To help address the fragmentation that exists today between databases, analytics and governance, and enable organizations to unlock these new capabilities, we shared several exciting announcements today at Microsoft Build that demonstrate our continued innovation and investment in the data products our customers have come to know and trust, which will enable our customers to achieve the kind of sustained agility that allows them to pivot and adapt in real-time, add layers of intelligence to their applications, unlock fast and predictive insights, and govern their data—wherever it resides.

Accelerate innovation

Today, we unveiled the new Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, the leading cloud data platform that fully integrates databases, analytics, and governance. This seamless data platform empowers organizations to invest more time creating value rather than integrating and managing their data estate.

Furthering our mission of integration, Azure Synapse Link for SQL removes data movement barriers, providing a seamless data pipeline to Azure Synapse Analytics, and enables near-real-time analytics for SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Database. Once Azure Synapse Link transfers data to Azure Synapse Analytics, data can be used for advanced analytics with no performance impact on transactional workloads. Over 10 million Azure SQL databases globally can now leverage this capability.

Achieve agility

Through continued investments in databases and analytics, we are empowering customers to achieve agility in new ways.

Now in preview SQL Server 2022 is our most Azure-enabled release yet, with continued innovation across performance, security, and availability. By connecting SQL server to Azure through seamless disaster recovery to Azure SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server 2022 provides true resilience. The latest Azure Arc innovation is here with the Business Critical tier of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance now generally available—helping customers run the most demanding mission-critical workloads in hybrid and multicloud environments. We continue to invest in bringing the best developer experience in any cloud with Azure SQL Database releasing new features to help simplify and expedite application development and reduce time to market for developers. In addition, the ledger feature in Azure SQL Database, now generally available, eliminates the additional cost and complexity of decentralized blockchain technology while providing the benefits of blockchain in a fully managed and familiar SQL environment.

New innovation in cloud-native NoSQL and open-source databases give developers the freedom to build on their terms. Azure Cosmos DB has an enhanced 30-day trial experience now generally available and has introduced new burst capacity and elasticity features in preview. Application traffic spikes don’t have to equal spikes in costs. New burst capacity and elasticity features ensure applications deliver high performance during peak times while still remaining cost-effective. The Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server Memory-Optimized service tier is now the improved "Business Critical" tier for high performance transactional or analytical applications with a 1.5x performance improvement over Single Server with faster failover time to standby.

When it comes to analytics, Azure Synapse is simply unmatched with more meaningful integrations that enable existing Synapse customers to get even more value from their Microsoft 365 data. Microsoft Graph Data Connect empowers customers to securely export their Microsoft 365 data estate, and it’s only available on Microsoft Azure. This enables every customer to unlock new actionable business insights with the employee and customer collaboration data that comes from Microsoft 365.

Customers like KPMG use Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform integrations to power their KPMG Digital Gateway bringing together a wealth of tools to help customers tackle regulatory change, turn data into value, and streamline compliance and planning while enabling effective collaboration across tax, legal, and finance departments. KPMG Digital Gateway puts its investments in machine learning, data analytics, powerful visualizations, and AI technologies all in one place. Client data is provided once and leveraged across applications, saving time and money.

To continue creating simple frictionless experiences, we announced the preview of datamart in Power BI, a new Power BI Premium self-service capability that enables users to uncover actionable insights through their own data sets. This out-of-the-box feature empowers developers and business analysts to build a datamart that can be centrally governed and managed for workloads up to half a terabyte—accelerating time to insight while alleviating demands on IT. This new feature brings the power of data warehousing and puts it in the hands of individual Power BI developers and analysts, helping you uncover more insights and drive digital transformation at every level of a business.

Build on a trusted platform

Meeting data privacy and governance standards cannot be an afterthought. When governance is not deeply integrated where data lives, it is nearly impossible to meet regulatory requirements. 

Data governance has become top of mind for almost every organization where data is fluidly moving across hybrid and multicloud environments. This makes it increasingly important to map the lineage of data. Dynamic Lineage for Azure SQL Databases in Microsoft Purview is currently in preview to further enrich the Microsoft Purview Data Map with details from actual runs of SQL stored procedures in Azure SQL Databases for customers to govern their data across hybrid and multicloud environments. We are also excited to announce that the Microsoft Purview Data Estate Insights will be generally available in the coming months.

As we look beyond the horizon, machine learning and AI capabilities will be pivotal in harnessing the power of data in new ways. Azure Machine Learning now offers a Responsible AI dashboard in preview, making it possible for customers to implement it more easily by debugging machine learning models and making informed data-driven decisions. The dashboard brings together capabilities such as data explorer, model interpretability, error analysis, counterfactual, and causal inference analysis in a single view. In addition, Azure Machine Learning now offers a Responsible AI scorecard in preview to summarize model performance and insights so that all stakeholders can easily participate in compliance reviews.

The opportunity to accelerate innovation in your business and achieve agility across all your data is substantial. Now is the time to realize its limitless potential. We look forward to seeing what you can do with it.

Learn more about Azure at Microsoft Build 

Deepen your skills with hand-picked learning modules, documentation, and community content.  
Watch all the sessions you loved, or catch up on any you missed after the event with Build On-Demand. 
Continue learning! Join Microsoft experts through live technical content and events to keep your learning going post-Build.
Read how to build productively, collaborate securely, and scale innovation—no matter where in the world with a comprehensive set of Microsoft developer tools and platform.  
Read the latest on how Azure powers your app innovation and modernization with the choice of control and productivity you need to deploy apps at scale. 
Read how you can Innovate faster and achieve greater agility with the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform and turn your data into decisions.

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure