Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Empowering space development off the planet with Azure

Any developer can be a space developer with Azure. Microsoft has a long history of empowering the software development community. We have the world’s most comprehensive developer tools and platforms from Github to Visual Studio, and we support a wide range of industries and use cases from healthcare, financial services, critical industries, and now space.

As Microsoft expands its focus toward space, we are bringing the power, approachability, and security of our developer story to the next frontier. Microsoft is empowering developers with a platform for on-orbit compute at the ultimate edge, so that spacecraft running AI workloads are connected to the hyperscale Azure cloud.

We are reducing the barriers to entry for space application development and increasing the flexibility and modularity of software solutions. Enabling those building space workloads to easily leverage the productivity of our developer tools and integration with Azure services—to develop, analyze, deploy, and operate space applications in orbit and on the ground.

Today we are bringing new partnerships and capabilities to the development community, including:

NASA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are testing AI at the ultimate edge for Astronaut Safety.
New partnerships are bringing development capabilities to on-orbit compute.

Unlocking new on-orbit climate data applications with Thales Alenia Space (TAS).
Developing new technologies with Loft Orbital to demonstrate re-taskable satellite functions and seamless connectivity to the terrestrial cloud.
Demonstrating reconfigurable on-orbit compute and AI processing with Ball Aerospace.

Rapidly analyzing spaceborne data with the new reference architecture for Azure Orbital with Azure Synapse.
Empowering analysts with newly integrated Blackshark.ai geospatial models are available with Azure Orbital.

Testing AI for Astronaut Safety at the ultimate edge

Microsoft, NASA, and HPE developed an AI workload test to run on the International Space Station (ISS) that could detect damage to astronaut equipment.

Using Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, NASA and Microsoft created a computer vision application that identifies the condition of the space gloves. Once trained in the cloud, the app was deployed to the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2, an AI-enabled software and hardware platform, aboard the ISS, and then operated at the ultimate edge enabling both local and remote analysis of the glove conditions.

Learn more about this project today.

On-orbit partnerships

Thales Alenia Space unlocks new on-orbit climate data applications with Microsoft to gather unmatched Earth observation insights.

Microsoft is partnering with Thales Alenia Space to demonstrate and validate on-orbit compute technologies with a demonstration onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales (67 percent) and Leonardo (33 percent), is the leader in orbital infrastructures and is developing high-power, edge-computing solutions for space.  Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space will deploy a powerful on-orbit computer, an on-orbit application framework, and high-performance Earth Observation sensors to unlock new on-orbit climate data processing applications for the benefit of our planet's sustainability. In collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR), Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space will work with research teams in remote sensing, computer vision, and climate science to demonstrate the potential of next-generation on-orbit compute for Earth observation. This space edge computing capacity will allow gathering faster, to-the-point Earth observation insights immediately applicable for our planet’s surveillance, understanding, and protection. This joint collaboration comes a year after the integration of Deeper Vision, an Earth observation data analytics software by Thales Alenia Space, into Azure Space and is a strong milestone towards joint strategic ambitions between Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space which have just signed a Memorandum of Understanding on geospatial solutions, digital ground segment, and space edge computing.

New partnership with Loft Orbital to advance space edge computing and software deployment to orbit.

The Microsoft and Loft Orbital partnership will enable a new way to develop, test, and validate software applications for space systems in Microsoft Azure, and then seamlessly deploy them to satellites in orbit using Loft's space infrastructure tools and platforms. This solution also offers more efficient paths to flight for modern ‘massless’ payloads, where parties needing space capabilities can leverage shared on-orbit hardware rather than having to build and launch their own.

Working together with Loft, we are bringing core satellite capabilities like tasking which has typically been executed on the ground, to a more agile commanding and tasking paradigm executed on-orbit. To do so, we are integrating the Microsoft Azure suite of products, including terrestrial cloud and ground stations services, with Loft software capabilities that provide access to spacecraft, including on-orbit edge computing environment and sensors.

This strategic partnership will provide government and commercial users with a scalable and simplified capability to deploy software in space, enabling new paradigms in remote sensing, edge compute, on-orbit autonomy, and other areas. This groundbreaking capability will be brought to market first on a jointly used satellite launching in 2023 that will provide a host environment for third-party software applications, enabling users to deploy and operate their applications in orbit.

Demonstrating reconfigurable on-orbit compute processing with Ball Aerospace.

Ball Aerospace, a systems integrator with a heritage of designing and building government satellite programs and mission applications, is planning a series of on-orbit testbed satellites that target the agile implementation of new software and hardware for the US Government. Together, Ball Aerospace and Microsoft are collaborating on the execution of these spacecraft missions to demonstrate reconfigurable on-orbit processing technologies, leveraging the Azure Cloud. This includes the use of containerization and cloud on the edge to enable a software-defined mission approach that embraces standards such as Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA), Universal Command and Control Interface (UCI), and Open Mission Systems (OMS). Modular and reconfigurable on-orbit compute will support multiple complex missions for the United States Government and grant the ability to support future concepts for smaller, agile, multi-mission capabilities across all federal space programs.

Analytics for spaceborne data using Azure Orbital

Satellite imagery is a valuable asset; using AI with satellite imagery is a value multiplier. Using geospatial AI over the same area of interest with regularly refreshed satellite imagery, analysts can monitor change detection for their respective areas of interest.

The use of AI with satellite imagery is a powerful, cost-effective tool spanning all industries that monitor, measure, and/or monetize large areas of the Earth. Extracting this value is hard work as satellite imagery consists of unstructured, big data that requires significant resources to transform and analyze in order to access information and store and use it as structured data.

The Azure Space team released a reference architecture articulating how to apply AI to satellite imagery at scale using Azure resources. This reference architecture makes use of Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Store Gen 2, Apache Spark Pool, Azure Data Share, Azure Batch, and Azure Container Registry. This Azure workflow reduces the complexity of extracting insights from remote sensing data by articulating how to group Azure resources to ingest, store, transform, and apply AI over satellite imagery then use the results for various applications. Azure resources allow for flexibility in the workflow, management of storage options, parallelization of workload, and (re)use of containerized models.

Given Azure’s orchestration flexibility, customers can bring their own imagery. Alternatively, if a customer needs imagery, they can call another imagery provider API specifying the respective area of interest, resolution, and vintage of their choosing through Microsoft’s partner Airbus Defense and Space or Microsoft’s Planetary Computer as an option. Customers can also bring their own trained models into the orchestration. If a customer needs geospatial intelligence and remote sensing AI, Microsoft has partnerships with Blackshark.ai, Orbital Insight, and Esri. For those customers looking to build AI, Microsoft offers tools like Azure Machine Learning and Azure Custom Vision.

Blackshark.ai geospatial models are available for analytics on Azure

Blackshark.ai is offering an end-to-end geospatial platform. Part of this platform is the geospatial analytics service called Orca, which detects objects, and extracts attributes about buildings, vegetation, and a growing number of other detection classes, such as roads or infrastructure in the future. This service is now available through Azure Synapse Analytics.

The containerized Orca service–fully integrated into Azure Synapse Analytics provides fast, global-scale, and accurate insights based on satellite or aerial imagery data sets that are available via Azure or provided by customers. Whenever fresh input data is available, the Orca service can provide precise insights for object and change detection, enabling applications such as efficient 3D mapping services, logistic planning, risk analysis, telecom signal propagation planning, or disaster relief planning. More detailed information about the Orca service is available on the Orca support page.

Learn more

Through our announcements today we are continuing our mission to reduce the barriers to entry to space. We are working closely with our partners to empower and enable developers that are building space workloads to easily leverage the best of Azure services and capabilities to transform their approach to development for space. We’re also working closely with an expanding partner ecosystem to help drive innovation on and off the planet.

Through the combination of cloud and on-orbit space capabilities, new applications are being created and iterated upon even faster which in turn provides original approaches to challenging problems. We look forward to meeting our industry peers to continue this discussion at this week’s Space Symposium.

Learn more about Azure Space today.
Quelle: Azure

Bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) to Azure with Custom IP Prefix

When planning a potential migration of on-premises infrastructure to Azure, you may want to retain your existing public IP addresses due to your customers' dependencies (for example, firewalls or other IP hardcoding) or to preserve an established IP reputation. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the ability to bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) to Azure in all public regions. Using the Custom IP Prefix resource, you can now bring your own public IPv4 ranges to Azure and use them like any other Azure-owned public IP ranges. Once onboarded, these IPs can be associated with Azure resources, interact with private IPs and VNETs within Azure’s network, and reach external destinations by egressing from Microsoft’s Wide Area Network. Read more about how bringing your IP addresses to Azure can help to speed up your cloud migration.

Provisioning a custom IP range

Onboarding your ranges to Azure can be done through the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or by using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. In order to bring a public IP range to use on Azure, you must own and have registered the range with a Routing Internet Registry such as ARIN or RIPE. When bringing an IP range to use on Azure, it remains under your ownership, but Microsoft is permitted to advertise it from our Wide Area Network (WAN). The ranges used for onboarding must be no smaller than a /24 (256 IP addresses) so that they will be accepted by Internet service providers. When you create a Custom IP Prefix resource for your IP range, Microsoft performs validation steps to verify your ownership of the range and its association with your Azure subscription. Each onboarded range is associated with an Azure region.

Using a custom IP range

Once your range has been provisioned on Azure, you have the option to assign public IP addresses from the range to resources immediately or to begin advertising the range before assigning, depending on what fits your specific use case. After the command is issued to commission a range, Microsoft will advertise it both regionally (within Azure) and globally (to the Internet). The specific region where the range was onboarded will also be posted publicly for geolocation providers. To assign the BYOIPs, you would create public IP prefixes (contiguous blocks of Standard SKU public IP addresses), from which you can allocate specific individual public IP addresses. Note that while an IP range is onboarded under the context of an Azure subscription, prefixes from this range can be derived from other subscriptions with appropriate permissions. Onboarded IPs can be associated with any resource that supports Standard SKU public IPs, such as virtual machines, Standard Public Load Balancers, Azure Firewalls, and more. You are not charged for maintenance and hosting of your onboarded Public IPs Prefix; you are charged only for egress bandwidth from the IPs and any attached resources.

Key takeaways

The ability to bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) to Azure is currently available in all regions.
The minimum size of an onboarded range is /24 (256 IP addresses).
Onboarded IPs are put in a Custom IP Prefix resource for management, from which Public IP Prefixes can be derived and utilized across subscriptions.
You are not charged for the hosting or management of onboarded ranges brought to Azure.

Additional resources

Custom IP Prefixes.
Create a Custom IP Prefix using Azure PowerShell.

Quelle: Azure

Join us at the Innovate for Impact digital event

How does a retail giant administer COVID-19 vaccinations in days, not months? Can a series-A startup’s innovation help identify massive fraud in seconds instead of hours? For leaders driving business growth, the cloud has forever opened our minds to endless possibilities. In a time of tectonic shifts in all markets and ways of life, what will distinguish the brands we choose tomorrow is an ability to inspire developer ingenuity, create immersive customer experiences, and not just adapt to changing needs, behaviors, and trends, but to anticipate them.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? But the environment and endurance needed to keep innovating can be hard for companies of all sizes, and this is why we’re kicking off Innovate for Impact on Tuesday, April 5 from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Pacific Time. When you register for the event, you’ll get to hear from thought leaders, technologists, and executives about the business impact of app innovation from every angle. Let’s talk about entrepreneurial ethos, dev culture, and how to read and leverage trends with cloud-native and AI technology—there’s so much we can learn from each other on this journey.

The event also brings together both born-in-cloud and enterprise perspectives on how to solve big challenges. You'll learn how Aqua Security, Confluent, Elastic, Trimble, and KPMG defied conventional thinking and built something new by empowering their teams, forging business models, and scaling through better processes. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from tangible, motivating cloud stories—not just what each company achieved, but what they overcame to differentiate.

Microsoft is one of the most innovative companies I know—from championing innovation through a ‘growth mindset’, to transforming our own business model to be cloud-first, to continuing to be at the forefront of delivering immersive experiences in gaming and the metaverse. Microsoft’s ability to continuously reimagine, this clairvoyance at predicting and getting ahead of trends, and the humility to “always be learning” is what makes it successful.

We’ve learned a lot from the thought leaders who joined us for this event, and I can’t wait to share the learnings with all of you. I also hope you’ll participate in the Q and A during the event.  We want to hear from you and have an ongoing dialogue about making innovation real.

Thank you and enjoy!
Ashmi

Register now

Innovate for Impact

Drive business growth with app innovation,
Tuesday, April 5, 2022,
9:00 to 10:30 AM Pacific Time.

Quelle: Azure

Diversifying the telecommunications supply chain with Open RAN

Over the past few years, there has been an increasingly steady drumbeat for the need to diversify and open the telecommunications supply chain. This has been driven both by security concerns and by the need to improve the negotiating power of operators by introducing new entrants into the market. A key part of this supply chain that can be diversified is radio access network (RAN), where operators have typically spent most of their investments in network infrastructure.

To address the need for diversification, groups such as the O-RAN alliance have formed to open up RAN capabilities. In addition, select operator communities from all over Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa have begun experimenting in this space. Governments have also been weighing in, designating telecommunications networks as a national priority and a critical part of infrastructure that needs to be secured, and nurtured to drive innovation. An example of this was the UK Government’s 5G diversification strategy—a plan to grow the telecommunications supply chain while simultaneously making it more resilient to future trends and threats.

Microsoft has successfully transformed into an edge and cloud company; so, we understand the magnitude of such an evolution. At Microsoft, our guiding principle is to support, develop, and foster a partner-rich ecosystem. We believe that the role that we play best as a cloud provider is to provide a secure, scalable, well-managed carrier-grade platform serving as the enabler for third parties to build upon.

Future Radio Access Network Challenge (FRANC)

As it turns out, the UK government’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports (DCMS) was thinking along the same lines. The Future Radio Access Network Challenge (FRANC) was designed as a follow-on to their diversification strategy. It identified the need to accelerate Open RAN innovation to meet its target of 35 percent of all network traffic over Open RAN by 2030, as well as spark UK-based innovation in this space.

This initiative aligns well with our ambitions—to grow and diversify the supply chain as well as support a healthy and vibrant Open RAN ecosystem. We reached out to Intel and Capgemini, industry leaders in Open RAN, and the University of Edinburgh, a leading academic institution, to join us in demonstrating how beautifully our ideas could fit together to achieve our mutual objectives.

DCMS has endorsed this approach, with the Microsoft-led consortium being one of the award recipients of their challenge. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022, we pulled back the curtain a bit more to explain what we will be doing jointly as a group, and how our combined efforts will help accelerate the Open RAN ecosystem.

Technology showcased at the Mobile World Congress 2022

At MWC 2022, in close collaboration with our partners, we showed how disaggregated software and hardware are the future of telecommunications networks. This new software-driven programmable network architecture leads to faster rollouts with lower total cost of ownership. Cloud technologies—AI and machine learning analytics, edge computing, large-scale management, self-diagnostics, network programmability, network verification, and global connectivity—can be leveraged to improve highly secure operational efficiency of the virtualized RAN. This infrastructure also supports the creation of new revenue streams through the enablement of a developer ecosystem. 

Additionally, we announced the next wave of Azure for Operators solutions and services, which includes Azure Operator Distributed Services (AODS). AODS combines the enhanced version of AT&T’s Network Cloud software we acquired with the best of Azure, including our industry-leading security, monitoring, analytics, AI, machine learning, and so much more. Capable of handling network-intensive workloads and mission-critical applications, AODS is a carrier-grade platform that provides flexibility and scalability to support deployments at the edge of the cloud, the edge of the network, or the enterprise edge. We’ve been focused on ensuring that this edge infrastructure (both near and far edge) is capable of supporting RAN workloads.

We demonstrated a system that used our AODS solution, which provides hybrid cloud platform for telecommunications network functions. The architectural components included commercial off-the-shelf hardware equipment with Intel’s silicon and Capgemini’s Open RAN network functions. Specifically, Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, PTP-enabled network interface cards (NICs), and the Intel vRAN Accelerator ACC100 Adapter, all leveraged by the FlexRAN™ layer 1 software. Capgemini provided the vCU and vDU Open RAN network functions, and Microsoft provided the cloud-managed platform through AODS.

Figure 1: Hardware setup of the live demonstration of carrier-grade cloud-managed Open RAN platform at MWC 2022. 

The setup included four commercial off-the-shelf servers connected to a top-of-rack (ToR) and management switch. A radio unit (RU), capable of 4×4 multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) over a 100 MHz channel, was connected to the ToR using 7.2 times front-haul interface. A grandmaster clock was also connected to the ToR switch providing PTP synchronization to the RU and the servers. A 5G smartphone device was used to connect to the network. We showed how with AODS we can connect all these together and deploy a virtualized RAN from a cloud with a few mouse clicks and manage it remotely. Such a seamless deployment process reduces the integration efforts that have to be done by vendors, allowing them to focus on innovation instead.

Here you can view a video of the demo. In particular, notice the live analytics this system provides. We will have more to say about that in an upcoming article.

Looking ahead

Along with our partners, Microsoft is bringing to life carrier-grade edge-cloud solutions that empower operators globally to deploy Open RAN network functions easily and securely. Our tools and services can manage RAN deployments at scale. With Azure machine learning and AI, a core component of our technologies, operators can perform analytics that optimize performance, improve management, and proactively detect and solve problems.

Security principles designed for the cloud are being adopted to make the platform resilient, to prevent, detect, and respond to threats in the network and across the firmware and telecommunications supply chains. Edge and network monitoring and programmability via open API’s will enable a new generation of 5G applications while simultaneously improving operational efficiency. Operators can increase revenues and reduce infrastructure costs while building future-proof solutions.

As we begin to build on our promise, we encourage operators and ecosystem partners to contact us to learn more.
Quelle: Azure

Accelerate silicon design innovation on Azure with Synopsys Cloud

Semiconductor and silicon technology are the basis of digital transformation happening everywhere, across industries and our daily lives, impacting the way we work, learn, and play. The continuous improvement in the performance and power of silicon has been key to enabling this innovation. Here at Microsoft, we’ve empowered our long-standing partners in the semiconductor industry to embrace Azure’s cloud infrastructure and scale out electronic design automation (EDA). With a new EDA-optimized cloud environment running on Azure, the launch of Synopsys Cloud marks a significant milestone for the industry by offering silicon design teams the ability to scale and accelerate their development cycles—transforming chip design the way that the cloud transformed computing.

Increasing flexibility and efficiency in silicon development on Azure

The collective rise in time-to-market pressure caused by the global chip shortage and increasing computational demands have caused chipmakers to seek more flexibility and efficiency in the silicon design process. Migrating chip design to Azure’s optimized infrastructure helps address part of this equation by enabling critical design and verification workloads on the cloud—resulting in faster time-to-results and better quality at a lower cost. With Synopsys Cloud built on Azure, chip designers will now also have access to a new pay-per-use model offering automated provisioning of infrastructure and EDA tools to address the growing demands of silicon design.

This “pay-as-you-go” model is a software as a service (SaaS)-based approach that will reduce barriers for companies of all sizes while enabling greater innovation and value for customers and EDA vendors alike. Using the power of Azure’s workload scaling and virtual machine (VM) selection capabilities, Synopsys Cloud customers will be able to optimize critical EDA workloads—from reducing processing time on verification tasks to saving runtime and enabling faster design convergence on library characterization.

Expanding access to chip design on the cloud

Microsoft has long been committed to helping companies of all sizes unlock more potential on the cloud. With its powerful chip design and verification tools running on Azure’s trusted and comprehensive cloud platform, Synopsys is Microsoft’s preferred partner for EDA on the cloud. Using Synopsys’ solution, customers ranging from startups to large design enterprises benefit from simplified access to custom infrastructure for all their chip design needs—helping them build silicon and tackle designs they previously could not

Innovation for wide-ranging impact

From intelligent scaling of EDA resources to using AI and machine learning models to transform design and resource management, silicon manufacturing has already seen vast improvements with the introduction of the cloud. The shift towards cloud-centric silicon design has enabled newfound access to compute, storage, and tooling resources. Ultimately, improved time-to-results, quality-of-results, and cost-of-results are just the beginning of what cloud-enabled EDA enhancements can offer. As design on the cloud becomes increasingly widespread, I look forward to seeing the silicon industry continuing to innovate towards new levels of ingenuity—powered by the Microsoft Cloud.

 

Tune in to Synopsys’ SNUG 2022 conference to watch a keynote by Dr. Aart de Geus, Chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys, including a fireside chat with Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

Learn more

Learn more about Azure for the semiconductor industry.
Learn more about Azure high-performance computing (HPC) for Silicon.
Learn more about Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).
Learn more about Microsoft’s global infrastructure.
Take a virtual tour of Microsoft’s datacenters.

Quelle: Azure

Introducing the new Azure Front Door: Reimagined for modern apps and content

This blog has been co-authored by Jessie Jia, Senior Program Manager, Azure Networking and Gunjan Jain, Principal Program Manager, Azure Networking.

In 2019, we launched Azure Front Door to bring enterprise-grade content delivery network (CDN) capabilities to our customers. This was a result of our own cloud journey over the past 13 years, which led us to develop unique infrastructure and services hardened by support for Microsoft’s largest applications like Bing, Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, Skype, and Azure. Read about LinkedIn’s experience1 migrating their own infrastructure to Azure Front Door.

Since then, a lot has changed for you and your customers. The acceleration of digital transformation to adapt to new ways of doing business, hybrid working models, and increasing security costs has driven the demand for a new type of cloud CDN that can address these modern challenges and simplify internet-first architectures in the cloud.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the new Azure Front Door, our native, modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) catering to both dynamic and static content acceleration with built-in turnkey security, and a simple and predictable pricing model. There are two Azure Front Door tiers—Azure Front Door Standard and Premium—that provide a unified, secure solution for delivering your applications, APIs, and content on Azure or anywhere.

Azure Front Door: The modern enterprise CDN

Every company is now a technology company challenged with managing a rapidly growing digital footprint, dispersed workforce, and evolving security threats. As a result, enterprises are looking for solutions that help meet the rising demands for better scalability, more security, higher performance, greater automation, and easier manageability—with reduced costs.

Whether you’re delivering content and files or building global apps and APIs, Azure Front Door can help you deliver higher availability, lower latency, better scale, and more secure experiences to your users wherever they are. Azure Front Door also enables you to define, manage, and monitor the global routing for your app.

Dynamic and static content acceleration with intelligent security

With the addition of Azure Front Door Standard and Premium, two new tiers that combine the capabilities of Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) and attach with Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF), Azure Front Door is now a unified, modern cloud CDN platform with intelligent threat protection and simple to understand pricing model, built on Microsoft’s massive-scale private global network.

Azure Front Door now also provides a rich set of advanced capabilities that enhance the DevOps experience, security posture, and cost-effectiveness for enterprise customers migrating and/or deploying high-performance, scalable, and secure applications on Azure or anywhere.

The key benefits you can get from Azure Front Door include:

Modern architecture

Build and operate dynamic, high-quality digital experiences with highly automated, secure, and reliable platforms.

Deeply integrated experiences with other Azure applications and services such as domain name system (DNS) and Web Apps to improve manageability and speed up deployment. We now offer DNS TXT record-based validation to simplify and reduce delays around custom domain validation.
Improved automation and simplified provisioning with cloud-native and DevOps friendly command line tools. For example, you can now provision custom domains along with other resources in one deployment and validate the domain ownership afterward or use the new Quick Create option in the portal to dramatically reduce deployment and configuration steps.
Enhanced analytics capabilities such as access logs, health probe logs, additional metrics, and pre-built traffic and security reports for more effective monitoring, troubleshooting, and debugging.
Expanded rules at the edge with enhanced rules engine capabilities adding regular expressions and server variables that let you move more of your business logic to the edge and create more complex and dynamic routing between your users and backends.

Fast global delivery

Deploy your apps and content at scale to your users wherever they are—creating opportunities for you to compete, weather change, and quickly adapt to new demand and markets. 

A truly global network built by Microsoft with hundreds of edge locations connected to Azure via a private WAN that can improve latency for apps by up to three times and provides enterprise-grade reliability and massive scalability to deliver low latency and high throughput for consistent application experiences.
Unified static and dynamic delivery is offered in a single service to accelerate and scale your application and with real-time routing to develop high-availability experiences for applications hosted in Azure or anywhere.
A simplified cost model that reduces billing complexity by having fewer meters customers need to plan for and integrated egress (data transfer outbound) pricing that removes the separate egress charge from Azure regions to Azure Front Door. Please refer to the Azure Front Door pricing page for more details.

Intelligent security

Protect your digital estate against known and new threats with intelligent security that embrace a Zero Trust framework.

Best-of-breed security services seamlessly attached such as built-in layer 3-4 DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall, Azure DNS to protect your domains, and Azure Private Link.
WAF enhancements offer a powerful, yet cost-effective protection from common attacks and bots and are customizable to application-specific detections. Azure Front Door Premium includes Azure Web Application Firewall at no additional cost and provides enhanced capabilities. Azure WAF is also releasing a new DRS 2.0 RuleSet, offering reduced false positives and anomaly scoring-based detection. Bot manager—now generally available, provides an additional layer of Bot detection based on Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
Azure Private Link support on Azure Front Door Premium with availability in all Azure regions with availability zones, enabling your application to extend all the way out to the edge with private access from Azure Front Door to your backends in Azure.

Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic)

The existing Azure Front Door and Azure CDN from Microsoft will now be known as Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) moving forward. Azure Front Door (classic), as well as Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic), will continue to be fully supported and you can continue to use them. However, we encourage you to take advantage of Azure Front Door Standard and Premium as the latest capabilities and future enhancements will not be available on Azure Front Door (classic).

Over the coming months, we will be launching zero downtime migrations from Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) to Azure Front Door Standard and Premium. Please stay tuned for more updates. If you are new to Azure Front Door, you can easily launch Azure Front Door Standard and Premium in the Azure portal or using our API.

Get started

Get started with the new Azure Front Door today! To learn more about the service and various features, refer to the Azure Front Door documentation. If you are interested in exploring capabilities beyond the standard offering, simply file a feature request on our Networking Community Page or feel free to contact us at afdfeedback@microsoft.com.

1Accelerating the LinkedIn Experience with Azure Front Door.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – March 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 Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

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

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal
What's new in Cost Management Labs
New ways to save money with Azure
Documentation updates
Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Let's dig into the details.

 

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal

If you manage an Enterprise Agreement (EA) billing account, you’re familiar with the EA portal where you can manage the account hierarchy, view credit balance, and view cost for each department, account, and subscription. This has been a great foundation, but did you know there are even more tools that can help you better monitor, manage, and optimize costs within the Azure portal?

When it comes to managing your billing account (enrollment), you have all the same EA tools available from Cost Management and Billing in the Azure portal:

Seamlessly create and manage the enrollment hierarchy.
Manage access to departments, accounts, and subscriptions.
View properties and manage policies, like the ability to view charges and purchase reservations.
View notification contacts for enrollment emails.

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

View and track Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) balance.
View and download invoices.
View and download consolidated usage and charges, including options for amortized reservation charges.
Analyze and drill into your costs in the portal or schedule automated exports.
Split shared costs to drive more visibility and accountability throughout the organization with cost allocation.
Configure budgets to get alerted before costs exceed predefined thresholds.

With these updates, managing your EA billing account from the Azure portal is now generally available for direct EA enrollments. Learn more and let us know what you’d like to see next.

 

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:

Update: Total cost in the cost analysis preview—now available in the public portal
See your total cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview or by using the cost analysis preview in Cost Management Labs.
New: Access preview views from classic cost analysis
Get one-click access to the new preview views from classic cost analysis in the View menu. You can see this in classic cost analysis in Cost Management Labs.
New: Anomaly detection alerts
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.
Grouping SQL databases and elastic pools
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.
Average cost in the cost analysis preview
See your average daily cost at the top of 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.
Budgets in the cost analysis preview
Quickly create and edit budgets directly from the cost analysis preview. If you don’t have a budget yet, you’ll see a suggested budget based on your forecast. 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 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

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

General availability: Automatically delete a VM and its associated resources simultaneously.
Generally available: Virtual Machine level disk bursting supports M-series, Msv2-series Medium Memory, and Mdsv2-series Medium Memory VM families.
General availability: Best practices assessment for SQL virtual machines.
General availability: Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server now available in US Gov Virginia and China East 2 and China North 2.
General availability: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server now available in US Gov Virginia and US Gov Arizona.
General availability: Azure NetApp Files is now available in Australia Central 2 with support for cross-region replication.
Preview: On-demand capacity reservations for Azure Site Recovery.
Preview: Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux Bring Your Own Subscription.
Preview: SKU recommendation in Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio.

 

Documentation updates

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

Learn about built-in views available in cost analysis.
Documented common questions about the UsageDetails API.
Increased the subscription limit from 2000 to 5000 subscriptions per EA enrollment account.
Updated subscription transfer articles for newly supported transfer scenarios, including reservations getting automatically transferred.

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

RISE with SAP on the Microsoft Cloud: A year in review

Today, we are announcing that Microsoft and SAP are advancing our partnership by deepening our commitment to each other’s platform. Microsoft will be the first public cloud provider to adopt the RISE with SAP solution internally to transform some of its large SAP ERP deployments. This takes place on the one-year anniversary of our partnership with SAP to offer the Microsoft Cloud as one of the infrastructure options for the RISE with SAP solution. This move deepens an already strong partnership and will allow Microsoft to accelerate our own SAP S/4HANA® modernization while enabling us to develop greater expertise and best practices to better serve our customers.

As part of its transformative journey and to gain operational efficiencies, SAP will optimize its IT operations for some critical internal business systems using the RISE with SAP operations model on Microsoft Azure. Customers and partners have experienced early success in accelerating their business transformation and simplifying their path to the intelligent enterprise. For example:

The National Basketball Association (NBA) chose to migrate its SAP® solutions and other IT resources to Microsoft Azure and leverage the RISE with SAP offering to facilitate its ongoing cloud evolution. The NBA has gained flexibility, scalability, and access to a wide range of data and AI services in Azure that will help the league deliver best-in-class fan engagement through data consolidation and reduced IT management overhead. “The RISE with SAP bundle is really strategic for the NBA,” says Puneet Toteja, Senior Director at NBA.

“With the built-in AI, data warehouse, and personalization capabilities of Azure, we can generate fan-centric experiences that bring together business, game, and fan data to enhance the ways people can enjoy interacting with the NBA,” remarks Sahil Gupta, Senior Vice President and Head of Application Development at NBA.

Fressnapf, the leading pet product retailer in Europe, has gained greater flexibility, scalability, and reliability using the RISE with SAP solution on Azure, which brings together the best-of-breeds: SAP as its central business platform and Azure as its scalable infrastructure platform.

“Microsoft always gave us open and honest advice and we could tell—they are in for the long game! We have chosen the partner closest to our heart,” says Benjamin Beinroth, CIO at Fressnapf.

Footwear, apparel, and accessories marketer and retailer Wolverine Worldwide made a commitment to migrate its data centers to Microsoft Azure in parallel with an upgrade to the RISE with SAP solution hosted on Azure. Wolverine Worldwide is moving to the cloud to support growth, improve agility, enhance employee experience, and improve speed to market.

Not only do customers prefer the Microsoft Cloud for their RISE with SAP solution implementation, but our ecosystem partners do as well. Atos, a global leader in digital transformation with 105,000 employees worldwide, has chosen Microsoft Cloud for its RISE with SAP solution implementation.

“We chose Azure to increase flexibility and scalability, with a system that we can adjust as required.  In addition, we have easier interoperation with the services on offer, like Teams and Power BI, and technologies like AI, machine learning, and chatbots,” explains Frédéric Aubrière, Group CIO at Atos.

Customers and partners choose Microsoft Cloud for their SAP solutions because of the ease of integration, breadth of advanced services and innovation, and the highest level of security and compliance. Microsoft offers the broadest set of connectors and APIs to enable quick integration into SAP solutions—whether improving productivity by integrating SAP applications and Microsoft Teams or enhancing data analytics with Power BI and SAP Analytics Cloud solution or automating and integrating SAP apps with other cloud data. These comprehensive services, tools, and capabilities have accelerated our customers’ and partners’ business transformation.

SAP and Microsoft: Integrate and co-innovate

We constantly strive to improve the user experience, simplify the automation and integration of SAP S/4HANA on the Microsoft Cloud, and accelerate customers’ business transformation. This partnership puts both SAP and Microsoft in a strong position to continue driving the best outcomes for customers with solutions from SAP in the public cloud.

We’re achieving this by focusing on addressing the needs of various SAP users:

SAP Business User

Microsoft Teams has become one of the most used applications on desktops and mobile apps for collaboration and communication. We have come a long way since we announced the expanded partnership between SAP and Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Teams across SAP solutions. This has enabled more scenarios, including SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, among others. Check out how Doosan created the Delightful Digital Workplace for its employees and how you can benefit from the integration of SAP SuccessFactors solutions and Microsoft Viva.

Developers

The innovation for SAP developers includes improvements in SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to increase availability and accelerate the development of SAP extensions. As part of our global expansion plan, we launched support in the Australia East region last year, making SAP BTP on Azure available in six regions, with more to be added in the coming months. We continue to add access to new security features in the cloud. SAP BTP now supports Azure Private Link, offering excellent private network connectivity between applications running on SAP BTP, Azure native services, and resources running in our customer’s subscription.

To architect for scalable and robust enterprise applications in the cloud, event-driven architectures are the strategic path forward. We are happy to announce the upcoming integration between the SAP Event Mesh capability and Azure Event Grid. This collaboration will greatly facilitate the integration of event-based architectures between Microsoft’s and SAP’s technology stacks. This bidirectional integration will enable scenarios such as Azure Logic App to be triggered by an event in SAP S/4HANA or an SAP software workflow triggered by an event in the Azure platform. This is further enhanced by improved integration of SAP Cloud Identity Services and Azure Active Directory, allowing for easier identity flows.

We will continue to build and share joint SAP and Microsoft reference architectures so customers can access best practices and guidance on how to deploy our new capabilities.

Administrators

The SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool has been a way to accelerate the creation of test and development systems for customers starting their journey to the cloud with SAP S/4HANA. Setting up production quality installations of SAP S/4HANA and implementing best practices to achieve performance, security, and cost optimization may still be challenging. Thanks to the partnership between SAP and Microsoft, it is now possible for customers to deploy production systems with SAP Cloud Appliance Library on Microsoft Azure. This functionality for production systems is currently only available in Azure and is a major productivity gain. With SAP Cloud Appliance Library, administrators can use a wizard with a simple UI flow to deploy an SAP and Microsoft approved SAP S/4HANA landscape, that is based on customer individual software stack definitions (via Maintenance Planner), SAP instance sizing, and high-availability options. Moreover, it benefits not only greenfield implementations, but in combination with the new “DMO to Azure” tool, it supports the conversion from on-premise SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

Lastly, customers can further enhance productivity by integrating SAP applications with Azure native services. The recently launched Azure Blob Storage Connector for the SAP Information Lifecycle Management service is a great example of how we facilitate life-cycle management using Azure’s scalability, security, and cost benefits.

Respecting the customer’s choice

Microsoft understands that every customer is different. Each one has their own set of requirements and priorities, and when it comes to their SAP systems, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The RISE with SAP solution offers the choice of Azure infrastructure, allowing customers to take the best path for their business. We are thankful for our deep, 25-year-long relationship with SAP and look forward to delivering more joint innovation to our customers.
Quelle: Azure

5 reasons to attend the Modernize and Migrate with Hybrid Cloud Flexibility digital event

Are you looking to modernize your applications and data and migrate your workloads to cloud? To provide you insights and guidance directly from Azure customers, experts, and engineers, we will be hosting Modernize and Migrate with Hybrid Cloud Flexibility digital event on Wednesday, April 13, 2022, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

Here are five reasons to attend Modernize and Migrate with Hybrid Cloud Flexibility digital event.

Hear best practices and real-life modernization and migration success stories from Azure customers and FastTrack for Azure engineers
This event will showcase Azure customers like GE, Volkswagen Financial Services, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and Azure Migration and Modernization Program customers like Jotun, and Planzer. These customers will share why and how they modernized and migrated to Azure. You will also hear real-life best practices from FastTrack for Azure engineers.
Join exclusive sessions on apps, data, and infrastructure modernization and migration scenarios
This event will include technical sessions providing guidance from Azure experts like Jeff Hollan, Jeff Woolsey, and Bob Ward on how to modernize .NET and Java applications, SQL databases, and all kinds of workloads to Azure. You will also get to learn about Azure Migrate, the central hub for migration and modernization tools, and hear about its latest updates.
Discover hybrid cloud solutions to help you modernize and migrate at your own pace
We understand that you might not be ready to move all workloads to the cloud yet and you need a consistent way of managing workloads across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge. In this event, you will discover how Azure Arc enables you to secure and govern infrastructure and apps anywhere, build cloud-native apps faster with familiar tools and services to run them on any Kubernetes platform, and modernize your data estate with Azure data services.
Get hands-on experience with deep-dive demos, workshops, and cloud skills challenges
In addition to the sessions, you can boost your hands-on experience with multiple deep-dive demos, three interactive workshops, and three cloud skills challenges. Each of these is specifically built for apps, data, and infrastructure modernization scenarios and gives you a hands-on in-depth experience of each scenario.
Enroll in a chance to win Surface Headphones, Surface Earbuds, or a Bose SoundLink Micro speaker
Once you register for this free event, you can earn points by participating in different activities like watching the event for more than 90 minutes and viewing resources like workshops and cloud skills challenges. Once you earn 400 points, you will automatically enter a chance to win prizes like Microsoft Surface Headphones, Microsoft Surface Earbuds, and Bose Soundlink Micro Bluetooth Speakers. Check out the detailed sweepstake rules.

Register today for the Modernize and Migrate with Hybrid Cloud Flexibility digital event

Modernize and Migrate with Hybrid Cloud Flexibility digital event
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
9:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Quelle: Azure

Manage port forwarding for backend pool with Azure Load Balancer

Starting today, Azure Load Balancer enables customers to manage port forwarding for Virtual Machine Scale Sets or a group of virtual machines in a backend pool with a single set-up with minimum management overhead.

What is port forwarding?

Port forwarding lets you connect to specific virtual machines by using the Load Balancer frontend IP address and port number. Load Balancer, upon receiving the traffic on a certain frontend port, will forward traffic to the target virtual machine on a specific backend port.

By employing an inbound NAT rule, you can access virtual machines in a virtual network through the IP address and port of the Load Balancer.

Inbound NAT rule or load balancing rule?

In a nutshell, inbound NAT rule is used for traffic forwarding by mapping each virtual machine to a frontend port of the Load Balancer for access. All traffic arriving at the specified frontend port of the Load Balancer will be directly forwarded to a single targeted virtual machine. Therefore, traffic is not load balanced in this case. Inbound NAT rules are useful when you want to forward traffic directly to a specific virtual machine and port combination. While load balancing rules are used to distribute traffic coming to a specific frontend of the Load Balancer across all virtual machines in the backend pool.

Figure 1: Inbound NAT rule for single machine.

Figure 2: Load Balancing rule.

You can have both load balancing rules and inbound NAT rules on the same Load Balancer. For example, a load balancing rule can be set up for the specific backend pool from frontend port 80 to backend port 80, so that incoming traffic can be distributed across the virtual machines in the backend pool. At the same time, you can also set up an inbound NAT rule for each virtual machine on backend port 443 so that you can use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to access each virtual machine for management purposes.

Figure 3: Use both inbound NAT rule and load balancing rule on a backend pool.

What are the customer challenges that we aim to solve?

Inbound NAT rules for individual target machine

When you have a large backend pool with frequent scaling up and down, this approach will create unnecessary overhead. An inbound NAT rule needs to be deleted before the target virtual machine can be taken out of the backend pool. Similarly, whenever scaling up occurs, a new inbound NAT rule for the new virtual machine needs to be created to complete the port forwarding set-up.

Inbound NAT pool

Inbound NAT pool is useful when the backend pool is composed of Virtual Machine Scale Sets. However, this approach is not viable when your backend pool is composed of a group of virtual machines.

Set up inbound NAT rule for backend pool

Based on frontend port range start, maximum number of machines in backend pool defined for an inbound NAT rule, Load Balancer will pre-allocate a range of frontend ports starting from frontend port range start. The range end is calculated by adding maximum number of machines in the backend pool to frontend port range start to ensure that there are enough frontend ports in the event of scaling up.

Figure 4: Add inbound NAT rule.

In this example, Load Balancer will pre-allocate 1000 frontend ports starting from port 500. In this case, the backend pool can scale up to 1000 machines without requiring extra management from the customer.

Figure 5: Inbound NAT rule for backend pool.

Port mapping for individual machines

Once the inbound NAT rule is created, Load Balancer will assign the frontend port to each virtual machine in the backend pool. Port mappings of existing machines will not change in the event of scaling up or down. In this example, to access centralus-vm1 on port 443, you can use https://40.89.253.167:502.

Figure 6: Port mapping for individual machines.

Learn more

What are inbound NAT rules?
Tutorial: Create a multiple virtual machines inbound NAT rule using the Azure portal
Product details: Azure Load Balancer

Quelle: Azure