Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

New Datadog integration with Azure offers a seamless configuration experience

This post was co-authored by Sreekanth Thirthala Venkata, Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio and .NET.

Microsoft Azure enables customers to migrate and modernize their applications to run in the cloud, in coordination with many partner solutions. One such partner is Datadog, which provides observability and security tools for users to understand the health and performance of their applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. But configuring the necessary integrations often requires navigating between the Azure portal and Datadog.

This adds complexity, takes time, and makes it difficult to troubleshoot if things aren’t working. To reduce the burden of managing across multiple portals, we worked with Datadog to create an integrated Datadog solution on the Azure cloud platform. Available via the Azure Marketplace, this solution provides a seamless experience for using the Datadog’s cloud monitoring solution in Azure.

“The Microsoft cloud is the first to enable a seamless configuration and management experience for customers using third-party solutions like Datadog. With Datadog, customers are empowered to use this experience to monitor their Azure workloads and enable an accelerated transition to the cloud.” —Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Solutions

With the new Azure integration with Datadog, organizations can now fully map their legacy and cloud-based systems, monitoring real-time data during every phase of the cloud transition, and ensure that migrated applications meet performance targets. This integration combines Azure’s global presence, flexibility, security, and compliance with Datadog's logging and monitoring capabilities to create the best experience for enterprises.

Through this unified experience, customers will be able to:

Provision a new Datadog organization and configure their Azure resources to send logs and metrics to Datadog—a fully managed setup with no infrastructure for customers to setup and operate.
Seamlessly send logs and metrics to Datadog. The log-forwarding process has been completely automated; rather than building out a log-forwarding pipeline with Diagnostic Settings, Event Hubs, and Functions, you can configure everything with just a few clicks.
Easily install the Datadog agent on VM hosts through a single-click.
Streamline single-sign on (SSO) to Datadog—a separate sign in from the Datadog portal is no longer required.
Get unified billing for the Datadog service through Azure subscription invoicing.

"Observability is a key capability for any successful cloud migration. Through our new partnership with Microsoft Azure, customers will now have access to the Datadog platform directly in the Azure console, enabling them to migrate, optimize and secure new and migrated workloads." —Amit Agarwal, Chief Product Officer, Datadog

Here’s a quick look at this integrated experience:

Acquire and setup the Datadog solution

Now let’s follow the step-by-step process to acquire and setup the Datadog solution:

Procuring the Datadog app: Azure customers can procure the Datadog app through the Azure Marketplace.

Provisioning in the Azure portal: After procuring in Azure Marketplace, customers can seamlessly provision Datadog as an integrated service on Azure via the Azure portal.

Configuring logs and metrics: Customers create a Datadog resource in Azure and configure which Azure resources send logs and metrics and to Datadog.

Installing Datadog agent: Customers can install the Datadog agent as an extension on virtual machines (VMs) and app services with a single click.

Access via SSO: Customers access Datadog from the Azure portal through a streamlined SSO experience and configure Datadog as a destination for logs and metrics from Azure services.

Next steps

Sign up for the preview of the new Datadog integration with Azure. The preview will be available on Azure Marketplace starting October 2020.
Read more about the Azure Monitor partner integration with Datadog.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft partners with the telecommunications industry to roll out 5G and more

The increasing demand for always-on connectivity, immersive experiences, secure collaboration, and remote human relationships is pushing networks to their limits, while the market is driving down price. The network infrastructure must ensure operators are able to optimize costs and gain efficiencies, while enabling the development of personalized and differentiated services. To address the requirements of rolling out 5G, operators will face strong challenges, including high capital expenditure (CapEx) investments, an increased need for scale, automation, and secure management of the massive volume of data it will generate.

Today starts a new chapter in our close collaboration with the telecommunications industry to unlock the power of 5G and bring cloud and edge closer than ever. We're building a carrier-grade cloud and bringing more Microsoft technology to the operator’s edge. This, in combination with our developer ecosystem, will help operators to future proof their networks, drive down costs, and create new services and business models.

In Microsoft, operators get a trusted partner who will empower them to unlock the potential of 5G. Enabling them to offer a range of new services such as ultra-reliable low-latency connectivity, mixed reality communications services, network slicing, and highly scalable IoT applications to transform entire industries and communities.

By harnessing the power of Microsoft Azure, on their edge, or in the cloud, operators can transition to a more flexible and scalable model, drive down infrastructure cost, use AI and machine learning (ML) to automate operations and create service differentiation. Furthermore, a hybrid and hyper-scale infrastructure will provide operators with the agility they need to rapidly innovate and experiment with new 5G services on a programmable network.

More specifically, we will further support operators as they evolve their infrastructure and operations using technologies such as software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and service-based architectures. We are bringing to market a carrier-grade platform for edge and cloud to support the operator’s goals to future proof their infrastructure with disaggregated, and containerized network architectures. Recognizing that not everything will move to the public cloud, we will meet operators where they are—whether at the enterprise edge, the network edge, or in the cloud.

Our approach is built on the acquisitions of industry leaders in cloud-native network functions—Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch and on the development of Azure Edge Zones. By bringing together hundreds of engineers with deep experience in the telecommunications space, we are ensuring that our product development process is catering to the most relevant networking needs of the operators. We will leverage the strengths of Microsoft to extend and enhance the current capabilities of industry-leading products such as Affirmed’s 5G core and Metaswitch’s UC portfolio. These capabilities, combined with Microsoft’s broad developer ecosystem and deep business to business partnership programs, provide Microsoft with a unique ability to support the operators as they seek to monetize the capabilities of their networks.

Your customer, your service, powered by our technology

As we build out our partnerships with different operators, it is clear to us that there will be different approaches to technology adoption based on business needs. Some operators may choose to adopt the Azure platform and select a varied mix of virtualized or containerized network function providers. We also have operators that have requested complete end-to-end services as components for their offers. As a part of these discussions, many operators have identified points of control that are important to them, for example:

Control over where a slice, network API, or function is presented to the customer.
Definition of where and how traffic enters and exits their network.
Visibility and control over where key functions are executed for a given customer scenario.
Configuration and performance parameters of core network functions.

As we build out Azure for Operators, we recognize the importance of ensuring operators have the control and visibility they require to manage their unique industry requirements. To that end, here is how our assets come together to provide operators with the platform they need.

Interconnect

It starts with the ability to interconnect deeply with the operator’s network around the globe. We have one of the largest networks that connect with operators at more than 170 points of presence and over 20,000 peering connections around the globe, putting direct connectivity within 25 miles of 85 percent of the world’s GDP. More than 200 operators have already chosen to integrate with the Azure network through our ExpressRoute service, enabling enterprises and partners to link their corporate networks privately and securely to Azure services. We also provide additional routes to connect to the service through options as varied as satellite connectivity and TV White Space spectrum.

Edge platform

This reach helps us to supply operators with cloud computing options that meet the customer wherever those capabilities are needed: at the enterprise edge, the network edge, the network core, or in the cloud. The various form factors, optimized to support the location in which they are deployed, are supported by the Azure platform—providing virtual machine and container services with a common management framework, DevOps support, and security control.

Network functions

We believe in an open platform that leverages the strengths of our partners. Our solutions are a combination of virtualized and containerized services as composable functions, developed by us and by our Network Equipment Provider partners, to support operators’ services such as the Radio Access Network, Mobile Packet Core, Voice and Interconnect services, and other network functions.

Technology from Affirmed and Metaswitch Networks will provide services for Mobile Packet Core, Voice, and Interconnect services.

Cloud solutions and Azure IoT for operators

By exposing these services through the Azure platform, we can combine them with other Azure capabilities such as Azure Cognitive Services (used by more than 1 million developers processing more than 10 billion transaction per day), Azure Machine Learning, and Azure IoT, to bring the power of AI and automation to the delivery of network services. These capabilities, in concert with our partnerships with OSS and BSS providers, enables us to help operators streamline and simplify operations, create new services to monetize the network, and gain greater insights into customer behavior.

In IoT our primary focus is simplifying our solutions to accelerate what we can do together from the edge to the cloud. We’ve done so by creating a platform that provides simple and secure provisioning of applications and devices to Azure cloud solutions through Azure IoT Central, which is the fastest and easiest way to build IoT solutions at scale. IoT Central enables customers to provision an IoT app in seconds, customize it in hours, and go to production the same day. IoT Plug and Play dramatically simplifies all aspects of IoT device support and provides devices that “just work” with any solution and is the perfect complement to achieve speed and simplicity through IoT Central. Azure IoT Central also gives the Mobile Operator the opportunity to monetize more of the IoT solution and puts them in a position to be a re-seller of the IoT Central application platform through their own solutions. Learn more about using Azure IoT for operators here.

Cellular connectivity is increasingly important for IoT solutions and represents a vast and generational shift for mobile operators as the share of devices in market shifts towards the enterprise. We will continue our deep partnership with operators to enable fast and efficient app development and deployment, which is critical to success at the edge. This will help support scenarios such as asset tracking across industries, manufacturing and distribution of smart products, and responsive supply chains. It will also help support scenarios where things are geographically dispersed, such as smart city automation, utility monitoring, and precision agriculture.

Where we go next

Our early engagement with partners such as Telstra and Etisalat helped us shape this path. We joined the 5G Open Innovation Lab as the founding public cloud partner to accelerate enterprise startups and launch new innovations to foster new 5G use cases with even greater access to leading-edge networks. The Lab will create long-term, sustainable developer and commercial ecosystems that will accelerate the delivery of exciting new capabilities at the edge, including pervasive IoT intelligence and immersive mixed reality. And this is just the beginning. I invite you to learn more about our solutions and watch the series of videos we have curated for you.
Quelle: Azure

Accelerating genomics workflows and data analysis on Azure

Genomics is foundational to the development of targeted therapeutics and precision medicine. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies has driven a revolution in genomics-based research and is helping facilitate better understanding of human biology and disease conditions. This expanded knowledge is leading to the proliferation of personalized medicine strategies to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases. The trend will continue to accelerate in the coming decade as use of genomics information becomes central to clinical decision support and healthcare delivery.

Sequencing genomes at the population level will be required to decipher the genomic fingerprint of a disease, predict interpersonal variability in progression and treatment response, and develop models for clinical decision support. The resulting explosion in genomics data and the computational power required for analysis (tens of exabytes and trillions of core hours in the next five years1) will require agility, easier management, data security, and access to scalable storage and compute capacity.

The demand for cloud-based solutions is evident. It is increasingly being recognized that community driven standards and open-source tools will be necessary in enabling data accessibility, tool interoperability, and reliability of results and models. Microsoft not only supports open-standards and open-source projects but has been actively contributing to these community driven efforts by making it easier to use these tools and software on Azure.

To that end, Microsoft Genomics has released several open source projects on GitHub, including Cromwell on Azure, Genomics Notebooks and Bioconductor support for Azure. We have also made available a growing list of genomics public datasets on the Azure Open Dataset platform.

Scale and automate genomic workflows on Azure with Cromwell

Cromwell is an open-source workflow management system geared toward scientific workflows, originally developed by the Broad Institute. With Cromwell on Azure, users can accelerate their genomic research with the hyperscale compute capabilities of Azure. Cromwell orchestrates the dynamic provisioning of computing resources via Azure Batch and integrates with customers’ Azure Blob storage account for easy data access.

Propelling novel next generation sequencing (NGS) based detection and characterization assay for COVID-19 with Biotia

Biotia is an emerging startup focused on building a platform leveraging next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) and artificial intelligence (AI) for precision disease detection and diagnosis. They were looking for a cloud-based workflow solution to manage their NGS pipelines and Cromwell on Azure was able to meet their key requirements.

"At Biotia, we have achieved substantial parallelization, thorough version control, and novel COVID-19 detection results by using Cromwell on Azure to back our compute-intensive genomics workflows. We are pleased to include Cromwell on Azure in our bioinformatics software stack." —Joe Barrows, Director of Software Engineering at Biotia

Enable collaborative and repeatable data analysis using Genomics Notebooks powered by Jupyter Notebooks on Azure

Jupyter Notebooks provides users an environment for analyzing data using R or Python and enabling reusability of methods and reproducibility of results. Biomedical researchers and data scientists are increasingly using notebooks for their genomics data analysis needs and for building machine learning models based on multi-modal datasets (genomic, phenotypic, clinical, EMR, demographic, etc.).

Microsoft’s Genomics Notebooks open-source project provides a growing collection of pre-configured notebooks that users can easily launch and use in their Azure workspace. These pre-configured notebooks cover scenarios from genomics variant detection, filtration, annotation, to transformation of the genomic, phenotypic and clinical data into multi-modal data frames needed for data querying and building machine learning models.

Leveraging genomic data to assess the impact of environmental change with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans

The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is responsible for preserving Canada’s aquatic natural resources. DFO researchers at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia have been using genomics to understand the impact of climate change and human activity on the migration patterns, genetic diversity and population demography of fish such as Atlantic Salmon and Atlantic Cod, which can have major socio-economic implications for the communities that rely on these resources.

The research teams are starting to sequence fish genomes in the hundreds and were looking for Azure based solutions for scaling and streamlining their growing genomics and data analysis needs. The team successfully deployed, and scale tested Cromwell on Azure and is now looking to adopt it as a common genomics workflow platform across their various institutions.

“Leveraging Cromwell on Azure for running our genomics pipelines give us the ability to scale our analysis to thousands of genomes for any species of fish with automation. We can essentially eliminate three months’ time of manual work to generate all the variant calls we need and move directly into connecting that data with other data sources we have. The data science tools will help us easily build and train complex multi-modal data models to gain deeper insights into the impact resulting from interactions between genetic factors, climate information, and human impacts on these species, and predict how they might respond to environmental challenges in the future.” —Dr. Tony Kess, Researcher at the Bradbury Population Genomics Lab, a part of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

Easily access the vast collection of community-built bioinformatics tools with Bioconductor on Azure

Bioconductor is an open source, open development project that focuses on providing a repository of extensible statistical and graphical software packages, developed in R, for the analysis of high-throughput genomic and biomedical data. Microsoft is collaborating with the Bioconductor core team in bringing Azure support for this wide-ranging OSS software repository.

Bioinformaticians and data scientists can now easily use their preferred Bioconductor software packages on Azure by deploying the preconfigured Bioconductor Docker image hosted in the Microsoft Container Registry on Docker Hub. Additionally, users can also use Azure Virtual Machine (VM) templates to deploy Genomics Data Science VM preconfigured with popular tools for data exploration, analysis, machine learning, and deep learning model development.

Power data analysis and machine learning models with genomics datasets available through the Azure Open Data platform

The Genomics Data Lake on the Azure Open Dataset platform provides a growing compendium of curated and publicly available genomics datasets. These datasets have been generated by key international collaborative efforts with a focus on providing resources for the biomedical research community. Users across healthcare, pharma and life sciences can now use the Genomics Data Lake on Azure to access these datasets for free and easily integrate the data into their genomics analysis workflows.

Accelerate whole exome and genome processing using Microsoft Genomics turnkey service on Azure

Microsoft Genomics is a highly scalable Azure service to perform secondary analysis of the human genome using the Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) and the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) open-source software. The service is ISO-certified, enables customers’ compliance with HIPAA, and is covered under the Microsoft Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Microsoft continues to optimize the performance of the service by leveraging the innovations in Azure’s high-performance compute infrastructure enabling customers to generate durable genetic variant data from whole genome sequence data (WGS) within hours. Compliance, performance, data durability and provenance make the service ideal for integration into genomics-based clinical decision support workflows.

Accelerating scientific discoveries to advance cures for childhood cancers through access to real-time clinical genome sequencing at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Whole-genome sequencing offers the most comprehensive assessment of differences between patients’ normal and cancer genomes. Realtime access to the genomic information is not only important for clinical decision support, but it can also accelerate research and novel discoveries and cures. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has partnered with Microsoft and DNAnexus to build St. Jude Cloud—the world’s largest public repository of pediatric genomics data.

This first-of-its-kind initiative provides researchers from around the world access to high-quality whole-genome, whole-exome and transcriptome data from appropriately consented St. Jude patients who have undergone clinical genomic profiling. St. Jude Cloud uses Azure and the Microsoft Genomics service to quickly upload, analyze, and harmonize the genomics data, which is subsequently made available through the St. Jude Cloud data browser to researchers worldwide.

“Access to high-quality clinical genomic data, generated leveraging the Microsoft Genomics service and streamed to St. Jude Cloud, will help further research in precision medicine for childhood cancer and other diseases.”—Dr. Jinghui Zhang, Chair of Department of Computational Biology at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Learn more and get started

Microsoft Genomics and the open-source projects are fully supported by a team of Microsoft developers and scientists committed to driving the innovation needed to advance genomics and precision medicine. Learn more about Microsoft Genomics solutions and help contribute to the open-source projects by visiting our GitHub repositories.

Microsoft Genomics service on Azure.
Cromwell on Azure.
Genomics Notebooks.
Bioconductor Docker Image for Azure.
Genomics Data Science VM.

1 Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical?

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure

Run your core applications on Azure

This week at Microsoft Ignite, we discussed how a growing number of customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) are running their mission- and business-critical applications on Microsoft Azure.

Across our customers, the common thread that ties mission and business-critical systems together is that they support core business processes. Examples include enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, but also analytics, e-commerce systems, systems of record like financial management, procurement, and payment, and more. Now more than ever, systems that support digitized customer experiences are also critical to business success.

Organizations like JetBlue rely on Azure for traditional business-critical applications like their e-commerce site, and for predictive models to improve the overall customer experience.
Companies like Allscripts deliver critical healthcare-related applications using open source software on Azure.
Manulife chose Azure to migrate and modernize its business-critical applications to improve agility, scalability, risk management, and cost-efficiency while accelerating the support of new business models.
Walgreens Boots Alliance runs SAP HANA on Azure, relying on virtual machines (VMs) with 12 TB of memory and 28 TB of storage to run their more than 100 TB scale-out SAP landscape.

Running your business on Azure can help you be future-ready and increase business resiliency, especially during uncertain times. For example, when cases of COVID-19 began to rise in the United States in February 2020, Adaptive Biotechnologies turned their immune medicine platform to map the immune response to COVID-19 to make this information publicly available to researchers around the world developing diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines.

Within weeks, Adaptive processed 500 million sequences, using 29 compute-years to identify immune signatures of infection. As a result, Adaptive demonstrated that the T cells signal could be an optimal marker to assess exposure to the COVID-19 virus at certain time points during and post-infection, enabling the company to start pursuing an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA for the world’s first T cell-based diagnostic for any disease.

“Azure’s cloud computing resources and machine learning capabilities are powering our Immune Medicine Platform, enabling us to rapidly map our immune cell receptors to diseases like COVID-19 and Lyme Disease, and fueling the next generation of diagnostics.” – Mark Adams, Chief Technical Officer, Adaptive Biotechnologies

Challenges and opportunities

Earlier in 2020, we had the pleasure of being joined by Dave Bartoletti, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, Ramki Ramaswamy, Vice President IT, Technology and Integrations at JetBlue, and Prakash Iyer, Senior Vice President, Software Architecture & Strategy at Trimble Inc. in a cloud migration webinar series. We discussed the top challenges that IT organizations face when managing current mission-critical infrastructures. Security issues, high costs, and the difficulties IT professionals face when they need to update their environments are top of mind.

 
Conversely, when we looked at the top benefits that companies have realized by migrating their mission-critical workloads to the cloud, it’s clear that the move to the cloud has been helpful in addressing many of these challenges. The top benefits they cited were:

Improved security and compliance.
Improved performance and latency of mission-critical systems.
Improved agility (including for modernizing existing systems, developing new capabilities)
Reduced overall IT costs.
Faster infrastructure implementation time.

That’s why we continue to deliver more across all these dimensions, and earlier at Microsoft Ignite, we announced the preview of several new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities to better meet our stakeholders’ needs.

New core IaaS capabilities to increase availability, security, scalability, and performance of your business-critical applications on Azure

We recently announced several new capabilities to meet the requirements of your business-critical workloads.

Azure Dedicated Hosts: More control, flexibility, and choice

Azure customers are now able to schedule platform maintenance operations on Dedicated Hosts and isolated virtual machines (VMs), and they can control when guest OS image updates on Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets can be rolled out. Azure Dedicated Hosts now support Virtual Machine Scale Sets, and our customers can also simplify the deployment of Azure Virtual Machines in Dedicated Hosts by letting the platform select the host group to which the VM will be deployed. All these new capabilities are now in preview. Finally, in the very near future, our customers will be able to use our Fsv2 series of VMs to run compute-intensive workloads on Azure Dedicated Hosts featuring Intel Cascade Lake processors for greater performance.

Higher performance general-purpose and memory-optimized virtual machines

Microsoft has also made recently available new Azure Virtual Machines, featuring Intel Cascade Lake processors, for general purpose and memory-intensive workloads. As a result, Azure now offers a new category of VMs that lowers the price of entry since it does not include a local temporary disk. These VM series provide up to 20 percent greater CPU performance compared to the prior generation.

New Disk Storage and networking capabilities enhance security, performance, and availability

New Azure Disk Storage updates, now generally available, include Azure Private Link integration, which enables secure import and export of data over a private virtual network for enhanced security, and support for 512E on Azure Ultra Disks to enable migration of legacy workloads, like older versions of Oracle® DB, to the cloud. Read the Azure Community post for additional details.

Finally, our customers can now use Azure Load Balancer with their globally distributed workloads, using cross-region load balancing (in preview) to improve their applications’ performance and availability.

New Linux tools and cost-effective licensing models help manage Linux infrastructure and workloads on Azure

Azure Hybrid Benefit now includes Linux, and together with Azure Image Builder provides new tools and cost-effective licensing models for you to migrate, operate and manage your Linux infrastructure and workloads on Azure.

Azure Hybrid Benefit now enables simpler and more cost-effective Linux subscription portability. This new capability is available in preview and gives customers the ability to convert existing pay-as-you-go instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Azure to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, using existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions. Customers can capitalize on existing investments in Red Hat and SUSE by bringing existing subscriptions to Azure, preserve any special pricing discounts, and avoid double-billing for any on-premises subscription that has transitioned to the cloud.

Azure Image Builder, generally available by Q4, 2020, is a free image building service that streamlines the creation, update, patching, management, and operation of Linux and Windows images. Azure Image Builder will deploy resources into your subscription when used; you pay only for the VMs and associated storage and networking resources consumed when running your image building pipeline.

Next steps and additional resources

As companies increase their tech intensity, the range of business-critical applications continues to expand. Our ecosystem-based approach gives us the opportunity to build a broad range of solutions with and for our customers and partners alike. We are energized by the possibilities ahead of us and what we can accomplish together.

To learn more about our offerings, visit our business-critical applications site to access reference architectures, ISV solutions, and product capabilities. You can also experience the latest capabilities on Azure by watching our training videos.

Learn more about scheduled maintenance for host updates.
Learn more about scheduled maintenance with scale sets.
Read the Azure Community post regarding the most recent Disk Storage updates.
Read the maintenance control feature documentation.
Request access to the Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets on Dedicated Hosts preview.
Review your options with Azure Hybrid Benefit – Linux subscription portability (preview).

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure

Unleash the full potential of your developer teams and increase Developer Velocity

In today’s environment, software development excellence is becoming even more critical for business success. Over the past few months, we’ve seen organizations realize that their future success depends on taking advantage of technology to rethink business models, innovate, and improve processes to better serve employees and customers. The reality is many companies across different industries are becoming software companies. According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company: Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance, there are currently over 20 million software engineers worldwide, and over 50 percent of these developers are working at organizations outside of the tech industry.

The most successful organizations understand that transforming into software companies cannot be achieved solely through the introduction of new technologies; rather, it requires a deep focus on supporting the people who will catalyze change and create the new value they seek.

In this same study, McKinsey concluded that business leaders need to empower the people behind software development – the developers – to unlock their productivity and innovation, in what the industry has started referring to as Developer Velocity.

What is Developer Velocity?

Developer Velocity means driving business performance through software development by empowering developers, creating the right environment for them to innovate, and removing points of friction.

Developer Velocity isn’t just about increasing speed of software delivery but it’s also about unleashing developer ingenuity – turning developer teams’ ideas into software that supports the needs of your customers and the goals of your business.

Unleashing the potential and talent of developer teams, the day-to-day developer experience, and keeping software talent happy and motivated drive software success.

We often hear from software leaders that the set of potential levers to improve performance are so large and diverse – that it is often unclear how to prioritize or where to start.

To lead to a precise understanding of what it takes for a company to increase Developer Velocity, in this same study, McKinsey conducted a comprehensive review of software development practices included technology, working practices, and organizational enablement and converged on a single holistic metric – “Developer Velocity Index” or the DVI score.  The Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score takes into account 46 different drivers across 13 capability areas (exhibit).

Some of the key striking findings from this study point out that companies with a higher Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score outperform revenue growth up to five times that of their competitors and they score 55 percent higher on innovation. Those organizations also surpass their peers on other key business performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, brand perception, and talent.

The study also concluded that from all the different drivers across the different dimensions, the top four drivers of Developer Velocity include best-in-class tools, product management capabilities, culture, and talent management.  Lastly, beyond the foundations, public cloud adoption is a key driver of business performance for non-software companies, open source adoption is the biggest differentiator for top performers, and companies adopting low-code platforms score 33 percent higher on innovation.

Developers have always been true catalysts of digital transformation, innovation, and business performance. This data just validates how crucial it is for companies to invest in their development teams. To learn more about Developer Velocity study and get detailed findings and insights for retail, manufacturing and finance industries, watch this 5-episode webinar series: Improve Business Performance Through Developer Velocity.

How do I calculate the Developer Velocity Index Score (DVI) for my organization?

Last May we launched our Developer Velocity Assessment Tool. You can use this tool to discover where your organization is on the Developer Velocity maturity scale and benchmark your Developer Velocity Index (DVI) relative to your peers. Then, get actionable guidance for how to drive better business outcomes for your organization.

This online assessment takes 15-30 mins to complete and was built to help you and your organization identify gaps across three key domains: technology, working practices and organizational enablement. The assessment provides personalized reports showing a detailed outline for how your organization can improve over time to meet the growing needs of your developers and software strategy.

This week we shipped additional features into our assessment tool to allow our customers to get an even clearer view of their Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score. These additions include new charts, reports and a detailed breakdown of their DVI scores by category, sub-category, and individual metric level.

We are very excited to see how organizations take advantage of this assessment to help identify specific drivers that can help drive better business outcomes. Get started with the Developer Velocity Assessment tool to calculate the DVI score for your organization and learn how you can boost your business performance.

Scale your DevOps practices to increase Developer Velocity

Although many organizations are adopting DevOps, implementing effective practices at enterprise-scale can be difficult.  At Microsoft Ignite, we are also excited the announce the new Enterprise DevOps Report 2020–2021, a Microsoft and Sogeti research study of more than 250 cloud and DevOps implementations. This report provides a comprehensive review on how to scale your DevOps practices to improve business metrics, customer satisfaction, and increase Developer Velocity – creating the right environment for developers to innovate. You can also use the study’s recommendations as a blueprint for your successful adoption of enterprise DevOps.

In this report, you’ll learn about:

• Six key areas of enterprise IT, including governance, that face significant challenges as part of an enterprise DevOps transformation.

• Common ideologies and patterns followed by top performing adopters to address the challenges of enterprise DevOps.

• Strategies implemented by successful enterprises to build continuous governance, security, quality, and compliance into their engineering processes.

• DevOps best practices to enable your organization to support distributed teams and remote work.

Empower your developer teams and boost your business performance

Developer Velocity helps you unleash the full potential of your developer teams, drive innovation, and boost business performance. Today more than ever investing in software excellence and building a culture that empowers developer teams will continue to be critical for every organization’s success.

Over the past few months we’ve seen many developers around the world building amazing customer applications and internal back to work solutions while working remotely. While things get back to normal, Microsoft is pleased to play a small part in supporting developers around the world and making remote development possible. To help developers build productively, collaborate securely, and scale innovation – no matter where they are – Microsoft offers the world’s most comprehensive developer toolkit with Visual Studio, GitHub, Microsoft Azure and Power Apps. It’s this set of capabilities that enables Developer Velocity within every organization.  You can learn more about our latest innovation on Visual Studio, GitHub, Azure, and Power Apps shared at Microsoft Ignite. Also don’t miss our Microsoft Ignite keynotes where you can learn more about Developer Velocity and Microsoft’s most comprehensive developer toolkit and platform:

• Satya Nadella: Building digital resilience

• Julia White: Invent with Purpose on Azure

• Scott Hanselman: App Development in Azure

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure

Mixed Reality Momentum: HoloLens 2 expands globally and new Azure service launches

Mixed reality blends our physical and digital worlds to extend computing beyond the screen and fundamentally change how we work, learn, and play. Mixed Reality has evolved from promising technology to a thriving ecosystem of solutions that are having significant and quantifiable impact today. It plays a significant role in how we manufacture goods, how we learn and retain information, and how we care for ourselves and others. 

Our mixed reality services, which leverage the scalability, reliability, and security of Azure, coupled with our industry leading HoloLens 2 headset, serve as the backbone of our comprehensive mixed reality platform—growing and expanding in several ways at Microsoft Iginte: 

HoloLens 2 is now shipping to new markets

Today, we are announcing that HoloLens 2 is now available in Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. HoloLens 2 will be available in South Korea later this fall. 

Proven return on investment (ROI) with Microsoft Azure and HoloLens 2

Thousands of leading companies in industries such as manufacturing, construction, healthcare, retail, and education are using HoloLens 2 and our Azure mixed reality services to save significant touch labor, reduce errors, improve learning and retention, and boost employee and customer satisfaction:

Lockheed Martin/NASA, United States

Leveraging a solution from mixed reality partner Scope AR, Lockheed Martin is is using HoloLens 2 to build the Orion spacecraft, which will take astronauts back to the moon. The benefits that they have realized using mixed reality are significant:

Mixed reality solutions with the HoloLens 2 has dramatically reduced touch touch labor—what used to require an eight hour shift can now be completed in just 45 minutes.
With the HoloLens, Lockheed Martin has reported zero errors in two plus years with the Orion spacecraft.
The Orion spacecraft has over 57,000 fasteners; Lockheed Martin is saving $38 per fastener installation.

Watch the following video to see how Lockheed Martin is using HoloLens 2 to send astronauts to the moon and beyond:

Medivis, United States

Medivis, a Microsoft mixed reality partner is using their SurgicalAR solution for 3D holographic visualizations (versus CT scans) to enable surgeons to perform routine procedures in an inherently superior way. To date, Medivis has:

Successfully completed more than 200 surgeries with the HoloLens.
Decreased radiation exposure to patients. On average, patients of SurgicalAR averaged 1 CT scan compared to 10 CT scans with traditional 2D surgical solutions.
Demonstrated the potential to place catheters with 1mm accuracy (versus the 2.2 cm accuracy that is often typical today).

Watch how Medivis is using HoloLens 2 for holographic guided surgery. 

Case Western Reserve University, United States

Case Western Reserve University is running a remote learning program using their HoloAnatomy solution and HoloLens 2 to help students more effectively learn and retain knowledge:  

Students who used HoloAnatomy and HoloLens 2 experienced a 50 percent improvement in grades versus students who used a textbook.
Students who used HoloAnatomy and HoloLens 2 retained 120 percent more knowledge over 12 months of learning versus students who did not have access to HoloAnatomy and HoloLens 2.

Watch how Case Western Reserve is teaching remote anatomy classes and improving learning outcomes.   

Azure Mixed Reality Services expands to add Azure Objects Anchors

Our Azure mixed reality services are a core pillar of our mixed reality platform. These mixed reality services overcome many of the technical challenges in building mixed reality applications and simplify cross platform mixed reality development. Today, we are announcing a preview of our latest mixed reality service, Azure Object Anchors:

In many of today’s mixed reality scenarios, there is a need to place physical markers such as QR codes to identify an object and manually align 3D and holographic content to that object. Azure Object Anchors enables mixed reality developers to build applications that automatically align 3D content to real-word objects—saving significant touch labor, reducing alignment errors, and improving user experience.

Toyota Motor Corporation is an early preview customer using Azure Object Anchors to build a task guidance application for their technicians: 

“Azure Object Anchors enables our technicians to service vehicles more quickly and accurately thanks to markerless and dynamic 3D model alignment. It has removed our need for QR codes and eliminated the risk of error from manual model alignment, thus making our maintenance procedures more efficient.”—Koichi Kayano, Program Manager Technical Service Division at Toyota

To learn more about Azure Object Anchors, see our technical blog post or sign up if you are interested in participating in the private preview.  

Microsoft Azure Kinect is going commercial, scales 3D time-of-flight technology through partners

Azure Kinect DK is our cutting-edge spatial computing developer kit that contains sophisticated computer vision and speech models, advanced AI sensors, and a range of powerful SDKs that can be connected to Azure cognitive services. Today, we are announcing the collaborations with two leading companies—Analog Devices and SICK AG—who will build devices enabled with the 3D Time of Flight depth technology that is currently only available via Azure Kinect:

Analog Devices will incorporate Microsoft’s Time of Flight technology in the design, manufacture and sale of depth sensor silicon alongside a commercial depth camera module aimed at consumer electronics, automotive cabins and industrial logistic use-cases. For more information, visit Analog’s website.
SICK AG, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of intelligent sensors and sensor solutions for industrial applications, will incorporate Microsoft’s Time of Flight technology to bring state-of-the-art technologies to SICK’s 3D Time of Flight Visionary-T camera product line, and make it even smarter. For more information, contact your local SICK subsidiary.

We are excited about the momentum we are seeing in mixed reality and the strong ROI that our customers are achieving with HoloLens 2 and our Azure mixed reality services. Today’s announcements will help to scale the breadth and impact of our mixed reality platform, which continues to increase the productivity of the firstline work force and transform how we live, work and play.
Quelle: Azure