Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Power mission-critical applications with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

In our current environment, organizations are increasingly looking towards digital solutions to engage their customers and remain competitive. They’re discovering that their customers’ needs can be best met through differentiated, digital experiences delivered by cloud-native applications.

When building a new application, one of the most important decisions to make is where to store the application data. We see tremendous interest in Azure Database for PostgreSQL when it comes to storing relational data in the cloud for mission-critical applications. Here’s why:

Why Azure Database for PostgreSQL?

100 percent open source.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL is built on community edition Postgres, with open extension support so you can leverage valuable PostgreSQL features, including JSONB, geospatial support, and rich indexing.
Our Postgres team at Microsoft is committed to nurturing a culture of contributing to and collaborating with the Postgres community, and we’re excited to welcome Postgres committers to the team. These committers review submitted code for Postgres, “commit” it into the source code repository, and work with other contributors to test, refine, and eventually incorporate it into the next Postgres build. In future blogs, they’ll share what they’re working on when it comes to new versions of Postgres and updates to the Citus open source extension.

Fully managed.

Using a managed Postgres database service on Azure makes your job simpler and allows you to focus on your application, by automating time- and cost-intensive tasks like configuring and managing high-availability, disaster recovery, backups, and data replication across regions.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL has enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities, such as Azure Advanced Threat Protection, and provides customized performance recommendations, making it suitable for your most mission-critical applications.

High-performance horizontal scaling.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale (Citus) scales out horizontally to hundreds of nodes, with no application rewrites, so you can easily build incredibly scalable applications. This is done using the Citus open source Postgres extension that intelligently and transparently distributes your data and queries across multiple nodes to achieve massive parallelism, along with a much bigger compute, memory, and disk footprint.
In future blogs, we’ll dive deeper into key use cases for Hyperscale (Citus) and share how organizations are building powerful applications using these capabilities. Hyperscale (Citus) enables organizations to scale multi-tenant SaaS applications, build high throughput transactional applications, and more.

Key considerations for running modern enterprise applications on Postgres

If you’re new to the world of Postgres and want to understand whether it’s a good fit for building your enterprise applications, check out our new whitepaper, Running Enterprise Applications on PostgreSQL, to learn about:

Benefits of using Postgres for modern, mission-critical applications, and considerations around performance, scalability, security, and more.
Postgres’ extensible design that enables you to future-proof your applications.
Postgres capabilities that empower developers to work more productively.

Announcing our Postgres blog series

We are here to help you at every stage of your journey with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and will be keeping you up to date with regular posts both here and on our Azure Database for PostgreSQL blog. We’ll be sharing:

Insights and updates directly from Postgres committers Thomas Munro, Jeff Davis, Andres Freund, and David Rowley—you can read the first post in the series, How to securely authenticate with SCRAM in Postgres 13, now.
Key customer use cases, stories, and architectures.
Resources and best practices to help you develop innovative applications to solve business challenges.

Whether you’re new to Postgres, new to Azure, or are already using Azure Database for PostgreSQL to power your enterprise applications, we look forward to supporting your application development journey.

Stay tuned for future blogs here and subscribe to our Azure Database for PostgreSQL blog.

Learn more about Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
Quelle: Azure

Bringing AI supercomputing to customers

The trend toward the use of massive AI models to power a large number of tasks is changing how AI is built. At Microsoft Build 2020, we shared our vision for AI at Scale utilizing state-of-the-art AI supercomputing in Azure and a new class of large-scale AI models enabling next-generation AI. The advantage of large scale models is that they only need to be trained once with massive amounts of data using AI supercomputing, enabling them to then be “fine-tuned” for different tasks and domains with much smaller datasets and resources. The more parameters that a model has, the better it can capture the difficult nuances of the data, as demonstrated by our 17-billion-parameter Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG) model and its ability to understand language to answer questions from or summarize documents seen for the first time. Natural language models like this, significantly larger than the state-of-the-art models a year ago, and many orders of magnitude the size of earlier image-centric models, are now powering a variety of tasks throughout Bing, Word, Outlook, and Dynamics.

Training models at this scale requires large clusters of hundreds of machines with specialized AI accelerators interconnected by high-bandwidth networks inside and across the machines. We have been building such clusters in Azure to enable new natural language generation and understanding capabilities across Microsoft products, and to power OpenAI on their mission to build safe artificial general intelligence. Our latest clusters provide so much aggregated compute power that they are referred to as AI supercomputers, with the one built for OpenAI reaching the top-five publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world. Using this supercomputer, OpenAI unveiled in May their 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 model and its ability to support a wide range of tasks it wasn’t specifically trained for, including writing poetry or translation.

The work that we have done on large-scale compute clusters, leading network design, and the software stack, including Azure Machine Learning, ONNX Runtime, and other Azure AI services, to manage it is directly aligned with our AI at Scale strategy. The innovation generated through this process is ultimately making Azure better at supporting the AI needs of all our customers, irrespective of their scale. For example, with the NDv2 VM series, Azure was the first and only public cloud offering clusters of VMs with NVIDIA’s V100 Tensor Core GPUs, connected by high-bandwidth low-latency NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand networking. A good analogy is how automotive technology is pioneered in the high-end racing industry and then makes its way into the cars that we drive every day.

New frontiers with unprecedented scale

“Advancing AI toward general intelligence requires, in part, powerful systems that can train increasingly more capable models. The computing capability required was just not possible until recently. Azure AI and its supercomputing capabilities provide us with leading systems that help accelerate our progress”  – Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

In our continuum of Azure innovation, we’re excited to announce the new ND A100 v4 VM series, our most powerful and massively scalable AI VM, available on-demand from eight, to thousands of interconnected NVIDIA GPUs across hundreds of VMs.

The ND A100 v4 VM series starts with a single virtual machine (VM) and eight NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs, but just like the human brain is composed of interconnected neurons, our ND A100 v4-based clusters can scale up to thousands of GPUs with an unprecedented 1.6 Tb/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM. Each GPU is provided with its own dedicated topology-agnostic 200 Gb/s NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand connection. Tens, hundreds, or thousands of GPUs can then work together as part of a Mellanox InfiniBand HDR cluster to achieve any level of AI ambition. Any AI goal (training a model from scratch, continuing its training with your own data, or fine-tuning it for your desired tasks) will be achieved much faster with dedicated GPU-to-GPU bandwidth 16x higher than any other public cloud offering.

The ND A100 v4 VM series is backed by an all-new Azure-engineered AMD Rome-powered platform with the latest hardware standards like PCIe Gen4 built into all major system components. PCIe Gen 4 and NVIDIA’s third-generation NVLINK architecture for the fastest GPU-to-GPU interconnection within each VM keeps data moving through the system more than 2x faster than before. 

Most customers will see an immediate boost of 2x to 3x compute performance over the previous generation of systems based on NVIDIA V100 GPUs with no engineering work. Customers leveraging new A100 features like multi-precision Tensor Cores with sparsity acceleration and Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) can achieve a boost of up to 20x.

“Leveraging NVIDIA’s most advanced compute and networking capabilities, Azure has architected an incredible platform for AI at scale in the cloud. Through an elastic architecture that can scale from a single partition of an NVIDIA A100 GPU to thousands of A100 GPUs with NVIDIA Mellanox Infiniband interconnects, Azure customers will be able to run the world’s most demanding AI workloads.” – Ian Buck, General Manager and Vice President of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA

The ND A100 v4 VM series leverages Azure core scalability blocks like VM Scale Sets to transparently configure clusters of any size automatically and dynamically. This will allow anyone, anywhere, to achieve AI at any scale, instantiating even AI supercomputer on-demand in minutes. You can then access VMs independently or launch and manage training jobs across the cluster using the Azure Machine Learning service.

The ND A100 v4 VM series and clusters are now in preview and will become a standard offering in the Azure portfolio, allowing anyone to unlock the potential of AI at Scale in the cloud. Please reach out to your local Microsoft account team for more information.
Quelle: Azure

Advancing the outage experience—automation, communication, and transparency

“Service incidents like outages are an unfortunate inevitability of the technology industry. Of course, we are constantly improving the reliability of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. We meet and exceed our Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the vast majority of customers and continue to invest in evolving tools and training that make it easy for you to design and operate mission-critical systems with confidence.

In spite of these efforts, we acknowledge the unfortunate reality that—given the scale of our operations and the pace of change—we will never be able to avoid outages entirely. During these times we endeavor to be as open and transparent as possible to ensure that all impacted customers and partners understand what’s happening. As part of our Advancing Reliability blog series, I asked Sami Kubba, Principal Program Manager overseeing our outage communications process, to outline the investments we’re making to continue improving this experience.”—Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure

 

In the cloud industry, we have a commitment to bring our customers the latest technology at scale, keeping customers and our platform secure, and ensuring that our customer experience is always optimal. For this to happen Azure is subject to a significant amount of change—and in rare circumstances, it is this change that can bring about unintended impact for our customers. As previously mentioned in this series of blog posts we take change very seriously and ensure that we have a systematic and phased approach to implementing changes as carefully as possible.

We continue to identify the inherent (and sometimes subtle) imperfections in the complex ways that our architectural designs, operational processes, hardware issues, software flaws, and human factors can align to cause service incidents—also known as outages. The reality of our industry is that impact caused by change is an intrinsic problem. When we think about outage communications we tend not to think of our competition as being other cloud providers, but rather the on-premises environment. On-premises change windows are controlled by administrators. They choose the best time to invoke any change, manage and monitor the risks, and roll it back if failures are observed.

Similarly, when an outage occurs in an on-premises environment, customers and users feel that they are more ‘in the know.’ Leadership is promptly made fully aware of the outage, they get access to support for troubleshooting, and expect that their team or partner company would be in a position to provide a full Post Incident Report (PIR)—previously called Root Cause Analysis (RCA)—once the issue is understood. Although our data analysis supports the hypothesis that time to mitigate an incident is faster in the cloud than on-premises, cloud outages can feel more stressful for customers when it comes to understanding the issue and what they can do about it.

Introducing our communications principles

During cloud outages, some customers have historically reported feeling as though they’re not promptly informed, or that they miss necessary updates and therefore lack a full understanding of what happened and what is being done to prevent future issues occurring. Based on these perceptions, we now operate by five pillars that guide our communications strategy—all of which have influenced our Azure Service Health experience in the Azure portal and include:

Speed
Granularity
Discoverability
Parity
Transparency

Speed

We must notify impacted customers as quickly as possible. This is our key objective around outage communications. Our goal is to notify all impacted Azure subscriptions within 15 minutes of an outage. We know that we can’t achieve this with human beings alone. By the time an engineer is engaged to investigate a monitoring alert to confirm impact (let alone engaging the right engineers to mitigate it, in what can be a complicated array of interconnectivities including third-party dependencies) too much time has passed. Any delay in communications leaves customers asking, “Is it me or is it Azure?” Customers can then spend needless time troubleshooting their own environments. Conversely, if we decide to err on the side of caution and communicate every time we suspect any potential customer impact, our customers could receive too many false positives. More importantly, if they are having an issue with their own environment, they could easily attribute these unrelated issues to a false alarm being sent by the platform. It is critical that we make investments that enable our communications to be both fast and accurate.

Last month, we outlined our continued investment in advancing Azure service quality with artificial intelligence: AIOps. This includes working towards improving automatic detection, engagement, and mitigation of cloud outages. Elements of this broader AIOps program are already being used in production to notify customers of outages that may be impacting their resources. These automatic notifications represented more than half of our outage communications in the last quarter. For many Azure services, automatic notifications are being sent in less than 10 minutes to impacted customers via Service Health—to be accessed in the Azure portal, or to trigger Service Health alerts that have been configured, more on this below.

With our investment in this area already improving the customer experience, we will continue to expand the scenarios in which we can notify customers in less than 15 minutes from the impact start time, all without the need for humans to confirm customer impact. We are also in the early stages of expanding our use of AI-based operations to identify related impacted services automatically and, upon mitigation, send resolution communications (for supported scenarios) as quickly as possible.

Granularity

We understand that when an outage causes impact, customers need to understand exactly which of their resources are impacted. One of the key building blocks in getting the health of specific resources are Resource Health signals. The Resource Health signal will check if a resource, such as a virtual machine (VM), SQL database, or storage account, is in a healthy state. Customers can also create Resource Health alerts, which leverage Azure Monitor, to let the right people know if a particular resource is having issues, regardless of whether it is a platform-wide issue or not. This is important to note: a Resource Health alert can be triggered due to a resource becoming unhealthy (for example, if the VM is rebooted from within the guest) which is not necessarily related to a platform event, like an outage. Customers can see the associated Resource Health checks, arranged by resource type.

We are building on this technology to augment and correlate each customer resource(s) that has moved into an unhealthy state with platform outages, all within Service Health. We are also investigating how we can include the impacted resources in our communication payloads, so that customers won’t necessarily need to sign in to Service Health to understand the impacted resources—of course, everyone should be able to consume this programmatically.

All of this will allow customers with large numbers of resources to know more precisely which of their services are impacted due to an outage, without having to conduct an investigation on their side. More importantly, customers can build alerts and trigger responses to these resource health alerts using native integrations to Logic Apps and Azure Functions.

Discoverability

Although we support both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ approaches for outage communications, we encourage customers to configure relevant alerts, so the right information is automatically pushed out to the right people and systems. Our customers and partners should not have to go searching to see if the resources they care about are impacted by an outage—they should be able to consume the notifications we send (in the medium of their choice) and react to them as appropriate. Despite this, we constantly find that customers visit the Azure Status page to determine the health of services on Azure.

Before the introduction of the authenticated in-portal Service Health experience, the Status page was the only way to discover known platform issues. These days, this public Status page is only used to communicate widespread outages (for example, impacting multiple regions and/or multiple services) so customers looking for potential issues impacting them don’t see the full story here. Since we rollout platform changes as safely as possible, the vast majority of issues like outages only impact a very small ‘blast radius’ of customer subscriptions. For these incidents, which make up more than 95 percent of our incidents, we communicate directly to impacted customers in-portal via Service Health.

We also recently integrated the ‘Emerging Issues’ feature into Service Health. This means that if we have an incident on the public Status page, and we have yet to identify and communicate to impacted customers, users can see this same information in-portal through Service Health, thereby receiving all relevant information without having to visit the Status page. We are encouraging all Azure users to make Service Health their ‘one stop shop’ for information related to service incidents, so they can see issues impacting them, understand which of their subscriptions and resources are impacted, and avoid the risk of making a false correlation, such as when an incident is posted on the Status page, but is not impacting them.

Most importantly, since we’re talking about the discoverability principle, from within Service Health customers can create Service Health alerts, which are push notifications leveraging the integration with Azure Monitor. This way, customers and partners can configure relevant notifications based on who needs to receive them and how they would best be notified—including by email, SMS, LogicApp, and/or through a webhook that can be integrated into service management tools like ServiceNow, PagerDuty, or Ops Genie.

To get started with simple alerts, consider routing all notifications to email a single distribution list. To take it to the next level, consider configuring different service health alerts for different use cases—maybe all production issues notify ServiceNow, maybe dev and test or pre-production issues might just email the relevant developer team, maybe any issue with a certain subscription also sends a text message to key people. All of this is completely customizable, to ensure that the right people are notified in the right way.

Parity

All Azure users should know that Service Health is the one place to go, for all service impacting events. First, we ensure that this experience is consistent across all our different Azure Services, each using Service Health to communicate any issues. As simple as this sounds, we are still navigating through some unique scenarios that make this complex. For example, most people using Azure DevOps don’t interact with the Azure portal. Since DevOps does not have its own authenticated Service Health experience, we can’t communicate updates directly to impacted customers for small DevOps outages that don’t justify going to the public Status page. To support scenarios like this, we have stood up the Azure DevOps status page where smaller scale DevOps outages can be communicated directly to the DevOps community.

Second, the Service Health experience is designed to communicate all impacting events across Azure—this includes maintenance events as well as service or feature retirements, and includes both widespread outages and isolated hiccups that only impact a single subscription. It is imperative that for any impact (whether it is potential, actual or upcoming) customers can expect the same experience and put in place a predictable action plan across all of their services on Azure.

Lastly, we are working towards expanding our philosophy of this pillar to extend to other Microsoft cloud products. We acknowledge that, at times, navigating through our different cloud products such as Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform can sometimes feel like navigating technologies from three different companies. As we look to the future, we are invested in harmonizing across these products to bring about a more consistent, best-in-class experience.

Transparency

As we have mentioned many times in the Advancing Reliability blog series, we know that trust is earned and needs to be maintained. When it comes to outages, we know that being transparent about what is happening, what we know, and what we don’t know is critically important. The cloud shouldn’t feel like a black box. During service issues, we provide regular communications to all impacted customers and partners. Often, in the early stages of investigating an issue, these updates might not seem detailed until we learn more about what’s happening. Even though we are committed to sharing tangible updates, we generally try to avoid sharing speculation, since we know customers make business decisions based on these updates during outages.

In addition, an outage is not over once customer impact is mitigated. We could still be learning about the complexities of what led to the issue, so sometimes the message sent at or after mitigation is a fairly rudimentary summation of what happened. For major incidents, we follow this up with a PIR generally within three days, once the contributing factors are better understood.

For incidents that may have impacted fewer subscriptions, our customers and partners can request more information from within Service Health by requesting a PIR for the incident. We have heard feedback in the past that PIRs should be even more transparent, so we continue to encourage our incident managers and communications managers to provide as much detail as possible—including information about the issue impact, and our next steps to mitigate future risk. Ideally to ensure that this class of issue is less likely and/or less impactful moving forward.

While our industry will never be completely immune to service outages, we do take every opportunity to look at what happened from a holistic perspective and share our learnings. One of the future areas of investment at which we are looking closely, is how best to keep customers updated with the progress we are making on the commitments outlined in our PIR next steps. By linking our internal repair items to our external commitments in our next steps, customers and partners will be able to track the progress that our engineering teams are making to ensure that corrective actions are completed.

Our communications across all of these scenarios (outages, maintenance, service retirements, and health advisories) will continue to evolve, as we learn more and continue investing in programs that support these five pillars.

Reliability is a shared responsibility

While Microsoft is responsible for the reliability of the Azure platform itself, our customers and partners are responsible for the reliability of their cloud applications—including using architectural best practices based on the requirements of each workload. Building a reliable application in the cloud is different from traditional application development. Historically, customers may have purchased levels of redundant higher-end hardware to minimize the chance of an entire application platform failing. In the cloud, we acknowledge up front that failures will happen. As outlined several times above, we will never be able to prevent all outages. In addition to Microsoft trying to prevent failures, when building reliable applications in the cloud your goal should be to minimize the effects of any single failing component.

To that end, we recently launched the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework—a set of guiding tenets that can be used to improve the quality of a workload. Reliability is one of the five pillars of architectural excellence alongside Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, and Security. If you already have a workload running in Azure and would like to assess your alignment to best practices in one or more of these areas, try the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review.

Specifically, the Reliability pillar describes six steps for building a reliable Azure application. Define availability and recovery requirements based on decomposed workloads and business needs. Use architectural best practices to identify possible failure points in your proposed/existing architecture and determine how the application will respond to failure. Test with simulations and forced failovers to test both detection and recovery from various failures. Deploy the application consistently using reliable and repeatable processes. Monitor application health to detect failures, monitor indicators of potential failures, and gauge the health of your applications. Finally, respond to failures and disasters by determining how best to address it based on established strategies.

Returning to our core topic of outage communications, we are working to incorporate relevant Well-Architected guidance into our PIRs in the aftermath of each service incident. Customers running critical workloads will be able to learn about specific steps to improve reliability that would have helped to avoid and lessen impact from that particular outage. For example, if an outage only impacted resources within a single Availability Zone, we will call this out as part of the PIRs and encourage impacted customers to consider zonal redundancies for their critical workloads.

Going forward

We outlined how Azure approaches communications during and after service incidents like outages. We want to be transparent about our five communication pillars, to explain both our progress to date and the areas in which we’re continuing to invest. Just as our engineering teams endeavor to learn from each incident to improve the reliability of the platform, our communications teams endeavor to learn from each incident to be more transparent, to get customers and partners the right details to make informed decisions, and to support customers and partners as best as possible during each of these difficult situations.

We are confident that we are making the right investments to continuing improving in this space, but we are increasingly looking for feedback on whether our communications are hitting the mark. We include an Azure post-incident survey at the end of each PIR we publish. We strive to review every response to learn from our customers and partners and validate whether we are focusing on the right areas and to keep improving the experience.

We continue to identify the inherent (and sometimes subtle) imperfections in the complex ways that our architectural designs, operational processes, hardware issues, software flaws, and human factors align to cause outages. Since trust is earned and needs to be maintained, we are committed to being as transparent as possible—especially during these infrequent but inevitable service issues.
Quelle: Azure

Build resilient applications with Kubernetes on Azure

Welcome to KubeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. While we won’t be able to see each other in person at KubeCon EU this year, we're excited that this new virtual format of KubeCon will make the conference more accessible than ever, with more people from the amazing Kubernetes community able to join and participate from around the world without leaving their homes.

With everything that has been happening, the last year has been an up and down experience, but through it all I’m incredibly proud of the focus and dedication from the Azure Kubernetes team. They have continued to iterate and improve our Kubernetes on Azure that provides enterprise-grade experience for our customers.

Kubernetes on Azure (and indeed anywhere) delivers an open and portable ecosystem for cloud-native development. In addition to this core promise, we also deliver a unique enterprise-grade experience that ensures the reliability and security your workloads demand, while also enabling the agility and efficiency that business today desires. You can securely deploy any workload to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to drive cost-savings at scale across your business. Today, we're going to tell you about even more capabilities that can help you along on your cloud-native journey to Kubernetes on Azure.

Improving latency and operational efficiency

One of the key drivers of cloud adoption is reducing latency. It used to be that it took days to get physical computers and set them up in a cluster. Today, you can deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Azure in less than five minutes. These improvements benefit the agility of our customers. For customers who want to scale and provision faster, we are announcing a preview of ephemeral OS disk support which makes responding to new compute demands on your cluster even faster.

Latency isn’t just about the length of time to create a cluster. It’s also about how fast you can detect and respond to operational problems. To help enterprises improve their operational efficiency, we’re announcing preview integration with Azure Resource Health which can alert you if your cluster is unhealthy for any reason. We’re also announcing the general availability of node image updates which allow you to upgrade the underlying operating system to respond to bugs or vulnerabilities in your cluster while staying on the same Kubernetes version for stability.

Finally, though Kubernetes has always enabled enterprises to drive cost savings through containerization, the new economic realities of the world during a pandemic mean that achieving cost efficiency for your business is more important than ever. We’ve got a great exercise that can help you learn how to optimize your costs using containers and the Azure Kubernetes Service.

Secure by design with Kubernetes on Azure

One of the key pillars of any enterprise computing platform is security. With market-leading features like policy integration and Azure Active Directory identity for Pods and cloud-native security have always been an important part of the Azure Kubernetes Service. I’m excited about some new features we’ve added recently to further enhance the security of your workloads running on Kubernetes.

Though Kubernetes has built-in support for secrets, most enterprise environments require a more secure and more compliant implementation. In the Azure Kubernetes Service, being enterprise-grade means providing integration between Azure Key Vault and the Azure Kubernetes service. Using Key Vault with Kubernetes enables you to securely store your credentials, certificates, and other secrets in state of the art, compliant secret store, and easily use them with your applications in an Azure Kubernetes cluster.

It’s even more exciting that this integration is built on the back of an open Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver that the Azure team built and open sourced for the entire Kubernetes community. Giving back to open source is an important part of what it means to be a community steward, and it was exciting to see our approach get validated as it was picked up and used by the HashiCorp Vault team for their secrets integration. Our open source team has been hard at work on improving many other parts of the security ecosystem. We’ve enhanced the CSI driver for Windows, and worked on cgroups v2 and containerd. If you want to learn more about how to secure your cloud-native workloads and make sure that your enterprise is following Microsoft’s best practices, check out our guide to Kubernetes best practices. They will teach you how to integrate firewalls, policy, and more to ensure you have both security and agility in your cloud-native development.

Next steps and KubeCon EU

I hope that you have an awesome KubeCon EU. As you go through the conference and learn more about Kubernetes, you can also learn more about Kubernetes on Azure with all of the great information online and in our virtual booth. If you’re new to KubeCon and Kubernetes and wondering how you can adopt Kubernetes for workloads from hobbyist to enterprise, we’ve got a great Kubernetes adoption guide for you.
Quelle: Azure

How to optimize your Azure workload costs

The economic challenges posed by the global health pandemic continue to affect every organization around the world. During this difficult time, cost optimization has become an especially critical topic. Recently, we provided an overview of how to approach cost optimization on Microsoft Azure, which laid out three focus areas to help you get the most value out of your Azure investment: understanding and forecasting your costs, optimizing your workload costs, and controlling your costs.

Today, we’ll dive more deeply into the second focus area—how you can optimize your Azure workloads costs—and show you how guidance in the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, tools like Azure Advisor, and offers like the Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Reservations can help you operate more efficiently on Azure and save.

Design workloads for cost optimization using best practices from the Azure Well-Architected Framework

The Azure Well-Architected Framework is designed to help you build and deploy cloud workloads with confidence, using actionable and simple to use deep technical content, assessments, and reference architectures based on proven industry best practices. You can assess workloads against the five pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework cloud design—cost optimization, reliability, security, performance efficiency, and operational excellence—to help you focus on the right activities and to ensure you optimize workloads and proactively meet business needs.

The cost optimization section of the Azure Well-Architected Framework is all about managing costs to get the most value out of your Azure workloads and covers:

Cost management principles, a series of important considerations that can help you achieve both business objectives and cost justification.
Cost best practices for design, provisioning, monitoring, and optimization.
Trade-offs between cost and other pillars like reliability and performance.

A great way to get started with the Azure Well-Architected Framework is by taking the Azure Well-Architected Review. This review examines your workload against the best practices defined by the pillars of reliability, cost optimization, operational excellence, security, and performance efficiency. You can choose to take the review for any or all of the pillars, so you can start by focusing on cost optimization, if you prefer.

Optimize your Azure resources with best practice recommendations from Azure Advisor

Your workloads are composed of resources, so configuring your resources according to the latest Azure best practices is critical to ensuring your workloads are cost optimized. Azure Advisor is a free service that helps you optimize your already-deployed Azure resources for cost, security, performance, reliability, and operational excellence. Advisor is aligned with the Azure Well-Architected Framework, but is targeted at the resource level instead of the workload level. Advisor’s recommendations are personalized to your Azure environment based on your resource telemetry and configurations.

Examples of Advisor cost recommendations include rightsizing underutilized or shutting down unused resources, buying reserved instances to save over pay-as-you-go costs, and using storage lifecycle management. Our full list of Advisor cost recommendations is available.

Advisor offers several features to make it faster and easier to optimize your resources. Quick Fix enables one-click bulk remediation of recommendations, so you can multi-select resources you’d like to remediate. Click Quick Fix, and Advisor takes care of the rest. You can configure Advisor to display only the recommendations that mean the most to you, such as those for your production subscriptions and resource groups. Advisor alerts notify you when you have new recommendations, and Advisor recommendation digests remind you about available recommendations you haven’t remediated yet.

Visit the Advisor documentation to learn more and get started remediating your cost recommendations.

Save big on Azure by leveraging your existing on-premises licensing investment with the Azure Hybrid Benefit

The Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that lets you bring your Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises licenses with Software Assurance or subscriptions to Azure and save up to 85 percent compared to standard pay as-you-go rates,1 so you only pay for the compute costs on Azure. You can apply these savings across Azure SQL and Azure Dedicated Host.

License mobility benefits offered by Azure include the ability to bring your Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to the cloud, leverage SQL Server licensing in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments, and gain additional licensing benefits, including 180-day dual use rights of your licenses, both on-premises and in Azure. For your heavily-virtualized workloads, you get four vCPUs of Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance for each core of SQL Server Enterprise.

These unique advantages plus additional benefits such as, free fail-over servers licensing for SQL Server disaster recovery and free extended security updates, make Azure the best-in-class cloud for Windows Server and SQL Server.

Check out the Azure Hybrid Benefit Documentation for more technical tutorials and resources.

Reserve upfront and pay less with Azure Reservations

Receive a discount on your Azure services by purchasing Azure Reservations, which is a one-year or three-year commitment to specific Azure services. Giving us visibility into your one-year or three-year resource needs in advance allows us to be more efficient. In return, we pass these savings onto you as discounts of up to 72 percent.2 When you buy a reservation, you immediately receive a discount and are no longer charged at pay-as-you-go rates. This offer is ideal for Azure services that use significant capacity or run for long periods of time in a consistent way.

Reservation discounts apply to the following eligible subscriptions and offer types:

Enterprise agreements (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0017P or MS-AZR-0148P).
Microsoft Customer Agreement subscriptions.
Individual plans with pay-as-you-go rates (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0003P or MS-AZR-0023P).
Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) subscriptions.

Learn more

Learn more about how to lower your upfront cash outflow with various monthly payment options at no additional cost in the reservations documentation.

You could achieve the lowest cost of ownership when you combine the Azure Hybrid Benefit, reservation pricing, and extended security updates. Cost optimize your Azure workloads today with these Azure cost saving options.

Check back soon for more cloud cost optimization guidance or visit our Azure cost optimization page to learn more.

1The 85 percent savings is based on 8-Core D13 v2 VM in East US 2 region. Savings are calculated from full price (license included) for SQL Server Enterprise edition VM against reduced rate (applying Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server and Windows Server), which excludes Software Assurance costs for SQL Server and Windows Server, which may vary based on EA agreement or any applicable volume licensing agreement. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size and compute family. Prices as of June 5, 2018 are subject to change.

2The 72 percent saving is based on one M32ts Azure VM for Windows OS in US Gov Virginia region running for 36 months at a pay-as-you-go rate of ~$3,660.81/month; reduced rate for a 3-year Reserved Instance of ~$663.45/month. Azure pricing as of October 30, 2018 (prices subject to change). Actual savings may vary based on location, instance type, or usage.
Quelle: Azure

New Azure SQL Learning Tools help reduce the global technology skills gap

Microsoft’s learning solutions pave the way toward data-centric jobs of the future

"It’s been forecasted 800 million people need to learn new skills for their jobs by 2030. In this time of change, people are hungry to learn, gain new skills, and grow their economic opportunity.”—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Across Microsoft, we are helping a new generation of technology workers develop the right level of skills. Recently, Microsoft announced the availability of new virtual learning programs. These programs, focused on technical topics, are already helping people enhance their digital expertise and, for some, are providing a foundation for success in a new career path.

Building upon this goal, we're excited to announce the Azure Data team’s latest additions to these educational programs.

Our all-new content will help beginners being introduced to Azure as well as SQL experts learn how to understand the benefits of Azure SQL. Since SQL Server and Azure SQL share the same engine, these new set of tools builds upon familiar content. This means SQL Server professionals can become Azure SQL professionals with just a little bit of help, such as:

Microsoft Learn learning path: This six-course Azure SQL fundamentals learning path provides a built-in lab environment for you to learn at your own pace without a subscription.

YouTube/Channel9 series: We offer more than 60 videos to help beginners learn more about Azure SQL. Viewers can experience on-demand training through Microsoft Developer and Azure SQL playlists on YouTube and Channel9.

GitHub content: Learners and educators can dig into open-source code in a scenario-driven GitHub workshop, where forking and redelivering is encouraged. You can access this content by visiting the SQL Server workshops page and selecting “Workshop: Azure SQL”.

Learn Live in the Azure SQL Bootcamp: In this four-day series of live sessions, Microsoft SQL experts Anna Hoffman and Bob Ward will help you get ramped up and support you as you learn. You can sign up for Azure SQL Bootcamp here to join us.

Azure SQL’s rapid adoption creates new opportunities

Azure SQL adoption is accelerating at a dramatic growth rate and will continue on this trajectory for the foreseeable future. Azure SQL unlocks new opportunities for our customers to optimize costs, build resiliency, and promote agility with AI-based features, rapid scaling capability, and much more.

A few weeks ago, a Morgan Stanley report noted, “The key insight of [the] 2nd edition of our New Stack monthly is that the relational database, commonly viewed as outdated for the digital era, is not only not dead but is seeing a resurgence reflecting strong growth in cloud. MSFT is a key beneficiary with the top share in cloud and overall".

It’s a terrific time to join the Azure SQL community and fine-tune your technical skills. If you have questions about the benefits, opportunities, or process of making a move from SQL on-premises to SQL in the Cloud, we can lend a hand to guide you. Our new learning materials answer these questions and go into greater technical depth. On Twitter, you can follow us @AzureSQL and get more involved in the community with the #AzureSQL.

Kudos due to our SQL community 

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a few members of our team who gathered feedback from customers, took that information to heart and developed our new curriculum. First, a heartfelt thank you to Anna Hoffman, Data Scientist, for your dedicated efforts to providing customers the latest content and for enabling more scalable platforms to deliver it. I’d also like to thank Bob Ward, one of our SQL visionaries, who has invested over 26 years driving SQL development. Last but not least, I’m grateful to Buck Woody, who has written hundreds of articles about databases to help educate future data experts.

Jumpstart your journey

In these uniquely challenging times, it is more important than ever for Microsoft to equip our SQL community with new tools and resources to help you succeed. Whether you are a SQL expert, or someone just starting, I encourage you to visit our latest resources and find out how you can jumpstart your journey to learn about Azure SQL.
Quelle: Azure