Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure Machine Learning—what’s new from Build 2020

Machine learning (ML) is gaining momentum across a number of industries and scenarios as enterprises look to drive innovation, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning empowers developers and data scientists with enterprise-grade capabilities to accelerate the ML lifecycle. At Microsoft Build 2020, we announced several advances to Azure Machine Learning across the following areas: ML for all skills, Enterprise grade MLOps, and responsible ML.

ML for all skills

New enhancements provide ML access for all skills.

Enhanced notebook in preview

Data scientists and developers can now access an enhanced notebook editor directly inside Azure Machine Learning studio. New capabilities to create, edit, and collaborate make remote work and sharing easier for data science teams and the notebook is fully compatible with Jupyter.

Boost development productivity with features like IntelliSense, inline error highlighting, and code suggestions from VSCode, which deliver the best-in-class coding experience in Jupyter notebooks.
Access real-time co-editing (coming soon) for seamless remote collaboration or pair debugging.
Inline controls to start, stop, and create a new compute using GPU or CPU Compute Instance inside notebooks.
Add new kernels to the notebook editor and quickly switch between different kernels like Python and R.

Real-time notebook co-editing with three users and IntelliSense.

Reinforcement learning support in preview

New reinforcement learning support in Azure Machine Learning enables data scientists to train agents who interact with the real world, such as control systems and game characters. To train agents on Azure Machine Learning, data scientists can use the SDK, studio UI, or command line interface (CLI). Azure Machine Learning simplifies running reinforcement learning at scale on remote compute clusters, including tracking experiment results in Tensorboard and Azure Machine Learning studio UI. See sample notebooks to train an agent to navigate a lava maze in Minecraft using Azure Machine Learning.

An agent successfully navigates the maze in Minecraft.

Data labeling in preview

Projects that have a computer-vision component, such as image classification or object detection, generally require labels for thousands of images. Data labeling in Azure Machine learning gives you a central place to create, manage, and monitor labeling projects. Use it to coordinate data, labels, and efficiently manage labeling tasks. The new ML assisted labeling feature helps trigger automatic machine learning models to accelerate the labeling task and is available for image classification (multi-class or multi-label) and object detection tasks.

Enterprise-grade MLOps

New features for MLOps designed to deliver innovation faster.

Azure Private Link for network isolation in preview

To enable secure model training and deployment, Azure Machine Learning provides a strong set of data and networking protection capabilities. These include support for Azure Virtual Networks, dedicated compute hosts and customer managed keys for encryption in transit and at rest. In addition, we are enabling Private Link for network isolation to access Azure Machine Learning over a private endpoint in your virtual network, so the Azure Machine Learning workspace will not be accessible to the internet. This is critical for many scenarios in regulated industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare.

Azure Cognitive Search integration in preview

Many enterprises have a large corpus of documents and can build cognitive search solutions to search for specific terms and find relevant results to improve productivity. To build an effective solution, often customized models are needed to enrich the search experience. Using Azure Machine Learning, developers can deliver custom search solutions by training and deploying models and now, seamlessly integrating the end points into the Azure Cognitive Search skillset.

Responsible ML

In collaboration with the Aether Committee and its working groups, we are bringing the latest research in responsible AI to Azure. The new responsible ML capabilities in Azure Machine Learning and our open-source toolkits empower data scientists and developers to understand ML models, protect people and their data, and control the end-to-end ML process. To learn more, read the responsible ML announcements from Build.

Innovating with customers

We continue to drive this innovation hand-in-hand with you, our customers. For example, Carhartt turned to Azure Machine Learning for quantitative insights to help their company get the right products to the places its customers work and live.

“The model we deployed on Azure Machine Learning helped us choose the three new retail locations we opened in 2019. Those stores exceeded their revenue plans by over 200 percent in December, the height of our season, and within months of opening were among the best-performing stores in their districts.” —Jolie Vitale, Director of BI and Analytics, Carhartt.

Start building today!

We hope you will join us and start your journey with Azure Machine Learning.

Get started with a free trial of Azure Machine Learning.
Learn more about Azure Machine Learning and follow the quick start guides and tutorials.

Quelle: Azure

Azure Maps Creator now available in preview

As enterprises continue to evolve in their digital transformation journey, there is a need for augmenting Azure Maps content with project-specific and private business knowledge of places. Today we're launching Azure Maps Creator in preview to extend location intelligence to indoor spaces.

Enterprises are taking advantage of Azure Maps capabilities to optimize business operations and transform their business strategy using location and map services. With IoT-powered systems delivering new and more accurate data than ever before, defining new patterns for taking advantage of location data findings is essential. Creator includes a new set of capabilities that allow an enterprise to securely create and use indoor maps that dynamically change as new events in spaces occur. The data is not used to improve Azure Maps, customers own and are in full control of the created map content, including defining how to secure access using Azure Maps authentication and authorization options. You can develop solutions for the general public or for selected authenticated users for virtually any indoor space such as offices, stores, factories, and hospitals for facility management, occupant and guest experiences, productivity tools, and more.

Azure Maps provides SDKs to easily build web and mobile applications with location and map services. Creator is fully integrated with existing Azure Maps capabilities. Using the same skill sets and developer tools, solutions can combine indoor maps and analytics with outdoor Azure Maps services for roads, traffic, mobility, weather, and more.

Create indoor maps

You can take advantage of existing data for creating and maintaining indoor maps. During construction or remodeling phases, architecture and engineering work includes floorplan drawings created with computer-aided drawing (CAD) tools. Creator offers a conversion service that enables developers to upload these CAD-based floorplans and convert them into map data which can be further enriched with other details. For example, you can create logical spaces representing areas covered by cameras or with Wi-Fi signal, and add equipment locations to help find printers and fire extinguishers. You can create maps with multiple buildings, like corporate campuses and hospitals, put the buildings in relation to each other using the geographic context, and easily add useful functions such as routing from one building to another.

We envision an ecosystem of partners offering specialized services or complementary technology making it easier to gather and process useful indoor map data. One of the partners that is an early adopter of the Creator capability is Archidata. Archidata has 25 years of experience in developing tools and processes for upgrading architectural documents to allow its real estate clients to evolve at the same pace as technology easily and inexpensively. Archidata has developed the capability to convert customers’ architectural plans to meet Azure Maps Drawing package requirements from any document format, including AutoCAD drawings, PDF, scanned paper plans, or Revit models.

Indoor maps in action

Indoor maps can be used in a multitude of scenarios taking advantage of map visualization, IoT, and location analytics. The Azure Maps SDK is enriched with a dedicated Indoor module so that applications delivering indoor experiences can be easily extended with the numerous rich capabilities the SDK offers.

Indoor map visualization brings an intuitive way to make decisions. It can be used to locate stores and gates in airports, alerts in factory production lines, book meeting rooms, show space utilization trends, and conditions. Indoor map visualization is delivered by the Azure Maps Render service and utilizes optimized vector tilesets. Each space and element of the map comes with a style to more rapidly deliver compelling maps. If you need applications that reflect map styles defined by live data, for example, if you are making use of Azure Digital Twins to track temperature or people count for different areas provided by IoT devices, you can use the Feature State service to visualize the latest measurements and deliver dynamic map styling in your applications.

Using Web Feature Service (WFS), you can also use your indoor map data to perform spatial queries and find, for example, rooms and equipment based on a given area of interest or other criteria such as the place name. The information retrieved can be used to visualize places of interest on maps but also for analytics and integration with other systems. For example, you can access and use the spatial data of your indoor map in other functions such as the Azure Maps Geofence API. In addition to all great functional value the WFS provides, this service adheres to the Open Geospatial Consortium API standard for Features which makes your solution highly interoperable with other commercial and open sourced geospatial products.

With the ability to view indoor spaces, it's natural to want to view objects on the map as they move around in real-time. The challenge has been that most devices are not location-aware inside a building, as GPS signals are obscured. To solve this, the next Windows release will feature a new Wi-Fi-based indoor location solution built into the geolocation API. When deployed, IT departments can use it to find lost laptops, or employees can get live navigation through a building indoor map. Azure Maps abstracts away from the method to let you choose the positioning technology suitable for your projects. While Windows is working together with enterprise Wi-Fi partners to build indoor positioning into the OS, you could also build cross-platform, mixed reality solutions with Azure Spatial Anchors accessible across HoloLens, iOS, and Android devices. Applications tracking indoor positions can take advantage of Azure Maps and bring additional insights to mixed reality applications (for example, room properties and devices in close proximity) as well as trigger automated processes built using Azure Maps Spatial service and others. Azure Maps also helps extend user experiences beyond indoor by making use of the same IoT events and underlying services to deliver spatial analytics.

SIRL (Sirl.io), an innovative indoor GPS and analytics platform, locates and communicates with mobile devices used by visitors and staff at accuracy down to 12 inches (30 cm) using precise indoor object mapping provided by Azure Maps Creator. SIRL is currently working with Fairway Market in the New York metropolitan area to add wayfinding and location-triggered recommendations to Fairway’s Mobile Checkout App. In addition, SIRL is helping Fairway’s category managers with merchandising insights and optimization via a cloud-based analytics dashboard.

Willow is a technology company that creates Digital Twins of real assets, either buildings or infrastructure. Willow's Digital Twin combines siloed data sets, including geospatial data, asset data, maintenance data, and occupant data into a virtual replica of the built form, which is then overlaid with live information. This is an emerging technology field in the built world as the physical and digital realms merge. Willow will leverage Azure Maps to provide users with an accurate, floor map of their assets as well as leverage Azure Maps for their Geographic Information System.

"By integrating Azure Maps into Willow, we can provide contextual insights to owners and operators" said Dale Brett, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Willow. "Azure Maps is helping us bring spatial context to IoT. That means we can drive more efficient maintenance practices, improve tenant safety and wayfinding, and provide asset owners with transparency across multiple sites."

Audax Labs is currently working with the Azure Maps team to develop solutions for the Retail Industry around parking garages. They have built a prototype for streamlining the parking process using the Creator capability. Customers can find and reserve a spot in the parking lot for calculated for their estimated time of arrival.
 

Next steps

Start learning more and easily develop modern solutions with Azure Maps today.

Learn more about Azure Maps Creator.
Create your first indoor map.
Creating Intelligent Spaces.

Quelle: Azure

Optimize for internet traffic with Peering Service and the routing preference option

Last week at the Microsoft Build conference, we announced that Azure Peering Service is now generally available. We also introduced “routing preference,” a new option for our customers to further architect and optimize their traffic to and from Azure over the “public Internet.”

Networking is a critical enabler of the cloud. The experience when accessing your applications and data depends on the performance of your network connection and the global network powering your applications and services in the cloud.

For the best experience, data should travel the shortest path and enter and exit the Microsoft network as close as possible to you or your users. Microsoft runs the Microsoft global network, one of the world's largest wide area networks (WANs). Stretching across all continents through hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber and hundreds of network points of presence (PoP), it powers all the Microsoft cloud services such as Azure, Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, and their millions of users.

A growing number of our customers are adopting an "Internet-first" approach. Driven by accelerated cloud adoption and the current global situation, and the need to quickly adjust and provide optimal access to users is a main priority. Cloud-centric architectures with virtual private networks (VPNs) and technologies such as SD-WAN are applied to optimize for cost, security, and performance.

Peering Service

Microsoft is always optimizing customer traffic within our network, from ingestion close to the user and carrying it as far as possible to its destination, avoiding the public Internet, to returning it the same way. Peering Service extends the optimized path to your doorstep or, in industry terms, to the last mile.

Concept diagram of Peering Service.

We have partnered with internet service providers (ISPs), internet exchange providers (IXPs), and software-defined cloud interconnect (SDCI) providers worldwide to provide reliable and performant public connectivity.

When connecting using a partner provider, you can take advantage of business-class internet connectivity with high availability and low latency. Using the optimal path and least amount of network hops, Peering Service improves the user experience in Microsoft apps, such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. Also, you will have access to optional advanced performance telemetry and security features such as route hijacking monitoring and prevention.

Prefix events in the portal showing an origin autonomous system number (ASN) change for a Peering Service customer's prefix.

Routing preference

While optimal consumption of apps is critical, so is the ability to architect the delivery. I am excited to introduce the new routing preference option in Azure. The option brings a new second network service tier and enables customers to select how traffic routes between their Azure resources and clients accessing them from the internet. The Microsoft global network is well provisioned with multiple redundant fiber paths to ensure exceptionally high reliability and availability. We do traffic engineering using a unique software-defined WAN controller that provides optimal path selection and high performance for your traffic.

Default routing of traffic for best performance in Azure.

While Microsoft will always default to the best performing and most secure option of carrying the traffic across our backbone from source to destination, the new competitive egress tier adds a secondary option for solutions that do not require the premium predictability and performance of Microsoft's global network. Instead, it will allow the routing of traffic directly to the public Internet.

Traffic routed with the new network service tier in Azure.

You can select your preferred routing when creating a public IP address and associating it to resources such as virtual machines (VMs), internet-facing load balancers, and more. You can also add the secondary routing preference, "Internet routing" for storage accounts that gives an additional endpoint to access services such as blobs, files, web, and Azure Data Lake over the public Internet.

Creation of an additional endpoint for internet routing option.

Let us look at how the two options compare. We did a performance comparison using ThousandEyes monitoring across multiple global locations, accessing Azure Virtual Machines. The average round-trip latency was measured over a period of 30 days. As expected, routing via Microsoft's network provides the best latency, with the gap between the two further widening with cross-continent traffic. The choice of best scheme, price, and performance is ultimately yours.

Performance between the Microsoft network and the public Internet.

Learn more

We continue to be fully committed to helping you connect to Azure in the best possible way, protect your workloads, and deliver a great networking experience. We will continue to provide innovative networking services and guidance to help you take full advantage of the cloud and are always interested in learning more about your new scenarios enabled by our networking services. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Learn more about Peering Service.
Learn more about routing preference.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft and Docker collaborate on new ways to deploy containers on Azure

Now more than ever, developers need agility to meet rapidly increasing demands from customers. Containerization is one key way to increase agility. Containerized applications are built in a more consistent and repeatable way, by way of defining desired infrastructure, dependencies, and configuration as code for all stages of the lifecycle. Applications often start and stop faster at runtime too, which often helps quickly start, stop, scale out, and update in the cloud.

With this in mind, we announced a new partnership earlier today between Microsoft and Docker to integrate Docker Desktop more closely with Microsoft Azure and the Visual Studio line of products.  

Docker Desktop built-in tools, features, and command-line utilities will provide a way to natively set Azure as a context to run containers in the cloud with context and run in Azure containers in a few simple commands. The product integration begins with the ability to create Azure Container Instances (ACI), which is a solution for any scenario that can operate in isolated containers, without orchestration.

Let’s take a look at new product integrations using an example. We have a simple TCP-based Python game server app that is already building and running on the local developer machine using Docker Desktop. The app depends on a slim version of Linux and other dependencies in requirements.txt. The Docker tools extension in Visual Studio Code provides easy commands to do builds and runs on Docker Desktop, and then a push to a private container registry in Docker Hub. The experience is particularly fast using the new release of WSL2.

With the updated version of Docker Desktop, coming later this year, we see native commands for creating a docker context for Azure Container Instances:

$ docker context aci-create paulyuk/webapp-dev
$ docker context use paulyuk/webapp-dev

Contexts are useful to easily swap between one or more environments that have a Docker host. As an example, I can have contexts for local (the default), myapp-dev, myapp-qa. The entire Docker tools chain (including Docker.exe CLI) honors the context. This makes running a container in Azure easy and consistent with running locally, just using the same familiar command:

$ docker run paulyuk/pythontcpgame:1.1

Deploying a container to Azure is as simple as that, using the standard tools in Docker Desktop. Plus, you can bring the whole experience together using Docker Desktop + Visual Studio + WSL2 + GitHub to have a cloud-optimized desktop. I go into more detail about the integrations in this DockerCon LIVE 2020 session.

We are thrilled about expanding our collaboration with Docker and continuing to make the developer experience better for developers.

Learn more

To learn more about the partnership, you can read this press release and blog post from Docker. You can leverage the current VS Code Docker Extension with docker contexts, Docker Desktop with WSL2 integration today. The preview with the ACI integration in Docker Desktop will follow later this year.
Quelle: Azure

Deploy to Azure using GitHub Actions from your favorite tools

Enterprises and teams are adopting DevOps technologies combined with people and processes to deliver high-quality code, with faster release cycles and continuous delivery of value, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction for their own customers.

However, it can often get difficult to craft CI/CD pipelines by editing multiple YAMLs to stitch your code to cloud automation workflows. Teams end up spending considerable time and effort setting up and switching between different discrete tools during their day-to-day development cycles.

In November, GitHub Actions for Azure became generally available to automate deploying your app code in GitHub to Azure directly from their repositories. Building on this, at Microsoft Build 2020 we announced that GitHub Actions for Azure are now integrated into Visual Studio Code, Azure CLI, and the Azure Portal simplifying the experience of deploying to Azure from your preferred entry points. Download the new Visual Studio Code extension or install the Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) extension for GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions for Azure can now deploy any enterprise application

GitHub Actions gives you the flexibility to build an automated software development lifecycle workflow. To help development teams easily create workflows to build, test, package, release, and deploy to Azure, more than 30 GitHub Actions for Azure are published on GitHub Marketplace, with more planned to roll out in the coming months.

These actions enable deployments to multiple Azure services, from web applications to serverless functions and Kubernetes, as well as Azure SQL and MySQL databases.

We also support Azure login actions that can serve as a generic step that lets customers use scripting for a breadth of Azure resources using Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell. Various utility actions like Azure Key Vault, App Service Settings, and more are also published that help developers target Azure to deploy even their complex enterprise applications while following all the DevOps best practices. Check out the sample application Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, a multilanguage application built with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, deployed with GitHub Actions and running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Easily get started with Actions for Azure

Various starter templates are made available to deploy your apps created with popular languages and frameworks such as .NET, Node.js, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Python in containers or running on any operating system. To simplify the onboarding experience with deploying web applications, we’ve also included sample repositories which can help you get started in four easy steps:

Fork the sample repository (example, Python sample).
Click on Deploy to Azure in the readme file to create an Azure Web App.
Configure the required GitHub Repo Secrets.
Update the workflow YAML with the Web App configuration and commit the changes.

These steps will trigger your CI/CD workflow to build and deploy an app to Azure using GitHub Actions.

Create Action workflows from Visual Studio Code, Azure Portal, or Azure CLI

Today there are millions of developers using Visual Studio Code targeting Azure. Similarly, there are millions of developers on Azure Portal as well. We want to meet Azure developers where they are and provide the best end-to-end developer experiences using all our developer tools. With the new integrations that we’re announcing for Actions into various tool extensions, you can now deploy to Azure effortlessly using GitHub Actions from your favorite tools. This will significantly reduce ramp-up time on GitHub Actions, avoid frequent context switching, and help your teams be more productive with built-in extensions in your favorite tools. We’re excited to announce three new tooling integrations:

In Azure Portal, GitHub Actions has now been added as a build provider in the App Service Deployment Center and Azure Kubernetes Service, making it easier for you to set up CI/CD workflows with GitHub Actions.
 
The Visual Studio Code Deploy to Azure extension helps you set up continuous build and deployment for Azure App Service or Azure Kubernetes Service without leaving the editor.

Azure CLI extension can be installed by running the command az extension add –name deploy-to-azure, and it supports deployments to Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Instance via the az aks app up and az container app up commands.

You can use any of these tool integrations to set up an automatically generated and fully customizable CI/CD workflow that’s triggered for every code push. The YAML file is pre-populated with build and release steps, which you can edit as needed. As part of creating the workflow, all the relevant Azure and GitHub repository-related configurations are set up, without you needing to worry about plumbing the two systems.

Get started

Check out the starter templates and the documentation for Deploy to Azure CLI extension, Visual Studio Code extension, and GitHub Actions for Azure to get started. If you have any changes you’d like to see or suggestions for these features, then we’d love your feedback as well as contributions in the respective GitHub repositories–we’re taking pull requests! If you encounter a problem with any specific action, you can also open an issue on the action repository.

Learn more

View more GitHub integrations with Azure to automate your code-to-cloud workflow.
Check out the comprehensive list of GitHub Actions.

Quelle: Azure

Streamlining your image building process with Azure Image Builder

Customizing virtual machine (VM) images to meet security and compliance requirements and achieve faster deployment is a strong need for many enterprises, but most don't enjoy the process and energy needed for determining the right tooling, building the right pipeline, and maintaining it continuously.

We built Azure Image Builder service to make building customized images easy in Azure.

Azure Image Builder service offers unification and simplification for your image building process across Azure and Azure Stack with an automated image building pipeline. Whether you want to build Windows or Linux virtual machine images, you can use existing image security configurations to build compliant images for your organization and patch existing custom images using Linux commands or Windows Update. Azure Image Builder supports images from multiple Linux distributions, Azure Marketplace, and Windows Virtual Desktop environments and you can build images for specialized VM sizes, including creating images for GPU VMs.

After you build the image, you can manage it with Shared Image Gallery and integrate your CI/CD pipeline with Azure Image Builder service. When you use Azure DevOps or other DevOps solutions, this gives you easy image patching, versioning, and regional replication capabilities.

Finally, Azure Image Builder service offers unmatched governance and compliance where role-based access control is integrated so you can determine who has access in which images and connect your existing VNET to access routable resources, servers, and services, including configuration servers (DSC, Chef, Puppet, and more). Deploying Azure Image Builder does not require a public IP address, which ensures the safety and gives you full control of the asset you’re building.

We’ve designed this service to take on the heavy-lifting when you’re building your next customized image, to meet the corporate and regulatory compliance rules, and preconfiguring VMs with applications for faster deployment without the hassle they used to require. You don't need to spend time learning how to build or maintain image pipelines, learn new tools, or have different tools. Simply describe your image configuration in a template, using your new or existing commands, scripts, build artifacts, and Azure Image Builder will create it for you.

Azure Image Build is expected to be generally available in Q3 2020.

Next steps with Azure Image Builder

Try Azure Image Builder in preview today with these resources:

Learn more about Azure Image Builder service.
Learn how to use Azure Image Builder with an image gallery for Linux virtual machines and Windows virtual machines.
Watch the Azure Image Builder Ignite webcast for a deep-dive into how Azure Image Builder and Shared Image Gallery can help you.

Quelle: Azure

The Azure SQL family: Innovation and value in the cloud

How businesses respond in times of uncertainty is as varied as the businesses themselves. Many slow down operations to operate more cost-effectively, while others lean into new opportunities that didn’t exist before. Regardless of how you respond, ensuring your organization can cost-effectively adapt and scale to rapidly changing conditions is key.

When it comes to migrating your data, you have a variety of options to consider, and it’s important to have the flexibility to choose a path that helps you respond to uncertainty in a way that makes the most sense for your business. Azure SQL is here to help.

Introducing Azure SQL

Azure SQL is a family of fully managed, secure, and intelligent SQL database services that support a wide range of application patterns, from re-hosting and modernizing existing SQL Server workloads to modern cloud application development.

Because the entire Azure SQL family is built upon the same SQL Server database engine, you can migrate applications with ease and continue to use the tools, languages, and resources you’re familiar with. You’ll discover that your skills and experience transfer easily to the cloud, as the innovative features in Azure SQL help you operate more efficiently and save money along the way.

Azure SQL helps you do more

Azure SQL has options for any budget. You can choose managed services that are automatically patched, updated, and backed-up for you, so you can refocus resources onto higher priorities. A recent Forrester study found operational and financial benefits of modernizing applications on Azure SQL, citing a three-year 238 percent return on investment and up to a 40 percent increase in database administrator (DBA) productivity, among other benefits.1

Azure SQL also helps you stay agile in an ever-changing world by reducing your costs and simplifying performance management. Serverless compute, for example, continuously right-sizes resources to meet workload demand. Hyperscale storage is built on a flexible, cloud native architecture that allows it to grow as needed, rapidly scaling up to 100 TB. Built-in AI powers intelligent features like automatic tuning and Advanced Threat Protection, which maintain peak performance and data protection on your behalf.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines offers similar efficiency and cost-effectiveness with Azure BlobCache, which is automatically provisioned for Azure Marketplace images and gives fast, free reads for customers. Given that typical SQL Server workloads are read-heavy, this provides tremendous savings.

Azure SQL comes with industry leading offers

In addition to the operational and financial benefits that come with managed services, Azure SQL can help reduce your upfront costs with industry-leading pricing and special offers, such as:

Azure Hybrid Benefit—If you have SQL Server and Windows licenses with active Software Assurance, you can reuse those licenses in the cloud and save up to 82 percent2 off pay-as-you-go rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database.
Reservation pricing—Get more cloud for less cost when you commit upfront to a one- or three-year term. With reservation pricing, you can save up to 80 percent3 versus pay-as-you-go pricing, and you can exchange or cancel unused reservations at any time.
Azure Dev/Test Pricing—Use your Visual Studio subscriptions to get discounted pricing and Azure credits for non-production scenarios, with savings up to 55 percent off pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance and Ubuntu Linux rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

Get started

Need help with next steps? We can guide you to the right Azure SQL service that best meets the needs of your database workload, and you can get started today.

1 “The Total Economic ImpactTM of Migration to Azure SQL Managed Databases,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting in March 2020 on behalf of Microsoft.

2 Calculations based on scenarios running 744 hours/month for 12 months at 3-year Reserved Instances or Reserved Capacity. Prices as of 10/24/2018, subject to change. Azure Windows VM calculations based on one D2V3 Azure VM in US West 2 region at the SUSE Linux Enterprise Basic rate. AWS calculations based on one m5.Large VM in US West (Oregon) using Windows Server pay-as-you-go rate for Reserved Instances under Standard 3-year term, all upfront payment. SQL Server calculations based on 8 vCore Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Business Critical in US West 2 running at Azure Hybrid Benefit rate. AWS calculations based on RDS for SQL EE for db.r4.2xlarge on US West (Oregon) in a multi AZ deployment for Reserved Instances under Standard 3-year term, all upfront payment. Extended security updates cost used for AWS is based on Windows Server Standard open NL ERP pricing in USD. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size, and performance tier. Savings exclude Software Assurance costs, which may vary based on Volume Licensing agreement. Contact your sales representative for details.

3 The 80% saving for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is based on the combined cost of Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and 3-year Azure Reserved Instance. The estimate does not include Software Assurance costs. Sample annual cost comparison of two D2V3 Windows Server VMs. Savings based on two D2V3 VMs in US West 2 Region running 744 hours/month for 12 months; Base compute rate at SUSE Linux Enterprise rate for US West 2. Azure pricing as of 04/24/2018. Prices subject to change. Actual savings may vary based on location, instance type, or usage. The 80% savings for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance is based on eight vCore SQL Database Business Critical in West 2 US Region, running 730 hours per month. Savings are calculated from on demand full price (license included) against base rate with Azure Hybrid Benefit plus 3-year reserved capacity commitment. Savings excludes Software Assurance cost for SQL Server Enterprise edition, which may vary based on EA agreement. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size and performance tier. Prices as of November 2018, subject to change.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Lighthouse—managing cloud, hybrid, and edge environments at-scale through a single control plane

Thousands of partners and enterprises use Azure Lighthouse to manage services across Azure tenants, representing tens of thousands of subscriptions and more than one million Azure resources from Azure Resource Manager—a unified control plane. With Azure Lighthouse, service providers, as well as self-managing enterprises, can achieve higher operational efficiency using Azure’s comprehensive and robust management tools. You can now view and manage resources, with higher automation, scale, and enhanced governance across hybrid estates and on-premises.

It is common for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to service customer resources across hybrid estates and on-premises environments. Many MSP partners rely on Azure Lighthouse, and now Azure Arc, to achieve a unified management solution in these advanced scenarios. MSPs can extend their service offerings to manage their customers’ on-premises environments through Azure Resource Manager, managing resources at scale and governing compliance using Azure policy.

ClearDATA—delivering robust governance across hybrid environments for healthcare customers

Using Azure Lighthouse, Azure Policy, and Azure Arc, ClearDATA—an Azure Expert MSP—provides compliance insights to enterprise customers in regulated industries, such as healthcare. Azure Arc enables ClearDATA to easily perform virtual machine inventories in hybrid environments, while Azure Policy used with Azure Lighthouse helps them to achieve consistency, security, and compliance across all of their customers in all of the clouds and private datacenters or branch offices the customers use.

ClearDATA provides compliance state insights across hybrid environments to enterprise customers.

“ClearDATA’s HIPAA compliant and HITRUST 9.1 certified solutions on Azure help enterprise organizations easily transition and accelerate their move to the cloud with greater confidence. A rich library of compliance reference architecture for Azure services, coupled with our unique Automated Safeguards and Remediation technology, unlocks the true potential of Azure Lighthouse and Azure cloud. Our visual and easy-to-use compliance dashboard and flexible reports provide transparency and visibility needed to demonstrate compliance.”—Suhas Kelkar, Chief Product Officer, ClearDATA.

Yorktel—monitoring customer edge devices

Yorktel manages health states of Microsoft collaboration devices (Surface Hubs 1, 2, and Microsoft Teams Rooms), including displays, microphones, cameras, speakers, and Microsoft Teams’ real-time features, on-behalf of its end-customers. By pivoting to Azure Monitor as their primary monitoring tool, and Azure Lighthouse as their secure access mechanism, Yorktel is shaking up edge device management. Consolidated views across all its customers provides Yorktel with comprehensive oversight, enabling timely alerts that trigger response workflows for speedy problem resolution. Azure Lighthouse has created smoother user experiences and higher customer satisfaction.

Yorktel’s Azure-based monitoring workflow for edge devices.

“Yorktel’s Azure Lighthouse enabled monitoring and management solution couldn’t have come at a better time. As the post-COVID-19 world prepares to return to work, this proactive problem and resolution technology presents the potential for dramatic impact, both for managed services providers and their customers. The efficiencies generated by faster, large-scale problem resolution will allow companies to focus on the strategic and transformational initiatives that will help them grow and acclimate to the post-COVID-19 world, rather than the tactical, day-to-day ‘keeping the lights on’.” —Jeremy Short, SVP of Microsoft Solutions, Yorktel

Vandis—delivering managed network services

Azure Lighthouse has also enabled multiple service providers, such as Azure Networking MSPs, to build and operate optimized hybrid connectivity from customer premises to customer subscriptions in Azure. Vandis, for example, uses Azure Lighthouse to plan, build, and operate a hybrid network for customers based on Azure Virtual WAN and Azure Express Route.

“Azure Lighthouse has enabled us to expand our Network-as-a-Service Platform to our customers as well as drive work-from-home solutions such as Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure.” —Ryan Young, CTO, Vandis

Azure Lighthouse—continuing to innovate for management-at-scale scenarios in Azure

Congratulations to all our partners who continue to add value to our joint customers with enhanced services for managing Azure and hybrid estates. Our team is as motivated as ever to innovate for our partner ecosystem, and we’ve been constantly adding new Azure Lighthouse capabilities as a result.

Here are a few highlights:

Service providers can now trigger notification and onboarding workflows for their teams, in their own Azure control plane, through activity logs that monitor customers’ resource delegation actions.
Customers can now upgrade their managed services offers inside their own Azure portal experiences, in service providers views, rather than visiting other portals or marketplaces.
Automation tools of choice across command-line interface (CLI), APIs (subscription function), and PowerShell can now display managed and managing tenant context of an Azure subscription.
Service providers can opt-out of managing customer delegated Azure scopes, on their own, to accelerate compliance and offboarding needs.
Azure Backup Explorer and Backup reports now offer cross-customer consolidated views for service providers, driving operator efficiency.
Azure Lighthouse is now a FEDRAMP High certified service available in Microsoft Azure Government.
Partners can now draft and publish managed services offers to the Azure Marketplace directly from the Partner Center, streamlining offer and lead management into a single portal.
Azure Lighthouse Help and Support experiences have been enhanced, including recommended solutions for common issues, empowering managing tenants with more insights to solve issues themselves.

And that’s a wrap for Build 2020 with Azure Lighthouse. I cannot wait to share more with you at Inspire 2020 in July. In the meantime, check out our new Azure Lighthouse learning content.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Stack updates and how it enables intelligence at the edge

Today, more than ever before, it is essential that our colleagues, customers, and partners be able to react quickly and confidently to rapidly changing circumstances. The ability to ingest, analyze, and act on incoming information requires that an organization have a robust, scalable technology infrastructure.

Such an infrastructure is not limited to one place or one platform. Modernized, and cloud-native applications can span across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments. Creating and managing this vast technology estate requires a modern paradigm that enables seamless experiences, no matter where the workload exists. The mindset of combining on-premises and cloud environments into a hybrid cloud has become a force in today’s industry and has been a core part of our strategy since the inception of Azure. In the face of the unprecedented transitions in today’s world, our mission remains the same: To enable our customers and partners to transform their organizations to achieve more, wherever they are.

Healthcare and Azure Stack

The healthcare industry has recently been confronted with incredible demands. Healthcare providers must balance the need to efficiently treat many new patients, and work with sensitive data to unlock possible treatments. These missions require that healthcare organizations practice diligent and careful stewardship to protect private patient and clinical data. The Azure Stack family brings intelligent, highly secure, real-time analytics using AI to any on-premises infrastructure, empowering healthcare providers to find answers while being good data stewards. We are working to bring solutions that enable digital pathology, medical imaging, and research and genomics at the edge, lowering latency and increasing throughput. The Azure hybrid platform equips healthcare systems to find previously hidden innovations that can improve operations – for example in emergency room wait times, operating room efficiencies, bed utilization, and patient-flow bottlenecks.

Here is a recent example of how Olympus is finding new ways to innovate in the operating room providing room status in real-time using Azure Stack Edge to enable edge computing using Azure AI and Azure Machine Learning.

Edge and hybrid computing expand the reach of cloud-native technologies to locations around the world. In the context of healthcare, the largest hospitals to the smallest clinics can be digitally transformed with edge computing. More broadly, there are often cases where edge compute needs to run in harsh environments, such as a field hospitals, rural clinics, disaster areas, factory floors, or retail stores. Our Azure Stack Rugged series, currently in preview, brings the power of the intelligent cloud to these demanding environments. The Rugged series includes innovations such as a battery-powered form factor that can be carried in a backpack into many unconventional situations, including search and rescue operations.

We’d like to share some of the efforts we’re taking on to enable healthcare workers to be successful in uncertain times.

Healthcare providers depend on the ability to share, with patient permission, health information within their systems, and between providers. The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) project provides a platform for this data interchange. Last year, we released a software as a solution (SaaS) version of the FHIR platform in Azure. This robust platform is now available on Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack Edge, allowing healthcare providers to quickly connect existing on-premises data sources, such as electronic health record systems or research databases, and enable the rapid exchange of data in between legacy and modern implementations of mobile and web development as well as between departments. Most importantly, FHIR on Azure Stack can simplify data ingestion and accelerate development with analytics and machine learning tools.

Researchers are constantly searching for answers and are increasingly turning to machine learning to crawl through mountains of data and visualize the results. We’re multiplying the machine learning inferencing and training power available to the Azure Stack family, working closely with AMD and NVIDIA to make GPUs widely available across Azure Stack. These new GPUs will enable a large number of AI/ML scenarios that work with on-premises data, as well as remote work with graphically intense workloads that require low latency and are data sensitive.

An ever-expanding ecosystem is what completes our platforms. We’re collaborating with our independent software vendor (ISV) partners to create solutions that bring their intelligence and power to the edge. The Aware Group, which builds IoT Edge modules that use AI to detect anomalies and perform noise classification, is creating a set of solutions tailored to several different industries. Avanade, a cloud services partner, is offering customers a way to easily deploy and manage Azure Stack Hub in locations that do not have a datacenter. This offering is based on HPE’s Edgeline EL8000, a small form factor server that does not require external cooling, making it ideal for unconventional locations.

Next steps with Azure Stack

Whether your goal is to reduce costs, comply with regulatory and data sovereignty requirements, enable low latency and edge workloads, or modernize your datacenter and applications, Azure Stack is here to enable your hybrid cloud strategy. For more details on how Azure Stack can help your organization, we invite you to watch this webinar.
Quelle: Azure