Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure Synapse Analytics: Insights for all

In November we announced Azure Synapse Analytics—a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics. Despite the massive disruptions occurring throughout industries in recent months, we continue to see a high level of excitement and enthusiasm for joining the private preview to use analytics in these times of crisis. Thank you to those who participated in the private preview for rallying around this groundbreaking technology, and for providing insightful feedback as we work together to fuel your innovation with purpose.

As we’ve worked closely with customers and partners during private preview, we have witnessed how Azure Synapse brings teams, data, and skills together. And as announced in the Build keynote, we are excited to open the new features to every data professional with public preview availability.

Insights for all

Azure Synapse provides a breathtaking view of your data across data warehouses and big data analytics systems. Bringing these two worlds together into a single service is challenging as it requires unifying similar concepts that operate differently in each world such as security, privacy, and performance. With Azure Synapse, this seamless unification of data warehousing and big data not only simplifies a business’s analytics platform, but also breaks down silos that exist today because of teams, data, and skills.

Team silos

Bring data teams together and enable them to seamlessly and securely collaborate, share, and analyze data. As data integration, data warehousing, and big data analytics can all be done from a single-pane-of-glass, businesses can break down organizational silos that stagnate time to insight.

Data silos

Manage, secure, and analyze all types of data. A single service can query structured or semi-structured data with data warehousing resources, and also quickly execute a serverless query over unstructured data from your data lake. Enable your data professionals to build end-to-end analytics solutions without having to stitch a multitude of services together.

Take dissolving data silos to the next level with Azure Synapse Link—a cloud-native hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP) implementation now available in public preview. This technology removes the barriers between Azure database services and Azure Synapse—enabling customers to get insights from their live transactional data stored in their operational databases with a single click, without managing data movement or placing a burden on their operational systems.

 

Skill silos

Bring all the existing skills across your business together to accomplish more with your data. With the deeply integrated Apache Spark and SQL engines in Azure Synapse, data professionals who prefer familiar SQL can seamlessly collaborate with those who prefer Spark—and vice versa. For instance, those familiar or who prefer SQL can query Spark tables using the T-SQL language. And data engineers or data scientists who prefer languages such as Python, Scala, SparkSQL, or C# can transform data, train models, and create proofs of concept in the same service that houses data pipelines, data lakes, and data warehouses.

Dissolving these silos is why companies like Neogrid choose Azure Synapse Analytics.

“Azure Synapse naturally facilitates collaboration and brings our data teams together. Working in the same analytics service will enable our teams to develop advanced analytics solutions faster, as well as provide a simplified and fast way to securely access and share data in a compliant manner.”

Emerson Tobar, CTO, Neogrid

Cost savings with industry-leading price-performance

Providing insights for all across your business is the key purpose of analytics. However, the cost it takes to discover and share those insights is equally important.

Azure Synapse Analytics has you covered. Early last year, we announced an independent study by GigaOm that compared Azure Synapse, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery using the highly recognized TPC-H benchmark queries. They found that Azure Synapse is up to 14x faster and costs 94 percent less than other cloud providers. A few months later, we announced a second benchmark report from GigaOm that used the TPC-DS benchmark queries that found Azure Synapse was again the industry leader in price performance. And today, we remain the undisputed leader with businesses reporting an average ROI of 271% when using Azure Synapse.

With the new public preview features, customers can continue to enjoy the industry-leading price performance for provisioned workloads, and begin leveraging the new serverless consumption model that offers pay-per-query functionality. With two ways to analyze data, customers can choose the most cost-effective option for each use case.

Advanced security at no additional cost

When it comes to data, security and privacy are paramount as the insights discovered using analytics are as precious as gold. Advanced security and privacy are built into the fabric of Azure Synapse, such as automated threat detection and always-on data encryption. And for fine-grained access control, businesses can help ensure data stays safe and private using column-level security and native row-level security, as well as dynamic data masking to automatically protect sensitive data in real-time. Most importantly, these critical features are available to all Azure Synapse customers at no additional cost.

Get started today

Try the new Azure Synapse features today with an Azure free trial account.
Register for our upcoming virtual summit and hear directly from Azure Synapse customers on how they are using the new preview features today.
Get started with Azure Synapse partners.

Quelle: Azure

Build apps of any size or scale with Azure Cosmos DB

During these uncertain times, building apps with agility and cost-effectiveness is more important than ever before. Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft’s NoSQL cloud database, is introducing new ways to affordably scale performance, launching features that enable rapid application development across teams, and making enterprise-grade security available to apps of any size or scale. With Azure Synapse Link, Azure Cosmos DB also becomes the first database to break the barriers between transactional and analytical stores.

Run low-cost, high-performance applications with autoscale and serverless

With guaranteed speed and availability, APIs for MongoDB, Cassandra, and Gremlin, and instant and elastic scalability worldwide, Azure Cosmos DB has been a popular choice for building cloud-native applications since it launched three years ago. We’re pleased to introduce new support for spiky and unpredictable workloads that can offer savings of up to 70 percent compared to running these types of workloads with the standard provisioned throughput pricing model.

Autoscale provisioned throughput (called “autopilot mode” in preview) will maintain SLAs while scaling up to a customer-specified maximum to meet the needs of unpredictable, high-throughput workloads. Consumption-based billing (starting at 10 percent of maximum) eliminates the need to monitor capacity, and the first 400 request units per second (RU/s) of throughput and 5 GB storage are free each month when paired with Azure Cosmos DB free tier.

Autoscale provisioned throughput responds to workload demands while maintaining SLAs.

The serverless pricing model, in preview soon, will handle traffic bursts on demand. This makes it easy to run spiky workloads that don’t have sustained traffic and means dev/test accounts will never again have to be deleted over the weekend. You will only pay for storage and database operations performed, without any resource planning or management.

Enhanced enterprise security and developer productivity at any scale

Regardless of size or scale, security and agility are critical for developing modern applications. Azure Cosmos DB offers new enhanced enterprise-grade data security to all applications with encryption-at-rest with customer-managed keys available now, and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration and point-in-time backup and restore, both coming soon.

To improve productivity and collaboration, a new version of the Azure Cosmos DB Python SDK is available now, with enhanced Jupyter Notebook features including C# notebooks, a new version of Azure Cosmos DB SDK for Java, change feed functionality preserving all operations history, and support for partial updates (HTTP PATCH)—the top UserVoice request—all coming soon.

"We found it easy to get started with Azure Cosmos DB and its flexibility helped us throughout our application development." —Lutz Küderli, Head of Digital Services, Life and Health, Munich Re

Faster insights with no data movement

Data scientists, business analysts, and data engineers can now get insights in near-real-time with cloud-native Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) using Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB, now in preview. With Azure Synapse Link, the data in Azure Cosmos DB is automatically and continuously made available for analytics with no Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) through an analytical store built on top of the transactional store, and continual data updates happening with no performance impact on transactions.

Azure Cosmos DB—the best-in-class NoSQL database for modern applications

The serverless pricing model and automatic scaling to match application needs, enterprise-grade capabilities, and cloud-native HTAP make Azure Cosmos DB the best-in-class NoSQL database to build scalable modern applications fast and with minimal capacity management and maximum cost-effectiveness.

Discover why Azure Cosmos DB is ideal for modern app development at Azure Cosmos DB.
Find videos on key concepts, tips, tricks, and more at the Azure Cosmos DB video channel.

What will you build?
Quelle: Azure

Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes preview and new ecosystem partners

In November 2019, we announced the preview of Azure Arc, a set of technologies that unlocks new hybrid scenarios for customers by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure across datacenters, edge, and multi-cloud. Based on the feedback and excitement of all the customers in the private preview, we are able to deliver Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes in preview to our customers. With this, anyone can use Azure Arc to connect and configure any Kubernetes cluster across customer datacenters, edge locations, and multi-cloud.

Over the last few months through private preview, organizations across a wide range of industries have experienced the power of Azure Arc for Kubernetes. Retail customers are deploying applications and configurations across their branch locations with guaranteed consistency. Financial institutions and healthcare providers are using Azure Arc to manage Kubernetes instances in geographic regions with custom data sovereignty requirements. Across several application scenarios and deployment environments, customers are embracing the diversity of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes is uniquely positioned through its openness and flexibility to help our customers meet their business challenges using the tools of their choice.

With today’s preview of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes, support for most CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions works out of the box. In addition, we are also announcing our first set of Azure Arc integration partners, including Red Hat OpenShift, Canonical Kubernetes, and Rancher Labs to ensure Azure Arc works great for all the key platforms our customers are using today.

Benefits of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes

Application delivery is an inherently collaborative activity, especially as customers adopt DevOps practices. Developers, system operators, infrastructure engineers, and database administrators each play an active role in developing, deploying, and managing applications across multiple environments. To do this efficiently, customers have a need for shared application and infrastructure lifecycle management for teams that are siloed, based on locations and skills. In uncertain times, like we’re going through today, it’s even more important to ensure that your organization has visibility and oversight so you can go fast, safely.

Developers creating modern applications are adopting Kubernetes to spend more time focused on the application and less on the infrastructure. There is a rich Kubernetes ecosystem ranging from off-the-shelf Helm charts to developer tooling to use. Using your existing DevOps pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, and Helm charts, Azure Arc enables deployment to any connected cluster at scale. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes adopts a GitOps methodology, so customers define their applications and cluster configuration in source control. This means changes to apps and configuration are versioned, enforced, and logged across any number of clusters.

Azure Arc provides a single pane of glass operating model to customers for all their Kubernetes clusters deployed across multiple locations. It brings Azure management to the clusters—unlocking Azure capabilities like Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and Azure Resource Graph. By bringing every system into Azure Arc, it’s much easier to establish clear roles and responsibilities for team members based on a clear separation of concerns without sacrificing visibility and access.

Inventory and organization: Work more efficiently by getting control over sprawling resources at organizational, team, and personal levels.

Bring all your resources into a single system so you can organize and inventory through a variety of Azure scopes, such as Management groups, Subscriptions, and Resource Groups.
Create, apply, and enforce standardized and custom tags to keep track of resources.
Build powerful queries and search your global portfolio with Azure Resource Graph.

Governance and configuration: Streamline activities by creating, applying, and enforcing policies to Kubernetes apps, data, and infrastructure anywhere.

Set guardrails across all your resources with Azure Policy to ensure consistent configurations to a single cluster, or to many at scale by leveraging inheritance capabilities.
Standardize role-based access control (RBAC) across systems and different types of resources.
Automate and delegate remediation of incidents and problems to service teams without IT intervention.
Enforce run-time conformance and audit resources with Azure Policy.

Integrated DevOps and management capabilities: Mix and match additional Azure services or your choice of tools.

Integrated with GitHub, Azure Monitor, Security Center, Update, and more.
Common templating for automating configuration and infrastructure as code provide repeatable deployments.
End-to-end identity for users and resources with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Azure Resource Manager.

Unified tools and experiences: Create a shared application and infrastructure lifecycle experience for teams that have traditionally been siloed based on locations, skills, and job descriptions.

Simplify your work with a unified and consistent view of your resources across datacenters, edge locations, and multi-cloud through the Azure portal and APIs.
Connect Kubernetes version of your choice from the ecosystem and work with them alongside Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs), physical servers, and Azure data services.
Establish clear roles and responsibilities for team members with clear separation of concerns without sacrificing visibility and access.

How our integration partners leverage Azure Arc

“Red Hat OpenShift delivers the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, with a proven track record and large installed base and tailor-built for workloads that need to run across the hybrid cloud. Azure Arc helps to provide a common control plane for OpenShift from corporate datacenters to the public cloud, providing a single management point for organizations seeking to pair the flexibility and innovation of OpenShift with the scalability and power of Azure.” —Mike Evans, Vice President, Technical Business Development, Red Hat OpenShift

“Canonical's Charmed Kubernetes enables enterprises to accelerate the development of a new generation of applications while benefiting from fully automated architecture and operations. By integrating Azure Arc, Charmed Kubernetes clusters can now be managed across any infrastructure, alongside Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) deployments, fitting coherently into an organization’s wider IT estate. This integration provides enterprises with a single, unified place to visualize, govern and manage their environments at scale, from edge to cloud.” —Christian Reis, VP Public Cloud, Canonical Kubernetes

“Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) on Microsoft Azure is a proven platform that provides amazing capabilities for cloud computing. By extending Azure to RKE anywhere with Azure Arc, Rancher Labs and Microsoft are poised to accelerate the development of a new generation of applications for the enterprise by bringing expanding and evolving IT estates under control.” —Sheng Liang, CEO, Rancher Labs

With Azure Arc, customers can connect and configure Kubernetes clusters and deploy modern applications at scale. Azure Arc also allows customers to run Azure data services on these Kubernetes clusters. In addition, the reality is that many customers have applications running on Windows and Linux servers. Azure Arc allows the management of servers as well, all from the same unified single-pane-of-glass experience. Going forward, the next Azure Arc preview will bring Azure data services, such as Azure Arc enabled SQL Managed Instance and Azure Arc enabled PostgreSQL Hyperscale, to Kubernetes clusters—taking advantage of always current, cloud-native services in the location they need.

We’ll continue to announce new capabilities and new previews for Azure Arc. We’d love to get your feedback and help shaping the upcoming capabilities as we go. To reach us, go to our UserVoice site.

Get started with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes

To learn more about enabling Kubernetes clusters with Azure Arc, get started with the preview today. You can checkout examples of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes on GitHub. 
Quelle: Azure

HoloLens 2 expands markets; Azure mixed reality services now broadly available

“When the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge are imbued with mixed reality and artificial intelligence, we have a framework for achieving amazing things and empowering even more people.” – Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO speaking at the HoloLens 2 launch

At Microsoft Build 2020, we shared some exciting mixed reality news that is helping us create a new reality for empowering organizations and people to achieve more. This blog post highlights some of that news across the following areas:

Strong adoption of HoloLens 2 is driving us to expand availability into new markets.
Our Azure mixed reality cloud services are now broadly available.
HoloLens 2 and mixed reality are empowering firstline workers through the global pandemic.

HoloLens 2 expands to new markets this Fall

HoloLens 2 is currently available in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In these markets, industry-leading companies in manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and education are using enterprise mixed reality applications to improve the productivity and quality of work for firstline workers. As you can see in the video below, with HoloLens 2 and Azure, these organizations are simultaneously driving faster training and up-skilling of employees, decreased task and process completion time, and reduced error rates and waste driving global demand for these solutions.

Below are a few key news items that will expand our HoloLens 2 impact:

HoloLens 2 will begin shipping to Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in Q4 2020.
Online sales of HoloLens 2 will start on the Microsoft Store in July 2020.

In response to feedback from our customers and partners, we have just shipped a software update for HoloLens 2, which includes these exciting new capabilities:

Reconfigure and seamlessly set up new devices for enterprise production with Windows AutoPilot.
Enroll HoloLens with your Mobile Device Management system using a provisioning package.
Hand Tracking improvements.
Support for additional system voice commands to control HoloLens, hands-free.
Expanded USB Ethernet enables support for 5G/LTE dongles.

Review the release notes to learn about all of the new capabilities.

Azure mixed reality services now broadly available

As we outlined above, mixed reality is changing the way we work in industries including manufacturing, healthcare, and retail. These changes are only possible by bringing the power of edge computing together with the cloud to create seamless, immersive experiences.

With Azure, we are making a suite of mixed reality services available to make it easier than ever for developers to build immersive, 3D applications, and experiences for mixed reality headsets (such as HoloLens) or AR-enabled phones (iOS and Android). 

Azure Spatial Anchors is helping enterprise and gaming developers to more easily build applications that can map, persist, and share 3D content at real-world scale. Applications using Azure Spatial Anchors leverage the scale and security of Azure to consistently and reliably render 3D content across HoloLens, iOS, and Android devices. Azure Spatial Anchors is now generally available.

Here are a few quotes from customers using Azure Spatial Anchors:

“Connecting the digital with the physical worlds is full of challenges. Azure Spatial Anchors is the only service that supports Hololens, iOS, and Android, making it the perfect fit for Spatial. The service works quickly, and is extremely reliable. Setting up Azure Spatial Anchors in our existing Azure Cloud account was simple, and allowed us to use a service we’re already familiar with.” – Mo Ben-Zacharia, CTO, Spatial.io 

See how Spatial is using Azure Spatial Anchors to enable the future of collaboration.

“Our service, Augmented Store At Home, is totally based on Azure Spatial Anchors. Being able to share and persist high-quality, 3D assets would not be possible otherwise. The capability of the sharing experience is simple and almost transparent for the user. We chose Azure Spatial Anchors because of the accuracy and for the cross-platform capabilities.” – Vincenzo Mazzone, CTO, Hevolus  

See how Hevolus is using Azure Spatial Anchors to drive the future of retail.

Azure Remote Rendering lets enterprise developers in industries including manufacturing, engineering, construction, and retail bring the highest quality 3D content and interactive experiences to mixed reality devices, such as HoloLens 2. This service uses the computing power of Azure to render even the most complex models in the cloud and streams them in real-time to your devices, so users can interact and collaborate with 3D content in amazing detail. Azure Remote Rendering is now in preview. 

To learn more about our Azure mixed reality offerings for developers, we encourage you to consider attending Mixed Reality Dev Days 2020, a virtual event coinciding with Build, designed to learn from experts and connect with the mixed reality developer community.

A new reality for healthcare

While the momentum across HoloLens and our mixed reality services is happening across many industries, this is especially evident in healthcare. We are harnessing the power of mixed reality to assist the firstline workers manufacturing PPE devices and ventilators, as well as those providing direct patient care. Here are a few of these examples:

Ventilator Challenge, United Kingdom: A consortium of major industrial, technology, and engineering businesses from across the aerospace, automotive, and medical sectors have come together to produce medical ventilators for the National Health Services. Microsoft HoloLens devices, running PTC’s Vuforia Expert Capture software, are being used to train thousands of firstline workers on how to assemble the equipment. The worker are guided by visual, 3D, immersive instructions every step of the way. In the event these workers need help with assembly, they are leveraging Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, which enables hands-free video calling on the HoloLens to let operators collaborate with experts on a PC or mobile device.

Dick Elsy, Chief Executive, High Value Manufacturing Catapult and Consortium lead, describes the impact of mixed reality on their efforts.“Ensuring the NHS has enough ventilators to treat patients with advanced COVID-19 symptoms has been critical to the UK’s continued battle against the disease. Microsoft and its partners have been instrumental in providing the tools that have enabled the VentilatorChallengeUK consortium members to collaborate effectively, manage complex supply chains and train staff in new manufacturing procedures. In doing so, we’ve been able to gear up to manufacture ten years’ worth of ventilators in just ten weeks.” 

Learn more about the role of mixed reality and this consortium’s work.

Case Western Reserve University, United States: Remote learning at one of the nation’s premiere research institutions and medical schools has just taken on a new dimension. For the first time ever, instead of working together on campus, all 185 first-year students from Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine are using Microsoft HoloLens 2 and the university’s signature HoloAnatomy mixed-reality software, despite the physical separation created by the COVID-19 pandemic. The remote-learning application of HoloAnatomy is believed to be the first of its kind in the world and the latest advance in the educational use of the holographic headset by Case Western Reserve.

Mark Griswold, a professor of radiology who is one of the faculty leaders for HoloAnatomy states, “This unfortunate crisis has become an opportunity to prove that we could extend the reach of HoloLens education. It’s about making the world smaller, making the campus smaller, and getting people together to experience the same thing from anywhere.” 

View a video compilation of the first several classes.

Avicenne Hospital/APHP Group, France: HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are being used on the front lines by doctors and nurses. Mixed reality is enabling multiple medical professionals to jointly participate in visits and consultations, while limiting the number of healthcare employees exposed to each patient. And by using mixed reality to access virtual 3D copies of patient records, they are eliminating the passing of physical charts and reducing the number of times a doctor or nurse needs to touch equipment, helping them to minimize exposure, while ensuring great patient care.

See Microsoft HoloLens being used in hospitals and learn more from Dr. Thomas Gregory.

Next steps with HoloLens 2

Learn more about how Microsoft HoloLens 2 and mixed reality can help your organization to achieve more.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Analytics: Clarity in an instant

What 2020 is teaching us is that the world can change in an instant. In the span of a few months, we have witnessed massive disruptions across every industry around the globe. Factories are idle, hotels are empty, and the transportation backbone that connects us all is quiet. Navigating these unprecedented times is challenging and requires a new level of agility for businesses to deal with abrupt changes in our world.

Core to achieving this agility is the ability to gain fresh, continuous insights from data. Our commitment to customers is to make analytics in Azure the most performant and secure experience it can be, and when we debuted Azure Synapse Analytics in November 2019, we effectively removed the barriers between enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics to enable data professionals to collaborate, build, and manage their analytics solutions with ease. Azure Synapse Analytics is a game-changer in the industry, and it has been exciting to see the strong customer interest since its debut.

But we didn’t stop there. Another barrier that has long existed is the one that separates operational data from analytical systems. Historically, supporting hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP) workloads has been complex, costly, and has forced customers to make tradeoffs between transactional and analytical processing needs. They either had to over-provision expensive resources such as memory to support both analytics and transactions in a single system or maintain distinct systems. Most customers opted for the latter, which means that they are forced to manage complex extract, load, and transform (ETL) pipelines to connect their analytical and operational systems, adding lag to their time to insights.

There has never been a simple, low cost, cloud-native HTAP implementation that enables immediate, in-the-moment insights on a business—until today.

Introducing: Azure Synapse Link

Today, we're pleased to announce the preview of Azure Synapse Link, a cloud-native implementation of HTAP. A capability that removes the barriers between Azure operational database services and Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Synapse Link enables customers to get insights from their real-time transactional data stored in their operational databases with a single click, without managing data movement or placing a burden on their operational systems. Azure Synapse Link is now available in Azure Cosmos DB and will be available in our other operational database services such as Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL, and others in the future.

 

 

How does it work? Fundamental to Azure Synapse Link is our cloud-native architecture. To enable it, customers simply click a button in their favorite Azure database service, and a direct link to the data is established with Azure Synapse Analytics. The operational data is then automatically and continuously made available to Azure Synapse Analytics in an optimized columnar structure, similar to a covering index. No complex ETL pipelines or additional database compute resources are required and customers can run their analytics workloads on real-time data through Azure Synapse Analytics immediately and cost-effectively.

To learn more about Azure Synapse Link, check out my Mechanics video:

Get started today

Get started today with Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Synapse Analytics for free.
For more details about Azure Synapse Link, check out the documentation.

Quelle: Azure

Build AI you can trust with responsible ML

As AI reaches critical momentum across industries and applications, it becomes essential to ensure the safe and responsible use of AI. AI deployments are increasingly impacted by the lack of customer trust in the transparency, accountability, and fairness of these solutions. Microsoft is committed to the advancement of AI and machine learning (ML), driven by principles that put people first, and tools to enable this in practice.

In collaboration with the Aether Committee and its working groups, we are bringing the latest research in responsible AI to Azure. Let’s look at how 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.

Understand

As ML becomes deeply integrated into our daily business processes, transparency is critical. Azure Machine Learning helps you to not only understand model behavior but also assess and mitigate unfairness.

Interpret and explain model behavior

Model interpretability capabilities in Azure Machine Learning, powered by the InterpretML toolkit, enable developers and data scientists to understand model behavior and provide model explanations to business stakeholders and customers.

Use model interpretability to:

Build accurate ML models.
Understand the behavior of a wide variety of models, including deep neural networks, during both training and inferencing phases.
Perform what-if analysis to determine the impact on model predictions when feature values are changed.

"Azure Machine Learning helps us build AI responsibly and build trust with our customers. Using the interpretability capabilities in the fraud detection efforts for our loyalty program, we are able to understand models better, identify genuine cases of fraud, and reduce the possibility of erroneous results." 
—Daniel Engberg, Head of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, Scandinavian Airlines

Assess and mitigate model unfairness

A challenge with building AI systems today is the inability to prioritize fairness. Using Fairlearn with Azure Machine Learning, developers and data scientists can leverage specialized algorithms to ensure fairer outcomes for everyone.

Use fairness capabilities to:

Assess model fairness during both model training and deployment.
Mitigate unfairness while optimizing model performance.
Use interactive visualizations to compare a set of recommended models that mitigate unfairness.

“Azure Machine Learning and its Fairlearn capabilities offer advanced fairness and explainability that have helped us deploy trustworthy AI solutions for our customers, while enabling stakeholder confidence and regulatory compliance.”  —Alex Mohelsky, EY Canada Partner and Advisory Data, Analytic and AI Leader

Protect

ML is increasingly used in scenarios that involve sensitive information like medical patient or census data. Current practices, such as redacting or masking data, can be limiting for ML. To address this issue, differential privacy and confidential machine learning techniques can be used to help organizations build solutions while maintaining data privacy and confidentiality.

Prevent data exposure with differential privacy

Using the new WhiteNoise differential privacy toolkit with Azure Machine Learning, data science teams can build ML solutions that preserve privacy and help prevent reidentification of an individual’s data. These differential privacy techniques have been developed in collaboration with researchers at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and School of Engineering.

Differential privacy protects sensitive data by:

Injecting statistical noise in data, to help prevent disclosure of private information, without significant accuracy loss.
Managing exposure risk by tracking the information budget used by individual queries and limiting further queries as appropriate.

Safeguard data with confidential machine learning

In addition to data privacy, organizations are looking to ensure security and confidentiality of all ML assets.

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, private links to connect to ML workspaces, dedicated compute hosts, and customer managed keys for encryption in transit and at rest.

Building on this secure foundation, Azure Machine Learning also enables data science teams at Microsoft to build models over confidential data in a secure environment, without being able to see the data. All ML assets are kept confidential during this process. This approach is fully compatible with open source ML frameworks and a wide range of hardware options. We are excited to bring these confidential machine learning capabilities to all developers and data scientists later this year.

Control

To build responsibly, the ML development process should be repeatable, reliable, and hold stakeholders accountable. Azure Machine Learning enables decision makers, auditors, and everyone in the ML lifecycle to support a responsible process.

Track ML assets using audit trail

Azure Machine Learning provides capabilities to automatically track lineage and maintain an audit trail of ML assets. Details—such as run history, training environment, and data and model explanations—are all captured in a central registry, allowing organizations to meet various audit requirements.

Increase accountability with model datasheets

Datasheets provide a standardized way to document ML information such as motivations, intended uses, and more. At Microsoft, we led research on datasheets, to provide transparency to data scientists, auditors and decision makers. We are also working with the Partnership on AI and leaders across industry, academia, and government to develop recommended practices and a process called ABOUT ML. The custom tags capability in Azure Machine Learning can be used to implement datasheets today and over time we will release additional features.

Start innovating responsibly

In addition to the new capabilities in Azure Machine Learning and our open-source tools, we have also developed principles for the responsible use of AI. The new responsible ML innovations and resources are designed to help developers and data scientists build more reliable, fairer, and trustworthy ML. Join us today and begin your journey with responsible ML!

Additional resources

Learn more about responsible ML.
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

Code, collaborate, and ship your apps from anywhere

Welcome to Microsoft Build 2020! This all-new 48-hour digital experience is designed to help you and other developers around the world come together to solve challenges, share knowledge, and stay connected. Here we’ll cover some of our latest innovations in developer tools and cloud platform technologies—to help you code, collaborate, and ship your apps from anywhere, so you can support the changing needs of your business and continue to deliver the quality experiences that your customers expect.

So how do you overcome the challenges of today and remain productive as developers? Thankfully, in today’s digital world there are tools to help you work remotely and be as productive as ever: with Azure as your trusted cloud platform and cloud-powered developer tools with Visual Studio and GitHub.

Code

Developers often spend endless hours configuring dev machines for new projects: cloning source code, installing runtimes, setting up linters and debuggers, configuring extensions—just to do it all again for the next project, the next bug, or the next code review. The challenge is even more prevalent in times of remote work, where you might not have access to your preferred development machine. Visual Studio Codespaces, available in preview, enables you to create a cloud-hosted development environment that’s ready to code, in seconds. You can access it from Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio and it also includes a full web-based editor you can use to edit, run, and debug your applications from any device. We recently announced that Codespaces is coming to GitHub in preview, so you can also easily code from any repo.

To help .NET developers share code across platforms, today we released .NET 5 Preview 4. With .NET 5, we continue the journey to unify the .NET platform across all workloads like mobile, desktop, and web. .NET 5 Preview 4 also has many improvements for working with containers and reducing the size of images particularly for multi-stage build scenarios.

For developers with C# and HTML skillsets looking to create web apps, Blazor is a free and open-source web framework that allows you to do that—without writing JavaScript. Today, we announced ASP.NET Blazor WebAssembly that lets you build web apps that run completely in the browser with C#, which can perform better, take up less memory than JavaScript, and can run completely offline.

If you are building a modern single page application with JavaScript and looking for minimal configuration and deployment globally in minutes, then check out a new hosting option in Azure App Service, Static Web Apps, now available in preview. Static Web Apps supports frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue or Static Site Generators such as Gatsby and Hugo. Initializing a Static Web App with a Git repo hooks up GitHub Actions that then connects smart defaults to your CI/CD pipeline. This means that any time a developer makes a change, it will go through the quality and security checks.

For applications optimized for cloud scale and performance, we recently announced the general availability of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for Windows Server containers. If you’re looking to lift and shift your Windows applications in containers, you can now run them on a managed Kubernetes service in Azure and get the full benefits of portability, scalability, and self-healing for your production workloads. To help you instantly scale your apps on demand with limitless, guaranteed speed and performance, today we announced new innovations to Azure Cosmos DB and considerable costs savings gained by pairing autoscale with the Azure Cosmos DB free tier.

Azure also makes it easy for developers to add AI into applications with Azure Cognitive Services. Today, we announced new capabilities, such as enhanced voice styles, enabling you to tailor the voice of your app to fit your brand or unique scenario. If you’re looking to run AI anywhere, we also announced general availability of container support for Language Understanding and Text Analysis.

And, if you need deliver apps quickly, take advantage of the combination of Microsoft Power Apps, a low code platform, and Azure to analyze data, automate processes and create virtual agents. Learn how to extend Power Apps with Azure services such as Bot Services, Logic Apps, and Functions. 

Collaborate

To effectively collaborate as a local or distributed development team, you need the ability to accommodate flexible work schedules, collaborate both asynchronously and in real-time when needed, and track and prioritize work. With Visual Studio Live Share, you can create shared coding sessions and co-edit, co-debug applications with your peers securely—no matter where you are. Today, we announced expanded capabilities for Visual Studio Live Share, which include text and voice chat support. With these additions, your team can collaborate more effectively from the comfort of your own dev tools, without the need for additional apps.

With over 50 million developers, GitHub is the place where developers code together. We continue to innovate to ensure collaboration is seamless at every stage of the software development lifecycle. For example, you may find yourself needing to brainstorm feature ideas, help new users get their bearings, and collaborate on best ways to use the software.  GitHub Discussions recently announced at GitHub Satellite helps you do just that and is in public beta. Learn more about the latest GitHub innovations to help you collaborate with your team members.

Ship

Over the past six months, we’ve published more than 30 GitHub Actions for Azure to help you create workflows to build, test, package, release and deploy to multiple Azure services, from web applications to serverless functions to Kubernetes. We heard from you that it can be difficult to craft CI/CD pipelines by editing a bunch of YAMLs and you spend a considerable time setting up and switching between different discrete tools. We are pleased to announce 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 for Azure.

Security is also top of mind when releasing code into production. At GitHub Satellite, we announced cloud betas of code scanning and secret scanning to help developers consume and ship code safely. With code scanning enabled in GitHub, every “Git push” is scanned for new security concerns using the world’s most advanced semantic analysis engine, CodeQL. Secrets scanning is now available for private repositories. This feature watches private repositories for known secret formats and immediately notifies developers when they are found. Developers can now identify, remediate, and prevent vulnerabilities in source code before they are deployed into production.

More exciting news for every developer

With all the new coding improvements and advancements combined with Windows 10—it truly is a great time to be a developer. Today, we announced the general availability of Windows Terminal 1.0, which provides a modern, fast terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, WSL, and Azure Cloud Shell. We also announced upcoming support for GPU compute in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for faster computations. And coming soon is GUI app support which means you can open a WSL instance and run a Linux GUI app directly (without the need of a third-party X Server). You can use this feature to run your favorite IDE in a Linux environment, or some applications that you could only find on Linux.​ 

Join us

Regardless if your team is onsite or remote, we want to help developers spend less time setting up environments, configuring systems and dealing with underlying infrastructure so you can spend more time coding and building solutions. We want to ensure development teams can easily collaborate on projects regardless of where you sit. We want to help you deliver and maintain code with automated workflows that are free from security vulnerabilities. Microsoft offers an end-to-end cloud platform and developer tools designed to meet your engineering needs and keep you and your team as productive as possible wherever you work.

Please join me in Scott Guthrie’s, Azure: Invent with purpose session, and make sure to watch Scott Hanselman’s session, Every Developer is Welcome, to see many of these new innovations designed for every developer. I can’t wait to see what you build!
Quelle: Azure