Kategorie: Microsoft 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

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