Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 43

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 94 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Applications

AZULINK: Get your application fully managed on Azure with a one-stop-shop partner committed to results and centralizing governance and scalability of your Azure services on IaaS and PaaS.

BI for Dynamics 365FO: Enable your organization to do more with company data. With Hillstar's standard BI connector for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, users can easily slice and dice through reports and drill down to deeper levels to see more detail.

Blender with Flamenco worker on Windows – ATLG: Blender with Flamenco on Azure provides an easy-to-deploy Flamenco manager/worker environment that can be plugged into Blender Cloud. This marketplace image serves the "render vm" role in the worker pool.

Build Agent PRO for Azure DevOps: This template offers a Linux-based build agent for Azure DevOps that can build and deploy .NET CORE, Angular, Node.JS, Java, C/C++, and Container projects by default. An emulation for ARM devices is also included.

Cisco Firepower Management Center Virtual (FMCv): Control access to your network, control application use, and defend against known attacks. Use AMP and sandboxing technologies to address unknown attacks and track malware infections throughout your network.

Cobra – Commercial Broker Assistant: Cobra includes everything brokers need for business, including Office 365 integration for easy communication with clients and intuitive storage for client data, contracts, and damages.

Data One: Data One can host, design, build, and manage existing and new reports for organizations that don’t have the capacity to manage their BI demands. The Data One platform simplifies reporting through Northern Data's dynamic BI portal.

DataRoad Reflect: DataRoad Reflect is a rapid data movement solution that lets you focus on delivering advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence instead of spending hours programming data migrations.

desknets NEO: desknets NEO reduces the burden of operation management with extensive administrative functions, such as user and organization registration information management and flexible access rights management. This application is available only in Japanese.

Docker Community Edition with Ubuntu 18.04 Lts: Docker Community Edition (CE) is ideal for individual developers and small teams looking to get started with Docker and experimenting with container-based apps.

EVE – cloud-based live captions for your event: EVE not only helps organizations comply with accessibility standards, it is also an additional medium, capturing every spoken word and sharing a transcript after a speech for further actions, including subtitles and SEO.

FM Converge on Azure: FM Converge on Azure is a highly responsive, cross-asset front-office/middle-office/operations/risk platform for pre-trade pricing, structuring, book valuation, and managing enterprise risk for a wide variety of financial instruments.

Get Azure Ops Data into Splunk – in 3 minutes: StreamWeaver offers a systematic, automated approach to distributing valuable operations data, including event, metric, topology, and log information, from all domains and clouds to the appropriate applications and teams.

Go timesheets, expense and leave software: Go is a scalable, web-based and mobile app for managing timesheets, expenses, and leave. Users can connect from anywhere – in the office or in the field – to submit time, leave, and expenses with attached receipts.

Hyper-Q Express Edition for Teradata to SQL DW: Hyper-Q takes SQL extensions and scripts written for Teradata and makes them interoperable with Azure SQL Data Warehouse while requiring little to no change to the business logic your company relies on.

Imredi Audit: The Imredi Audit solution is designed to audit stores, collect and analyze data from retail outlets, and help manage field employees. This application is available only in Russian.

iNAS: Unissoft is pleased to provide its iNAS cloud-based record-keeping solution for Azure and Office 365 users. iNAS protects records from inadvertent or unauthorized alteration, deletion, access, and retrieval while monitoring the integrity of records through an audit trail.

Indoorway InSite 4.0: Indoorway provides accurate data and useful analytics about the movement of assets in industrial sites. Locate in real time any moving resources relevant to key production and intralogistics processes.

IoT Core Services: IoT Core Services by conplement AG provides a fast and secure end-to-end solution for device/machine connections in the Internet of Things and digital value-added services. This application is available only in German.

Jenkins with CentOS 7.6: Jenkins is an open source automation server written in Java. Jenkins helps automate the non-human part of the software development process, with continuous integration and facilitating technical aspects of continuous delivery.

Lamp with CentOS 7.6: LAMP is an archetypal model of web service stacks, named as an acronym of its original components: Linux operating system, Apache HTTP server, MySQL relational database management system, and PHP programming language.

Lamp with Ubuntu Server 18.04 Lts: LAMP is an archetypal model of web service stacks, named as an acronym of its original components: Linux operating system, Apache HTTP server, MySQL relational database management system, and PHP programming language.

LANCOM vRouter: The LANCOM vRouter is a software-based router for operation in virtualized environments. With its comprehensive range of functions and numerous security features based on the operating system LCOS, it offers a leading basis for modern infrastructures.

Mediant CE Session Border Controller (SBC): AudioCodes' Mediant Session Border Controllers deliver seamless connectivity, enhanced security, and quality assurance for enterprise and service provider VoIP networks.

MinIO Helm Chart: MinIO is an object storage server mainly used for storing unstructured data such as photos, videos, and log files.

Mojro Technologies Private Limited: Mojro's proprietary algorithms are deployed to perform space and route optimization together at scale and enable your organization to automate the planning and execution of logistics.

Movie Viewer: Movie Viewer is a virtual editing tool that enables you to create clips from multiple videos and combine them into playlists. This application is available only in Japanese.

NGINX Plus Developer Edition: NGINX Plus brings enterprise-ready features such as application load balancing, monitoring, and advanced management to your Microsoft Azure application stack.

Nginx with Ubuntu Server 18.04 Lts: NGINX is open source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. NGINX started as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability.

Objectivity Metadata Connect: Metadata Connect allows you to define information about data from any external source and form connections within it. You can then understand how data interacts as it is changed and perform powerful navigational and pathfinding queries.

On-Net Integration Business Series: On-Net Integration Business Series on Microsoft Azure boosts operational efficiency with a wide range of functions. This application is available only in Japanese.

Opus Suite: Opus Suite gives you fast, accurate analyses, optimization, simulation, and answers throughout your system's lifecycle, helping you take control over performance and lifecycle cost.

OrangeHRM: OrangeHRM is a free, comprehensive human resource management system that captures the essential functionalities required for any enterprise.

ProScheduler WFM: ProScheduler is an enterprise-class workforce management system offering cutting-edge optimization and real-time features. ProScheduler is quick to implement, easy to learn, and typically offers a return on investment within six months.

PyTorch from NVIDIA: PyTorch is a GPU-accelerated tensor computation framework with a Python front end. This image bundles NVIDIA's container for PyTorch into the NGC base image for Microsoft Azure.

PyTorch Helm Chart: PyTorch is a deep learning platform that accelerates the transition from research prototyping to production deployment. This Bitnami image includes Torchvision for specific computer vision support.

Remote Desktop Services 2019 RDS Farm: Set up a basic remote desktop services (RDS) IaaS farm on Azure for testing or a production environment. Scale from 1 RDS host to 50 RDS hosts and allow users to connect to published desktops and applications from any device or OS.

SecureBox: SecureBox is a secure cloud file sharing platform. Access your data anywhere and back up, view, sync, and share your data on Microsoft Azure.

SFTP Gateway: Built on the base Ubuntu 18.04 image from Canonical, SFTP Gateway is a secure-by-default, pre-configured SFTP server that saves files to Azure Blob Storage. Use SFTP Gateway as a traditional SFTP server or to upload files to Azure storage.

SmartGov for Administration: Proven in over 30 government departments and SOEs, SmartGov for Administration is a tried and tested solution for the digitization of some of the most problematic processes in the South African public sector back office.

Speech to Text: Zoom Media offers its highly accurate Speech to Text service in 10 languages (Arabic, Danish, Dutch, English US, Filipino, Finnish, Flemish, Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish). All models can be used in batch or real time and are customizable upon request.

TensorFlow from NVIDIA: TensorFlow is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. This image bundles NVIDIA's GPU-optimized TensorFlow container along with the base NGC Image.

Theobald Software Xtract IS for Azure: With Xtract IS for Azure you can either develop new SSIS packages from scratch or use your existing SSIS packages developed with Xtract IS Ultimate/Enterprise. Develop on-premises and run in the cloud.

Tidal Migrations – Premium Insights for Database: Tidal Migrations provides your team with a simple, fast, and cost-effective cloud migration management solution. This add-on empowers your team with actionable insights on the databases you plan to migrate to Azure.

Total Access Control: Total Access Control from PortSys offers a Zero Trust approach to secure access to valuable resources wherever they may reside, locally or in the cloud. This single, scalable solution manages access across the enterprise.

Wanos WAN Optimization (SD-WAN): Reduce bandwidth and boost remote network access to Azure resources through TCP acceleration, compression, deduplication, object caching, packet loss recovery, forward error correction, QoS, and related WAN acceleration techniques.

WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.3: WISE-PaaS/RMM IoT by Advantech is a reliable, scalable, and extensible IoT device management platform that bridges layers in Advantech IoT platform architecture, including IoT device, system, and cloud layers.

WordPress with Ubuntu Server 16.04 Lts: WordPress is a free and open source content management system based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system.

Consulting Services

AI Roadmap – 1 Day Brief: This one-day briefing from StrategyWise will illustrate why you should use Azure AI tools with industry-specific case studies showing the value you can expect from digital transformation, prescriptive modeling, and AI applications built on Azure.

AI Roadmap – 3 Week Assessment: StrategyWise's three-week assessment will provide you with a comprehensive blueprint for executing successful AI projects on the Azure stack, helping you to drive organizational change and process improvements.

AI Roadmap – 5 Day Workshop: This five-day workshop from StrategyWise will help you identify prime opportunities in your organization to drive organizational change and process improvements through artificial intelligence powered by Azure.

Analytics Roadmap – 1 Day Brief: StrategyWise will illustrate why you should democratize analytics with industry-specific case studies showing the value you can expect from digital transformation, prescriptive modeling, and AI applications built on Azure.

Analytics Roadmap – 3 Week Assessment: Looking to launch an advanced analytics initiative on Azure? This three-week assessment will provide a blueprint for executing successful analytics projects on Azure, helping you to drive organizational change and process improvements.

Analytics Roadmap – 5 Day Workshop: This five-day workshop from StrategyWise will help you identify prime opportunities in your organization to drive organizational change and process improvements through analytics democratization powered by Azure.

App Modernization using App service 10 Weeks Imp.: Build, deploy, and scale modern web, mobile, and API apps using Azure App Service. This service includes architecture design, engineering, and deploying applications in the Azure environment.

Application Portfolio Assessment: 6 Weeks: Cloudreach's six-week Application Portfolio Assessment with Cloudamize provides enterprises who want to migrate to Azure with a comprehensive migration strategy and a high-level estimate of run and build costs.

Assessment for Modern Datacenter – 4 weeks: Sonata's four-week assessment service advises customers and recommends a roadmap to build a datacenter in the Azure cloud. This service includes analyzing the feasibility of moving existing datacenter infrastructure to Azure.

Azure Application Modernization Assessment – 2 weeks: Sonata's two-week assessment service advises customers on application modernization options and recommends a roadmap to modernize legacy applications in the Azure cloud.

Azure Datacenter Modernization 8 weeks Imp: Sonata's eight-week implementation will migrate and establish a modern datacenter in the Azure cloud. The service will provision datacenter resources and migrate data, databases, and applications to Azure.

Azure IoT: 3-Day Proof of Concept: This three-day engagement from Tallan will educate your team on what is possible in Azure IoT Hub and build out your POC utilizing Azure IoT services and Power BI.

Azure IoT: 3-Day Workshop: Tallan's three-day workshop includes presentations, stakeholder interviews, analysis, demos, and hands-on learning to help you create a technical strategy for your IoT solution.

Azure Managed Services: 8 Week Implementation: Cloudreach Cloud Core delivers service management of your cloud platform through monitoring, configuration, troubleshooting, security services, delivery management, and continual service improvement.

Azure Migration: 1-day Assessment: Atmosera's cloud assessment delivers a clear roadmap with options to evaluate workloads and performance data, prioritize business needs, and understand trade-offs when migrating to Azure.

Azure MSP Powered by CLIP: 6-Wk Assessment: Brillio Azure Managed Services Provider (MSP) Powered by CLIP offers 360-degree coverage to enterprises throughout their cloud journey – from assessment to managing the cloud environment.

Big Data Roadmap – 1 Day Briefing: This StrategyWise briefing will illustrate why you should leverage big data with industry-specific case studies showing the value you can expect from digital transformation, prescriptive modeling, and AI applications in the Azure environment.

Big Data Roadmap – 5 Day Workshop: Looking to ramp up on big data powered by Azure? This five-day workshop will help you identify prime opportunities in your organization to drive organizational change and process improvements through big data on Azure.

Business Continuity Disaster Recovery 2 Weeks Imp.: This two-week implementation helps customers set up business continuity planning and disaster recovery on Azure. The service includes setting up BCP/DR environments in Azure and configuring apps and databases.

Connected Factory by APEx: Cognizant APEx is an Industry 4.0 solution accelerator that enables the integration of devices, systems, and processes powered by the Azure IoT cloud platform to build a connected factory for optimized and enhanced operations.

Data and Analytics Strategy: 1-day Workshop: RevGen Partners' one-day interactive workshop introduces success with Azure for data and analytics, a review of current capabilities, and a high-level strategy and roadmap toward maturity.

Data Estate Modernisation: 1 Day Workshop: Northdoor's initial one-day workshop for technical and business leaders will assess your existing data estate and provide a roadmap to modernize your data platform (hybrid or full Azure) and licensing model.

DevOps Assessment: 1-Week Assessment: Create DevOps pipeline best practices for Azure DevOps, walk through current DevOps environments and action items needed to move to Azure DevOps, and create and use test workloads as a POC in this assessment from Tallan.

DevOps Implementation: 3-Week Implementation: Tallan will work with you to get all your applications using the same build automation mechanisms for Azure DevOps and ultimately help you build your DevOps pipeline strategy.

Discovery Free 2 hours Workshop: In this free workshop, Cloocus will investigate your current IT operation system, gather requirements, introduce methodology and references, and propose a fitting cloud roadmap.

Employee Experience @Work: Teams Jumpstart: The Cognizant Jumpstart for Microsoft Teams helps you successfully deploy and get immediate business value from this powerful platform using Azure bots, functions, and other services.

Free 1/2 Day Cloud Economic Assessment: Blue Silver Shift will deliver a half-day workshop with your leadership team to go through digital transformation and the cloud, understanding your business, and building business goals and outcomes.

Free Azure Cost Optimization: 1-day Assessment: ProArch's one-day assessment will analyze all workloads you are using and provide a recommendation report detailing how you can reduce your cloud cost by 30–60 percent or more by moving to Microsoft Azure.

Health Content: Manage & Localize – 4-hr Assessment: Lionbridge will review your content creation and localization process, content types, linguistic needs, regulatory requirements, current pain points, and volumes to develop a custom end-to-end solution.

IBM Domino Migration to MS Azure 2-Day Assessment: The Point Alliance methodology, industry-standard migration tools, unique intellectual property, onsite and remote consultants, and proven track record combine to mitigate risk and ensure a successful Azure migration.

Launch IT Lifecycle Mgmt: 10-Week Implementation: Launch is a collection of IT lifecycle management services designed to make IT organizations more efficient through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and automation.

Legislative Management Consulting Svcs: 10-Wk Imp: This service is a great way to migrate from legacy systems to solutions on Azure. Tallan will work with IT and business users to enable disaster recovery and insightful data visualizations while reducing manual effort.

Machine Learning Discovery Study: 4-wk Assessment: The Data Analysis Bureau will guide you on your data and analytics journey through its Discovery Study, bringing industry and domain best practice and insight to your business.

Managed Services: Capgemini’s Enterprise Portfolio Modernization initiative is a suite of services that aligns application lifecycle and modernization capabilities with Microsoft Azure to offer an end-to-end approach to digital transformation with enterprise capabilities.

Microsoft Azure Cloud Migration: 1-Hour Briefing: Are you considering a cloud migration or just want a better understanding of Microsoft Azure? Utilize Plc will help you understand the capabilities of Azure, including Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and security features.

Modernization Blueprint (Small): 3 Week Assessment: The Modernization Blueprint provides expert analysis and Azure-specific recommendations across the modernization journey. Deliverables include an implementation plan, strategic vision, and a comprehensive proposal and playbook.

OneMigrate: Sogeti can reduce cloud migration efforts by 40 percent with OneMigrate, an automated platform plugged in with Azure Site Recovery for server migration and CloudBoost library for environment provisioning.

People Analytics Data Platform: 2-Wk Implementation: This People Analytics solution from Tallan offers insight into the information you likely already have about your employees so that you can identify trends in attrition, helping you retain your top talent.

Predictive Analytics, ML, AI: POC 1 week+: Quadbase Systems offers this one-week proof of concept to demonstrate use cases for predictive analytics and machine learning on Azure ML. You will learn how to apply techniques to improve your business performance.

SQL Server Migration: 3-Day Assessment: CSW offers this migration assessment to help you move your on-premises SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL Database. You will receive an assessment document, suggested cloud architecture, and migration plan.

SQL Server Migration: 4-Week Implementation: After your migration assessment, CSW can carry out the plan to move your on-premises database to Azure SQL Database. CSW engineers will ensure your SQL workload runs flawlessly in Microsoft’s cloud environment.

Telstra Cloud Sight: Telstra Cloud Sight is an automated orchestration platform that enables you to configure your cloud accounts easily and keep them compliant, secure, and optimized – all aligned to your chosen best practice blueprints and with minimal human intervention.

Telstra Managed Public Cloud: Readify will install its cloud management layer atop your cloud infrastructure, enabling its expert team to effectively perform day-to-day management, monitoring, and essential security-related activities.

Website Migration – IaaS: 4-Week Implementation: CSW will migrate your website to Microsoft Azure, allowing you to capitalize on reliable cloud hosting services and scalability. This implementation includes moving all assets, SSL certificates, domains, databases, and more.

Website Migration – PaaS: 2-Week Implementation: CSW will migrate your website to Microsoft Azure, allowing you to capitalize on reliable cloud hosting services and scalability. This implementation includes moving all assets, SSL certificates, domains, databases, and more.

Website Migration: 2-Day Assessment: This assessment from CSW will help you review your website architecture, platform, infrastructure, performance, security, backup, and recovery and then establish the necessary Microsoft Azure services for a cloud implementation.

Quelle: Azure

Petrofac transforms large-scale construction with Azure IoT

Figure 1. Petrofac is a leading oilfield services company

Petrofac unlocks value for energy customers

Petrofac, designs, builds, operates, and maintains oil, gas, and renewable energy assets. The company is committed to digital transformation. It looks to unlock value for itself and its clients using technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), automation, machine learning, predictive analytics, digital twin, and Edge computing.

“This is an exciting time for Petrofac,” explains Fady Sleiman, Chief Digital Officer, Petrofac. “We are working to incorporate digital platforms within our business and combine these with our engineering and operations know-how to underpin our competitiveness in the marketplace and improve our capability and effectiveness.”

Partnering to transform large-scale construction

When considering the impact of digital technology within its construction activities Petrofac turned to Accenture Digital’s Industry X.0 team to create a solution that would increase safety, productivity, and efficiency at its project sites during the critical construction and commissioning phases.

Petrofac’s project supervisors need to answer questions like, “Are my welders well distributed on available work-fronts today?” or “Has my concrete mixer arrived?” or ‘’Do we have adequate safety supervision at the boiler’s area?’’ on projects which can be spread out over the size of a large city involving thousands of people, hundreds of tons of materials, and heavy equipment movement. Accenture Digital worked with Petrofac to develop a Connected Construction solution using Azure IoT to provide these insights.

“Azure IoT enabled us to build out a solution with Edge analytics and PaaS cloud components. These were instrumented using a range of connectivity solutions to enable us to meet the scale requirements for the project,” said Yen-Sze Soon, Managing Director, Accenture Digital – Industry X.0.

Accenture architected a solution to collect and transmit data from tags on workers and equipment. The site data was integrated with project data like milestones, productivity, planning, permitting, weather, and documents as well as historical data, to provide a live, one-stop dashboard.  The dashboard provides operational visibility into precise details of the project, all accessed in one place (see Figure 2.)

“The live dashboard displays project KPIs, build progress, total number of people and equipment on site, and weather alerts. It even flags deviations schedule and planned production compliance,” said Daniel Atbir, Vice President, Construction, Petrofac.

Figure 2. An example of the one-stop view of a construction project

Project tracking to increase productivity

With the new dashboard, site supervisors track productivity across construction zones or within construction crews (See Figure 3.) They can pinpoint bottlenecks and deviations and take appropriate remedial action.

During the initial trial, the team observed that productivity dropped significantly before and after lunch. Looking at the worker heatmap, the team realized that productivity was slowing down because workers were leaving the construction site. They were driving a distance to get lunch. Petrofac responded by building an onsite cafeteria. Productivity and welfare increased.

Figure 3. An example of a map of manpower in construction zones

Pursuing better outcomes for worker safety

If a worker requires assistance on the job, he or she can activate an alarm signal on the digital tag each worker wears. The site supervisor and health, safety, and environment (HSE) team receives the alert and can provide immediate assistance. “With real-time alerts and knowing the worker’s exact location, our teams respond more quickly for better outcomes,” explains Daniel.

Optimizing the use of high-value equipment

Knowing the location of equipment seems simple. But on a large-scale infrastructure project, it can be a challenge. By tagging high-value equipment and having locations transmitted and known in real-time, Connected Construction is enabling Petrofac to support its subcontractors to optimize the use of equipment in a more collaborative way. Equipment is optimally allocated to increase productivity and, therefore, construction progress.

Figure 4.  Petrofac gains valuable insights from Connected Construction

Summary

Petrofac and Accenture Digital implemented the Connected Construction solution on a large scale to increase productivity, safety, and efficiency. Accenture and Avanade won the Microsoft Internet of Things Partner of the Year award based on their involvement with the  Petrofac project and commitment to Azure IoT. “Thanks to Accenture’s industry innovation and the Microsoft Azure IoT platform, our Connected Construction initiative is providing valuable insights for Petrofac,” added Fady.

Learn more about Azure IoT and Azure IoT Edge.
Quelle: Azure

Reduce disaster recovery time with Azure Site Recovery

Companies and cloud solutions teams by and large understand the need for a disaster recovery solution. One of the first steps while defining and choosing a disaster recovery plan is to perform a business impact analysis. This process helps in identifying applications that support critical business processes, the impact to the business in case of an outage, and guides in developing the right disaster recovery strategy for your business. Once you perform the analysis and identify critical applications, the next step is to chart down your disaster recovery strategy. This usually translates into:

Identifying the right employees or admins who will handle the disaster recovery segment
Setting targets for recover time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)
Identifying the right product or service based on the needs
Identifying all the required software and hardware resources needed
Frequently testing the disaster recovery strategy
Making continuous improvements to improve the RPO and RTO, identifying and rectifying failure points if any

Configuring disaster recovery of Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Site Recovery

With the best in class RTO and RPO, Azure Site Recovery is one of the leaders in the space of disaster recovery. Being a first-class solution in Azure also gives the service, the edge to enable, test, and perform disaster recovery for customers in just a few clicks. One of the key differentiators while choosing a disaster recovery solution is the availability of integrations with additional resources to achieve parity between source and target. This essentially also reduces the RTO as it reduces the number of manual steps required once the virtual machine is brought up online in the target. The failure points are also minimized with this.

Let’s take a look at a common architecture model.

As a disaster recovery administrator, there are multiple components that you would need to handle to ensure that a target disaster recovery site is activated with similar configurations in the event of a disaster. Other than the virtual machines, it also includes the internal load balancers, the network security groups, and the public IPs that are used to access the virtual machines from outside of Azure. With Azure Site Recovery, while configuring for disaster recovery for your virtual machines, you can also provide the input for corresponding network resources in the target, which will be honored at the time of failover. This takes away the complexities of having to deal with scripts or manual steps and reduces the RTO significantly. The service is also intelligent enough to allow selection of only those target resources that comply with the target virtual machine that will be created, thereby reducing the points of failover.

Azure natively provides you the high availability and reliability for your mission-critical workloads, and you can choose to improve your protection and meet compliance requirements using the disaster recovery provided by Azure Site Recovery. Getting started with Azure Site Recovery is easy, check out pricing information and sign up for a free Microsoft Azure trial. You can also visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Cost Management updates – August 2019

Whether you're a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Create targeted budgets with filters and forecast costs
What's new in Azure Cost Management Labs
Save and share customized views in cost analysis
Dark theme support in cost analysis
More flexibility for creating and managing subscriptions
Update tags for App Service environments
New videos
Documentation updates

Let's dig into the details.

 

Create targeted budgets with filters and forecast costs

Azure Cost Management budgets allow you to track and keep an eye on spending at any level of the organization. Budgets can be created on any scope above your Azure resources, from the billing account or a management group down to the resource groups where you're managing your apps. Now, with the ability to create filtered budgets in the Azure portal, you can easily monitor costs for anything from the entire organization to a single resource.

Let's say you're building out a prototype that requires a large VM for a month. You've estimated how much time you'll need and got approval for that based on prices in the Azure pricing calculator. Create a budget in the parent resource group filtered down to that resource and specify 25, 50, 75, and 100 percent thresholds to get notified as you're approaching weekly limits. And don't forget to setup auto-shutdown for nights and weekends, to ensure you don't blow that the first week.

On the other hand, you may need to track costs across multiple resource groups in multiple subscriptions, for test and production environments, for a specific app. To do this, tag all your resources with a specific tag, like Application, and ask your billing account or management group admin to create a budget filtered down to that that tag.

Of course, that's not all. You can create a budget filtered down to any property available within cost analysis, whether that's based on the resource hierarchy (e.g. resource group, subscription), meter hierarchy (e.g. service, meter category), or additional resource metadata (e.g. location, tags).

In addition to creating filtered budgets, you can also see a trend and forecast of costs based on those filters to help you plan ahead and set a realistic budget based on historical usage patterns.

If you haven't setup a budget yet, create one today and get notified before you go over your planned spending.

 

What's new in Azure Cost Management Labs

We introduced Cost Management Labs last month to give you a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management, get early feedback, and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Azure Cost Management Labs:

Save and share customized views is now available in public portal.
Save private and shared views with the Save and Save as commands in cost analysis, then use the view menu (between the scope and date pills) to switch between all private, shared, and built-in views.
Download charts as an image
Open the desired view, then click the Export command at the top, select the PNG option, and click the Download charts button.
Dark theme support in cost analysis
Support for the Azure portal dark theme was added to cost analysis in early August. We're making the last few final touches and expect this to be available from the full portal in early September.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Azure Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. We're very eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. Try Azure Cost Management Labs today.

 

Save and share customized views in cost analysis

The announcement for saving and sharing customized views in Cost Management Labs launched last month. Now, you can enjoy these same views from the Azure portal. If you missed last month’s update, here's what you missed:

Customizing a view in cost analysis is easy. Pick the date range you need, group the data to see a breakdown, choose the right visualization, and you're ready to go. Pin your view to a dashboard for one-click access, then share the dashboard with your team so everyone can track cost from a single place.

You can also share a direct link to your customized view so others can copy and personalize it for themselves:

Both sharing options offer flexibility, but you need something more convenient. Now you can save customized views and share them with others, directly from within cost analysis.

To do this, start by selecting a built-in view, customize it, and click the Save as command. You'll need Azure Cost Management Contributor access (or greater) to the scope to share views, but anyone can save private views, pin them to a dashboard, or share a URL. You can create up to 50 shared views per scope and up to 50 private views across scopes.

All views are accessible from the view menu. You'll see your private views first, then those shared across the scope, and lastly the built-in views which are always available.

Try saving your own customized views today and let us know what you'd like to see next. We're looking forward to learning about your ideas.

 

Dark theme support in cost analysis

If any Azure portal theme were to have a cult following, it'd be the dark theme. Whether you're interested in the dark theme for accessibility, power efficiency on a mobile device, or simply prefer the aesthetics, you need a consistent, end-to-end experience. Anything that takes out of that is jarring and forces you to take a second for your eyes to adjust. And there's nothing as eye-opening as switching from dark to light themes.  The good news is, cost analysis now supports the Azure portal dark theme in Azure Cost Management Labs.

 

More flexibility for creating and managing subscriptions

As your organization grows, so does your reliance on the cloud. More teams are asking for access, which leads to extra overhead for creating and managing subscriptions. You need more flexibility to build a sustainable, scalable governance strategy.

With increased requirements coming from internal teams, many organizations are creating subscriptions (instead of resource groups) for individual teams to give them more flexibility to build the Azure solutions they need. This also simplifies governance reporting scenarios, as cost and compliance naturally rolls up to subscriptions and management groups. To better support this, you can now create up to 200 subscriptions per Enterprise Agreement (EA) enrollment account (increased from 50).

You already know you can create EA and MCA subscriptions with the Microsoft.Subscription/createSubscription API. Originally, this required at least one subscription to be created from the portal. This limitation has been removed and you can now create your first subscription directly from the API without opening the portal. You can also add subscriptions to a management group from the CreateSubscription API, which will help streamline automation scenarios for organizations using management groups for organizational reporting or policy assignment.

You can also request and track billing ownership transfers for pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and MCA subscriptions from directly within the Azure portal, with an option to keep the subscription in the current directory and retaining all Azure Role-based access control (RBAC) role assignments. Previously, transferring subscriptions reset RBAC access, which required additional overhead to reconfigure access. The new options should offer additional flexibility, depending on your needs. Transferring EA subscriptions can be performed from the Enterprise portal and will be available from the Azure portal in a future update.

 

Update tags for App Service environments

In our June update, we mentioned the App Service team added support for tags in usage data for App Service environments. We've heard reports of this not working for some organizations. If you are still missing tags for your App Service environments, please update the tags on those resources. Simply add a new tag, save your tag changes, then remove it, if you don't want to keep it. That should do it. You should see tags in your usage within the next 8-12 hours.

To learn more about data refresh times, see Understand Azure Cost Management data.

 

New videos

For those visual learners out there, there are 3 new videos you should take a look at:

Azure Cost Management for Azure Gov  is a great overview for anyone, even if you're not using Azure Gov
Working with APIs
Debugging and optimizing Cosmos DB (docs) touches on cost optimization via Cosmos DB Request Units (RUs)

 

Documentation updates

Here are the latest documentation updates:

Added new create experience with filters and forecast to Create and manage budgets.
Updated note about top cost contributors in Start analyzing costs.
Minor tweaks to Manage AWS costs and usage in Azure.
Learn which cost and usage fields can be used to build a unique ID in Understand the terms in your Azure usage and charges file.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Azure Cost Management doc change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the doc and submit a quick pull request.

 

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from the last month. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. As always, share your ideas and vote up others in the Azure Cost Management feedback forum.
Quelle: Azure

Beyond the printed form: Unlocking insights from documents with Form Recognizer

Data extraction from printed forms is by now a tried and true technology. Form Recognizer extracts key value pairs, tables and text from documents such as W2 tax statements, oil and gas drilling well reports, completion reports, invoices, and purchase orders. However, real-world businesses often rely on a variety of documents for their day-to-day needs that are not always cleanly printed.

We are excited to announce the addition of handwritten and mixed-mode (printed and handwritten) support. Starting now, handling handwritten and mixed-mode forms is the new norm.

Extracting data from handwritten and mixed-mode content with Form Recognizer

Entire data sets that were inaccessible in the past due to the limitations of extraction technology now become available. The handwritten and mixed-mode capability of Form Recognizer is available in preview and enables you to extract structured data out of handwritten text filled in forms such as:

Medical forms: New patient information, doctor notes.
Financial forms: Account opening forms, credit card applications.
Insurance: Claim forms, liability forms.
Manufacturing forms: Packaging slips, testing forms, quality forms.
And more.

By using our vast experience in optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning for form analysis, our experts created a state-of-the-art solution that goes beyond printed forms. The OCR technology behind the service supports both handwritten and printed. Expanding the scope of Form Recognizer allows you to tap into previously uncharted territories, by making new sources of data available to you. You may extract valuable business information from newly available data, keeping you ahead of your competition.

Whether you are using Form Recognizer for the first time or already integrated it into your organization, you will now have an opportunity to create new business applications:

Expand your available data set: If you are only extracting data from machine printed forms, expand your total data set to mixed-mode forms and historic handwritten forms.
Create one application for a mix of documents: If you use a mix of handwritten and printed forms, you can create one application that applies across all your data.
Avoid manual digitization of handwritten forms: Original forms may be fed to Form Recognizer without any pre-processing, extracting the same key-value pairs and table data you would get from a machine-printed form to reduce costs, errors, and time.

Our customer: Avanade

Avanade values people as their most important asset. They are always on the lookout for talented and passionate professionals to grow their organization. One way they find these people is by attending external events, which may include university career fairs, trade shows, or technical conferences to name a few. 

During these events they often take the details of those interested in finding out more about Avanade, as well as their permission to contact them at a later date. Normally this is completed with a digital form using a set of tablets. But when the stand is particularly busy, they use a short paper form that attendees can fill in with their handwritten details. Unfortunately, these forms needed to be manually entered into the marketing database, requiring a considerable amount of time and resources. With the volume of potential new contacts at these events, multiplied by the number of events Avanade attends, this task can be daunting.

Azure Form Recognizer’s new handwritten support simplifies the process, giving Avanade peace of mind knowing no contact is lost and the information is there for them immediately.

In addition, Avanade integrated Form Recognizer as a skill within their cognitive search solution, enabling them to quickly use the service in their existing platform and follow-up with new leads, while their competitors may be spending time digitizing their handwritten forms.

“Azure Form Recognizer takes a vast amount of effort out of the process, changing the task from data entry to data validation. By integrating Form Recognizer with Azure Search, we are also immediately able to use the service in our existing platforms. If we need to find and check a form for any reason, for example to check for a valid signature there, we can simply search by any of the fields like name or job title and jump straight to that form. In our initial tests, using Form Recognizer has reduced the time taken to digitize the forms and double check the entries by 35 percent, a number we only expect to get better as we work to optimize our tools to work hand in hand with the service, and add in more automation.” – Fergus Kidd, Emerging Technology Engineer, Avanade

Getting started

To learn more about Form Recognizer and the rest of the Azure AI ecosystem, please visit our website and read the documentation.

Get started by contacting us.

For additional questions please reach out to us at formrecog_contact@microsoft.com
Quelle: Azure

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 42

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 86 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Applications

360°VR Museum: The 360°VR Museum is a virtual exhibition platform that allows users to view HD 360-degree re-creations of local and international exhibitions where visitors can move around freely using a mouse or touch screen input. This application is available only in Korean.

Apache Airflow Helm Chart: Apache Airflow is a tool to express and execute workflows as directed acyclic graphs. It includes utilities to schedule tasks, monitor task progress, and handle task dependencies.

Apache Superset (Ubuntu): Websoft9 Superset stack is a preconfigured, ready-to-run image for running the Apache Superset data exploration and visualization web application on Azure.

Ataccama ONE: Data Quality Management: Employ smart, automated metadata discovery algorithms to know the state of your data quality; empower data users to make smarter, more informed decisions; and prevent costly mistakes with Ataccama ONE.

Avid Media Composer Azure Test Drive: Experience editing in the cloud with Avid Media Composer on Azure. This Test Drive includes one NV12 virtual machine with Avid Media Composer 2018.12, sample media, and Teradici Cloud Access software installed.

CallidusCloud Workflow: CallidusCloud Workflow includes everything you need to organize, automate, execute, and analyze business processes to connect people, data, and daily activities.

CentOS 6.10: This secure, cost-efficient, and quick to deploy distribution of Linux is based on CentOS and provided by Northbridge Secure. Enjoy the power of Microsoft Azure from any device in a matter of hours.

Citrix ADC 13.0: Providing operational consistency and a smooth user experience, Citrix ADC is an enterprise-grade application delivery controller that delivers your applications quickly, reliably, and securely – with deployment and pricing flexibility to meet your unique needs.

Citynet: Citynet is a monthly subscription-based SaaS application that enables cities to upload their unstructured city council data to Azure, where it's automatically and semantically indexed and made available for natural language querying.

cleverEAI by Sunato: cleverEAI monitors all BizTalk integration processes. View your workflows in real time, analyze, and reprocess failed instances immediately. This VM image contains a complete BizTalk environment, configured automatically by the cleverEAI installation package.

CMFlex: The CMFlex SaaS solution can be operated in different browsers and devices via the web, allowing you to manage your business from anywhere with accurate, real-time information. This application is available only in Portuguese.

Compliant FileVision: Compliant FileVision is a policy management solution that empowers you to implement consistent, efficient, and sustainable processes for managing the lifecycle of corporate policies and standards, incidents, service improvement requests, and procedures.

Data Protector: Micro Focus Data Protector is an enterprise-grade backup and DR solution for large, complex, heterogeneous IT environments. Built on a scalable architecture that combines security and analytics, it enables users to meet continuity needs reliably and cost-effectively.

FileMage Gateway: FileMage Gateway is a secure cloud file transfer solution that seamlessly connects legacy SFTP, FTPS, and FTP protocols to Azure Blob Storage.

Forms Connect: Forms Connect enables you to digitize paper processes by capturing images and data and storing them in Office 365. This solution is ideal for HR and finance teams looking to solve the challenges of capturing information from the field and moving it to Azure.

Global Product Authentication Service: Global Product Authentication Service is an innovative cloud‐based brand protection, track-and-trace, and consumer engagement service that drives business value by addressing challenges organizations face when operating in global markets.

Graylog (Ubuntu): Websoft9 Graylog stack is a preconfigured, ready-to-run image for running log systems on Azure. Graylog captures, stores, and enables real-time analysis of terabytes of machine data.

HealthCloud: The HealthCloud platform enables organizations and partners to easily develop highly interoperable solutions across the healthcare value chain. Its API-driven methodology delivers consolidated health data and patient-centric records from a wide range of sources.

Hibun Information Leak Prevention Solution: Protect confidential data from various information leaks, including theft, loss of device, insider fraud, and information theft by targeted cyberattacks.

Hyperlex: Hyperlex is a Software-as-a-Service solution for contract management and analysis with AI that identifies legal documents and their important information for retrieval, saving your organization considerable time and resources. This application is available only in French.

Hysolate for Privileged User Devices: Privileged Access Workstations (PAWs) provide a dedicated operating system for sensitive tasks that is protected from attacks and threat vectors. Hysolate makes PAWs practical to adopt at scale without degrading productivity.

Hystax Backup and Disaster Recovery to Azure: Hystax Backup and Disaster Recovery to Azure delivers consistent replication, storage-agnostic snapshots, and orchestration functionality with enterprise-grade recovery point objective and recovery time objective.

Imago.ai Intelligent Chatbot: Intelligent Chatbot on Microsoft Azure includes an interactive chatbot interface allowing clients to plug into any digital media as well as a dashboard that combines user behaviors and history to provide business insights.

InnGage Citypoints: InnoWave’s InnGage Citypoints gamification application on Microsoft Azure recognizes and rewards citizens who adopt good citizenship practices.

Intellicus BI Server V18.1 (25 Users – Linux): Intellicus BI Server on Microsoft Azure is an end-to-end self-service business intelligence platform that offers advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, a semantic layer, and integrated ETL capabilities.

Intellicus BI Server V18.1 (50 Users – Linux): Intellicus BI Server on Microsoft Azure is an end-to-end self-service business intelligence platform that offers advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, a semantic layer, and integrated ETL capabilities.

Intellicus BI Server V18.1 (100 Users – Linux): Intellicus BI Server on Microsoft Azure is an end-to-end self-service business intelligence platform that offers advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, a semantic layer, and integrated ETL capabilities.

Jamcracker CSB Service Provider Version 7.0.3: This solution automates order management, provisioning, and billing and can be easily integrated to support enterprise ITSM, billing, ERP, and identity systems including Active Directory and Active Directory Federation Services.

Jenkins (Ubuntu): Jenkins is an automation server with a broad plugin ecosystem for supporting practically every tool as a part of the delivery pipeline. Websoft9 Jenkins stack is a preconfigured, ready-to-run image for running Jenkins on Azure.

Jenkins on Windows Server 2016: Jenkins is a leading open source CI/CD server that enables the automation of building, testing, and shipping software projects. Jenkins on Windows Server 2016 includes all plugins needed to deploy any service to Azure.

KNIME Server Small: KNIME Server, KNIME's flagship collaboration product, offers shared repositories, advanced access management, flexible execution, web enablement, and commercial support. Share data, nodes, metanodes, and workflows throughout your company.

Knowage Community Edition (Ubuntu): Websoft9 Knowage is a preconfigured, ready-to-run image for deployment Knowage on Azure. Knowage Community Edition includes all analytical capabilities and guarantees a full end user experience.

Lustre on Azure: Lustre on Azure is a scalable, parallel file system built for high performance computing (HPC). It is ideally suited for dynamic, pay-as-you-go applications from rapid simulation and prototyping to peak HPC workloads.

Machine Translation: Tilde Machine Translation offers custom systems to fit each client's needs, delivering human-like translations that help save time and money, facilitate processes, and maximize sales.

NGINX Plus Enterprise Edition: NGINX Plus brings enterprise-ready features such as application load balancing, monitoring, and advanced management to your Azure application stack, helping you deliver applications with the performance, security, and scale of Azure.

Odoo Community Edition (Ubuntu): Websoft9 Odoo stack is a preconfigured, ready-to-run image for Odoo on Azure. The Odoo suite of web-based, open source business apps includes CRM, website builder, e-commerce, warehouse management, project management, and more.

OMNIA Low-code Platform: Model your applications using a business language based on economic theory, greatly reducing your product's development cycles from conception to deployment.

Omnia Retail: Omnia is a leading SaaS solution for integrated dynamic pricing and online marketing automation. It helps retailers regain control, save time, and drive profitable growth.

OXID eShop e-commerce platform: ESYON's OXID SaaS solution on Azure offers powerful, modern shop software with many out-of-the-box functions for B2B, B2C, and internationalization.

Package Be Cloud RGDP Azure – PIA: Designed to facilitate your compliance process, Be Cloud's tool can be adapted to your specific needs or to your business sector. This application is available only in French.

POINTR – Customer & Marketing Analytics: POINTR is a customer and marketing analytics application built using Microsoft Azure and Power BI. It delivers customer intelligence and actionable insights from personalized marketing campaigns via an intuitive interface.

Population Health Management Solution: BroadReach creates simple solutions to complex health challenges. By combining expert consulting and powered Vantage technologies, BroadReach gives clients the innovative edge to transform health outcomes.

Portability: Onecub is a personal data portability tool for the GDPR right to portability (article 20), providing companies with an all-in-one service to offer controlled, innovative portability to their clients.

Postgres Pro Enterprise Database 11: Postgres Pro Standard Database comes with SQL and NoSQL support. Postgres Pro Enterprise Database contains more features on top of Postgres Pro Standard Database to work with large databases and process lots of transactions.

Power BI voor Exact Online: Power BI for Exact Online is a powerful business analysis application configured and optimized for Exact Online's business administration and accounting environment. This application is available only in the Netherlands.

Power BI voor Twinfield: Power BI for Twinfield is a powerful business analysis application configured and optimized for Twinfield's business administration and accounting environment. This application is available only in the Netherlands.

Realtime Sales Radar: Track developments and sales figures of your online platforms in real time with the help of this HMS consulting service and data collection in the Azure cloud.

ReportServer on Ubuntu: Websoft9 offers a preconfigured and ready-to-run image for ReportServer, a modern and versatile business intelligence (OSBI) platform, on Azure.

SentryOne Test: SentryOne Test (formerly LegiTest) is a comprehensive, automated data testing framework that allows you to test all your data-centric applications in an easy-to-use platform.

Service Management Automation X: Micro Focus SMAX is an application suite for service and asset management, built from the ground up to include machine learning and analytics.

Snyk Cloud Security Platform: This Snyk solution lets developers securely use open source software while accelerating migration to Azure of micro-services and containerized and serverless workloads.

Social Intranet Analytics – with Netmind Core: Get a detailed overview of the use, acceptance, multilocation collaboration, and interactions on your social intranet with Netmind Core from Mindlab.

sospes: Sospes allows staff to report workplace incidents (injuries, property damage, environmental hazards, security threats) and generates management and regulatory reports.

StoreHippo: StoreHippo is a SaaS e-commerce platform used by customers across more than 15 countries and 35 business verticals. StoreHippo offers scalability and flexibility for next-gen businesses.

SyAudit for Medical Record Audits: This solution from SyTrue scans medical records and highlights key data by record type to let auditors quickly validate findings through a modernized workflow.

Tidal Migrations – Premium Insights for Database: Analyze your databases and uncover roadblocks to Azure cloud migration with this add-on to your Tidal Migrations subscription.

Trac – Issue Tracking System (Ubuntu): This stack from Websoft9 is a preconfigured image for Trac on Azure. Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects.

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Module: This IoT Edge Module (with Python) from BRFRame automatically categorizes dataset anomalies, eliminating manual work that can take time and lead to inaccuracies.

Video Inteligencia para Seguridad y Prevención: This video analytics solution acts as the brain of a security system, enabling decision-making in real time. This application is available only in Spanish.

VM Explorer: Micro Focus VM Explorer is an easy-to-use and reliable backup solution, offering fast VM and granular restore, replication, and verification of VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

winsafe: Winsafe from Nextronic is an IoT dashboard platform that can locate static or mobile end-devices positioned in outdoor or indoor areas without a dedicated infrastructure.

Consulting Services

Advanced DevOps Automation with CI/CD: 10-Day Imp.: Leveraging InCycle’s Azure DevOps Accelerators, InCycle cloud architects will ensure customers realize modern CI/CD pipelines, IT governance, and minimum time to production.

App Modernization Implementation – 3-Week Imp.: Based on InCycle’s proprietary Modern App Factory approach and Accelerators, InCycle’s Azure architects will analyze your environment, co-define your goals, and develop a cloud adoption strategy and roadmap.

Application Portfolio Assessment – Briefing: 1-day: HCL Technologies' free one-day briefing ensures customers understand HCL’s Cloud Assessment Framework and how it performs assessment in a proven methodology for migration to Microsoft Azure.

Azure AI & Bots: 2-Hr Assessment: This Neudesic assessment will provide a recommendation on how Microsoft Azure can be used to meet a key business need with an AI-powered bot using Neudesic's agile, repeatable approach to accelerate delivery time and value.

Azure Architecture Assessment – 2-day workshop: In this assessment, Cloud Valley's cloud architects gather functional and operational requirements, see how they align with your current business goals, and propose a technological solution.

Azure back-up and DR workshop – 2.5 days: Acora's team will review your on-premises or cloud environment to provide a recommended approach for migrating to Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Cloud Readiness: 2-Week Assessment: Emtec evaluates business processes and technology infrastructure to assess current investments and identify potential areas that are ripe for successful cloud migration and adoption.

Azure Management Services: 10-Wk Implementation: Catapult Systems' Azure Management Services allow users to continuously optimize their cloud environment. In this assessment, Catapult helps you pick the option that best fits the objectives for your cloud environment.

Azure Migration – 2 Day Assessment: This Third I assessment is driven by an in-depth review of your existing solution architecture to help identify a suitable modern data warehouse to match your solution needs.

Azure Migration: 2.5 day Workshop: Acora will review your technical capability and readiness for a migration to Azure and provide recommendations on the cost, resources, and time needed to move with minimal downtime.

Citrix Workspace on Azure: 5 Day Proof of Concept: Get a custom proof of concept of Citrix Cloud Workspace Integrated with Microsoft Azure along with design and cost estimates to enable your organization to move forward with the solution.

Cloud Foundation Assessment: 6 Wk Assessment: This Anglepoint assessment will help you optimize your environment before you migrate to the cloud to ensure the most cost-effective solution that maximizes throughput and availability.

Cloud Journey Assessment – 4 Weeks: In this four-week assessment, Dedalus will determine the Azure dependencies for each of your applications to prioritize which applications and systems are the best candidates for migration.

Cloud Migration – 8 week implementation: CloudOps will help develop an Azure migration and cloud-native strategy that meets your current workload and security requirements while enabling you to scale to the future needs of your business.

Cloud Optimized WAN Engagement: 4-day Assessment: Equinix will help develop a customized WAN strategy focusing on improved latency, performance, security, and flexibility while providing clear insights into your expected return on investment or total cost of ownership.

DataDebut Cloud Analytics: 5-Day Proof of Concept: This POC engagement helps boost your understanding of cloud concepts and offerings so that you can identify potential future value of enhancing your data platform, define your path to cloud-native data analytics, and more.

DataGuide Cloud Analytics Intro: 1-Day Assessment: Intended for solution architects, project and program managers, and key stakeholders, this free engagement gives your organization an overview of Azure data analytics and how they can greatly enhance your data estate.

DataVision Project Discovery: 5-Day Assessment: This Azure data project discovery provides in-depth analysis, design, and planning, enabling you to employ future-proof architectures, identify the best approach for the rationalization of existing data assets, and more.

Equinix Cloud Exchange: 2-day Implementation: Equinix's Cloud Enablement services make it easy to complete the setup and configuration necessary to activate your connection to the Azure cloud.

ExpressRoute Connectivity Strategy: 3-day Workshop: This Equinix workshop empowers customers to implement an Azure ExpressRoute connectivity strategy tailored for their specific needs and is a fast-track path to optimized Azure consumption.

Onboarding Services – USA: 4 weeks implementation: Anunta's Onboarding Services on Azure ensure end-to-end management of virtual desktop workload transition to the cloud, including implementation, Active Directory configuration, image creation, app configuration, and more.

Palo Alto Test Drive on Azure: 1/2 Day Workshop: See how easy it is to securely extend your corporate datacenter to Azure using Palo Alto Networks Next Generation VM-Series firewalls with security features to protect applications and data from threats.

Predica Azure Migration 5-Day Proof of Concept: In this cloud migration proof of concept, Predica will guide you through the process of workload migration, ensuring you get the most from your Microsoft Azure implementation.

Security & Compliance Assessment – 4 Wk Assessment: This Logicworks offering will help you assess your Azure environment against compliance frameworks and receive automated reporting, vulnerability scanning, and a remediation roadmap to help you improve security.

Spyglass/Azure Security – 10 Wk. Implementation: Catapult's Spyglass service jump-starts your cloud security by deploying Microsoft's security tools and leveraging security experts, best practices, and centralized security dashboards.

Quelle: Azure

PyTorch on Azure: Full support for PyTorch 1.2

Congratulations to the PyTorch community on the release of PyTorch 1.2! Last fall, as part of our dedication to open source AI, we made PyTorch one of the primary, fully supported training frameworks on Azure. PyTorch is supported across many of our AI platform services and our developers participate in the PyTorch community, contributing key improvements to the code base. Today we would like to share the many ways you can use PyTorch 1.2 on Azure and highlight some of the contributions we’ve made to help customers take their PyTorch models from training to production.

PyTorch 1.2 on Azure

Getting started with PyTorch on Azure is easy and a great way to train and deploy your PyTorch models. We’ve integrated PyTorch 1.2 in the following Azure services so you can utilize the latest features:

Azure Machine Learning service – Azure Machine Learning streamlines the building, training, and deployment of machine learning models. Azure Machine Learning’s Python SDK has a dedicated PyTorch estimator that makes it easy to run PyTorch training scripts on any compute target you choose, whether it’s your local machine, a single virtual machine (VM) in Azure, or a GPU cluster in Azure. Learn how to train Pytorch deep learning models at scale with Azure Machine Learning.
Azure Notebooks – Azure Notebooks provides a free, cloud-hosted Jupyter notebook server with PyTorch 1.2 pre-installed. To learn more, check out the PyTorch tutorials and examples.
Data Science Virtual Machine – Data Science Virtual Machines are pre-configured with popular data science and deep learning tools, including PyTorch 1.2. You can choose a variety of machine types to host your Data Science Virtual Machine, including those with GPUs. To learn more, refer to the Data Science Virtual Machine documentation.

From PyTorch to production

PyTorch is a popular open-source deep learning framework for creating and training models. It is built to use the power of GPUs for faster training and is deeply integrated with Python, making it easy to get started. However, deploying trained models to production has historically been a pain point for customers. For production environments, using Python for the core computations may not be suitable due to performance and multi-threading requirements. To address this challenge, we collaborated with the PyTorch community to make it easier to use PyTorch trained models in production.

PyTorch’s JIT compiler transitions models from eager mode to graph mode using tracing, TorchScript, or a mix of both. We then recommend using PyTorch’s built-in support for ONNX export. ONNX stands for Open Neural Network Exchange and is an open standard format for representing machine learning models. ONNX models can be inferenced using ONNX Runtime. ONNX Runtime is an inference engine for production scale machine learning workloads that are open source, cross platform, and highly optimized. Written in C++, it runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac. Its small binary size makes it suitable for a range of target devices and environments. It’s accelerated on CPU, GPU, and VPU thanks to Intel and NVIDIA who have integrated their accelerators with ONNX Runtime.

In PyTorch 1.2, we contributed enhanced ONNX export capabilities:

Support for a wider range of PyTorch models, including object detection and segmentation models such as mask RCNN, faster RCNN, and SSD
Support for models that work on variable length inputs
Export models that can run on various versions of ONNX inference engines
Optimization of models with constant folding
End-to-end tutorial showing export of a PyTorch model to ONNX and running inference in ONNX Runtime

You can deploy your own PyTorch models to various production environments with ONNX Runtime. Learn more at the links below:

Deploy to the cloud
Deploy to Windows apps
Deploy to Linux IoT ARM device

Next steps

We are very excited to see PyTorch continue to evolve and improve. We are proud of our support for and contributions to the PyTorch community. PyTorch 1.2 is now available on Azure—start your free trial today.

We look forward to hearing from you as you use PyTorch on Azure.
Quelle: Azure