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Microsoft is now a FinOps Certified Service Provider

In an era where cloud computing has become the backbone of modern business operations, efficient financial management is the linchpin that keeps organizations agile and cost-effective. The FinOps Framework has emerged as a powerful approach to optimize cloud costs, allowing organizations to efficiently manage their cloud expenditure. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Microsoft has achieved a milestone that reaffirms our commitment to empowering our customers and partners in their journey towards optimized cloud spending. We are now a FinOps Certified Service Provider. This certification is a testament to our unwavering dedication to providing you with the best-in-class solutions for managing your cloud finances and ensuring that your organization thrives in this era of digital transformation.

FinOps consulting journey at Microsoft

Our journey in FinOps consulting dates back to the early days of Microsoft Azure, where we embarked on a mission to assist organizations in navigating the complex landscape of cloud cost management. Over the years, we have had the privilege of collaborating with countless organizations, ensuring they unlock the full potential of their cloud investments. What truly excites us, however, is the remarkable momentum that the FinOps Foundation has generated. This foundation has played a pivotal role in cultivating a vibrant and inclusive community of FinOps professionals, united by a shared passion for optimizing cloud expenditures.

Together with this dynamic community, we are poised to take the world of FinOps to the next level. Our continued collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and dedication to the cause will not only enhance our collective understanding of cloud financial management but also drive innovation and excellence in this critical domain. With the power of collaboration and the momentum of the FinOps community, we are prepared to shape the future of FinOps, making it more accessible, efficient, and beneficial for all.

At Microsoft, our commitment to you extends throughout the entire service lifecycle. Whether you are Unified Enterprise Support customer, receiving Proactive Services, or a Microsoft Industry Solutions Delivery (ISD) customer, receiving modernization and enabling innovation for the Microsoft cloud, we are here to provide the expertise and guidance you need to meet your FinOps goals. 

Your goals may by focused on enablement or long-term optimization. We receive many questions from our customers that correspond to each of these goal categories:

Enablement:

“I’m looking to improve our financial forecast for the upcoming year.”—Chief Financial Officer.

“I’ve been meaning to make our cloud spending more efficient but haven’t had the time.”—Chief Technical Officer.

“I’m setting our unit’s KPIs and want to make our operations for the coming quarter leaner.”—Business Unit Lead.

“I need to support our leadership in achieving our quarterly goals and make operations more efficient.”—Product/Application Owner.

Long-term optimization:

“I’m concerned about the economic downturn and need to improve our bottom line.”—Chief Financial Officer.

“I need to reduce my operational cost so that I can free up money for innovative projects.”—Chief Technology Officer.

“I need to make sure our group’s strategy is aligned to company goals.”—Business Unit Lead.

“I work closely with the product and am responsible for the changes.”—Product/Application Owner.

With these questions and requirements in mind, we have developed a series of offerings that provide the solutions.

FinOps solution offerings at Microsoft

Our Unified Enterprise Support currently has three FinOps offerings:

FinOps Introduction

FinOps Assessment

FinOps Operations for Azure

Azure Cost Management Tool Chain

Azure Billing Mechanics

Azure Cost Management Mechanics

Azure Cost Optimization Opportunities

Our Industry Solutions Delivery, Journey to FinOps offering helps our customers optimize their existing landscape, establish a cost-conscious culture, and supporting governance controls to maximize the value of their Azure spend. This offer helps our customers:

Understand the underlying drivers of cost by cloud resource types.

Uncover the link between current cost and performance and cost optimization levers.

Achieve tangible impact/savings through a systematic and continuous cost optimization process while aligning with performance, scalability, and stability goals.

Develop or accelerate a cost-conscious organization.

You can also leverage publicly available FinOps information including:

Review your capability using the FinOps Assessments.

Learn more through the FinOps documentation available.

We’ll share more details on these and other service offerings in future blog posts.

The Microsoft vision for the future of FinOps

Looking forward, we are excited to share our vision for the future of FinOps. Engaging with the FinOps community through the FinOps Foundation Slack and active participation in working groups is a vital part of our strategy. Some of the working groups we actively contribute to include FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), aimed at building and maintaining a common specification for cloud cost, usage, and billing data) and FinOps Champion (focused on creating a FinOps Champion Program). These initiatives demonstrate our commitment to shaping the future of cloud cost management.

We are continuously exploring new ways to enhance your FinOps experience. Our goal is to bring you the latest tools, best practices, and thought leadership that will empower you in the ever-evolving cloud ecosystem. As the cloud landscape continues to evolve, we are dedicated to ensuring that your organization remains at the forefront of FinOps, equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to thrive in this dynamic environment.

Microsoft as a FinOps Certified Service Provider

Microsoft’s certification as a FinOps Certified Service Provider is a significant milestone in the realm of cloud cost management. It highlights the growing importance of FinOps in the cloud industry and underscores the critical role of financial discipline in optimizing cloud spending. By achieving this certification, Microsoft has positioned itself as a leader in cloud cost management, benefiting its customers, the industry, and cloud users around the world.

As organizations continue to embrace cloud computing, the need for effective cloud cost management will only grow. With the Microsoft’s commitment to FinOps, businesses can expect greater control over their cloud expenses, ensuring that their cloud investments align with their financial goals and operational needs. The FinOps Foundation recently launched the State of FinOps Survey for 2024 to collect industry data to help organizations better understand FinOps trends and common challenges faced. Please consider taking the time to complete this survey and check out past years results.

Your success is our utmost priority, and we encourage you to take action today. Reach out to your dedicated account representative to discover how we can help you achieve your FinOps objectives. Additionally, we invite you to review our publicly available FinOps documentation, which is a valuable resource for in-depth insights into optimizing your cloud finances. You can also actively engage with us in the FinOps Foundation community, where you can connect with fellow professionals, share valuable insights, and stay updated on the latest industry trends.

What’s next for FinOps?

We look forward to the opportunity to meet you in person at Microsoft Ignite and the FinOps Foundation Seattle Roadshow on November 15, 2023. These events provide an excellent platform to network, share experiences, and continue building a brighter and more cost-efficient cloud future together. Your journey to optimized cloud spending starts here, and we are here to support you every step of the way.
The post Microsoft is now a FinOps Certified Service Provider appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Come build with us: Microsoft and OpenAI partnership unveils new AI opportunities

At OpenAI’s first DevDay Conference on November 6, 2023, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella made a surprise appearance during OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s keynote to deliver a powerful message: “Our job number one is to build the best systems, so you can build the best models and deliver those to developers.” This was a testament to the deep partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI. We’re excited about the latest announcements from OpenAI’s first DevDay event and want to highlight the opportunities it presents for all AI builders.

New models: GPT-4 Turbo on Azure OpenAI Service

We are very enthusiastic about all the new models introduced, including GPT-3.5 Turbo, and updates to models including DALL-E 3, and Whisper 3. Among them, the eagerly awaited GPT-4 Turbo offers lower pricing, extended prompt length, and structured JSON formatting with improved efficiency and control. We’re looking forward to making these great Turbo models available on Azure OpenAI Service by the end of this year in keeping with our standard practice of bringing new model innovation from our partners at OpenAI to the Azure OpenAI Service.

Increasing access for all AI Builders

OpenAI’s announcement of lower pricing is significant. It will make the models more accessible and increase their utilization, allowing a broader range of applications to harness their power and ushering in a new era of generative AI. On Azure OpenAI Service, token pricing for the new models will be at parity with OpenAI’s prices.

And in an exciting development, Microsoft made GitHub Enterprise available to all DevDay conference in-person attendees to use for free for 90 days. GitHub Enterprise is a powerful tool for developers, assisting in code completion and development. Its integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem aligns with the mission of helping developers easily bring ideas to life on Azure.

GPTs: New ways to create and monetize

GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others. No coding is required. You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone. Just like with plug-ins, we are looking forward to building deep ecosystem support for GPTs, which we’ll share more on next week at our Microsoft Ignite conference.

Microsoft and OpenAI partnership

OpenAI’s introduction of a Custom Models program will be of particular interest to enterprises, and Microsoft will continue to offer the convenience of integrating OpenAI’s services seamlessly within Microsoft’s existing ecosystem and support infrastructure, providing a comprehensive solution for all enterprise needs.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, echoed the sentiment of a strong and productive partnership with Microsoft. “I think we have the best partnership in tech,” Altman told Nadella onstage.

Nadella went on to talk about the companies’ alignment. “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And to me, ultimately, AI is only going to be useful if it truly does empower…it’s about being able to get the benefits of AI broadly disseminated to everyone,” Nadella said.

With these announcements, developers and enterprises are now poised to explore new horizons, empowered by the combined strengths of Microsoft and OpenAI, and the limitless possibilities of generative AI.

Get started with Azure OpenAI Service today

Apply now for access to Azure OpenAI Service. 

Review the new documentation for Azure OpenAI Service.

Explore the playground and customization in Azure AI Studio.

Learn more about Data, Privacy, and Security for Azure OpenAI Service.

Bookmark the What’s New page.

The post Come build with us: Microsoft and OpenAI partnership unveils new AI opportunities appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Evolving Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to transform data into intuitive insights

The quiet revolution of data and analytics in agriculture 

As AGRITECHNICA 2023—the world’s leading trade fair for agricultural machinery—makes a triumphant return after nearly four years, over 450,000 attendees from 130 countries will come together to witness the latest and greatest agriculture innovations firsthand. However, not all of these breakthrough innovations take up large exhibition spaces. Some are quietly revolutionizing the industry through data and analytics, equipping farmers with tools for smarter, data-driven decision-making.  

These data-driven tools—including transformative AI that is reshaping industries—depend on clean, unified data. That’s why we announced Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture in March 2023, a data platform that leverages industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to connect and unify farm data from disparate sources. With Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, organizations can leverage high-quality datasets for digital agriculture solutions, allowing customers and partners to focus on product innovation rather than data management.

Today, alongside Bayer at the AGRITECHNICA 2023 conference, we’re thrilled to announce the latest updates to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture that are ushering in an era of AI in agriculture.

A growing ecosystem of partners and data with Microsoft Fabric integrations

To start, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is evolving to include new integrations with Microsoft Fabric. This begins with the inclusion of Microsoft Fabric Data Factory, bringing cloud-scale data movement and transformation to agriculture-specific scenarios. Now, third-party data partners can build connectors to ingest data from more sources into a unified database. Leveraging these Fabric integrations, Microsoft and our partners are expanding Azure Data Manager for Agriculture with more agriculture-specific connectors and capabilities so that insights are no longer limited by specific data types and sources.  

We’ve also built connector patterns that others can use as references and expanded the common data model to incorporate geospatial data, making more data integrations seamless and efficient. Given the importance of the ability to search through time and space when looking at observation data, geospatial ground truth data has been elevated to a first-class component.  

We are also excited to expand support for Bayer’s Climate FieldView as a built-in data source. Once initiated by a farmer, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture provides a straightforward path to retrieving both historic and up-to-date activity files, from which further aggregated insights can be derived. Users can leverage auto-sync planting, application, and harvest activity files from Climate FieldView accounts directly into Azure Data Manager for Agriculture.  

Microsoft and Bayer: Leveraging generative AI to enable interaction with data through language

But it doesn’t stop at data. We believe access to insights and data should be more interactive, intuitive, and entirely human-centric. Imagine, as a farmer, being able to simply ask the question: “Which fields had rain last night?” or “How many acres have been harvested?” and receiving a precise and accurate answer, immediately.  

With new large language model APIs in Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, generative AI in agriculture is now a reality. The large language model APIs enable the seamless retrieval of data mapped to farm operations, sensors, weather, and imagery so that farming-related context and insights can be queried in a conversational context. These capabilities enable others to build their own agriculture copilots that deliver insights to customers and farmers about disease, yield, labor needs, harvest windows, and more—leveraging actual planning and observational data.  

Bayer is the first partner bringing these large language model capabilities to life with a copilot for agriculture. In its early stages, Bayer is presenting an agriculture copilot and testing multiple scenarios with internal teams to discover where large language model capabilities can add value through the ability to interact with agronomic data using natural language.

The Bayer copilot for agriculture is a querying system that helps end users like dealers and farmers get actionable insights from their farm and environment data. Users ask the AI-powered chatbot about different scenarios and the copilot provides accurate responses almost instantly.

Building on a foundation of innovation 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture has already enabled incredible evolutions in Agriculture with partners like Accenture, Bayer, and Land O’Lakes.  

By integrating disparate data sources and streamlining them into a unified interface, Accenture’s Farm of the Future empowers farmers to track and manage their sustainability initiatives more effectively. Built on Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, the solution provides comprehensive oversight of a farm’s sustainability practices. Advanced analytics deliver actionable insights that help farmers optimize resource allocation, minimize environmental impact, and maximize overall agricultural productivity and profitability.  

Bayer’s Climate FieldView platform uses Azure Data Manager for Agriculture’s satellite and weather pipelines and common data model to enable insights on potential yield-limiting factors in growers’ fields. Thanks to Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, Bayer can remain focused on building intelligent solutions for growers, rather than investing time and resources in data management. 

Land O’Lakes is using Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to reduce time spent on data integrations, thereby cutting down engineering efforts and costs.

“Our job is to bring all the information together to make sense of it. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is helping us do that.”
Tom Ryan, President at Truterra, the sustainability division of Land O’Lakes

Land O’Lakes data scientists are now able to derive better insights through comprehensive analytics and intelligent modeling—ultimately supporting more efficient, sustainable farming.  

Learn more about our agriculture solutions

If you’re interested in learning more about our commitment to innovation in agriculture, come visit us at Bayer’s booth (Hall 8, Booth C15) at AGRITECHNICA 2023 in Hanover, Germany the week of November 12 to 18, 2023. We’ll be presenting several sessions, including:  

November 12, 2023—Recent advancements in large language modelling applied to agricultureLearn how AI technology can be applied to agriculture through an improved and efficient enhancement to analytics processing—offering increased insights at the speed of a question. This session will discuss what’s available today and what the near-term future holds.

November 13, 2023—Advancements in technology targeting the Agriculture and food value chain Hear various organizational perspectives about recent advancements in agriculture that support data interoperability, improved transparency across agricultural value chains, accelerated farm and food innovation, and the partnerships driving this change. 

For additional information, visit the Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture website. The future is bright, as generative AI and other analytics solutions enable insights around optimizing resource allocation, minimizing environmental impact, maximizing agricultural productivity, and much more.  
The post Evolving Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to transform data into intuitive insights appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Cost Management updates—November 2023

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

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft 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.

In this month’s edition, we will cover some of the updates from the previous month and give you a preview of what we are planning for Microsoft Ignite 2023. Enjoy reading!

Introducing cost views for Azure Kubernetes service (AKS)

Improvements to cost management exports

Pricing updates on Azure.com

What’s new in Cost Management Labs

New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud

Documentation updates

What’s next

Introducing cost views for Azure Kubernetes service (AKS)

We know that Kubernetes come with a lot of cost benefits and continues to gain popularity. Teams run their applications on a single cluster sharing the infrastructure costs and scaling capacity only when load demands. Talking to our customers, we understand that while this shared computing model is great for cost savings, it poses challenges for them to gain visibility into granular costs based on Kubernetes’ entities. As an example, teams running multiple applications on a cluster have visibility into infrastructure costs of the cluster using cost analysis or cost reports, they however lack visibility into costs incurred by each application making cost allocation and optimization very difficult.

To address these challenges, we are thrilled to announce that the preview of the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cost views will be available starting on November 14, 2023. You will gain visibility into the costs of namespaces and an aggregated view of the costs of assets within the cluster. These views will be available in Cost analysis within the Azure portal, an experience which you are already familiar with. It will make analyzing and allocating costs for your cluster much easier.

This is just the beginning of our journey to enable granular visibility into AKS costs, we will continue to add additional capabilities for AKS cost management.

Please look for an Azure update regarding this launch in the week of November 13, 2023.

Improvements to cost management exports 

Announcing an improved exports experience designed to streamline your FinOps practice. With automatic exports of additional cost-impacting datasets, the updated exports are optimized to handle large datasets while enhancing the user experience.   

You can export additional datasets, including price sheets, reservation recommendations, reservation details, and reservation transactions. Furthermore, you can download cost and usage details using the open-source FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) format, which combines actual and amortized costs and reduces data processing times and storage and compute costs.  

With the enhanced user interface, you can easily create multiple exports for various cost management datasets using a single, simplified create experience. Moreover, you have the option to selectively rerun an existing Export job for a historical date range instead of creating a new one-time export of the required date range.  

FinOps datasets can be large and challenging to manage. You can easily handle large datasets through features like file partitioning, that breaks the file into manageable chunks and file overwrite for daily exports, which replaces the previous day’s file with an updated file each day and the upcoming support for Parquet format and file compression. These optimizations improve file manageability, reduce download latency, and help you save on storage and network charges.  

You can choose the latest or any of the previous dataset schema versions during the export creation. This ensures that the data processing layers that you have built on top of these datasets can be reused without compromising on the latest API functionality.  

You can enhance security and compliance by configuring exports to storage accounts behind a firewall which provides access control for the public endpoint of the storage account.  

The exports preview will be rolled out over the coming months. If you’re interested in getting access to the upcoming preview, sign up today. Also, stay tuned for updates in Azure updates to remain informed about the latest enhancements and features. 

Pricing updates on Azure

Many new additions have made it into our Azure pricing experiences, and we’re thrilled to share with you some notable updates that will make it even easier for you to estimate the costs of your solutions. Here are some highlights:

Azure Container Apps now includes Savings Plan, giving you more options to save on your costs.

We’re excited to offer limited-time discounts on select Linux Dv5 and Ev5 virtual machine (VM) series in Sweden Central region and Dv3 VMs in United States West region, with up to 50 percent savings on one-year reserved pricing.

We’ve launched pricing pages for two new services: Microsoft Playwright Testing and HDInsight on AKS. Additionally, the Form Recognizer page has been rebranded to Azure AI Document Intelligence.

We’ve added four new services to the Azure Pricing Calculator, including Dev Box, Microsoft Playwright Testing, Azure AI Content Safety, and Microsoft Graph Data Connect.

Managed Lustre and the VM series’ Bpsv2, Bs v2, and Basv2 series now show their new generally available prices.

Azure Communication Services has revamped their pricing page and added pricing for several new services, including Advanced Messaging (in preview), Job routing, and number lookup.

Many services have exciting updates too, including Azure AI Speech (new Text Batch pricing offers), VMWare Solutions (five year reserved instance (RI) pricing added), Azure Notification Hubs (new availability zone feature), App Service (new Isolated v2 Memory Optimized SKUs), Microsoft Defender (Malware scanning add on offer), Azure Open AI (new AI models added), Netapp Files (cool tier added), Ubuntu Pro Linux (new license offer), Event Grid (added Standard (namespace) capabilities), Express Route (added the Traffic Collector offer), Cache for Redis (new Enterprise SKUs), Azure Arc (new Extended Security updates), Data lake Storage Gen2 (added GZRS and RA-GZRS Redundancies), SQL DB (a new Freemium offer), Microsoft Fabric (new “OneLake” storage offer), Databricks (new pre-purchase plan and new compute SKUs available for Photon jobs), API Management (new Standard v2 offers), Azure Monitor (new Commitment Tiers), Language Service (new Customer NER and Text Analytics for health Offers), and Cosmos DB (new multi-node storage options).

We’re committed to continually improving our pricing tools to make them more accessible and user-friendly for our customers. We hope these changes will help you estimate the costs for your Azure solutions more accurately. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions for future improvements. Thank you for choosing Azure as your cloud platform!

What’s new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what’s coming in Microsoft Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share 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 Cost Management Labs:

Update: Drill down in Cost analysis smart views—Now enabled by default in the public portal.  

Drill into your cost data with one click using Cost analysis smart views. You can drill into a row to view the full details, view related resources from the context menu (three dots), open the resource to manage it from the Go to menu, remove filters using the Customize command, and use the Back command to undo a change. You can enable this option from the Try preview menu.   

Currency selection in Cost analysis smart views View your non-USD charges in USD or switch between the currencies you have charges in to view the total cost for that currency only. To change currency, select Customize at the top of the view and select the currency you would like to apply. Currency selection is not applicable to those with only USD charges. Currency selection is enabled by default in Labs. If not enabled for you, enable currency selection from the Try preview menu. 

Streamlined Cost Management menuOrganize Cost Management tools into related sections for reporting, monitoring, optimization, and configuration settings. You can enable this option from the Try preview menu. 

Recommendations view View a summary of cost recommendations that help you optimize your Azure resources in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using the Try preview menu. 

Forecast in Cost analysis smart viewsShow your forecast cost for the period at the top of Cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try preview.

Group related resources in Cost analysis smart views Group related resources, like disks under virtual machines or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID. 

Charts in Cost analysis smart viewsView your daily or monthly cost over time in Cost analysis smart views. You can opt in using Try preview.

View cost for your resourcesThe cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that resource. 

Try Cost Management labs today.

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud

Here are new and updated offers you might be interested in for your cost optimization needs.

Generally available: Zone Redundant Storage for Azure Disks is now available in more regions.

Generally Available: Azure Dedicated Host – Resize.

Public preview: Announcing the new Azure Bastion Developer SKU.

The availability of Azure compute reservations exchanges extended until at least July 1st, 2024.

Azure Container Apps is now eligible for Azure savings plan for compute.

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates for cost management you might be interested in:

Savings plan scopes.

Buy an Azure savings plan.

Understand usage details fields.

Migrate from Azure Enterprise Reporting to Microsoft Cost Management APIs overview.

Transfer Azure product billing ownership to your Microsoft Partner Agreement (MPA).

Azure product transfer hub—Microsoft Cost Management.

Self-service exchanges and refunds for Azure Reservations.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!

What’s next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don’t forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We’re always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow Microsoft Cost Management on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Microsoft Cost Management.

Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team.
The post Microsoft Cost Management updates—November 2023 appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure