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A lot of people talk about retirement but far fewer people have the information and tools to plan for it properly. Just how much money you need to live comfortably once you stop working can be the million-dollar (or more!) question. Although there is no shortage of retirement calculators, many only provide a limited one-time analysis and require detailed personal information that may be sold to third parties. We developedThe Retirement Tracker with one idea: to empower individuals to take control over their retirement planning with tools to easily plan, track, and even socialize their early retirement.With The Retirement Tracker, people can aggregate their financial accounts—including savings, 401Ks, and stock portfolios—on one safe, convenient retirement app. The Retirement Tracker analyzes real-time data from these accounts to track net worth and automatically update retirement targets. A small part of this information, such as stock transactions, can even be shared among people’s self-created investment groups to encourage information sharing and friendly competition.Scaling up for early retirement on Google CloudWhen building The Retirement Tracker, we needed a technology partner that would enable us to securely and effectively scale while saving time and administrative costs. That’s why we started working withGoogle Cloud and partnering with theGoogle for Startups Cloud Program.Google Cloud gives us a highly secure-by-design infrastructure, valuable cloud credits to obtain products from an expansive technology platform, access to dedicated startup experts, and potential for joining the Google Cloud Marketplace.Even though we are a small team, we innovate quickly and easily onGoogle Workspace using Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. We also store and protect all sensitive company documents on Google Cloud and post our“Restimators” investment video series on YouTube. More recently, we’ve adoptedFirebase to scale and manage our infrastructure while accelerating the development of The Retirement Tracker.In just days, we implemented Plaid authentication and authorization protocols, enabling customers to quickly and securely connect details about their investment and savings accounts to The Retirement Tracker. This is a process that possibly would have taken us months if we had to manually build these security capabilities from scratch.Google Firebase now delivers a seamless customer experience by aggregating and displaying near real-time data from multiple financial accounts on a single dashboard. On the back end, Firebase automatically queries read-only tokens, securely accesses account balance changes, and encrypts sensitive data in the cloud. Firebase also makes it easy for customers to administer internal investment groups and selectively socialize information such as stock purchases and sales—without revealing transaction quantities or prices. Customers create these small invite-only groups to help family and friends improve their retirement portfolios with friendly competition and strategic crowdsourcing. Customers can also participate in additional investment discussions hosted by The Retirement Trackeron Discord.Building a sustainable financial futureSince we started using Google and Google Cloud solutions, everything is easier to build and scale. We constantly perfect the customer experience with new features and services, while leaving our IT and cloud infrastructure in the hands of Google Cloud experts. Demand for our app is growing fast as we prepare to move The Retirement Tracker out of beta in 2022. Moving forward, we’re excited to continue to grow in the Google for Startups Cloud Program, and with our dedicated Google team to improve the observability and reliability of The Retirement Tracker to handle the volume of users we’re anticipating in 2023 and beyond. To help us do so, we’re exploring additional Google Cloud solutions such asLooker,BigQuery, andCloud Spanner. These solutions will enable us to rapidly expand our services and offer customers a variety of new benefits from using The Retirement Tracker. Our participation in the Google for Startups Cloud Program has been instrumental to our success. The Startup Success Manager has worked with our team to identify programs we could apply to in order to strengthen our relationship even further. With Google Cloud, we’re making early retirement easier and more accessible on one convenient, highly secure mobile app. We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we drive innovation and financial inclusion by empowering people to plan, track, and socialize retirement planning that can be at once so important and so difficult for so many people. If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our pagehere to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

1. Juni 2022

da Agency

Snap Inc. adopts Google Cloud TPU for deep learning recommendation models

While many people still think of academic research when it comes to deep learning, Snap Inc. has been applying deep learning models to improve its recommendation engines on a daily basis. Using Google’s Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Snap has accelerated its pace of innovation and model improvement to enhance the user experience. Snap’s blog Training Large-Scale Recommendation Models with TPUs tells the story of how the Snap ad ranking team leveraged Google’s leading-edge TPUs to train deep learning models quickly and efficiently. But there’s a lot more to the story than the how, and that’s what we’re sharing here.Faster leads to betterSnap’s ad ranking team is charged with training the models that make sure the right ad is served to the right Snapchatter at the right time. With 300+ million users daily and millions of ads to rank, training models quickly and efficiently is a large part of a Snap ML engineer’s daily workload. It’s simple, really: the more models Snap’s engineers can train, the more likely they are to find the models that perform better—and the less it costs to do so. Better ad recommendation models translate to more relevant ads for users, driving greater engagement and improving conversion rates for advertisers.Over the past decade, there has been tremendous evolution in the hardware accelerators used to train large ML models like those Snap uses for ad ranking, from general-purpose multicore central processing units (CPUs) to graphics processing units (GPUs) to TPUs. TPUs are Google’s custom-developed application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) used to accelerate ML workloads. TPUs are designed from the ground up to minimize time to accuracy when training large models. Models that previously took weeks to train on other hardware platforms can now be trained in hours on TPUs—a product of Google’s leadership and experience in machine learning (dig into the technology in Snap’s blog).Benchmarking successSnap wanted to understand for itself what kind of improvements in training speed it might see using TPUs. So, the Snap team benchmarked model training using TPUs versus both GPUs and CPUs, and the results were impressive. GPUs underperformed TPUs in terms of both throughput and cost, with a reduction in throughput of 67 percent and an increase in costs of 52 percent when using GPUs. Similarly, TPU-based training drastically outperformed CPU-based training for Snap’s most common models. For example, when looking at their standard ad recommendation model, TPUs slashed processing costs by as much as 74 percent while increasing throughput by as much as 250 percent—all with the same level of accuracy.Because TPU embedding API is a native and optimized solution for embedding-based operations, it performs embedding-based computations and lookups more efficiently. This is particularly valuable to recommenders, which have additional requirements such as fast embedding lookups and high memory bandwidth.Benefits across the boardFor Snap’s ad ranking team, those improvements translate into tangible workflow advantages. It’s not unusual for Snap to have a month’s worth of data that includes all the logs of users who were shown particular ads and a record of whether they interacted with an ad or not. That means it has millions of data points to process, and Snap wants to model them as quickly as possible so it can make better recommendations going forward. It’s an iterative process, and the faster Snap can get the results from one experiment, the faster its engineers can spin up another with even better results—and they’d much prefer to do that in hours rather than days. Increased efficiency and velocity benefit Snapchatters, too. The better the models are, the more likely they are to correctly predict the likelihood that a given user will interact with a particular ad, improving the user experience and boosting engagement. Improved engagement leads to higher conversion rates and greater advertiser value—and given the volumes of ads and users Snap deals with, even a one percent improvement has real monetary impact.Working at the leading edgeSnap is working hard to improve its recommendation quality with the goal of delivering greater value to advertisers and a better experience for Snapchatters. That includes going all-in on leading-edge solutions like Google TPUs that allow its talented ML engineers to shine. Now that you know the whole story, see how Snap got there with the help of Google: Training Large-Scale Recommendation Models with TPUs.Related ArticleCloud TPU VMs are generally availableCloud TPU VMs with Ranking & Recommendation acceleration are generally available on Google Cloud. Customers will have direct access to TP…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

1. Juni 2022

da Agency

No more normal? No problem when you build supply chains with data and AI

What if, after all the upheavals and innovations of the past two years, we’re not headed for some new normal but instead an era of no more normal?“There are big, big challenges that need to be solved every single day by supply chain professionals,” Hans Thalbauer, Google Cloud’s managing director for supply chain and logistics, pointed out during our recent Supply Chain & Logistics Spotlight event. Among the issues Thalbauer ticked off were changes from the pandemic, consumer demand, labor shortages, the climate crisis, geopolitical instability, and energy shortages.“And the thing is, it’s not just a short term issue, we think it’s a long-term and systemic issue,” Thielbauer said. “There’s a big question out there, which is: How will global trade change? Is it really transforming and translating into something new? Will global trade continue to work as is?”Even experts at the White House are asking these very questions at this very time. The same day as the Supply Chain & Logistics Spotlight, the president’s Council of Economic Advisors released their annual report with an entire chapter dedicated to supply chain. In it, they noted that once-obscure, and ideally invisible, supply chains had “entered dinner table conversations.” And for good reason. “Because of outsourcing, offshoring, and insufficient investment in resilience, many supply chains have become complex and fragile,” the economists wrote. Nor are they alone in worrying about the future of logistics.Whatever the outcomes—more global or local, more automated or disintermediated, more agile or fragile—one of the likeliest results is a greater reliance on technology, and especially data, to help handle all the disruptions and interruptions on the horizon. Leaders in the field, including at The Home Depot, Paack, and Seara Foods, are discovering opportunities in a few key areas: connecting data from end to end; the power of platforms to access and share information; and the importance of predictive analytics to mitigate issues as, or even before, they arise.“We need to create visibility, flexibility, and innovation,” Thalbauer said. “Too often companies just focus on their orders, forecasts, and inventory, but typically they ignore the rest of the world. We need to bring in the public information, the traffic, weather, climate, and financial risks, connect that with the enterprise data, and we need to actually enable community data to create collaboration between business partners at every tier.”End-to-end dataCompanies have always sought visibility from the factory to the warehouse to the store and now the front door, and all the points in between. Both the challenge and necessity of seeing into all these is that as the data has grown, and our capabilities along with it, so has the complexity. It’s at a scale no humans can manage, which makes the importance not only of data but analytics and AI all the more essential.Home Depot has had a front row seat to these growing interdependencies—especially when it comes to serving competing yet complimentary clienteles. The pandemic presented its share of unexpected opportunities, as the combination of soaring home values, disposable income, and DIYers looking for (stay at) home projects led to runs on everything from lumber to sheds-turned-offices to garage doors. Empty shelves can lead to angry customers. And in this case, it wasn’t just homeowners and renters Home Depot was contending with, explained Chris Smith, vice president of IT Supply Chain at Home Depot, but also an increasingly important base of contractors and even large-scale developers. Both tended to need different materials, at different scales, and shopped in different ways, and these demands have only expanded during the pandemic.Whatever the future of logistics look like—more global or local, more automated or disintermediated, more agile or fragile—one of the likeliest results is a greater reliance on technology.“We really have what we call an omnichannel algorithm.” Chris Smith, VP of IT Supply Chain at The Home Depot. “It’s really marrying up the customer’s preferences with our understanding of capacity, assortment, inventory availability, taking all that together, and saying: How do we best meet the customer promise and do it with the most efficient use of our supply chain? So where do we fulfill it from, where is the inventory available, and how do we do that in a way that’s most economical for us while still meeting the promise of the customer,” Smith said. Paack, a last-mile delivery start-up serving the UK, Spain, France, Portugal, and Italy, is similarly pushing the envelope on fulfillment. The company focuses on combining a wealth of data—from drivers, customers, sensors, weather, and more—to ensure guaranteed delivery. So far, their success rate is approaching 98% of on-time delivery, with special scheduling tools to ensure customers are available to receive their packages.Using solutions like the Last Mile Fleet Solution from Google Maps Platform, Paack can manage drivers and customers in real-time.“The granularity of information we can collect in terms of which routes are being effectively followed by the driver’s route versus planned routes, the ability for them to change directions, because we might know locally of better ways to go, notifications from the customer as to their availability—these really allows us to build a better experience for everyone,” Olivier Colinet, chief product and technology officer for Paack, said. “We want first-time drivers to be the most productive drivers, and this first step allows us to do so.”Power of platformsPaack’s success exemplifies the power of building a strong platform for customers and workers, as well as tapping existing platforms, like Google Maps, to bolster your own.On the other side of the globe, the world’s largest meat supplier is seeking to empower thousands of ranchers and farmers with a platform of their own. Seara, a Brazil-based supplier of pork, chicken and eggs that is part of the globe-spanning JBS conglomerate, launched its SuperAgroTech platform in July 2021. Though in development for years, the program could hardly have come at a more critical time for the global food supply. The food industry was already coping with pandemic-related shortages and shutdowns, and then came the spillover effects from the war in Ukraine.“In general, the entire supply chain was affected and the operation had to adapt to new working conditions,” Thiago Acconcia, the director of innovation and strategy at Seara, said. “So in the farms, in the field, the same situations are repeated, and the creation of this digital online platform enters as a facilitator when it gives autonomy to the farmer, providing them with the data input and digital communication.” It’s a level of connectivity the farmers never had with Seara before—and vice versa.The technology has been deployed to more than 9,000 farms at launch. Through a range of IoT sensors, monitoring devices, and data inputs from farmers, operators and Seara data, teams can track a host of results. These include yields, animal health, profits, and even environmental and social impacts, which are becoming increasingly important features for consumers.The eventual goal is to reach 100% digital management of the farm.“So today, we are able to activate any producer in a few seconds, regardless of the location,” Acconcia said. With SuperAgroTech, the platform “doesn’t mind if it’s in the very south of the country, if it’s in the central part. It’s strengthening the relationships with our producers and also promoting a level of personalized attention they’ve never had.”Such platforms also provide a level of visibility and connectivity rarely enjoyed before, as well as a virtuous cycle between data collection, analysis, and insights put back into action on the platform. In an unpredictable world, this kind of integration is becoming essential.Stacks of containersPredictive AnalyticsAs a company’s digital strategies evolve through integrated data and robust platforms, one of the most exciting opportunities arises around predictive analytics.While seeing into the future remains science fiction (at least for now), AI, cloud, and even emerging quantum computing are providing robust ways to better reveal trends, make connections, and anticipate both opportunities and interruptions.Home Depot has looked at ways to quickly adapt its digital stores using consumer data and AI to create better experiences, as well as smoothing out supply chain issues. Home Depot’s Chris Smith pointed to a listing for an out-of-stock appliance or tool, for example, that will quickly offer other locations or items for sale as a convenient alternative.“We can apply machine learning in many different ways to make better, faster decisions, both in how we support moving inventory through our supply chain or how we understand available capacity to support our customers,” Smith said. “And with automation, from our distribution centers to our forecasting and replenishment systems, we’re going to continue to look at places where we can optimize and automate to make better decisions.”For Paack, predictions could come in the form of traffic or storms or even the likelihood that a repeat customer will be available or not, without having to prompt them.And at Seara, the role of data and analytics is not just vital to the business but the very vitality of the world. As climate, supply chains, global conflicts, migration, and other issues continue to constrain the food supply, anticipating issues could be the difference between salvaging a crop or not. “We started creating advanced analytics by means of AI tools to not only notify real-time problems but also to predict what’s going to happen in the near and long future,” Acconcia said. “We are talking about the world’s food, and SuperAgroTech has the role to feed the world, and to overcome these biggest challenges.”
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

1. Juni 2022

da Agency

Introducing granular instance sizing for Cloud Spanner, now run production workloads for as low as $40/month

Cloud Spanner is a relational database service that offers industry leading 99.999% availability, and near unlimited scale to handle even the most demanding of workloads. For these reasons, customers in various industries trust Spanner for their workloads with significant throughput requirements. We have heard from our customers that they would like to standardize on Spanner for all their workloads – big and small as they value the manageability, scale-insurance, and consistent performance that Spanner offers.Therefore, last year we launched granular instance sizing in preview so that you can run your workloads on Spanner starting at approximately $65/month. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of granular instance sizing. With granular instance sizing, at a much lower cost you can still get all of the Spanner benefits like transparent replication across zones and regions, high-availability, resilience to different types of failures, and the ability to scale up and down as needed without any downtime. And with Committed Use Discounts, the entry price for production workload further reduces to less than $40/month as you receive a 40% discount for a 3-year commitment. How granular instances workWith granular instance sizing, we are introducing a new unit for provisioning resources in Spanner – “Processing Units (PUs)” in addition to “Nodes”. One Spanner node is equal to 1,000 PUs; so you can start with a 100 PUs instance and provision in batches of 100 PUs, and get a proportional amount of compute and storage resources. All Spanner instances including the instances with less than 1,000 PUs or 1 node have the same availability SLA of 99.99% for regional instances and 99.999% for multi-regional instances. You can use this feature to cost-effectively run workloads of all sizes on Spanner and scale seamlessly as needed. With granular instance sizing you get proportional resources for proportional price, for example, a 100 PUs Spanner instance can support a maximum of 10 databases with up to ~410 GB of data storage. The limit for number of databases per Spanner instance scales proportionally with the provisioned compute capacity in the instance to a maximum of 100 databases per instance. Additionally, a Spanner instance can store unlimited data as long as sufficient compute capacity is provisioned in the instance as there is a limit of 4TB of data per 1,000 PUs (1 node).You can easily use granular instance sizing by selecting the instance configuration, Processing Units (PUs) as the unit of compute capacity and then providing their quantity. The summary on the right side of the console-page displays the per-hour compute cost based on the number of Processing Units; it also lists the maximum storage which is available for the instance.Making Spanner more accessible for every developer and workload Our mission is to democratize access to Spanner so that developers can easily get started with a familiar interface and low entry cost, and seamlessly scale their workloads without downtime. In addition to reducing the cost of entry for production workloads with granular instance sizing, we also recently introduced Committed Use Discounts (CUDs)for you. With CUDs, you make hourly spend based usage commitments for a year or longer for Spanner compute capacity and get discounted prices for it. Spend based commitment offers maximum flexibility as the discount is automatically applied on compute capacity of instances in any instance-configuration (regional or multi-regional) across projects. You can reduce your costs by purchasing either a one-year CUD that provides a 20% discount or a three-year CUD that provides a 40% discount. So if a three-year committed-use-discount of 40% is applied to a 100 PUs regional Spanner instance for example in us-central1, your monthly bill will be less than $40/month. We also announced the preview of the PostgreSQL interface for Spanner at Google Cloud Next ‘21. With this capability, you can build transformative applications with Spanner while using the familiar PostgreSQL dialect. You can leverage the core subset of capabilities that PostgreSQL offers with the scale, consistency and high-availability of Spanner. We will soon be announcing the General Availability of the PostgreSQL interface of Spanner. With granular instance sizing, CUDs and PostgreSQL interface for Spanner our goal is to address the popular demand from developers to make the best in class experience on Spanner more accessible and cost effective. For example, a two-person game development startup developed their first game on a 100 PUs Spanner instance that they plan to launch soon. This gaming startup aspires their gaming title to have the same success as PokemonGo (also built on Spanner) and when it does, they won”t have to worry about re-architecting their database because Spanner offers them seamless scaling to support their millions of users.Learn moreWe invite you to build your applications on Spanner and scale as your business grows. To get started with Spanner, create an instanceor try it out with a Spanner QwiklabRelated ArticleEliminate hotspots in Cloud BigtableLearn how hotspots can impact the performance of your Cloud Bigtable database. Debugging hot tablets can reduce P99 latencies and increas…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

1. Juni 2022

da Agency

How developers can benefit from the new 5G paradigm

5G is not an upgrade, it’s a new paradigm

Fueled by the rapid expansion of the cloud, 5G is much more than a network upgrade—it will help create a new application paradigm and pave the way for the emergence of a new breed of network-intelligent applications that enable developers to solve problems previously out of reach. These modern connected apps will use software-defined 5G technology to communicate and interact with the network, leveraging APIs to deliver a high-performance, optimized user experience.

For developers, 5G will unlock use cases across many sectors of industry and society. It will enable massive machine-type communications (MMTC) for billions of devices in complex pipeline monitoring scenarios. It will help solve for mission-critical use cases requiring ultra-reliable low latency (URLLC) such as smart cities, where AR and VR-enabled video devices help people improve safety and security. And it will leverage enhanced mobile broadband (EMBB) to allow thousands of sports fans in a packed stadium to enjoy the on-field action live on their devices, all at the same time.

Imagine the kind of applications you could create if you turned the network from a bottleneck into an asset. If you could manage and control networking functions through software instead of hardware and leverage the cloud everywhere. If you could deploy an enterprise solution globally with the ability to solve problems locally. To manage company assets that react in near real time to conditions as different as a coal mine in Indonesia and a busy highway in the Netherlands.

The 5G opportunity for developers

With this new breed of application, forward-thinking developers will be at the forefront of change. The opportunity lies in bringing together ubiquitous computing and 5G leading to a new class of applications.

Analysys Mason, a management consulting firm, forecasts cumulative six-year enterprise spending on business applications that require 5G totaling $20 billion USD over the 2022-2027 timeframe, growing at a 75 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

This is the future of the cloud, and it not only changes how we experience apps but the way they’re built. Developers can now take advantage of new 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) capabilities to bring computing closer to the problems they’re trying to solve. Network APIs will play a fundamental role in this change. Developers will be able to leverage network APIs as a control plane to make the best use of available infrastructure and the network. This will give developers more control over application performance and help improve the user experience—and help them move from a single use case model to a write-once, run anywhere ability to scale.

But developing applications for 5G is still an emerging area and accessing the opportunity is like trying to enter a building with no door. Anyone trying to enter confronts a host of complexities including a wide range of standards, multiple vendors and operators, and numerous network configurations.

How Microsoft enables the opportunity for developers

At Microsoft, we’re opening the door to the power of 5G to help developers take full advantage of the opportunity. We recognize the challenges developers face when forced to build on multiple networks or work within walled gardens that restrict data usage across outside platforms. Microsoft is committed to helping developers create on their own terms with a distributed, open-source environment and to build on a consistent, carrier-agnostic platform. And we are at the forefront of an effort to help standardize APIs, coordinating work across technology and communications providers.

Microsoft covers the full app development lifecycle with multi-cloud support, so solution components can be run on multiple clouds and on all Azure and Azure edge-based services from public and private MEC, Azure Stack HCI, Azure Sphere, and space. New networking capabilities will help developers optimize app performance cross-network (for example, private MEC to public MEC) and cross-layer, where information can be shared among layers for more efficient use of network resources and to achieve high adaptivity. Developers will have the freedom to choose their preferred development framework and language while taking advantage of familiar Microsoft tools such as GitHub, Power Platform, Azure DevOps, and more.

An Azure-based portal will give developers all the resources they need to build 5G apps, from installation to testing to management. Azure Arc will help developers build apps and services with flexibility to run across Azure, multiple clouds, data centers, and edge environments through a unified management platform built for multi-cloud and hybrid. And as the cloud everywhere enables ubiquitous connectivity, our focus on security remains with built-in zero trust for the security issues of the future.

Last, we know as a developer you are always considering how to push your applications to do more. By taking advantage of ubiquitous compute and 5G, you can run complex AI workloads with confidence thanks to ultra-reliable connectivity. Imagine taking these network-intelligent apps to market and the opportunities to expand your reach by uploading your apps to Azure Marketplace—where your work can be discovered by Microsoft’s wide network of enterprises, systems integrators (SIs), and operators.

Microsoft’s vision for 5G, brought to life with Ferrovial

We’re opening the door for developers to seize the 5G opportunity and recently shared a great real-world example at Build, showcasing a partnership between Microsoft and a Spanish multinational company using 5G to build smart highways.

As highways become more digitized to improve safety, Ferrovial has created a digital smart roads solution called AIVIA, where the road is “exposed as an API,” enabling infrastructure to automatically adjust in real-time to changing situations and information gathered from cameras and sensors placed along the highway. In this way, Ferrovial can create a digital twin of the highway in real-time to mirror road conditions.

In another scenario, Ferrovial built an AI solution for object recognition to identify safety hazards such as debris or broken-down vehicles. Ferrovial can offer these services to drivers or expose the information as APIs to connected vehicles or autonomous cars. For example, they can identify traffic congestion and automatically respond by updating digital highway signs.

Powering the intelligent video analysis is an accelerator called Edge Video Services (EVS), a Microsoft platform for developing video analytics solutions that can be deployed on Azure public MEC. It provides intelligent, real-time video analytics for the Ferrovial use case, including vehicle counting. EVS splits computation across private and public MEC or regular Azure regions and is optimized to work with 5G networks to make the best use of the underlying infrastructure.

The ultra-reliability and intelligence collected by these devices demonstrate how 5G can help developers achieve mission-critical workload results in highly complex, real-world scenarios. For Ferrovial, it’s literally solving safety problems at the roadside. And because Azure is virtually everywhere, it can be managed all through one unified and flexible platform.

Paving the way for developers to build modern connected apps at the edge with 5G

The new paradigm is here. Microsoft is committed to helping developers act on the 5G opportunity and build the next generation of network-intelligent applications on an open-source platform with proven building blocks for 5G app innovation.

We believe now is the ideal time for developers to benefit from the coming transformation and we’re proving our commitment to 5G by investing heavily in a platform designed to unlock the possibilities.

Our goal is to pave the way for you to innovate from the cloud to the edge to space—Microsoft offers developers a platform and ecosystem strong enough to support the vision, and the vast potential of 5G. The cloud is expanding into a ubiquitous, highly distributed fabric that’s bringing faster computing closer to the problems developers are trying to solve. And unlocking new scenarios only limited by our imaginations.

Learn more about how Microsoft is helping developers embrace 5G. Sign up for news and updates delivered to your inbox.
Quelle: Azure

1. Juni 2022

da Agency

Microsoft Cost Management updates – May 2022

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, 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. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Azure Cost Management and Billing is now Microsoft Cost Management.
Anomaly detection alerts and accuracy improvements.
Viewing cost for child resources in the cost analysis preview.
Reviewing cost for Azure Lab Services.
Help shape the future of Cost Management and Billing.
What's new in Cost Management Labs.
New ways to save money with Azure.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.
Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team.

Let's dig into the details.

Azure Cost Management and Billing is now Microsoft Cost Management

In October, we announced that Azure Cost Management started covering select Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Windows 365, and Power Platform seat-based offers as part of Microsoft Customer Agreement billing accounts. In January, we added Cost Management to the Microsoft 365 admin center to offer a lightweight cost analysis experience for Microsoft 365 billing admins. As more seat-based offers are added to Microsoft Customer Agreement, you’ll see Azure Cost Management and Billing expand to cover all your Microsoft Cloud costs. To that end, we are re-introducing Azure Cost Management and Billing as Microsoft Cost Management – an integrated tool to monitor, manage, and optimize your Microsoft Cloud costs.

Microsoft Cost Management will continue to focus on the same core tenets of driving transparency and visibility into your costs throughout the organization, increasing organizational accountability, and optimizing cloud efficiency across all your Microsoft Cloud services. And going forward, you can expect to see deeper integration across services and better tooling to support their diverse needs.

We’re excited to make this pivot towards a single, holistic solution for organizations to monitor, manage, and optimize their cloud costs under a single, more flexible billing account.

Anomaly detection alerts and accuracy improvements

In February, we announced the Cost Management anomaly detection preview for subscriptions. The feedback we’ve heard has been great. Keep it coming! This month, we have two exciting updates for anomaly detection.

First, the anomaly detection model has been significantly improved to predict and detect anomalies more accurately. Hopefully, you won’t even notice this silent improvement, but we’re excited to see the results and wanted to at least share that with you. Improving detection accuracy is critical and we’ll continue to invest in that going forward.

Second, you probably won’t be surprised that the top request we’ve heard has been that you want to get notified when an anomaly is detected. This month, we’ve fully rolled out anomaly detection alerts and are already seeing broad adoption. If you haven’t seen it yet, getting setup is easy:

Start on a subscription scope.
Open the Cost alerts page.
Select +Add > Add anomaly alert.
Add your desired recipients and submit.

It's that simple. All email recipients will be notified when a subscription cost anomaly has been detected.

Your anomaly alert email will include a summary of changes in resource group count and cost as well as the top resource group changes for the day compared to the previous 60 days with a direct link to the portal so you can review the cost and dig in further.

Coupled with scheduled emails and budget alerts, anomaly detection is just one more weapon in your arsenal when it comes to staying informed about cost changes across your subscriptions. Learn more about anomaly detection and start setting up anomaly alerts today.

Viewing cost for child resources in the cost analysis preview

Understanding what you're being charged for can be complicated. The best place to start for many people is the Resources view in the cost analysis preview, which shows resources that are incurring cost. But even a straightforward list of resources can be hard to follow when a single deployment includes multiple, related resources. To help summarize your resource costs, we're investigating ways to group related resources together. Today, I’ll cover how we’re changing cost analysis to show child resources.

Many Azure services use nested or child resources. SQL servers have databases, storage accounts have containers, and virtual networks have subnets, just to name a few. Most of these child resources are only used to configure services, but sometimes these resources have their own usage and charges. SQL databases are perhaps the most common example.

SQL databases are deployed as part of a SQL server instance, but usage is tracked at the database level. In addition to this, you may also have charges on the parent server, like for Microsoft Defender for SQL. To get the total cost for you SQL deployment in classic cost analysis, you need to find the server and each database and then manually sum up their total cost. As an example, you can see the aepool elastic pool at the top of the list below and the treyanalyticsengine server lower down on the first page. What you don’t see is another database even lower in the list. You can imagine how troubling this would be when you need the total cost of a large server instance with many databases.

Now, in the cost analysis preview, these child resources are grouped together under their parent resource, giving you a quick, at-a-glance view of your deployment and its total cost. Using the same subscription, you can now see all three charges grouped together under the server, offering a nice one-line summary for your total server costs.

For those paying close attention, you may also notice the change in row count. Classic cost analysis shows 53 rows where every resource is broken out on its own and the cost analysis preview only shows 25 rows. This comes down to the different resources that are being grouped together, making it easier than ever to get that at-a-glance summary of your costs.

In addition to SQL servers, you’ll also see other services with child resources, like App Service, Synapse, VNet gateways, and more. Each of these will similarly be shown grouped together in the cost analysis preview.

You can see this today in the cost analysis preview. Try it out and let us know what you’d like to see next.

Reviewing cost for Azure Lab Services

Azure Lab Services is an offering that helps easily set up and provide on-demand access to preconfigured VMs to support your scenarios. Teach a class, train professionals, run a hackathon or a hands-on lab, and more. Simply define your needs and the service will roll the lab out to your audience. Users access all their lab VMs from a single place. If you’re using Lab Services, you might be interested in some new improvements around how you review and monitor your costs. Specifically, here’s what you’ll see after the latest update:

Charges are broken down by lab VM, not the lab plan.
Resources are tagged with lab VM and lab plan, which you can use to filter or group by in classic cost analysis.
You can set custom tags on labs to organize and analyze cost.

Learn more about Cost management guide for Azure Lab Services.

Help shape the future of Cost Management and Billing

Do you report on or manage cost for your team or organization? We're exploring new alert capabilities to improve your cost monitoring experience and would love to get your feedback in a brief, 10-minute survey.

Please share this with others within your organization – we’re looking for as much feedback as we can get!

Take the survey.

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure 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:

New: Configuration renamed to “Manage subscription” – Now available in the public portal
“Configuration” is a central hub for all settings you can use to monitor, manage, and optimize costs. To improve discoverability and ease of access, we tested a few variations of the name. Results are in and we’ve found that “Manage subscription” (or appropriate name for your scope) leads to more engagement. Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see change in the central configuration management experience.
New: Product column experiment in the cost analysis preview
We’re testing new columns in the Resources and Services views in the cost analysis preview for Microsoft Customer Agreement. You may see a single Product column instead of the Service, Tier, and Meter columns. Please leave feedback to let us know which you prefer.
New: Group related resources in the cost analysis preview
Group related resources, like disks under VMs or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “costanalysis-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID. Wait 24 hours for tags to be available in usage and your resources will be grouped. Leave feedback to let us know how we can improve this experience further for you.
Update: Anomaly detection alerts – Now available in the public portal
Subscribe to automatic email alerts when a new anomaly has been detected. Anomaly detection is only available for subscriptions in the cost analysis preview. You can opt into this preview using Try Preview and then configure anomaly alerts from the Alerts page.
Update: Grouping SQL databases and elastic pools – Now available in the public portal
Get an at-a-glance view of your total SQL costs by grouping SQL databases and elastic pools under their parent server in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Charts in the cost analysis preview
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Cost Management tutorials
Whether you’re just getting started or looking to learn more about specific features, tutorials are now a click away from the Cost Management overview in Cost Management Labs.
View cost for your resources
The 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 particular resource.
Change scope from the menu
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.

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

New ways to save money with Azure

Here are five new and updated offers you might be interested in:

Generally available: Scale-down mode in AKS.
Generally available: Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server higher burstable compute.
Generally available: Windows Server guest licensing offer for Azure Stack HCI.
Generally available: Azure Archive Storage now available in Switzerland North.
Preview: Azure Virtual Machines DCsv3 in Australia, Japan, US, and Asia.

New videos and learning opportunities

Here are a couple new videos you might be interested in:

Azure Cost Management for ISVs (26 minutes).
Cost Savings with Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server (8 minutes).

Follow the Azure Cost Management and Billing YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Azure Cost Management and Billing.

Documentation updates

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

New: Troubleshoot common Cost Management errors.
Added anomaly detection to Identify anomalies and unexpected changes in cost.
Updated AWS configuration steps in Set up AWS integration.
Added note about how daily exports will have two runs at the beginning of the month in Create and manage exported data.

Want to keep an eye on all of the 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.

Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We're looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you'll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Azure Cost Management and Billing team:

Join our team.

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management and Billing updates. 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. 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 Azure Cost Management and Billing.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management and Billing team. Stay safe and stay healthy.
Quelle: Azure