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Designing your cloud strategy to maximize value on Azure

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be challenging to adjust your business strategies to maintain productive operations and processes. You need new ways to increase efficiencies, optimize costs, and adopt new technologies at a faster rate. Your digital transformation is more critical than ever in these trying times.

Microsoft stands with you, our customers, moving quickly to adapt to the ongoing pace of global change. We believe technology will enable your success and allow you to adapt to and meet these challenges. Our goal is to provide a clear path for you to achieve benefits from the cloud, meeting your distinct business, security, and cost management requirements. We continue to invest in customer-proven, comprehensive guidance and learning resources, enabling you to successfully adopt Microsoft Azure and create ongoing cloud value across your organization.

At Microsoft Ignite, we are focused on three areas to help you:

Successfully achieve more value from the cloud.
Adapt your cloud journey to meet your needs.
Build expertise to confidently use Azure.

Successfully achieve more value from the cloud

Microsoft’s technical guidance is based on industry best practices and the successful cloud adoption experiences of our customers and you can use this proven guidance to enable your entire organization to achieve cloud value. Onboard stakeholders, prove your organization’s cloud value, and reach your business goals with resources to guide your cloud journey—develop and deploy well-architected workloads and execute the operations of your company’s cloud adoption strategy.

Plan your cloud journey with a clear path forward using the cross-team, organization-wide “people, process, and technology” approach of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. This technical guidance and industry best practices offers business process-centric templates, assessments, and customer-tested documentation across your cloud adoption journey.
Configure and optimize your Azure environment for scale, security, governance, networking, and identity to enable application migrations and greenfield development with Azure landing zones. Modular Azure landing zones are based on common cloud design areas—enabling you to establish guardrails and policies for your environment’s compliant security and governance.
Deploy and optimize your workloads and implement best practices across your entire cloud estate. The newly released Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework provides technical guidance specifically at the workload level across five pillars; cost optimization, security, reliability, performance efficiency and operational excellence. You can use Azure Advisor to evaluate resources deployed on Azure, offering you personalized, actionable guidance to continually optimize your Azure resources. And starting at Microsoft Ignite, Azure Advisor is previewing Advisor score where you will be able to understand and improve your current optimization posture according to Azure best practices with a prioritized list of the most impactful recommendations for your deployments, and report on your optimization progress over time.
Manage costs and unlock your cloud value while making use of cloud tools like Azure Cost Management + Billing that analyzes, manages, and optimizes your cloud spend. We recently announced that you can now manage and analyze both your Azure and AWS spend from a single location with the Azure Cost Management + Billing connector for AWS. You can also enjoy favorable licensing terms and save with Azure Hybrid Benefit, Azure Spot Virtual Machines and Azure Dev/Test pricing or pay in advance to receive deep discounts with Azure Reservations. Also new in preview, Azure Hybrid Benefit features are now being extended to Red Hat and SUSE Linux customers, for easier cloud migration, more integrated Azure user experience, and greater Linux subscription portability.
Adopt agile software development methods and securely ship code, faster. With remote work being the norm in many countries, you must change how you support developers with processes to increase productivity. Developers write code, keep systems running, and deliver continuous value to customers. Your teams can collaborate openly, implementing Azure DevOps across your organization, using GitHub, with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, and the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. Azure services are a key part of Microsoft’s support for building resilience in your development teams and our commitment to keeping you up to date extends through our entire DevOps product line which includes the imminent availability Azure DevOps Server 2020.

Adapt your cloud journey to meet your needs.

Every organization has unique business challenges during the journey to cloud adoption. You may lack the necessary expertise needed to accelerate digital transformation, or you might encounter difficulties along the way. Microsoft Partners and programs provide access to a variety of resources and Azure technical expertise to meet your unique business, industry, and security requirements. Together, we will enable you to adopt the cloud at your pace—tailored to your needs.

Accelerate with Azure advanced specialized partners and Azure expert managed service providers who offer expert technical assistance, advice, and support to enable success on Azure. You can find partners with expertise in all phases of the cloud adoption lifecycle, that follow the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure to accelerate your cloud journey.
Get technical assistance with the Azure Migration Program for proactive guidance and expert help at each stage of the journey to successfully migrate infrastructure, databases, and application workloads with confidence. You can access free migration tools, step-by-step technical guidance, training, and help in finding a migration partner.
Move efficiently with FastTrack for Azure (for qualifying projects) for rapid, effective design and deployment of cloud solutions, with tailored guidance from Azure engineers, proven best practices, and architectural guidance.
Rely on Microsoft Consulting Services to help you adopt technology solutions across digital strategy, data insight, sales, and more. You can count on Microsoft expertise to guide your digital transformation. We will be with you—every step of the way.
Work with Microsoft account teams and Azure technical specialists to guide and support your cloud journey—from strategy, planning, solution design and readiness, to execution.

Build Azure expertise to confidently use Azure

Workforce skilling and technical knowledge building are critical factors for a successful cloud adoption effort, according to the World Economic Forum.1

Studies demonstrate that “more than half (54 percent) of all employees will require significant reskilling by 2022.

 

According to Gartner, “even before there was a coronavirus pandemic, boards ranked digital/technology disruption as their top business priority for 2020—followed by obtaining the talent needed to execute tech transformation.”2 In the current COVID-19 crisis, your digital transformation is no longer an initiative, but a business imperative—along with aligning skilling to drive your modernization effort: 

 

COVID-19 has escalated digital initiatives into digital imperatives, creating urgent pressure on HR leaders to work with their CEO, CFO and CIO to rethink skills needs as business models change at light speed.

 

With increased remote work and learning unfolding across the globe during the COVID-19 crisis, we continue to invest in Microsoft’s learning platforms, meeting your demand for digital literacies now, and the pace of future digital technology needs.

At Microsoft, we are moving in-person training to virtual instructor-led training, delivering a variety of free digital learning experiences. We want to enable everyone to have the right skills and expertise to successfully use Azure, with confidence.

Continuously build your skills on Microsoft Learn with free, on-demand, self-paced learning paths, to skill up at any level, and certify your skills. Get hands-on experience in a sandbox environment and watch original live and pre-recorded technical content from Microsoft and the Learn TV community. Begin your cloud journey with the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure learning path and learn how to build great solutions with the Azure Well-Architected Framework learning path.
Attend free Azure Virtual Training Days to learn from Microsoft experts in an instructor-led one-day virtual event, with presentations, demonstrations, discussions, and hands-on workshops and explore the full Microsoft event catalogue.
Engage with Microsoft learning partners for training solutions to suit your learning needs—blended learning, in-person, and online learning to prepare for certification. At Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing in preview an easier way to schedule instructor-led training with our trusted Learning Partners. On Microsoft Learn, search for courses by location and time, filter for virtual deliveries, and complete the scheduling process with an integrated checkout process directly on the partner website.
Validate your skills with Microsoft Certifications and demonstrate your achievements with industry-recognized Microsoft certifications.

Working with our partners, we are ensuring, together, that you and people across the globe can reach their learning goals, and become certified in Microsoft technologies, while staying safe at home. Learn more about our updated guidelines for Microsoft Training and Certification.

You can find more information and comprehensive technical resources to support all these initiatives to enable you with a clear path forward to successfully achieve more cloud value with Azure.

 

1 World Economic Forum: The Future of Jobs Report, 2018

2 Lack of Skills Threatens Digital Transformation, Lack of Skills Threatens Digital Transformation, July 2020

Azure. Invent with purpose.
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Run your core applications on Azure

This week at Microsoft Ignite, we discussed how a growing number of customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) are running their mission- and business-critical applications on Microsoft Azure.

Across our customers, the common thread that ties mission and business-critical systems together is that they support core business processes. Examples include enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, but also analytics, e-commerce systems, systems of record like financial management, procurement, and payment, and more. Now more than ever, systems that support digitized customer experiences are also critical to business success.

Organizations like JetBlue rely on Azure for traditional business-critical applications like their e-commerce site, and for predictive models to improve the overall customer experience.
Companies like Allscripts deliver critical healthcare-related applications using open source software on Azure.
Manulife chose Azure to migrate and modernize its business-critical applications to improve agility, scalability, risk management, and cost-efficiency while accelerating the support of new business models.
Walgreens Boots Alliance runs SAP HANA on Azure, relying on virtual machines (VMs) with 12 TB of memory and 28 TB of storage to run their more than 100 TB scale-out SAP landscape.

Running your business on Azure can help you be future-ready and increase business resiliency, especially during uncertain times. For example, when cases of COVID-19 began to rise in the United States in February 2020, Adaptive Biotechnologies turned their immune medicine platform to map the immune response to COVID-19 to make this information publicly available to researchers around the world developing diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines.

Within weeks, Adaptive processed 500 million sequences, using 29 compute-years to identify immune signatures of infection. As a result, Adaptive demonstrated that the T cells signal could be an optimal marker to assess exposure to the COVID-19 virus at certain time points during and post-infection, enabling the company to start pursuing an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA for the world’s first T cell-based diagnostic for any disease.

“Azure’s cloud computing resources and machine learning capabilities are powering our Immune Medicine Platform, enabling us to rapidly map our immune cell receptors to diseases like COVID-19 and Lyme Disease, and fueling the next generation of diagnostics.” – Mark Adams, Chief Technical Officer, Adaptive Biotechnologies

Challenges and opportunities

Earlier in 2020, we had the pleasure of being joined by Dave Bartoletti, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, Ramki Ramaswamy, Vice President IT, Technology and Integrations at JetBlue, and Prakash Iyer, Senior Vice President, Software Architecture & Strategy at Trimble Inc. in a cloud migration webinar series. We discussed the top challenges that IT organizations face when managing current mission-critical infrastructures. Security issues, high costs, and the difficulties IT professionals face when they need to update their environments are top of mind.

 
Conversely, when we looked at the top benefits that companies have realized by migrating their mission-critical workloads to the cloud, it’s clear that the move to the cloud has been helpful in addressing many of these challenges. The top benefits they cited were:

Improved security and compliance.
Improved performance and latency of mission-critical systems.
Improved agility (including for modernizing existing systems, developing new capabilities)
Reduced overall IT costs.
Faster infrastructure implementation time.

That’s why we continue to deliver more across all these dimensions, and earlier at Microsoft Ignite, we announced the preview of several new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities to better meet our stakeholders’ needs.

New core IaaS capabilities to increase availability, security, scalability, and performance of your business-critical applications on Azure

We recently announced several new capabilities to meet the requirements of your business-critical workloads.

Azure Dedicated Hosts: More control, flexibility, and choice

Azure customers are now able to schedule platform maintenance operations on Dedicated Hosts and isolated virtual machines (VMs), and they can control when guest OS image updates on Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets can be rolled out. Azure Dedicated Hosts now support Virtual Machine Scale Sets, and our customers can also simplify the deployment of Azure Virtual Machines in Dedicated Hosts by letting the platform select the host group to which the VM will be deployed. All these new capabilities are now in preview. Finally, in the very near future, our customers will be able to use our Fsv2 series of VMs to run compute-intensive workloads on Azure Dedicated Hosts featuring Intel Cascade Lake processors for greater performance.

Higher performance general-purpose and memory-optimized virtual machines

Microsoft has also made recently available new Azure Virtual Machines, featuring Intel Cascade Lake processors, for general purpose and memory-intensive workloads. As a result, Azure now offers a new category of VMs that lowers the price of entry since it does not include a local temporary disk. These VM series provide up to 20 percent greater CPU performance compared to the prior generation.

New Disk Storage and networking capabilities enhance security, performance, and availability

New Azure Disk Storage updates, now generally available, include Azure Private Link integration, which enables secure import and export of data over a private virtual network for enhanced security, and support for 512E on Azure Ultra Disks to enable migration of legacy workloads, like older versions of Oracle® DB, to the cloud. Read the Azure Community post for additional details.

Finally, our customers can now use Azure Load Balancer with their globally distributed workloads, using cross-region load balancing (in preview) to improve their applications’ performance and availability.

New Linux tools and cost-effective licensing models help manage Linux infrastructure and workloads on Azure

Azure Hybrid Benefit now includes Linux, and together with Azure Image Builder provides new tools and cost-effective licensing models for you to migrate, operate and manage your Linux infrastructure and workloads on Azure.

Azure Hybrid Benefit now enables simpler and more cost-effective Linux subscription portability. This new capability is available in preview and gives customers the ability to convert existing pay-as-you-go instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Azure to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, using existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions. Customers can capitalize on existing investments in Red Hat and SUSE by bringing existing subscriptions to Azure, preserve any special pricing discounts, and avoid double-billing for any on-premises subscription that has transitioned to the cloud.

Azure Image Builder, generally available by Q4, 2020, is a free image building service that streamlines the creation, update, patching, management, and operation of Linux and Windows images. Azure Image Builder will deploy resources into your subscription when used; you pay only for the VMs and associated storage and networking resources consumed when running your image building pipeline.

Next steps and additional resources

As companies increase their tech intensity, the range of business-critical applications continues to expand. Our ecosystem-based approach gives us the opportunity to build a broad range of solutions with and for our customers and partners alike. We are energized by the possibilities ahead of us and what we can accomplish together.

To learn more about our offerings, visit our business-critical applications site to access reference architectures, ISV solutions, and product capabilities. You can also experience the latest capabilities on Azure by watching our training videos.

Learn more about scheduled maintenance for host updates.
Learn more about scheduled maintenance with scale sets.
Read the Azure Community post regarding the most recent Disk Storage updates.
Read the maintenance control feature documentation.
Request access to the Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets on Dedicated Hosts preview.
Review your options with Azure Hybrid Benefit – Linux subscription portability (preview).

Azure. Invent with purpose.

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Unleash the full potential of your developer teams and increase Developer Velocity

In today’s environment, software development excellence is becoming even more critical for business success. Over the past few months, we’ve seen organizations realize that their future success depends on taking advantage of technology to rethink business models, innovate, and improve processes to better serve employees and customers. The reality is many companies across different industries are becoming software companies. According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company: Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance, there are currently over 20 million software engineers worldwide, and over 50 percent of these developers are working at organizations outside of the tech industry.

The most successful organizations understand that transforming into software companies cannot be achieved solely through the introduction of new technologies; rather, it requires a deep focus on supporting the people who will catalyze change and create the new value they seek.

In this same study, McKinsey concluded that business leaders need to empower the people behind software development – the developers – to unlock their productivity and innovation, in what the industry has started referring to as Developer Velocity.

What is Developer Velocity?

Developer Velocity means driving business performance through software development by empowering developers, creating the right environment for them to innovate, and removing points of friction.

Developer Velocity isn’t just about increasing speed of software delivery but it’s also about unleashing developer ingenuity – turning developer teams’ ideas into software that supports the needs of your customers and the goals of your business.

Unleashing the potential and talent of developer teams, the day-to-day developer experience, and keeping software talent happy and motivated drive software success.

We often hear from software leaders that the set of potential levers to improve performance are so large and diverse – that it is often unclear how to prioritize or where to start.

To lead to a precise understanding of what it takes for a company to increase Developer Velocity, in this same study, McKinsey conducted a comprehensive review of software development practices included technology, working practices, and organizational enablement and converged on a single holistic metric – “Developer Velocity Index” or the DVI score.  The Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score takes into account 46 different drivers across 13 capability areas (exhibit).

Some of the key striking findings from this study point out that companies with a higher Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score outperform revenue growth up to five times that of their competitors and they score 55 percent higher on innovation. Those organizations also surpass their peers on other key business performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, brand perception, and talent.

The study also concluded that from all the different drivers across the different dimensions, the top four drivers of Developer Velocity include best-in-class tools, product management capabilities, culture, and talent management.  Lastly, beyond the foundations, public cloud adoption is a key driver of business performance for non-software companies, open source adoption is the biggest differentiator for top performers, and companies adopting low-code platforms score 33 percent higher on innovation.

Developers have always been true catalysts of digital transformation, innovation, and business performance. This data just validates how crucial it is for companies to invest in their development teams. To learn more about Developer Velocity study and get detailed findings and insights for retail, manufacturing and finance industries, watch this 5-episode webinar series: Improve Business Performance Through Developer Velocity.

How do I calculate the Developer Velocity Index Score (DVI) for my organization?

Last May we launched our Developer Velocity Assessment Tool. You can use this tool to discover where your organization is on the Developer Velocity maturity scale and benchmark your Developer Velocity Index (DVI) relative to your peers. Then, get actionable guidance for how to drive better business outcomes for your organization.

This online assessment takes 15-30 mins to complete and was built to help you and your organization identify gaps across three key domains: technology, working practices and organizational enablement. The assessment provides personalized reports showing a detailed outline for how your organization can improve over time to meet the growing needs of your developers and software strategy.

This week we shipped additional features into our assessment tool to allow our customers to get an even clearer view of their Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score. These additions include new charts, reports and a detailed breakdown of their DVI scores by category, sub-category, and individual metric level.

We are very excited to see how organizations take advantage of this assessment to help identify specific drivers that can help drive better business outcomes. Get started with the Developer Velocity Assessment tool to calculate the DVI score for your organization and learn how you can boost your business performance.

Scale your DevOps practices to increase Developer Velocity

Although many organizations are adopting DevOps, implementing effective practices at enterprise-scale can be difficult.  At Microsoft Ignite, we are also excited the announce the new Enterprise DevOps Report 2020–2021, a Microsoft and Sogeti research study of more than 250 cloud and DevOps implementations. This report provides a comprehensive review on how to scale your DevOps practices to improve business metrics, customer satisfaction, and increase Developer Velocity – creating the right environment for developers to innovate. You can also use the study’s recommendations as a blueprint for your successful adoption of enterprise DevOps.

In this report, you’ll learn about:

• Six key areas of enterprise IT, including governance, that face significant challenges as part of an enterprise DevOps transformation.

• Common ideologies and patterns followed by top performing adopters to address the challenges of enterprise DevOps.

• Strategies implemented by successful enterprises to build continuous governance, security, quality, and compliance into their engineering processes.

• DevOps best practices to enable your organization to support distributed teams and remote work.

 

Empower your developer teams and boost your business performance

Developer Velocity helps you unleash the full potential of your developer teams, drive innovation, and boost business performance. Today more than ever investing in software excellence and building a culture that empowers developer teams will continue to be critical for every organization’s success.

Over the past few months we’ve seen many developers around the world building amazing customer applications and internal back to work solutions while working remotely. While things get back to normal, Microsoft is pleased to play a small part in supporting developers around the world and making remote development possible. To help developers build productively, collaborate securely, and scale innovation – no matter where they are – Microsoft offers the world’s most comprehensive developer toolkit with Visual Studio, GitHub, Microsoft Azure and Power Apps. It’s this set of capabilities that enables Developer Velocity within every organization.  You can learn more about our latest innovation on Visual Studio, GitHub, Azure, and Power Apps shared at Microsoft Ignite. Also don’t miss our Microsoft Ignite keynotes where you can learn more about Developer Velocity and Microsoft’s most comprehensive developer toolkit and platform:

• Satya Nadella: Building digital resilience

• Julia White: Invent with Purpose on Azure

• Scott Hanselman: App Development in Azure

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Mixed Reality Momentum: HoloLens 2 expands globally and new Azure service launches

Mixed reality blends our physical and digital worlds to extend computing beyond the screen and fundamentally change how we work, learn, and play. Mixed Reality has evolved from promising technology to a thriving ecosystem of solutions that are having significant and quantifiable impact today. It plays a significant role in how we manufacture goods, how we learn and retain information, and how we care for ourselves and others. 

Our mixed reality services, which leverage the scalability, reliability, and security of Azure, coupled with our industry leading HoloLens 2 headset, serve as the backbone of our comprehensive mixed reality platform—growing and expanding in several ways at Microsoft Iginte: 

HoloLens 2 is now shipping to new markets

Today, we are announcing that HoloLens 2 is now available in Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. HoloLens 2 will be available in South Korea later this fall. 

Proven return on investment (ROI) with Microsoft Azure and HoloLens 2

Thousands of leading companies in industries such as manufacturing, construction, healthcare, retail, and education are using HoloLens 2 and our Azure mixed reality services to save significant touch labor, reduce errors, improve learning and retention, and boost employee and customer satisfaction:

Lockheed Martin/NASA, United States

Leveraging a solution from mixed reality partner Scope AR, Lockheed Martin is is using HoloLens 2 to build the Orion spacecraft, which will take astronauts back to the moon. The benefits that they have realized using mixed reality are significant:

Mixed reality solutions with the HoloLens 2 has dramatically reduced touch touch labor—what used to require an eight hour shift can now be completed in just 45 minutes.
With the HoloLens, Lockheed Martin has reported zero errors in two plus years with the Orion spacecraft.
The Orion spacecraft has over 57,000 fasteners; Lockheed Martin is saving $38 per fastener installation.

Watch the following video to see how Lockheed Martin is using HoloLens 2 to send astronauts to the moon and beyond:

 

Medivis, United States

Medivis, a Microsoft mixed reality partner is using their SurgicalAR solution for 3D holographic visualizations (versus CT scans) to enable surgeons to perform routine procedures in an inherently superior way. To date, Medivis has:

Successfully completed more than 200 surgeries with the HoloLens.
Decreased radiation exposure to patients. On average, patients of SurgicalAR averaged 1 CT scan compared to 10 CT scans with traditional 2D surgical solutions.
Demonstrated the potential to place catheters with 1mm accuracy (versus the 2.2 cm accuracy that is often typical today).

Watch how Medivis is using HoloLens 2 for holographic guided surgery. 

Case Western Reserve University, United States

Case Western Reserve University is running a remote learning program using their HoloAnatomy solution and HoloLens 2 to help students more effectively learn and retain knowledge:  

Students who used HoloAnatomy and HoloLens 2 experienced a 50 percent improvement in grades versus students who used a textbook.
Students who used HoloAnatomy and HoloLens 2 retained 120 percent more knowledge over 12 months of learning versus students who did not have access to HoloAnatomy and HoloLens 2.

Watch how Case Western Reserve is teaching remote anatomy classes and improving learning outcomes.   

Azure Mixed Reality Services expands to add Azure Objects Anchors

Our Azure mixed reality services are a core pillar of our mixed reality platform. These mixed reality services overcome many of the technical challenges in building mixed reality applications and simplify cross platform mixed reality development. Today, we are announcing a preview of our latest mixed reality service, Azure Object Anchors:

In many of today’s mixed reality scenarios, there is a need to place physical markers such as QR codes to identify an object and manually align 3D and holographic content to that object. Azure Object Anchors enables mixed reality developers to build applications that automatically align 3D content to real-word objects—saving significant touch labor, reducing alignment errors, and improving user experience.

Toyota Motor Corporation is an early preview customer using Azure Object Anchors to build a task guidance application for their technicians: 

“Azure Object Anchors enables our technicians to service vehicles more quickly and accurately thanks to markerless and dynamic 3D model alignment. It has removed our need for QR codes and eliminated the risk of error from manual model alignment, thus making our maintenance procedures more efficient.”—Koichi Kayano, Program Manager Technical Service Division at Toyota

To learn more about Azure Object Anchors, see our technical blog post or sign up if you are interested in participating in the private preview.  

Microsoft Azure Kinect is going commercial, scales 3D time-of-flight technology through partners

Azure Kinect DK is our cutting-edge spatial computing developer kit that contains sophisticated computer vision and speech models, advanced AI sensors, and a range of powerful SDKs that can be connected to Azure cognitive services. Today, we are announcing the collaborations with two leading companies—Analog Devices and SICK AG—who will build devices enabled with the 3D Time of Flight depth technology that is currently only available via Azure Kinect:

Analog Devices will incorporate Microsoft’s Time of Flight technology in the design, manufacture and sale of depth sensor silicon alongside a commercial depth camera module aimed at consumer electronics, automotive cabins and industrial logistic use-cases. For more information, visit Analog’s website.
SICK AG, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of intelligent sensors and sensor solutions for industrial applications, will incorporate Microsoft’s Time of Flight technology to bring state-of-the-art technologies to SICK’s 3D Time of Flight Visionary-T camera product line, and make it even smarter. For more information, contact your local SICK subsidiary.

We are excited about the momentum we are seeing in mixed reality and the strong ROI that our customers are achieving with HoloLens 2 and our Azure mixed reality services. Today’s announcements will help to scale the breadth and impact of our mixed reality platform, which continues to increase the productivity of the firstline work force and transform how we live, work and play.
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How Azure IoT enables business resilience

Businesses around the world have been harnessing the Internet of Things (IoT) to reduce operational expenses, power breakthrough customer experiences, and create new revenue streams. Now, faced with the unprecedented challenges of our times, businesses are also harnessing IoT to create safer workplaces as employees return to work, reduce expenses to weather downturns, reduce environmental impact and help with sustainability goals, and remain competitive as IoT becomes a standard way of operating a business.

Microsoft is a recognized leader in IoT. Our mission is to simplify IoT and make it available to every organization on the planet, regardless of size or technical capability. And we haven’t stopped there; we simplified IoT with no code and low code offerings like Azure IoT Central that customers and partners can use without any cloud solutions development skills.

At Microsoft, we deeply understand the value of embracing tech intensity, of using data and AI to address challenges and identify opportunities. Azure IoT plays a leading role in this transformation with an edge and cloud methodology that instills confidence in organizations’ ability to act on the insights presented to them.

Azure IoT is uniquely positioned as a fully open, flexible platform that spans industry applications and simplifies the development process. This week at Microsoft Ignite, we shared the latest from Azure IoT and how partners and customers are using these innovations in amazing ways.

RXR Realty builds on Azure IoT to increase safety

When faced with the question of what is needed to enable a safer, sustainable return to the workplace, New York-based RXR Realty looked at how they could quickly pivot the work they were doing around smart buildings to support a holistic end-to-end approach that spans an employee’s entire day—from waking up, to entering the office building and having a productive day, to going home. The result was the RxWell program, a connected environment solution built on Azure IoT, which was developed and deployed in under six months through partnership with Microsoft, McKinsey, and Infosys.

RXR Realty knew that for every one office worker that returns to the office, it drives five service jobs, such as food service and childcare providers, therefore helping stimulate the local economy. Azure technology allowed them to quickly build an edge-to-cloud solution that merges physical and digital assets, giving office workers the tools and peace of mind to navigate the workplace in safety. This technology helps manage employee rotations and enable touch-free building and elevator access.

Additionally, real-time analytics deliver insights into occupant density, air quality, humidity, and population health, enabling businesses and their workers to make informed decisions and navigate office buildings safely and confidently. Read the RXR Realty customer story and watch the Microsoft Mechanics—How We Built It video featuring RXR Realty to get a demo-rich, technical breakdown of the RxWell solution.

GE Aviation digitally models and observes aircrafts with Azure Digital Twins

As connected solutions continue to grow, companies are looking for ways to create richer models of entire connected business environments. Companies are currently able to use Azure Digital Twins to design and build sophisticated digital replicas of assets, environments, and business systems that can be used across connected environments including, smart buildings, utilities, factories, farms, railways, and entire cities.

Many of our customers and partners are already benefiting from Azure Digital Twins. Using Azure Digital Twins, GE Aviation can model digital representations of individual aircrafts and their components to track asset performance, monitor component usage, and view maintenance history. In a world where it’s not always possible to send someone on site, these insights allow GE Aviation to observe the plane inside and out and mitigate issues before they occur—helping get essential supplies and goods to our doors.

"Azure Digital Twins allows us to fuse vital data—whether it’s from our Asset Records system, our EMS system or another—into the asset-centric point of view needed for the new Asset Lifecycle product we’re creating to show an asset’s state at any point in time. Azure Digital Twins also provides an out-of-the-box ability to track changes for properties or relationships between components over time for advanced analytics. This proves valuable for supporting airlines in making critical maintenance decisions, such as whether or not to keep parts on the wing longer, while also helping reduce their maintenance burden, costs, and the amount of downtime or out-of-service-time for an aircraft.”—Nate Hicks, Sr. Product Manager at GE Aviation’s Digital Group

Azure Digital Twins, currently in preview with general availability coming soon, will bring many new capabilities plus the scale, reliability, and broader market availability necessary for customers to build production-ready solutions. Partners can use its flexible integration capabilities to bring together any service and data points from edge devices, as well as any business system—even from outside Azure. Its use of an open modeling language, Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL), allows companies to create custom models of any connected environment while maintaining compatibility with other parts of the Azure ecosystem.

ENGIE helps decarbonize energy production with Azure Time Series Insights

The emergence of connected environments also means the continued generation of large volumes of data as assets are connected and brought together. To truly see the benefits, companies require comprehensive analytics across large-scale IoT data sets. ENGIE Digital, a European provider of renewable energy, integrated Azure Time Series insights with Azure IoT Edge to deliver a robust data and AI-driven analytics platform across hundreds of renewable energy sites. This enabled them to support historical data analysis and keep pace with large volumes of data while generating contextualized insights, Azure Time Series Insights ensures they always have the latest data at hand.

Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 is a powerful, fully managed IoT analytics platform created to help contextualize and turn IoT data into actionable insights. Features made generally available in July included multi-layered, scalable storage options for both highly interactive analytics over a short time span and advanced analysis of decades worth of historical data. Rich semantic modeling also enables the analysis of billions of events across millions of IoT sensors to identify trends and anomalies, conduct root-cause analysis, and deliver insights for operational excellence.

AT&T builds cellular-enabled guardian module with Azure Sphere

Security continues to be a key investment area for Microsoft as it is imperative that every IoT device is secured by design.  Accordingly, we are very pleased to share the news from Microsoft Ignite that AT&T and Microsoft are teaming up to enable enterprises to seamlessly connect machines and equipment to the cloud with highly secure global network connectivity. The new, cellular-enabled guardian module shows how Microsoft is empowering customers to achieve more, and in turn, to deliver innovation and opportunity to their customers. Check out the full announcement blog post to see opportunities created.

In addition to all the great customer and partner announcements, we announced the following product innovations:

Azure IoT Hub on-premises in Azure Stack Hub

While customers and partners love the power and productivity Azure IoT Hub brings in the cloud, they also asked for support on-premises. We are bringing Azure IoT Hub on-premises in Azure Stack Hub. This is another industry first from Azure IoT and enables customers to take advantage of Azure IoT Hub in occasionally connected or fully disconnected environments, such as manufacturing shop floors, remote industrial sites, and more. We are putting the finishing touches on preview, which will be available in October.

Azure Defender for IoT with CyberX capabilities

IoT security is fundamental and needs to be addressed throughout the ecosystem as organizations’ assets, data, brand, and overall reputation are on the line. Building on this security momentum and research that shows 97 percent of companies highlight security as a concern when adopting IoT, we are expanding upon our existing industry-leading IoT security offerings.

First, we rebranded Azure Security Center for IoT to Azure Defender for IoT. Already generally available, this offering integrates seamlessly with Azure IoT Hub to proactively monitor IoT and IoT Edge devices and cloud solutions and provide security recommendations and alerts.

Next, we are bringing the availability of Azure Defender for IoT CyberX capabilities, which incorporates agentless technology from our recent acquisition of CyberX and offers new capabilities for securing unmanaged brownfield devices used in operational technology environments. The combination of on-device, agent-based monitoring with the new agentless CyberX capabilities makes Azure Defender for IoT one of the most fully featured and sophisticated security offerings in the industry.

And finally, we continue to partner with industry to refine the IoT Security Maturity Model (SMM) in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). This establishes a consistent approach for matching security investments with need, addressing areas including governance, processes, technologies, and operations—for which Microsoft co-authored and edited the Practitioner’s Guide.

New Azure IoT Central capabilities

Azure IoT Central is our IoT application platform that builds on top of the Azure IoT platform. It’s an easy, cost-effective way to build, manage, and operate IoT solutions. Go from idea, to proof of concept (PoC), to enterprise scale in weeks with one of the most advanced IoT application platform in the industry.

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced a set of important new Azure IoT Central capabilities including:

New Azure IoT Central application template for video analytics—Use this new application template to quickly and easily develop and scale AI-powered video analytics solutions through Intel AI Modules. Leverage existing IP cameras with Azure Media Services and Azure Storage to store and stream relevant portions of the live video feed and live video analytics.
Continuous data export—Send filtered and enriched data from your devices in near real-time to cloud destinations unlocking business insights with IoT data. The new data export capability allows you to re-use destinations, send only specific streams of data, and enrich your data with data from your Azure IoT Central application.
Use Jobs to interact with devices—The Jobs experience in Azure IoT Central has been redesigned with a new wizard that allows you to create, run, and save jobs. The UI includes rich charts and interactions for monitoring the progress and completion of jobs across a fleet of devices. Next month, we’ll be releasing additional capabilities that include job schedules and batches.
Command-line interface (CLI) improvements—The Azure IoT Central CLI extension has a new set of commands including az iot central user, az iot central api-token, and az iot central device compute-device-key for generating device SAS keys used during provisioning.
Raw data views—Use the new raw data view to inspect telemetry in real-time as it flows from your devices.
File upload—Azure IoT Central now supports uploading media and other files directly from connected devices.

New Azure IoT Edge capabilities

Azure IoT Edge is a leading edge compute offering in the industry, offering unparalleled production readiness and security. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced a set of breakthrough new capabilities including:

Nested Azure IoT Edge preview support enables customers to deploy Azure IoT Edge nodes across networks organized in hierarchical layers, such as ISA-95 network topologies, adhering to strict networking requirements to ensure a secure environment from real-time production all the way to the cloud.
Azure IoT Edge security with enclaves are now generally available, enabling deployment and execution of Trusted Applications in devices suitably equipped with trusted execution environments.
Edge Compute Node protection profile for IoT device security certification combines industry standard definitions and practices to enable how IoT stakeholders create and consume device security claims.
Industry-leading monitoring with the latest release of Azure IoT Edge enables rich monitoring of Azure IoT Edge fleets and applications at scale by emitting a rich set of metrics from IoT Edge system modules. Our new monitoring support easily integrates with existing monitoring solutions and even enables local monitoring for offline use cases.

Unified Azure Certified Device program and final certification for IoT Plug and Play

A unified Azure Certified Device program expands on previous Microsoft certification offerings that validate IoT devices meet specific capability needs and work great on Azure. This program helps device builders increase visibility of their products while making it easy for solution builders and customers to find the right device for their IoT solutions via the Azure Certified Device Catalog.

Certifications currently available include: Azure Certified Device, IoT Plug and Play, and Edge Managed. The Final IoT Plug and Play certification, announced in August, helps reduce time to market for device builders. Additionally, Azure IoT platform services and SDKs for IoT Plug and Play will be generally available by the end of this month.

View our developer documentation for more information, and join the companies already beginning to prepare and certify their devices for IoT Plug and Play.  Also, read the full technical blog to learn more about these certifications and others in development.

Accelerate technical skills with Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification and new learning content

Part of empowering tech intensity in our customers and partners is providing the tools and resources for individuals to successfully use advanced digital technologies, such as machine learning and IoT, so they can see projects through to realization. The Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification is a great first step to support developers in gaining technical knowledge, advancing their career, and becoming recognized as experts on their journey to building innovative new solutions.

Developers looking to start their IoT learning and certification journey can find free online courses at Microsoft Learn. They can also prepare for certification with the new Internet of Things Event Learning Path on GitHub. This series of five video-based modules explores topics including IoT device connectivity, IoT data communication strategies, use of AI at the edge, data processing considerations for IoT data, and IoT solutioning based on the Azure IoT reference architecture.

We encourage you to explore these new releases and innovations in depth, and learn more about how Azure IoT can help with  business resilience and staying agile for the future of connected ecosystems. We also recommend checking out these

Microsoft Ignite sessions:

Azure IoT services, roadmap, and vision: from connected assets to connected environments.
Azure IoT: Building end-to-end IoT solutions secured from edge to cloud.

Additional IoT learning resources:

IoT at Microsoft Ignite: Learn Collection.
Microsoft IoT Deep Dives.
Azure IoT Developer Specialty Certification.
How to prepare for Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification blog.
IoT Learning Path blog post.
Round-up of IoT developer resources and insights.
Security Maturity Model (SMM) training.

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure

da Agency

Docker Open Sources Compose for Amazon ECS and Microsoft ACI

Today we are open sourcing the code for the Amazon ECS and Microsoft ACI Compose integrations. This is the first time that Docker has made Compose available for the cloud, allowing developers to take their Compose projects they were running locally and deploy them to the cloud by simply switching context.

With Docker focusing on developers, we’ve been doubling down on the parts of Docker that developers love, like Desktop, Hub, and of course Compose. Millions of developers all over the world use Compose to develop their applications and love its simplicity but there was no simple way to get these applications running in the cloud.

Docker is working to make it easier to get code running in the cloud in two ways. First we moved the Compose specification into a community project. This will allow Compose to evolve with the community so that it may better solve more user needs and ensure that it is agnostic of runtime platform. Second, we’ve been working with Amazon and Microsoft on CLI integrations for Amazon ECS and Microsoft ACI that allow you to use docker compose up to deploy Compose applications directly to the cloud.

While implementing these integrations, we wanted to make sure that existing CLI commands were not impacted. We also wanted an architecture that would make it easy to add new backends and provide SDKs in popular languages. We achieved this with the following architecture:

The Node SDK and Compose CLI parts of this diagram are what we have open sourced today. This architecture is not final and we plan to merge the Compose CLI with the existing CLI at a later time.

Depending on the Docker Context that the user selects, the Compose CLI switches which backend is used for the command or API call. This allows us to pass commands which use existing contexts to the existing CLI transparently. The backend interface abstraction allows the implementation of a backend for any container runtime so that users can get the same Docker CLI UX they know and love for it along with the new APIs and SDK.

The Compose CLI can serve a gRPC API to provide similar functionality to that of the CLI commands. We chose to use gRPC as this allows us to generate high quality SDKs in popular languages like Node.js, Python, and Golang. While we currently only provide a Node SDK that supports single container management on ACI, there are plans to add Compose support, extend it to ECS and other backends, and add other language SDKs in the near future. The Node SDK is already used by VS Code to implement its Docker experience on ACI.

This work wouldn’t have been possible without help from our partners at Microsoft and AWS who helped us build the best possible experience for their respective platforms. Our team has enjoyed working with all of you! From Microsoft we’d specifically like to thank Mike Morton, Karol Zadora-Przylecki, Brandon Waterloo, MacKenzie Olson, and Paul Yuknewicz. From AWS we’d like to thank Carmen Puccio, David Killmon, Sravan Rengarajan, Uttara Sridhar, and David Duffey.

These tools are currently in beta so feedback and pull requests are welcome!

Compose CLI source: https://github.com/docker/compose-cliNode SDK source: https://github.com/docker/node-sdk

To get started working with Compose in the Cloud you can download Docker Desktop here, get a free Hub account to deploy your images from here. Once you have you image saved to Docker Hub you will be able to deploy it to either ECS or ACI, to find out more about how to do this:

Read about how to use the Amazon ECS integration here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/context/ecs-integration/Read about how to use the Microsoft ACI integration here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/context/aci-integration/
The post Docker Open Sources Compose for Amazon ECS and Microsoft ACI appeared first on Docker Blog.
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