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Forrester names Microsoft a leader in Wave report for Industrial IoT Software Platforms

As a company, we work every day to empower every person on the planet to achieve more. As part of that, we’re committed to investing in IoT and intelligent edge, two technology trends accelerating ubiquitous computing and bringing unparalleled opportunity for transformation across industries. We’ve been working hard to make our Azure IoT platform more open, security-enhanced, and scalable, as well as to create opportunities in new market areas and our growing partner ecosystem. Our core focus is addressing the industry challenge of securing connected devices at every layer and advancing IoT to create a more seamless experience between the physical and digital worlds.

Today, Microsoft is positioned as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms, Q4 2019, receiving of the highest score possible, 5.00, in partner strategy, innovation roadmap, and platform differentiation criteria, the highest score in the market presence category, and the second-highest score in the current offering category.

According to the Forrester report, “Microsoft powers industrial partners but also delivers a credible platform of its own. Microsoft continues to add features to the platform at an impressive rate, with the richer edge capabilities of Azure IoT Edge and the simplified application and device onboarding offered by Azure IoT Central formally launching since we last evaluated this market.”

We believe this latest recognition spotlights our commitment and ability to:

Support a comprehensive set of deployment models, from edge to cloud. According to our own IoT Signals research, the decision-makers surveyed believe that in the next two years, AI, edge computing, and 5G will be critical technological drivers for IoT success. And they want tools that can drive success across diverse deployment models.

Deliver business integration that goes beyond connectivity and device management. It’s become increasingly important for businesses to be able to link IoT workflows to data and processes across the operation, and we’re helping customers accelerate time to value.

Turn analytics into actionable intelligence. Industrial firms capture and generate mountains of time-series data in real-time. Transforming this data into timely insights is key to turning that data into decisions that move the business forward.

We’re committed to making Azure the ideal IoT platform, and this recognition comes at a great point in our journey. Download this complimentary full report and read the analysis behind Microsoft’s positioning as a Leader.

More information on our Azure IoT Industrial platform.

The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms, Q4 2019, Michele Pelino and Paul Miller, November 13, 2019. This graphic was published by Forrester Research as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. 

Quelle: Azure

How to build globally distributed applications with Azure Cosmos DB and Pulumi

This post was co-authored by Mikhail Shilkov, Software Engineer, Pulumi.

Pulumi is reinventing how people build modern cloud applications, with a unique platform that combines deep systems and infrastructure innovation with elegant programming models and developer tools.

We live in amazing times when people and businesses on different continents can interact at the speed of light. Numerous industries and applications target users around the globe: e-commerce websites, multiplayer online games, connected IoT devices, collaborative work and leisure experiences, and many more. All of these applications demand computing and data infrastructure in proximity to the end-customers to minimize latency and keep the user experience engaging. The modern cloud makes these scenarios possible. 

Azure infrastructure

Azure Cosmos DB provides a turn-key data distribution to any number of regions, meaning that locations can be added or removed along the way while running production workloads. Azure takes care of data replication, resiliency, and efficiency while providing APIs for read and write operations with a latency of less than 10 milliseconds.

In contrast, compute services—virtual machines, container instances, Azure App Services, Azure Functions, and managed Azure Kubernetes Service—are located in a single Azure region. To make good use of the geographic redundancy of the database, users should deploy their application to each of the target regions.

 

Globally distributed application

Application regions must stay in sync with Azure Cosmos DB regions to enjoy low-latency benefits. Operational teams must manage the pool of applications and services to provide the correct locality in addition to auto-scaling configuration, efficient networking, security, and maintainability.

To help manage the complexity, the approach of infrastructure as code comes to the rescue.

Infrastructure as code

While the Azure portal is an excellent pane-of-glass for all Azure services, it shouldn’t be used directly to provision production applications. Instead, we should strive to describe the infrastructure in terms of a program which can be executed to create all the required cloud resources.

Traditionally, this could be achieved with an automation script, e.g., a PowerShell Cmdlet or a bash script calling the Azure CLI. However, this approach is laborious and error prone. Bringing an environment from its current state to the desired is often non-trivial. A failure in the middle of the script often requires manual intervention to repair environments, leading to downtime.

Desired state configuration is another style of infrastructure definition. A user describes the desired final state of infrastructure in a declarative manner, and the tooling takes care of bringing an environment from its current state to the parity with the desired state. Such a program is more natural to evolve and track changes.

Azure Resource Manager Templates is the bespoke desired-state-configuration tool in the world of Azure. The state is described as a JSON template, listing all the resources and properties. However, large JSON templates can be quite hard to write manually. They have a high learning curve and quickly become large, complex, verbose, and repetitive. Developers find themselves missing simple programming language possibilities like iterations or custom functions.

Pulumi solves this problem by using general-purpose programming languages to describe the desired state of cloud infrastructure. Using JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python reduces the amount of code many-fold, while bringing constructs like functions and components to the DevOps toolbox.

Global applications with Pulumi

To illustrate the point, we develpoed a TypeScript program to provision a distributed application in Azure.

The target scenario requires quite a few resources to distribute the application across multiple Azure regions, including:

Provision an Azure Cosmos DB account in multiple regions
Deploy a copy of the application layer to each of those regions
Connect each application to the Azure Cosmos DB local replica
Add a Traffic Manager to route user requests to the nearest application endpoint

Global application with Azure and Pulumi

 

However, instead of coding this manually, we can rely on Pulumi's CosmosApp component as described in How To Build Globally Distributed Applications with Azure Cosmos DB and Pulumi. The component creates distributed Azure Cosmos DB resources, as well as the front-end routing component while allowing pluggable compute layer implementation.

You can find the sample code in Reusable Component to Create Globally-distributed Applications with Azure Cosmos DB.

Pulumi CLI executes the code, translate it to the tree of resources to create, and deploys all of them to Azure:

After the command succeeds, the application is up and running in three regions of my choice.

Next steps

Infrastructure as code is instrumental in enabling modern DevOps practices in the universe of global and scalable cloud applications.

Pulumi lets you use a general-purpose programming language to define infrastructure. It brings the best tools and practices from the software development world to the domain of infrastructure management.

Try the CosmosApp (available on GitHub—TypeScript, C#) with serverless functions, containers, or virtual machines to get started with Pulumi and Azure.
Quelle: Azure

Democratizing Smart City solutions with Azure IoT Central

One of the most dynamic landscapes embracing Internet of Things (IoT) is the modern city. As urbanization grows, city leaders are under increasing pressure to make cities safer, accessible, sustainable, and prosperous.

Underlying all these important goals is the bedrock that makes a city run: infrastructure. Whether it be water, electricity, streets, traffic lights, cities are increasingly using the Internet of Things (IoT) to manage their infrastructure by capturing and analyzing data from connected devices and sensors. This gives city managers real-time insights to improve operational efficiency and outcomes and to altogether rethink and reinvent city government functions and operations.

Microsoft and its ecosystem of service and hardware providers are deeply engaged with cities and communities around the world, addressing the most pressing issues that government leaders face. For instance, traffic congestion continues to increase in most urban areas, placing growing pressure on existing physical infrastructure. In the emerging world, new physical infrastructure needs to be built altogether. Citizens also have growing concerns about public safety and security. Investments in IoT-based solutions for city operations are accelerating to address these concerns, led by applications like smart street lighting, smart waste, and smart parking. Cities are also realizing the benefit of IoT for optimizing the management of globally scarce resources, such as water and energy. Amidst this growing investment, early results from the world's leading smart cities are promising. Some cities have seen approximately 60 percent in energy savings from leveraging LED-based smart streetlights, while others have been able to save 25-80 liters of water per person per day. Optimized traffic flow in some areas is helping commuters shave 15-30 minutes daily, resulting in a 10-15 percent reduction in emissions, and 66 percent operational cost reduction from smart waste management.

Despite a growing consensus around the benefits of adopting IoT solutions, scaling beyond the proof of concept remains difficult. Most smart city solutions today consist of bespoke pilots, unable to scale or repeat due to growing costs, complexity, and lack of specialized technical talent, in a market landscape that is already incredibly fragmented. Earlier this year we surveyed 3,000 enterprise decision-makers across the world, including government organizations, of whom 83 percent consider IoT “critical” to success, notably for public safety and infrastructure and facilities management. At the same time, the vast majority of the decision-makers expressed concerns about persistent knowledge gaps for how to scale their solutions securely, reliably, and affordably, the main reason why the average maturity of production-level IoT projects remains extremely low (read the full IoT Signals report). In order to help IoT solution builders navigate the complexity of designing enterprise-grade IoT systems, we published our learnings in a whitepaper called “The 8 attributes of successful IoT solutions” to help IoT solution builders ask the right questions up front as they design their systems, and to help them select the right technology platforms.

Building Smart Cities IoT solutions with Azure IoT Central

To further help IoT solution builders confidently scale their projects, we recently announced updates to Azure IoT Central, our IoT app platform for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise-grade solutions. IoT Central provides a fully managed platform for building and customizing solutions, designed to support solution builders with each of the attributes of successful IoT systems, including security, disaster recovery, high availability, and more. By removing the complexity and overhead of setup, management, and operations, IoT Central is lowering the barrier for IoT solution builders across industries, and accelerates the creation of innovative solutions across all industries, from retail to healthcare to energy to government. Check out our recent IoT Central blog for a full list of our updates and examples of solution builders across different industries.

As part of our mission to democratize IoT for all, we released an initial set of Azure IoT Central government app templates to help solution builders start building IoT solutions quickly with out-of-box device command and control, monitoring and alerting, a user interface with built-in permissions, configurable dashboards, and extensibility APIs. Solution builders can brand, customize, and easily connect their solutions to their line of business applications, such as Dynamics 365 for integrated field service, Azure ML services, or their third-party services of choice.

Developers can get started today with any of the government app templates for free and access starter resources, including sample operator dashboards, simulated devices, pre-configured rules, and alerting to explore what is possible. We’ve also provided guidance for customizing and extending solutions with documentation, tutorials, and how-to’s. Ultimately you can brand and sell your finished solution to your customers, either directly or through Microsoft AppSource.

Government app templates available today:

Connected waste management: Sensors deployed in garbage containers in cities can inform how full a trash bin is and optimize waste collection routes. Moreover, advanced capabilities for smart waste applications involve the use of analytics to detect bin contamination.

Water quality monitoring: Traditional water quality monitoring relies on manual sampling techniques and field laboratory analysis, which is both time consuming and costly. By remotely monitoring water quality in real-time, water quality issues can be managed before citizens are impacted.

Water consumption monitoring: Traditional water consumption tracking relies on water operators manually reading water meters across various sites. More and more cities are replacing traditional meters with advanced smart meters, enabling remote monitoring of consumption as well as remote control of valves to manage water flow. Water consumption monitoring coupled with information and insights flowing back to individual households can increase awareness and reduce water consumption.

Expect to see more app templates for solution builders over time to cover other smart city scenarios, with templates for smart streetlights, air quality monitoring, smart parking, and more.

Innovative smart cities solution partners using Azure IoT Central

From established leading research organizations to enterprises to public utilities, we are seeing solution builders leverage Azure IoT Central to transform their public sector services.

Smart water infrastructure

Dutch-based company, Oasen, supplies 48 billion liters of high-quality drinking water every year to 750,000 residents across municipalities in the South Holland region. Oasen turned to Microsoft and OrangeNXT to digitally transform its water structure. Using Azure IoT Central, the company is introducing scalability, flexibility, and greater innovation to its operations through remote management of its water distribution network. Leveraging Azure Digital Twins and Azure IoT Central, Oasen connects multiple sources of data (including data extracted from smart water meters and smart valves in pipelines), to create a true digital twin of the water grid.

By remotely controlling and monitoring valves, Oasen can now automatically test grid sections (step-testing) to radically improve grid quality, as well as predict burst water mains and assess which pipelines are most at risk of damage and need repair. These smart water shutters and smart meter implementations significantly reduce manual work. Furthermore, the smart grid solution allows the automatic shutdown of sections of the distribution network if a leak is detected, preventing damage, and reducing water quality hazards.

Water quality monitoring

Other solution builders have built solutions for water quality management. According to the World Health Organization, nearly one-fourth of people across the globe drink water contaminated with feces, with an estimated 50 percent of the global population projected to live in water-stressed areas by 2025, (either in close proximity to polluted or otherwise scarce water sources). There has never been a greater need for high-quality data from liquid sensor networks to track ion levels in the water, which can fluctuate dramatically within the scope of several hundred meters and can have devastating impacts on public health. Imec, a leading international research and development firm specializing in nanoelectronics and digital technology, has developed water sensor devices from inexpensive ion sensors on silicone substrates for monitoring water quality in real-time.

Imec, together with partners, will pilot this solution in a testbed of about 2,500 sensors installed across the Flanders region in Belgium. The sensors detect salinity in the water in real-time, allowing officials to track water quality fluctuations over time. Imec’s water quality monitoring solution was built on Azure IoT Central, which provides the flexible foundation required to design, test, and scale the solution across the city.

“IoT Central is a fast and easy to use platform suitable for an innovative R&D organization such as ours. This means we can dedicate ourselves to enable large fine-grained networks of water quality sensors and, through the collected data, improve visibility into water quality and enable better water management to the mission to make water quality better visible. ”—Marcel Zevenbergen, Program Manager, Imec

Smart street lighting

Combined with LED conversion, smart street lighting solutions have helped uncover massive efficiency opportunities for cities, with operational savings typically reaching over 65 percent. Telensa is a world leader in connected streetlight solutions, managing over 1.7 million poles in 400 cities around the world. Telensa PLANet is an end-to-end smart street lighting system consisting of wireless nodes that connect individual lights to a dedicated network and a central management application. The system helps cities reduce energy and maintenance costs while improving the efficiency of maintenance through automatic fault reporting and turning streetlight poles into hubs for other smart city sensors, such as for air quality and traffic monitoring. Since no two cities are the same, Telensa has developed its Urban IQ solution to enables cities to add any 3rd party sensors to their connected street lighting, make the insights available across city departments, and to provide sophisticated real-time visualization out of the box. Telensa built its Urban IQ solution with Azure IoT Central, to fit with current systems and to be ready for future directions. By moving device management and connectivity functions to IoT Central,  and dramatically lowering the cost of adding other sense and control apps to their Azure data fabric, Telensa can focus on enhancing smart city functionality and adding value for its customers.

Connecting the dots for smarter cities

With solutions that take full advantage of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, we continue to demonstrate how cloud, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI) have the power to drastically transform and enhances cities to be more sustainable, enjoyable, and inclusive. Azure IoT continues to accelerate results with a growing and diverse set of partners creating solutions relevant to smart cities from spatially-aware solutions that provide real-world context, to smart grids of the future, to urban mobility and spatial intelligence. Together, we can build more intelligent and connected cities that empower people and organizations to achieve more.

Get started today with Azure IoT Central.

Smart City Expo World Congress

Microsoft will be at Smart City Expo World Congress, the industry-leading event for urbanization, to connect smart city technologies and partners with cities on a digital transformation journey. Visit our booth at Gran Via, Hall P2, Stand B223 and learn more about our conference presence at SCEWC 2019. We also encourage you to meet with us at the following sessions:

Congress | Solutions Talk: Keys to Achieving Digital Transformation in Government – Wednesday, November 20 at 10:30 AM
Microsoft Booth 33 – Learning Hub: Talking cities: from smart streetlights to smart water to smart traffic – Wednesday, November 20 at 15:00 PM
Microsoft Booth 33 – Learning Hub: Mobility insights for Smart City AI – Tuesday, November 19th at 12:00 PM

Quelle: Azure

Azure Container Registry: Preview of diagnostic and audit logs

The Azure Container Registry team is happy to announce the preview of audit logs – one of our top items on UserVoice. In this release, we have new Azure portal and command-line interface (CLI) experiences to enable resource logs for diagnostic and audit evaluation of your registry logs.

This feature enables a capability to monitor your container registry by providing an audit trail of all relevant user driven activities on the registry. These logs contain information related to authentication, login details, repository level activities, and other user-driven events. In addition to these logs, Azure also provides a generic activity log which maintains a range of Azure Resource Manager information, including service health and other Azure management operations on the registry.

This feature also enables a user to turn on the resource logs for their container registry and can help facilitate with some of their compliance and diagnosing needs related to:

Security and compliance related tracking.
Diagnosing operational issues related to registry activities such as pull, push events.

Collection of resource logs for your registry however requires some additional steps as they are not turned on by default. Figure one displays how to configure diagnostics settings to enable Log Analytics. The logs can be viewed in Azure Monitor but would first require to be collected into a Log Analytics workspace.

Figure one

You can find the detailed steps to set up diagnostic workspace for collecting the logs and to use Azure Monitor for viewing the registry logs.

Azure Monitor is the consistent means to view and visualize your resource logs in Azure. Once the logs collections has been setup in Log Analytics, you can begin to view the logs data by running these queries. Figure 2 shows an example of running one of the sample queries.

Figure two

The current release is preview, in the future we will provide logs on other registry events like Delete, Untag, Replication, and more. Please continue to provide your feedback to help prioritize these feature asks.

Availability and feedback

Push, Pull, and Login event logs are currently available with delete and untag event logs to follow shortly.  As always, we love to hear your feedback on existing features as well as ideas for product roadmap.

Here’s a list of resources how you can use to engage with our team and provide feedback:

Roadmap – For visibility into our planned work.
UserVoice – To vote for existing requests or create a new request.
Issues – To view existing bugs and issues, logging new ones.
Azure Container Registry documents – For Container Registry tutorials and documentation.

Quelle: Azure