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10 user experience updates to the Azure portal

We’re constantly working to improve your user experience in the Azure portal. Our goal is to offer you a productive and easy-to-use single-pane-of glass where you can build, manage, and monitor your Azure services, applications, and infrastructure. In this post, I’d like to share the highlights of our latest experience improvements, including:

Improved portal home experience: increased focus and clarity to bring services and instances that are relevant to you front and center.
New service cards: new service hovercards that present contextual information relevant to each service.
Enhanced service browsing experience: simplified offering navigation by progressively disclosing services.
Extended Microsoft Learn integration: contextual integration of free training in key parts of the experience.
Improved instance browsing experience: updated experience for more than 70 services with improved performance, better filtering and sorting options, grouping, and to allow exporting your resource lists to a CSV file.
Improved Azure Resource Graph experience: re-use and share your queries via Resource Graph Saved Queries.
Automatic refresh in Azure Dashboard: set automatic refresh intervals for your dashboard.
Improved service icons: New icons re-designed for better visual consistency and reduced distractions.
Simplified settings panel: better separation between general settings and localization.
New landing page for Azure Mobile application: added a new landing page that brings important information.

Improved portal home experience

We have improved the Azure portal home page to increase focus and clarity and to make things that are important to you easily accessible.

  Figure 1 – simplified Azure portal home.

We’ve organized these into differentiated sections for ease of use:

Services and resources (dynamic): the top section has dynamic content that gets adjusted based on your usage without requiring any additional customizations. The more you use the portal, the more it adjusts to you!
Common entry points and useful info (static): the lower section contains static content with common entry points to provide quick access to main navigation flows that are always there, enabling users to develop muscle memory for repeated usage.

Figure 2 – sections of the home page.

The Azure services section provides quick access to the Azure Marketplace, a list of eight of the most-used Azure services, and access to browse the entire Azure offering. The list of services is populated by default with some of our most popular services and gets automatically updated with your most recently used services. The Recent resources section shows a list of your recently used resources. Both lists get updated as you use the product. Our goal is to bring relevant services and instances front and center without requiring customization. The more you use the product, the more useful it gets for you! The rest of the sections are static, providing important points of reference for navigation and access to key Azure products, services, content, and training.

The overall home experience has been streamlined by hiding the left navigation bar under an always present menu button in the top navigation bar:

Figure 3 – The menu button

The main motivation for this change is improving focus, reducing distractions and redundancy, and to enable more immersive experiences. Before this change, when you were immersed in a workload in the portal you always had two vertical menus side by side, the left navigation bar and the menu for the experience. The left navigation bar is still available with all its functionality, including favorites, through the menu button at the top bar, always only one click away.

Figure 4 – The new experience allows for more focus.

If you prefer the old visual, having the left navigation always present, you can always bring it back using the Portal Settings panel.

New service cards

We have added hover cards associated with each service that show contextual information and provide direct access to some of the most common workflows. These hover cards are displayed after the cursor is placed for about a second on a service tile. We used the same interaction pattern and design than Outlook uses for identities (users and groups) that are well established with our customer base.

Figure 5 – hover card for virtual machines.

The cards expose relevant contextual information and actions for a service, including:

Create an instance: this provides quick access to a very common flow, short circuiting going though intermediate screens to launch the creation.
Browse instances: browse the full list of instances of that service.
Recently used: the last three recently used instances of that service, providing direct contextual access.
Microsoft Learn content: specialized free training curated for that service. The curation has been done by the Microsoft Learn team based on usage data and customer feedback.
Links to documents: key documents to learn or use the product (quick starts, technical docs, pricing.)
Free offerings available: if the service has free options available, surface them.

Figure 6 – Anatomy of the card

The cards help improve on multiple aspects including more efficient customer journeys, better discoverability, and contextualized information, all presented in the context of one service. The card also helps customers of all levels of expertise: While new customers can benefit from Microsoft Learn content and free offerings advanced customers have a faster path the create instances or access their recently used instances of that service.

The card does not only show on the home page. It is available in every place we display a service like the left navigation bar, the all services list, as well as the Azure home page.

Extended Microsoft Learn integration

Microsoft Learn provides official high-quality free learning material for Microsoft technologies. In this portal update we have introduced several contextual integration points:

Service browsing: contextual integration at the service category level (compute, storage, web, etc.)
Service cards: contextual integration at the service level (virtual machine, Cosmos DB, etc.) available in Azure home page, left navigation, and service browsing experience.
Azure QuickStart center: integration of most popular trainings in the landing page
Azure home: direct access to the main Microsoft Learn entry point

Moving forward, the Azure portal and Microsoft Learn integration will continue to grow, to help you improve your Azure journey!

Enhanced service browsing experience

Azure is big and gets bigger every day. Navigating through Azure’s offering in the portal can be intimidating and challenging due to the vast set of available services. To make this easier, we’ve made the following updates:

Improved global search: improved performance and functionality when searching for services in the global search box in the top bar of the portal. This improved search is also always present and available in your portal session.
Improved service browsing experience: improved the All services experience adding an overview category supporting progressive disclosure of services, reducing visual clutter, and adding contextual Microsoft Learn content.

For service browsing, we introduced an overview category with the goal of progressively disclosing information.

Figure 7 – progressive disclosure of information and better discoverability

The new Overview category presents a list of 15 of Azure’s most popular services, curated Microsoft Learn training content, and access to key functionality like Azure QuickStart center and free offerings.

If the service that you are looking for is not available on this screen you can use the service search functionality, at the top left, or you can browse through the different categories available, at the left of the screen. When displaying a category, we are now surfacing contextual and free Microsoft Learn content to assist you in your Azure learning journey.

Figure 8 – service category with contextual and free Microsoft Learn integration. The training offered in this category is contextual and related to databases in this case.

Improved instance browsing experience

The resource instances browsing experience, going through the list of instances and services is one of the most common entry points for customers using the portal. We are introducing an updated experience that leverages the power of Azure Resource Graph to provide improved performance, better filtering and sorting options, better grouping, and allows exporting your resource lists to a CSV file.

Figure 9 – improved resource browsing experience

As of this month, this experience will be available for more than 70 services and over the next few months it will be rolled out across the entire platform.

Improved Azure Resource Graph experience

The Azure Resource Graph Explorer available in the portal enables you to write queries and create dashboards using the full power of Azure Resource Graph. Here is a video that shows how to use Resource Graph to write queries and create an inventory dashboard for your Azure subscriptions.

We have now introduced Azure Resource Graph Queries in the Azure portal as a new top-level resource. Basically, you can save any Kusto Query Language (KQL) query as a resource in your Azure subscription. Like any other resource you can share it with colleagues, set permissions, check activity logs, and tag it.

Figure 10 – Azure Graph Queries

Automatic refresh in Azure Dashboards

We have added automatic refresh to our Azure dashboards, allowing to automatically refresh your dashboards over several time intervals.

Figure 11 – Configuring automatic refresh

Improved service icons

We’ve updated all of the service icons in the Azure portal with a more consistent and modern look. All these icons have been designed together as a family to provide better visual consistency and reduce distractions.

Figure 12– Improved icons

Simplified settings panel

The settings panel has been simplified. The main reason for this change is that many customers could not find the “Language & region” settings in the previous design and were asking us for capabilities that were already available in the portal. This new design separates the general and the Language & region settings, the portal supports 18 languages and dozens of regional formats, which was a common source of confusion for many of our users.

Figure 13 – separation of general and localization settings

New landing page for Azure Mobile application

The Azure mobile app enables you to stay connected, informed, and in control of your Azure assets while on the go. The app is available for iOS and Android devices.

We have added a brand-new landing screen to the Azure Mobile App that brings all important information together as soon as you open the application. The new Home experience is composed of multiple cards with support for:

Azure services
Recent resources
Latest alerts
Service Health
Resource groups
Favorites

The home view is fully customizable, you can decide what sections to show and in which order to show them.

Figure 14 – new home in the Azure Mobile App

If you have not tried the Azure Mobile app yet, make sure to try it out.

Let us know what you think

We’ve gone through a lot of new capabilities and still did not cover everything that is coming up in this release! The team is always hard at work focusing on improving the experience and is always eager to get your feedback and learn how can we make your experience better.

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure

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A Roadmap for Building Modern Applications

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash
No matter what industry you’re in, your application modernization strategy matters. Overlooking or downplaying its importance is a quick way for customers to sour and competitors to gain an edge. It’s why 91% of executives believe their revenues will take a hit without successful digital transformation.
The good news is modern applications offer a clear path forward. Creating a roadmap for your modern application strategy is a critical step toward a more agile and continuous model of software development and delivery – one that’s centered on delivering perpetually expanding value and new experiences to customers. 
This is the first of a series of blogs where we will look at industry viewpoints, different approaches, underlying platforms and real-world stories that are foundational to successful modern application development in order to provide a roadmap for application modernization.
What’s in Your Environment? 
The technology inventory at companies today is as diverse, distributed and complex as ever. It includes a variety of technology stacks, application frameworks, services and languages. During a modernization process, new Open Source technologies are often integrated with legacy solutions. Existing applications need to be maintained and enhanced, modern applications need to be developed and on-ramped, and some applications need to take the gentle off-ramp to retirement. To top that off, applications today can span on-premises, public and hybrid cloud and the edge. 
This is why we view applications as a spectrum. They are built on a variety of services – from multiple cloud resources, managed services and SaaS offerings to containers, configuration formats (Helm charts, Kubernetes YAML and Docker Compose files) and functions. Sure, they can be born in the cloud, but they don’t have to be. No matter the configuration or environment, it’s important to be able to build and manage these applications in a consistent and unified manner. 
Can You Support App Modernization?
While you need to continue supporting existing applications that rely on legacy processes, you also need to ramp up on new application platforms, languages and processes. The more different technologies there are in your environment, the harder it gets to support and maintain everything — particularly without consistent processes and a common underlying platform.
You have a modernization and digital transformation strategy, but are there sufficient resources to support it? Do you have the right talent and skill sets already in place? Is platform and process inconsistency harming your modernization efforts? 
What’s Driving Your Modernization?
Companies of all shapes and sizes have their eyes set on the cloud. It’s no longer an if, but when. In a recent report, Forrester states that nearly half of survey respondents are migrating existing workloads into cloud environments and then improving these applications as part of their current cloud strategy. This helps them prove business value quickly to then expand upon without taking an overwhelming first step. Forrester recommends identifying the compelling events to modernize now (i.e. deliver new customer experiences faster or a directive to move 50% of apps to the cloud) and then setting priorities for the modernization, tackling the highest priority “core” applications first. 
Small steps in the right direction can lead to large scale innovation within your organization. We see this across our customer base at companies including Nationwide, Carnival Corporation and Liberty Mutual.
In future posts of this blog series, we’ll take a closer look at the elements that go into spurring this innovation and bringing about positive results right away and well into the future. In the coming weeks, keep an eye out for new posts on why modern applications are at the heart of digital transformation and industry trends on the state of application development, as well as best practices and real-world customer stories that help to guide modernization strategies. We hope you will follow along!
In the meantime, to learn more about modern application development:

Check out our new eBook on real-world customer stories 
Read the full report from Forrester, “Modernize Core Applications With Cloud” 

New #Docker blog series by @marked_man: A roadmap for building #modernapplications to support #digitaltransformationClick To Tweet

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Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now Azure Synapse Analytics

On November fourth, we announced Azure Synapse Analytics, the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate business intelligence and machine learning needs.

With Azure Synapse, data professionals can query both relational and non-relational data using the familiar SQL language. This can be done using either serverless on-demand queries for data exploration and ad hoc analysis or provisioned resources for your most demanding data warehousing needs. A single service for any workload.

In fact, it’s the first and only analytics system to have run all the TPC-H queries at petabyte-scale. For current SQL Data Warehouse customers, you can continue running your existing data warehouse workloads in production today with Azure Synapse and will automatically benefit from the new preview capabilities when they become generally available. You can sign up to preview new features like serverless on-demand query, Azure Synapse studio, and Apache Spark™ integration.

 

Taking SQL beyond data warehousing

A cloud native, distributed SQL processing engine is at the foundation of Azure Synapse and is what enables the service to support the most demanding enterprise data warehousing workloads. This week at Ignite we introduced a number of exciting features to make data warehousing with Azure Synapse easier and allow organizations to use SQL for a broader set of analytics use cases.

Unlock powerful insights faster from all data

Azure Synapse deeply integrates with Power BI and Azure Machine Learning to drive insights for all users, from data scientists coding with statistics to the business user with Power BI. And to make all types of analytics possible, we’re announcing native and built-in prediction support, as well as runtime level improvements to how Azure Synapse handles streaming data, parquet files, and Polybase. Let’s dive into more detail:

With the native PREDICT statement, you can score machine learning models within your data warehouse—avoiding the need for large and complex data movement. The PREDICT function (available in preview) relies on open model framework and takes user data as input to generate predictions. Users can convert existing models trained in Azure Machine Learning, Apache Spark™, or other frameworks into an internal format representation without having to start from scratch, accelerating time to insight.

We’ve enabled direct streaming ingestion support and ability to execute analytical queries over streaming data. Capabilities such as: joins across multiple streaming inputs, aggregations within one or more streaming inputs, transform semi-structured data and multiple temporal windows are all supported directly in your data warehousing environment (available in preview). For streaming ingestion, customers can integrate with Event Hubs (including Event Hubs for Kafka) and IoT Hubs.

We’re also removing the barrier that inhibits securely and easily sharing data inside or outside your organization with Azure Data Share integration for sharing both data lake and data warehouse data.

By using new ParquetDirect technology, we are making interactive queries over the data lake a reality (in preview). It’s designed to access Parquet files with native support directly built into the engine. Through improved data scan rates, intelligent data caching and columnstore batch processing, we’ve improved Polybase execution by over 13x.

Workload isolation

To support customers as they democratize their data warehouses, we are announcing new features for intelligent workload management. The new Workload Isolation functionality allows you to manage the execution of heterogeneous workloads while providing flexibility and control over data warehouse resources. This leads to improved execution predictability and enhances the ability to satisfy predefined SLAs.

COPY statement

Analyzing petabyte-scale data requires ingesting petabyte-scale data. To streamline the data ingestion process, we are introducing a simple and flexible COPY statement. With only one command, Azure Synapse now enables data to be seamlessly ingested into a data warehouse in a fast and secure manner.

This new COPY statement enables using a single T-SQL statement to load data, parse standard CSV files, and more.

COPY statement sample code:

COPY INTO dbo.[FactOnlineSales] FROM ’https://contoso.blob.core.windows.net/Sales/’

Safe keeping for data with unmatched security

Azure has the most advanced security and privacy features in the market. These features are built into the fabric of Azure Synapse, such as automated threat detection and always-on data encryption. And for fine-grained access control businesses can ensure data stays safe and private using column-level security, native row-level security, and dynamic data masking (now generally available) to automatically protect sensitive data in real time.

To further enhance security and privacy, we are introducing Azure Private Link. It provides a secure and scalable way to consume deployed resources from your own Azure Virtual Network (VNet). A secure connection is established using a consent-based call flow. Once established, all data that flows between Azure Synapse and service consumers is isolated from the internet and stays on the Microsoft network. There is no longer a need for gateways, network addresses translation (NAT) devices, or public IP addresses to communicate with the service.

Get started today

Businesses can continue running their existing data warehouse workloads in production today with generally available features on Azure Synapse.

Email the team to nominate yourself to try the preview features announced in this blog.
Visit the Azure Synapse Analytics page to learn more.
Get started with a free Azure Synapse Analytics account.
Register for the live virtual event with the Azure Synapse Analytics team.

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure

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Migrating your applications to Openshift 4

If you’re looking for a path to upgrade your Red Hat OpenShift 3.7+ cluster to OpenShift 4.2, you’re in luck. The Cluster Application Migration tool (CAM) was built to migrate stateful and stateless applications from a source cluster to a destination cluster.
The initial intent of this tool is to address the OCP 3.7+ to OCP 4.2+ upgrade scenarios. That said, as requested by many Openshift users, it will also be possible to use this tool to migrate applications between OCP4 clusters.
This tool is based on two popular open source projects: Velero and Restic.

https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero

https://restic.net/

High-Level Architecture

Velero is installed on both your source and destination cluster, and object storage is used to store your backup information before getting restored on your target cluster. The OpenShift Container Platform Migration API orchestrates your migration from a central location. This API includes an easy to use user-interface and is usually installed on your target cluster by an operator.
Migrating Persistent Volumes
The migration of your PVs was a major focus for us in building this migration tool. CAM 1.0 offers two different mechanisms to migrate your data: MOVE or COPY.
 1. Move the Persistent Volume
Moving PVs requires shared storage between your source and destination cluster (ex: NFS). This is the fastest option and offers minimal downtime as the data is not copied, but only re-attached to the destination cluster. 

 2. Copy the Persistent Volume
This is a two-step approach which can support all storage backends (default option). Your data is first copied on your replication repository and then restored on your target cluster. Your migration can be first “stage” to copy most of the data without any impact to your source cluster. Then, your can “migrate” which will only copy files that have been changed since your last staging, reducing the downtime significantly before the final cut-over.

The Migration Web UI
Your migrations can be fully executed from a simple web UI. The configuration steps are simple: 

 Add both your source and destination clusters by providing your endpoint and credentials.
Add an object storage repository by also providing the end point and your credentials.
Finally, create a migration plan listing all of the projects (namespaces) that you would like to migrate.

Things to Know
 1. Cluster scoped resources
Cluster scoped resources are currently not migrated by this tool as they are not part of your namespace. Only resources inside your namespace are migrated. Our CPMA tool can help you find those resources and configure them to your new targeted cluster before executing your migration.
 2. Moving traffic to your new cluster
Once your migration is completed, your traffic must be redirected to your new cluster. The most common way to do this would be to either update your DNS entry or change your load balancer configuration. Using a load balancer in a multi-cluster configuration is a great way to reduce your downtime. If you are currently only using one cluster, this might be a good opportunity to look at the advantages of running a fully redundant cluster architecture.

 3. Cluster Admin Requirement
In CAM 1.0, you will need cluster admin privileges to perform a migration. This is something we hope to improve in the near future to allow app owners to migrate their own applications without such privilege.
 
The post Migrating your applications to Openshift 4 appeared first on Red Hat OpenShift Blog.
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What’s new with Azure Monitor

At Microsoft Ignite 2018, we shared our vision to bring together infrastructure, application, and network monitoring into one unified offering, and provide full-stack monitoring for your applications. We have since made rapid strides towards delivering that reality to our customers. From consolidating our logs, metrics and alerts platforms, and integrating existing capabilities such as Application Insights and Log Analytics, to adding new monitoring capability containers and virtual machines, and contributing back to the community through open-source projects such as OpenTelemetry. In this blog, I'll share the newest enhancements from Azure Monitor at Microsoft Ignite, including four examples of how we continue to build seamless, and integrated monitoring solution that works well for cloud-native and legacy workloads and is cost-effective. Be sure to read the full blog post to get a list of all the exciting enhancements.

Monitor containers anywhere

Customers love the convenience of the out of the box monitoring that Azure Monitor for containers provides for all their Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. But, you also have Kubernetes clusters running outside AKS. For customers who have hybrid environments, we are now launching the ability to monitor Kubernetes clusters on-premises and on Azure Stack (with AKS Engine) in preview. Just install the container agent and you can create alerts and get insights into the performance of your on-premises workloads in the Azure portal, along with your AKS workloads. Learn more about hybrid Kubernetes monitoring.

We are also making the popular Prometheus integration generally available. Azure Monitor can now scrape your Prometheus metrics and store them on your behalf, without you having to operate your own Prometheus collection and storage infrastructure. We also have new Grafana templates for you to visualize all the performance data that is collected from your Kubernetes clusters. Learn more about the Prometheus integration and Grafana templates.

Troubleshooting network issues faster

Monitoring a typical cloud network containing application gateways, VPN connections, virtual networks, etc., is a time-consuming activity. To troubleshoot an issue, you need to know the specific networking resources that support your application and scan for the health of these resources across multiple subscriptions and resource groups.

The Network Insights preview in Azure Monitor provides a single dashboard that gives you visibility into network topology, dependencies, health, and other key metrics for related network resources. The insights are derived from data that’s available in Azure Monitor today, so no additional setup or configuration is required.

With Network Insights, you have visibility into the health of your network across all of your subscriptions. Intuitive search and detailed topology maps enable faster drill-downs, help localization of networking issues, and suggest remediation in a matter of minutes. Learn more about Network Insights.

Work better and collaborate with workbooks

We've gotten great feedback from customers on Azure Monitor workbooks because it gives you a single tool that can combine text, analytic queries, metrics, and parameters into a rich interactive report that you can share with your team members and collaborate.

We have seen customers use workbooks in several ways including exploring the usage of an app, going through a root cause analysis, putting together an operational playbook, and more. We are now making workbooks generally available. Since the launch in preview, we have added support for a number of new data sources, including Azure Data Explorer, Azure Resource Graph, Azure Monitor Logs, Metrics, Alerts, etc., and added visualization options such as charts, grids, tiles, honeycombs, and maps. The Azure Monitor Workbook platform now forms the basis of new monitoring experiences in Azure services such as Azure Sentinel, Storage accounts, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Active Directory, and SAP Hana. Learn more about Azure Monitor workbooks.

In addition to the highlights of the innovation that we are driving above, here are even more detailed new capabilities we're delivering today:

 New agent and additions to profiling and tracing capabilities in Application Insights: For customers who have ASP.NET applications hosted on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) running IIS, we are adding a new “codeless” onboarding method that uses an agent and does not require access to the code. Learn more.

We've added the ability to specify central processing units and memory thresholds for the Application Insights Profiler, so you have better control of when to collect traces. Learn more.
We've also added a source code view (via decompilation) in Application Insights Snapshot Debugger to allow you to quickly diagnose the failing code.

 Application change analysis enhancements: We have added a lot of features for application change analysis to help you scale. We have introduced the ability to turn on application change analysis at an App Services plan level, you can now see resource manager changes for any resource, and there are richer diagnostics for common scenarios (such as VMs + VNET, SQL server, and Storage). We also added an impact analysis feature to see downstream dependencies for a change and revamped the user experience. Learn more.
 Traffic Analytics accelerated processing: The new accelerated processing option in Traffic Analytics allows you to process NSG Flow logs at 10-minute intervals. Learn more.
 Live container metrics and live deployments (preview): We are adding the ability to see live performance metrics and live deployments in your AKS cluster. Together with the live events and live logs features, you can get a near real-time performance and health view of your AKS cluster and troubleshoot issues faster.
 Log integrations: Using the new Subscription Diagnostic settings, you can now stream every type of activity log for your subscription to Azure Monitor Logs, Event Hub, and Storage and no longer need Subscription Log Profiles or Log Analytics Activity Log connector. In addition, you can now export log data from services such as Azure App Services and Azure Storage accounts directly to Azure Monitor. These features are available for free while in preview.
 Azure Monitor for Cosmos DB: You can now view usage, failures, capacity, throughput, and operations for your Azure Cosmos DBs across your subscriptions.  You can see the rollups at subscription, Azure Cosmos DB level or the individual container level and then drill through to the resource for further troubleshooting.

Our customer feedback has been instrumental in shaping these features, and we hope you'll keep the feedback coming. If you have any questions or suggestions, reach out to our Tech Community forum.

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure