Monat: September 2017

Paxata launches Self-Service Data Preparation on Azure HDInsight to accelerate Data Prep

We are pleased to announce the expansion of HDInsight Application Platform to include Paxata, a leading self-service data preparation offering. You can get this offering now at Azure Marketplace and read more on the press announcement by Paxata.

Azure HDInsight is the industry leading fully-managed cloud Apache Hadoop and Spark offering, which gives you optimized open-source analytic clusters for Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and Microsoft R Server backed by a 99.9% SLA. Paxata’s Adaptive Information Platform empowers business consumers to turn raw data into ready information, instantly and automatically, in order to gain fast time-to-insights, thus accelerating time to value for customers using HDInsight. This combined offering of Paxata on Azure HDInsight enables customers to gain insights faster while running on an enterprise ready platform.

Microsoft Azure HDInsight – Open Source Big Data Analytics at Enterprise grade & scale

Each of Azure HDInsight's big data technologies are easily deployable as managed clusters with enterprise-level security and monitoring. The ecosystem of productivity applications in Big data has grown with the goal of making it easier for customers to solve their big data and analytical problems faster. Today, customers often find it challenging to discover these productivity applications and then in turn struggle to install and configure these apps.

To address this gap, the HDInsight Application Platform provides a unique experience to HDInsight where Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) can directly offer their applications to customers – and customers can easily discover, install and use these applications built for the Big data ecosystem by a single click.

The largest and most time-consuming challenge for analytics is simply getting the data ready. Roughly 80% of the time is spent bringing together data from diverse sources, cleansing, shaping, and preparing data. As part of this integration, Paxata has optimized their Spark-based Adaptive Information Platform on Azure HDInsight to simplify information management for business consumers.

Paxata Self-Service Data Preparation – Accelerates analytics and time to insight

Paxata Self-Service Data Preparation application, built on the Adaptive Information Platform, provides an intuitive solution that enables any business consumer to turn raw data into trustworthy information and gain insights from their data faster. You can combine unstructured and structured data from various sources, cleanse, shape and publish data to any destination. Business consumers work with an interactive, visual experience with complete governance and reliable performance provided with HDInsight. This truly enables a self-service model for big data where non-technical users can harness the power of big data to accelerate insights.

The following are the salient highlights of Adaptive Information Platform:

Easy to use: Familiar to customers, business consumers use an Excel-like, intuitive, interactive visual experience to interact with data with no coding required.
 Smart: Algorithmic intelligence is used to recommend how to join and append datasets and normalize values.
Unified Information Platform: Paxata provides a unified solution for data integration, data quality, enrichment, collaboration and governance.
Built-in governance and security:  Paxata provides self-documenting data lineage and support for authentication, authorization, encryption, auditing and usage tracking.
Built for scale: Powered by the Apache Spark™-based engine for in-memory high-performance, parallel, pipelined, distributed processing.
Built for the cloud: Elastic scalability to support variable workloads.

Following image shows how Paxata Adaptive Information Platform delivers comprehensive information management with governance, scalability and extensibility.

Paxata on Azure HDInsight: Simplified information management at enterprise scale.

Customers can install Paxata on HDInsight using the one-click deploy experience of HDInsight Application Platform. Paxata’s Adaptive Information Platform is deployed as an application in a secure and compliant manner and doesn’t require customers to open up any ports. All requests are routed through the secure gateway on HDInsight and users are authenticated with Paxata’s own authentication system as well.

Once provisioned, business consumers can access the data using the self-service interface in a secure manner and analyze large data volumes interactively. This is made possible because Paxata’s Adaptive Information Platform leverages Apache Spark™ running on Azure HDInsight, a managed service which is backed by enterprise grade SLA of 99.9%. This ensures that the end user, in this case a business consumer, can use Paxata’s Adaptive Information Management Platform and focus on turning raw data into information without worrying about the underlying platform.

Getting started with Paxata’s Adaptive Information Platform on HDInsight

To install Paxata’s Adaptive Information Platform on HDInsight, you have to create a HDInsight 3.6 cluster with Apache Spark 2.1. You can choose Paxata as an application when creating a new cluster or add Paxata to an existing cluster as well. If you don’t have a license key, you can get one at the Paxata Azure data prep page.

The following screenshot shows how to install Paxata on HDInsight Spark cluster.

Once Paxata’s Adaptive Information Platform is installed you can launch it by browsing to the applications blade inside the HDInsight cluster.

Resources

Install Paxata on Azure HDInsight
Video series on Paxata
Learn more about Azure HDInsight
Learn more about Paxata
Press release by Paxata

Summary

We are pleased to announce the expansion of HDInsight Application Platform to include Paxata. Paxata’s Adaptive Information Platform empowers business consumers to turn raw data into ready information, instantly, in order to gain fast time-to-insights, thus accelerating time to value for customers using HDInsight. This combined offering of Paxata on Azure HDInsight enables customers to gain insights faster while running on an enterprise ready platform.
Quelle: Azure

Get the most out of your Azure portal experience

Hello, Azure friends! If you manage Azure resources, you’re probably already familiar with the Azure portal. In this blog post, I’d like to highlight some of the experiences and capabilities that you can take advantage of to get the most out of your Azure portal experience.

Quickly find what you need

Getting to your resources in a fast and convenient way is key for productivity. The Azure portal provides a search functionality, always present in the top navigation bar, that allows you to search across your resources, resource groups, available services, and public Azure documentation.

When the search box gets the focus, it immediately provides access to your recently used resources.

As you type a search string, it searches for matches in your list of resources (e.g. virtual machines, databases, app services, etc.), resource groups, services available in Azure, and documentation.

 

Notice that the search above is performed across multiple subscriptions (in this case across all my 34 subscriptions). This is a configurable setting, so you are in full control of the scope of your search.

The search box is always present in the top navigation bar. You can also get to it using the key combination “G” + “/” and jump to any point of interest using just the keyboard!

Browse through your resources

Very often you will want or need to browse through your resources. In fact, this is the most common entry point for most customers using the portal. You can browse through all of your resources, or scope resources by type (e.g. all your virtual machines, app services, etc.). In both cases, you have many additional filters available to continue scoping down the list and focus on the resources that are important to you. These experiences display resources across multiple subscriptions and locations, so you can get to everything that you care about in one screen. The image below shows a single list displaying resources from my 34 subscriptions across all locations: 

Act on multiple resources

Want to start multiple virtual machines at once? The list of resources provides the ability to either act on one or multiple resources.

The animation below shows the following scenario: I have created a few testing VMs and need to start to run some tests. I can start them with a single and quick interaction.

Organize resources using tags

Tags allow you to annotate your resources with information that you can later use to organize those resources logically. Tags also show up on your billing data so you can use them for both resource and cost management. We are improving the tagging experience and now you can tag, or untag, multiple resources with a single interaction, as shown in the image below.

Consistent experience

Azure offers a wide range of services, and learning the fundamentals on how to do basic management on everything can be scary. The Azure portal provides a consistent experience that covers finding an instance of a resource, covered at the beginning of this post, to performing basic management operations. The image below highlights some of the common patterns using the Virtual Machine overview screen as an example.

Management landing pages for most resources contain the same structure and basic elements, so once you learn a few patterns, you can apply them across most of the portal. The image below shows the overview pages for App Service, Virtual Machine, and SQL. Notice that all screens follow the structure introduced in the previous image.

Make it your own

We know that everyone works differently, and to support that we offer multiple ways of customizing the portal to match the way you work and bring what is important to you front and center. Here are some things that you can customize:

Items in the left navigation bar
Theme (we support 4 different themes)
Language and locale (we support 18 languages)
Columns in the browse lists (All Resources, Virtual Machines, App Services, etc.)
Dashboards (more on this in the next section)

Customizable dashboards

The Azure portal dashboard is a canvas that you can make your own. It is fully customizable, and you can change it to bring what is important to you front and center.

You can create multiple dashboards and share them with your colleagues, as explained in this article. Dashboards can be updated by dragging and dropping tiles or programmatically. The image below shows an example of a dashboards that you can build in the Azure portal:

The Azure portal provides a vast variety of tiles that you can use to build your dashboard. Two tiles that I’d like to call out are ARM Data and ARM Actions:

The ARM Data allows you to display data from any of your resources in Azure Resource Manager. Just add an instance of the tile to your dashboard, point it to a resource URI, and navigate to the property that you want to display. The ARM Actions is similar, but for actions on resources.

In the image below, the ARM Data and ARM Actions tiles are used to display information about a VM and two commands for starting and stopping it:

If it is in Azure Resource Manager, it can be in your dashboard!

Integrated console experience in the portal

You can manage your account using a point and click GUI or via a command-line experience using Cloud Shell (Bash or PowerShell). Cloud Shell provides an authenticated, browser-based shell experience hosted on the cloud and accessible from virtually anywhere embedded in the portal, and is always one click away.

Leverage the power of Azure Resource Manager templates

As you progress in your Azure journey, it is very likely that you will use Azure Resource Manager templates. You can create your template from scratch or use/extend one of the more than 600 templates available in the Azure Quickstart Templates gallery.

The Azure portal provides a great experience to author and execute templates. You can quickly get to the template authoring experience by searching for “custom template” in the global search box:

 

This experience is fully integrated with the Azure Quickstart Templates gallery, so you can load any template from the gallery. Once you find a template that fits your needs you can edit it using Template Editor screen that provides a full outline of the template, syntax coloring, and helpers to easily add new resource instances into the template, or execute the template. If you decide to execute the template, the portal will provide a data entry screen with specialized fields and validations to reduce data input errors.

In addition to what we have already shown above, the portal provides a template library that you can use to store your own templates.

Also, every resource exposes an “Automation script” option in their left menu that provides the Azure Resource Manager template along with all the code for running the template in CLI, PowerShell, .NET and Ruby for the entire resource group in which that resource is included:

Make the most out of Azure

Building cloud applications is a hard task, and making the most out of the platform is even harder. Azure Advisor helps you make the most out of Azure by providing recommendations for improving cost, availability, security, and performance. Azure Advisor is available by default in the left navigation bar. Once you get to Azure Advisor, you can select the subscriptions the platform will provide the best recommendations to help you optimize your applications and infrastructure.

Start using Azure Advisor today and make the most out of Azure!

Monitor your Azure resources

Azure Monitor provides base level infrastructure metrics and logs for most services in Microsoft Azure. It is available by default in the left navigation bar, so being on top of your infrastructure and applications is just one click away!

Notice that the Azure Monitor screen above follows the same UX patterns that we introduced previously in this blog post when discussing about “Consistent management experience”. Learn more about the latest on Azure Monitor.

Optimize your cloud spend

With the Azure portal you are always one click away from being able to see and understand what are you being charged for. The default left navigation bar has an entry that takes you to the “Cost Management + Billing” screen.

Try Azure Cost Management. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Take Azure with you, everywhere!

The Azure mobile app enables you to stay informed, connected, and in control of your Azure resources and applications. Learn more about the Azure mobile app.

Download the Azure mobile app today and let us know what do you think!

Get early access to new features

In Azure portal preview we often deploy some features in early stages. If you want to try those new features, please use the preview stamp and let us know what you think as your feedback will help to improve those features!

Let us know what you think!

We’ve gone through a lot of stuff and still did not cover everything available in the Azure portal! 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. Feel free to reach out directly to me at lwelicki@microsoft.com with your feedback or any thoughts about Azure user experience.

Let’s build together the best cloud experience!
Quelle: Azure

Five more reasons why you should download the Azure mobile app

This post was co-authored by Ilse Terrazas Ortega, Program Manager, Azure mobile app

You may have already heard about the Azure mobile app at the Build conference back in May 2017. The app lets you stay connected with Azure even when you are on the go. You can read more details in our launch blog post from May.
Over the last few months, we have been working closely with our customers to improve the Azure mobile app. And today, we are excited to share five more reasons why the Azure app is a must-have.

1. Monitoring resources

The Azure mobile app allows you to quickly check your resources status at a glance. Drill in, and see more details like metrics, Activity Log, properties and execute actions.

2. Executing scripts to respond to issues

Need to urgently execute your get-out-of-trouble script? You can use Bash and now even PowerShell on Cloud Shell to take full control of your Azure resources. All of your scripts are stored on CloudDrive to use across the app and the portal.

 

3. Organizing resources and resource group

Have a lot of resources? No problem, you can favorite your most important resources across subscriptions and keep them in your Favorites tab for easy access.
 

Start creating your Favorites list now – you can do it from the resource view or directly from the resources list tab as shown below.

4. Resource sharing

Tired of sending screenshots to your coworkers to help them find a resource? Now you can share a direct link to the resource via email, text message or other apps with the click of a button.
 

5. Tracking Azure Health incidents

The Azure mobile app can even help you track Azure Health incidents. Just scan the QR code from the portal and track the incident from your phone.
 

 

Download the preview app today and let us know what you'd like to see next in the feedback forum. Keep an eye out for updates and follow @AzureApp on Twitter for the  latest news.
Quelle: Azure