Monat: September 2017

New advancements in Azure for IT digital transformation

I'm at Ignite this week, where more than 20,000 of us are talking about how we can drive our businesses forward in a climate of constant technology change. We are in a time where technology is one of the core ways companies can better serve customers and differentiate versus competitors. It is an awesome responsibility. The pace of change is fast, and constant – but with that comes great opportunity for innovation, and true business transformation.

Here at Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. I believe that mission has a special meaning for the IT audience, particularly in the era of cloud computing. Collectively we are working with each of you to take advantage of new possibilities in this exciting time. That's the reason we are building Azure – for all of you. The trusted scale and resiliency of our Azure infrastructure, the productivity of our Azure services for building and delivering modern applications, and our unmatched hybrid capabilities, are the foundation that can help propel your business forward. With 42 regions announced around the world and an expansive network spanning more than 4,500 points of presence– we’re the backbone for your business.

Core Infrastructure

Cloud usage goes far beyond the development and test workloads people originally started with. Enterprises are driving a second wave of cloud adoption, including putting their most mission-critical, demanding systems in the cloud. We are the preferred cloud for the enterprise, with more than 90% of the Fortune 500 choosing the Microsoft cloud. Today at Ignite, we’re making several announcements about advancements in Azure infrastructure:

New VM sizes. We continue to expand our compute options at a rapid rate. In my general session, I will demonstrate SAP HANA running on both M-series and purpose-built infrastructure, the largest of their kind in the cloud. I will discuss the preview of the B-series VM for burstable workloads, and announce the upcoming Fv2-, NCv2-, ND-series which offer the innovation of new processor types like Intel’s Scalable Xeon and NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 and P40 GPUs.
The preview of Azure File Sync, offering secure, centralized file share management in the cloud. This new service provides more redundancy and removes complexity when it comes to sharing files, eliminating the need for special configuration or code changes.
A new enterprise NFS service, powered by NetApp. Building on the partnership with NetApp announced in June, Microsoft will deliver a first-party, native NFS v3/v4 service based on NetApp’s proven ONTAP® and other hybrid cloud data services, with preview available in early 2018. This service will deliver enterprise-grade data storage, management, security, and protection for customers moving to Microsoft Azure. We will also enable this service to advance hybrid cloud scenarios, providing visibility and control across Azure, on-premises and hosted NFS workloads. 
The preview of a new Azure networking service called Azure DDoS Protection, which helps protect publicly accessible endpoints from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Azure DDoS Protection learns an application’s normal traffic patterns and automatically applies traffic scrubbing when attacks are detected to ensure only legitimate traffic reaches the service.
The introduction of two new cloud governance services – Azure Cost Management and Azure Policy – to help you monitor and optimize cloud spend and cloud compliance. We are making Azure Cost Management free for Azure customers, and you can sign up now for a preview of Azure Policy. 
Integration of the native security and management experience. New updates in the Azure portal simplify the process of backing up, monitoring, and configuring diaster recovery for virtual machines. We are also announcing update management will now be free for Azure customers.
A preview of the new Azure Migrate service, which helps discover and migrate virtual machines and servers. The new service captures all on-premises applications, workloads, and data, and helps map migration dependencies over to Azure, making IT’s jobs immensely easier. Azure Migrate also integrates with the Database Migration Services we released today.
A preview of the new Azure Data Box, which provides a secure way to transfer very large datasets to Azure. This integrates seamlessly with Azure services like Backup and Site Recovery as well as partner solutions from CommVault, Netapp, Veritas, Veeam, and others.

Building on the news from last week about the preview of Azure Availability Zones, later today I will also talk about the unique measures we are taking in Azure to help customers ensure business continuity. As the only cloud provider with single VM SLAs, 21 announced region pairs for disaster recovery, Azure offers differentiated rich high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. This means you have the best support, resiliency, and availability for your mission-critical workloads.

Modern Applications

Applications are central to every digital transformation strategy. One of the compelling and more recent technologies that is helping in the modernization of applications is containers. Having received more attention from developers to date, containers are now accelerating application deployment and streamlining the way IT operations and development teams collaborate to deliver applications. Today we are announcing even more exciting advancements in this space:

Windows Server containers were introduced with Windows Server 2016. The first Semi-Annual Channel release of Windows Server, version 1709, introduces further advances in container technology, including an optimized Nano Server Container image (80% smaller!), new support for Linux containers on Hyper-V, and the ability to run native Linux tools with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka Bash for Windows).
Azure supports containers broadly, offering many options to deploy, from simple infrastructure to richly managed. Azure Container Instances (ACI) provide the simplest way to create and deploy new containers in the cloud with just a few simple clicks, and today I’m announcing Azure Container Instances now support Windows Server in addition to Linux.
Azure Service Fabric offers a generalized hosting and container orchestration platform designed for highly scalable applications, and today we are announcing the general availability of Linux support.

Hybrid Cloud

Nearly 85 percent of organizations tell us they have a cloud strategy that is hybrid, and even more – 91 percent – say they believe that hybrid cloud will be a long-term approach. Hybrid cloud capabilities help you adopt the cloud faster. What is unique about Microsoft’s hybrid cloud approach is that we build consistency between on-premises and the cloud. Consistency helps take the complexity of hybrid cloud out because it means you don’t need two different systems for everything. We build that consistency across identity, data, development, and security and management. Today we’re advancing our hybrid cloud leadership even further via the following developments:

Azure Stack is now shipping from our partners Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo. You can see all of these integrated systems on the show floor at Ignite. As an extension of Azure, Azure Stack brings the agility and fast-paced innovation of cloud computing to on-premises environments. Only Azure Stack lets you deliver Azure services from your organization’s datacenter, while balancing the right amount of flexibility and control – for truly-consistent hybrid cloud deployments.
Our fully managed Azure SQL Database service now has 100 percent SQL Server compatibility for no code changes via Managed Instance. And today, we are introducing a new Azure Database Migration Service that enables a near-zero downtime migration. Now customers can migrate all of their data to Azure without hassle or high cost.
Azure Security Center can now be used to secure workloads running on-premises and in other clouds. We’re also releasing today new capabilities to better defend against threats and respond quickly, including Just in Time (JIT) access, dynamic app whitelisting, and being able to drill down into an attack end to end with interactive investigation paths and mapping.

Beyond all of the product innovation above, one of the areas I’m proud of is the work we’re doing to save customers money. For example, the Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and the newly announced Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server allow customers to use their existing licenses to get discounts in Azure, making Azure the most economical choice and path to the cloud for these customers. Together with the new Azure Reserved VM Instances we just announced, customers will be able to save up to 82 percent on Windows Server VMs. The free Azure Cost Management capabilities I mentioned above help customers save money by optimizing how they run things in Azure. And we are now offering the new Azure free account which introduces the free use of many popular services for 12 months, in addition to the $200 free credit we provide.

It’s an exciting time for IT, and we’re equally excited that you are our trusted partners in this era of digital transformation. I look forward to hearing your questions or feedback so that we can further your trust in us and empower each of you to achieve more.
Quelle: Azure

Your future cloud is hybrid, and so is Azure

When we talk to our customers about their cloud strategy, it comes through loud and clear: they need choice and flexibility in where to run their workloads and applications. There’s no question companies are rapidly turning to the cloud and seizing the opportunities it brings – increased agility, faster innovation, just to name a few. The conversation is rarely “all cloud or nothing.” In fact, for most enterprises, or highly regulated industries, it’s a hybrid approach to cloud that makes the most sense.

Customers choose hybrid to future-proof their cloud strategies

Hybrid cloud made a great deal of sense to our customers like CarMax, who needed to reduce latency between their corporate data center and store locations. It made sense to Willis Towers Watson, who leveraged an on-premises data warehouse together with Azure to perform compute intensive analysis. It made sense to AVID, an Emmy Award-winning entertainment and media solutions company, who built an innovative media processing solution for global broadcasting corporations using a hybrid cloud approach for fast processing in local newsrooms.

The conversation around hybrid cloud continues to evolve. Hybrid is essential in a world of AI and IoT as we move towards an Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge working together. A distributed hybrid cloud enables a future-proof, long-term approach – which is exactly why we see it playing a central role in cloud strategies for the foreseeable future. We asked 2,500 IT professionals about their approach to cloud, and 91 percent of these IT workers believe hybrid cloud will remain the approach for their organizations five years from now.
 
Recently, other major cloud players have finally started listening to customers and admitted the need to offer hybrid solutions. Azure has always been hybrid by design, based on our decades of enterprise experience. We stand alone in offering a hybrid cloud experience that is consistent across on-premises and the cloud. Meanwhile, cobbled-together partnerships like AWS and VMWare (and others) fundamentally miss the ability of hybrid to meet customer needs, and the great value of this model to customers.

Let’s talk about what hybrid is, and isn’t

Hybrid is the future of cloud. One of the most promising things about cloud is the application innovation that new approaches like containers, microservices, serverless, and platform-as-a-service enable. The arrival of Azure Stack, just one of our many solutions to help advance hybrid scenarios, is an absolute game-changer. It enables a consistent development experience for cloud-native and traditional applications, with the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

Microsoft has set the bar in terms of hybrid – we’re proud of it. The consistency of our hybrid approach is exactly why customers find it appealing. When we say consistency, we do mean consistency across data, management, identity, and security. Customers must secure and manage their data and users across both the cloud and on-premises, and not having multiple systems helps reduce complexity.

True hybrid cloud helps address customer requirements around industry regulations, connectivity and latency. Regulation might evolve, but it won’t go away. The speed of light won’t get faster. And, geopolitical environments will always be dynamic. Our customers tell us a hybrid approach to cloud also lets them use existing on-premises technology as an asset in digital transformation as opposed to treating them as purely legacy investments.

Hybrid is not taking the virtualization customers have historically done and putting it into someone else’s data center. That’s why the AWS and VMWare offer as hybrid fails to address the real reason hybrid cloud is attractive to customers – and customers are left with the complexity of two vendors, two platforms, two portals and so on.

New customer-focused hybrid solutions at Ignite 2017

This week at Ignite we’re excited to continue the conversation about hybrid cloud with many of you. We’ll showcase our hybrid capabilities and announce new updates. You’ll hear about Azure Stack shipping, the extension of Azure Security Center to hybrid environments, and a new fully-automated Database Migration Service, and the GA of SQL Server 2017 – the first born in the cloud database that’s also available on-premises on Linux, Windows Server and Docker containers.

At Microsoft, we’ve always been passionate about the value of hybrid cloud. Our enterprise roots run deep and we look forward to continuing to bring you game-changing hybrid solutions as you transform your business.
Quelle: Azure

Built-in security and operations management for Azure and hybrid environments

The growth of cloud infrastructure usage has been tremendous in the last couple years. In my conversations with customers, many are looking for technologies to help with cloud security and cloud management. More customers are asking for management that is rooted in the cloud and really designed for the new cloud paradigm. At Microsoft we are your trusted partner for enterprise today and in the future, and we are in a unique position where we build both a cloud platform and have a long history of delivering management and security services.

With Azure we are blurring the lines between the traditional categories of platform and management as we deliver an open cloud platform that has built-in security and operations management – and can still meet the needs of our largest enterprise customers. Our customers benefit from this approach with a simpler experience across the full security and operations management lifecycle. We also recognize the importance of building tools that manage and secure not just Azure but also your traditional workloads, and that’s why we are focused on delivering hybrid capabilities.

Today I’m excited to announce several new services and features across these areas:

Azure Cost Management by Cloudyn available for free. Azure Cost Management helps organizations manage and optimize cloud spend across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Cost management has been one of the most popular requests from our customers and I’m excited to announce that it is now available for free to Azure customers and partners to manage Azure spend. Learn more about Azure Cost Management by Cloudyn.
Azure Security Center protection for hybrid workloads. Azure Security Center helps you protect workloads running in Azure from cyber threats and can now also be used to secure workloads running on-premises and in other clouds. Today we are releasing new capabilities to better detect and defend against advanced threats, automate and orchestrate security workflows, and streamline investigation of threats. Learn more about Azure Security Center updates.
Integration of management into the virtual machine experience in the Azure portal. This new experience simplifies the process of adding backup, site recovery, monitoring, update management and more to your existing virtual machines.
Update management, configuration management & change tracking included at no cost for Azure customers to help you manage missing updates and track configuration changes efficiently across Windows and Linux virtual machines in Azure, and across your hybrid environments. Python support has been added to the Automation service in addition to the existing PowerShell & Graphical authoring capabilities to make it easier to automate both Windows and Linux environments. Learn more about Azure Automation and configuration updates.
End to end monitoring from the application to the infrastructure. The new Azure monitor user experience centralizes the monitoring services together so that you can get visibility across infrastructure and applications. In addition, we have significantly optimized your experience for Azure Log Analytics, as well as with metrics exploration, application performance monitoring, and failure diagnostics in Application Insights. We have also integrated Azure alerts with IT Service Management tools and released new solutions for Container Monitoring. Learn more about Azure Monitoring updates.
Azure Policy to help you deliver governance and compliance. The new Azure Policy service, now in limited preview, helps you establish standards, guardrails, and continually monitor compliance to deliver enterprise-wide governance. Azure policies can be applied over your Azure resources, from a single subscription to a management group with control across your entire organization. Sign up for the Azure Policy limited preview.
PowerShell support in Azure Cloud Shell complements Bash as another authenticated, browser-based shell tool to streamline your Azure management experience. Learn more about PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell.

The importance of securing and managing your cloud workloads

In this world where customers expect to do business with you 24×7 and threats are only getting more sophisticated, we recommend that at a minimum you turn on security, backup and monitoring for your virtual machines. The Azure platform is designed to reduce your security and operations management burden for building, maintaining, and securing the datacenters, but as a customer you can partner with us to ensure that your Azure resources are secure and well-managed with the right security and compliance controls in place. 

I hope you will join me at Microsoft Ignite, either in person or virtually, to see these new features and updates in action. I’m excited to hear from you on how you are securing and managing your resources in the cloud and encourage you to continue sending us feedback. You can create a free account to get started exploring Azure security and operations management today.
Quelle: Azure

At Ignite, Microsoft is updating its Cognitive Services collection of intelligent APIs

Microsoft Cognitive Services enables developers to augment the next generation of applications with the ability to see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret needs using natural methods of communication. Think about the possibilities: being able to add vision and speech recognition, emotion and sentiment detection, language understanding, and search, to applications without having any data science expertise.

Today, we are excited to announce several service updates:

Text Analytics API is now generally available. Text Analytics is a cloud-based service that provides advanced natural language processing over raw text. It includes API functions such as sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and language detection.
Bing Custom Search API will be generally available in October. Bing Custom Search lets you create a highly-customized targeted web search experience to deliver more relevant results from your targeted web space through a commercial grade service.
Bing Search APIs v7 will be will be generally available in October. Allowing you to bring the immense knowledge of the planet to your applications, the v7 update will provide several improvements, such as results coming back fast with improved performance for queries on the Bing Web Search API. New sorting and filtering options make it easier to find relevant results in news trending topics and image searches. Better error messages make it easy to troubleshoot and diagnose problem queries, and updated, modernized documentation make it easy bring the power of the Bing Search APIs to your applications.
We plan to make Language Understanding Intelligent Service and Microsoft Bot Framework, which contains everything you need to build and connect intelligent bots, generally available later this year.
We’re also adding new capabilities to our services:

QnAMaker preview API is now enabling to build, train and publish a simple question and answer bot from product manuals.
We’re expanding Face API, Computer Vision API and Content Moderator in 7 additional regions – South Central US, West US2, East US, Brazil, North Europe, Australia East and East Asia.

Creating a highly targeted search for your users

As mentioned, we’re excited to announce that Bing Custom Search will be generally available in October!
With Bing Custom Search, you can create a highly-customized targeted web search experience, to deliver more relevant results from targeted web space through a commercial grade service.

Featuring a straightforward User Interface, Bing Custom Search enables you to create your own web search engine without a line of code. You can specify the slices of the web you want to draw from – or let cutting-edge AI technology help to identify them. Businesses of any size, hobbyists and entrepreneurs can design and deploy web search applications for any possible scenario.

For example, Amicus has recently released a platform that changes the way charitable aid is funded and delivered, showing donors where every dollar is spent and giving non-profits real-time tools to report and measure performance. This allows donors to fund ‘projects’ instead of blindly giving money to an organization, and non-profits to build project requests based on measurable outcomes. This transition presented a very unique challenge: how to enable donors to research and learn about the projects and activities performed by non-profits? Amicus needed to help donors Learn, Find and Fund projects that were of interest and relevant to them, something complex with traditional search engines.

With Bing Custom Search, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Amicus has been able to identify its own set of relevant web pages in advance: when users have a single concept of interest (like ‘water’, ‘education’ or ‘India’), Bing Custom Search is able to deliver highly relevant results in the context of global aid.

“This is exactly what our audience needs in order to learn about a broader range of important work performed by relief organizations, beyond those the donors currently know about. Bing Custom Search, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, delivers a ‘Learn and Find’ experience in ways never before possible.” – says Beth Katz, Chief Product Officer at Amicus.

Get Started with Bing Custom Search

To easily get started with Bing Custom Search, you can look at the service page, refer to the documentation and start building a great experience with the quick start guide.

Bringing text to life in your application

We are excited to announce that Text Analytics is now generally available in the Azure Portal, and now available in four additional regions: South Central US, East US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Text Analytics API is a cloud-based service that provides advanced natural language processing over raw text. Text Analytics API has three main functions: sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, and language detection.

Sentiment Analysis – Find out what customers think of your brand or topic by analyzing raw text for clues about positive or negative sentiment. This API returns a sentiment score between 0 and 1 for each document, where 1 is the most positive. Our models are pretrained using an extensive body of text and natural language technologies from Microsoft. 
Key Phrase Extraction – Automatically extract key phrases to quickly identify the main points. For example, for the input text ‘The food was delicious and there were wonderful staff’, the service returns the main talking points: ‘food’ and ‘wonderful staff’. 
Language Detection – For up to 120 languages, detect which language the input text is written in and report a single language code for every document submitted on the request.

Some customers scenarios where Text Analytics is used are customer feedback analytics, as an enricher to search scenarios, and in conjunction with LUIS and the Bot Framework (analyzing sentiment of a conversation over time).

More and more customers are using Text Analytics API: Brainshark is a cloud-based sales training and readiness platform that helps sales people achieve mastery in the presentation of sales materials to clients, slashing the costs and resources needed for training and maximizing the effectiveness of sales engagements.

Brainshark is now creating a training platform that allows sales representatives to perfect their pitch through video and Cognitive Services. Utilizing Face API, Emotion API, and Text Analytics, it’s possible to analyze their pitch, and feed a Machine Learning model to provide feedback on their performance.

“Now, companies are simply pushing sales people into the field and they’re learning through experience— a ridiculously expensive way to train. Every deal lost due to lack of confidence costs the company real money. If we can minimize that and actually get sales people ready to sell, it’ll have a huge impact on productivity,” says Jim Ninivaggi, Senior Vice President, Business Development at Brainshark.

Get Started with Text Analytics API

One of the best way to get started with Text Analytics API is to look at our Quick Start guides. Here is a snippet from the C# Quickstart that show how to consume the API using the C# SDK.  We also have quickstart in Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Let’s say that I want to be able to explore the most important phrases, sentiment and language from feedback I receive from my customers with Text Analytics API.

// EXTRACTING LANGUAGE
LanguageBatchResult result = client.DetectLanguage(
new BatchInput(
new List<Input>()
{
new Input("1", "This is a document written in English."),
new Input("2", "Este es un document escrito en Español."),
new Input("3", "这是一个用中文写的文件")
}));
// Printing language results.
foreach (var document in result.Documents)
{
Console.WriteLine("Document ID: {0}, Language:{1}",
document.Id, document.DetectedLanguages[0].Name);
}
// GETTING KEY PHRASES
KeyPhraseBatchResult result2 = client.KeyPhrases(
new MultiLanguageBatchInput(
new List<MultiLanguageInput>()
{
new MultiLanguageInput("ja", "1", "猫は幸せ"),
new MultiLanguageInput("de", "2",
"Fahrt nach Stuttgart und dann zum Hotel zu Fu."),
new MultiLanguageInput("en", "3", "My cat is stiff as a rock."),
new MultiLanguageInput("es", "4", "A mi me encanta el fútbol!")
}));
// Printing keyphrases
foreach (var document in result2.Documents)
{
Console.WriteLine("Document ID: {0} ", document.Id);
Console.WriteLine("t Key phrases:");
foreach (string keyphrase in document.KeyPhrases)
{ Console.WriteLine("tt" + keyphrase); }
}
// SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
SentimentBatchResult result3 = client.Sentiment(
new MultiLanguageBatchInput(
new List<MultiLanguageInput>()
{
new MultiLanguageInput("en", "0", "I had the best day of my life."),
new MultiLanguageInput("en", "1",
"This was a waste of my time. The speaker put me to sleep."),
new MultiLanguageInput("es", "2",
"No tengo dinero ni nada que dar…"),
new MultiLanguageInput("it", "3",
"L'hotel veneziano era meraviglioso.
È un bellissimo pezzo di architettura."),
}));

// Printing sentiment results
foreach (var document in result3.Documents)
{
Console.WriteLine("Document ID: {0} , Sentiment Score: {1:0.00}",
document.Id, document.Score);
}

Don’t hesitate to refer to the API definitions for technical documentation for the APIs.

We also developed a very interesting tutorial here that integrates Text Analytics into Power BI to extract the most important phrases and sentiment from customer feedback. You’ll see how we’re using a custom Power Query function and creating a nice Word Cloud from these phrases.

Happy coding!
 
The Microsoft Cognitive Services Team
Quelle: Azure