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Join the Azure Collective on Stack Overflow

The developer community is central to developer productivity. We’ve seen developers ask and answer questions and share content to contribute to each other’s success, helping us all to achieve more. 

We appreciate that the developer community is getting value out of Stack Overflow and the content that has already been created by hundreds of thousands of developers. We share in your enthusiasm for the platform and want to explore a new way to help build the community experience there.

That’s why we are excited to announce we’ve launched the Azure Collective on Stack Overflow. Users who join the Microsoft Azure Collective will find more than 190,000 questions and other relevant content using over 350 tags.

Why join the Microsoft Azure Collective?

The Microsoft Azure Collective is now your one-stop shop on Stack Overflow for all things Azure. We’ve curated Azure tags such as azure-functions, azure-storage, azure-active-directory, azure-sql-database, and azure-cosmosdb by highlighting recommended answers to your questions. This means that even if your question doesn’t have the most votes, we can help promote the right answers.

Additionally, as part of the Collective, you will:

Quickly find trusted answers recommended by Recognized Members of the Azure community.
Engage with new content formats and get in-depth product knowledge that’s only on the Collective like Articles and Bulletins directly from Azure.
Build your Collective reputation when you ask or answer questions and see your contributions appear on the member leaderboard. If your contributions continually help other users, we can invite you to become a Recognized Member. Recognized Members are acknowledged on their Stack Overflow profile and include a few extra privileges within the Collective, such as the ability to recommend answers.
Become part of our Azure developer community, empowering developers to work better together.

Who can join the Microsoft Azure Collective?

Any Stack Overflow account user can be a member. The Collective is a space for developers and technologists on Stack Overflow to engage on all Microsoft Azure products, including Compute, Containers, Identity & Security, Databases, Analytics, web, and mobile.

How can I find the Microsoft Azure Collective on Stack Overflow?

You'll find the Collective anywhere you find questions with Azure tags, like azure, azure-functions, or simply visit us.

Ready to join the Collective? Here’s how:

Already on Stack Overflow? Join the Azure Collective as a member.

New to Stack Overflow? Sign up and join us! Just make sure to check how to ask a good question first.

We hope this new curated destination for developers will enhance your ability to navigate questions to your problems more quickly and provide you with additional resources to bolster your research and learning activities.

Looking for more ways to connect with the developer community?

Join us on March 7th for this year's Azure Open Source Day, a free digital event. Learn how to use your data to build intelligent, scalable apps faster and easier with open source. See demos of the latest open-source capabilities in action—while connecting with the community of open-source experts and enthusiasts. Hear from Microsoft insiders like Brendan Burns and Donovan Brown and get insights from industry leaders at companies like GitHub, Redis, and HashiCorp. Be sure to bring your questions for the live chat Q&A.

Quelle: Azure

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6 ways to improve accessibility with Azure AI

There are over one billion people in the world living with disabilities, and many face barriers to employment, education, and societal inclusion. In 2021, Microsoft launched a new five-year initiative to address these challenges by focusing on three priorities: developing more accessible technology, using this technology to create opportunities for people with disabilities to enter the workforce, and building a more inclusive workplace for people with disabilities. The goal is to bridge the disability divide and tap into the untapped talent pool of people with disabilities. Digital technology can play a crucial role in improving communication, interaction, and access to information for this community.

Background

As technology continues to advance, it becomes increasingly important for companies to consider the accessibility of their products and services, to make sure people with disabilities aren’t left behind. Accessibility is also great for business. With at least one in five adults in the U.S. identifying as having a disability according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the cost of ignoring this growing market segment is huge. Designing inclusive products and services with people with disabilities in mind also improves the experience for all users. Features like video captioning and voice control are crucial accessibility tools for some individuals but make the experience better for everyone. During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for Microsoft accessibility features such as Teams captioning increased by 30 times the previous use, and Immersive Reader usage increased by 560 percent. A 2018 study by Accenture in partnership with Disability: In and the American Association of People with Disabilities found that inclusive companies had, over a four-year period, 28 percent higher revenue, double the net income, and 30 percent higher economic profit margins than their peers.

Solution

Microsoft and Azure AI offer a range of accessibility solutions to help organizations create more inclusive experiences for their users. These solutions include speech transcription and captioning, content readers, translation services, voice assistants, facial recognition, and computer vision. These AI-powered tools can help individuals with disabilities better access and engage with digital content, whether it's through speech-to-text transcription, image captioning, or text-to-speech translation.

Six use cases

Azure AI powers many of the accessible experiences found within Microsoft today. Here are some of our favorites:

Conversation, meetings, and live broadcasting: Microsoft Teams supports speech-to-text transcription and captioning for meetings and calls, powered by Azure Cognitive Services, making it easier for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing to participate in online communication. These features also benefit people with ADHD, people who are multi-tasking, or those in noisy or low-bandwidth environments.
Content reading: Microsoft products such as Outlook, Edge, and PowerPoint include a read-aloud feature, powered by Azure Cognitive Services, that uses text-to-speech technology to read web pages, documents, and emails aloud. This makes it easier for people who are blind or have low vision, in addition to people with Dyslexia, ADHD, or Autism to access and consume digital content. It also enables all users to multi-task and listen to content on the go.
Communication: Microsoft Translator is a translation service that supports speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and optical character recognition (OCR) to enable communication across different languages and formats in Teams or Outlook.
Device access: Windows Hello uses facial recognition technology, powered by Azure Face API, to allow users to log in to their devices with their face, making it easier for people with mobility disabilities to access their devices, and providing a hands-free, efficient login experience for everyone.
Device control: Microsoft products such as Windows and Xbox include voice assistants powered by speech-to-text technology, which can be used by users of all abilities to control the device and access information and services through voice commands.
Images and surroundings: Microsoft Edge, PowerPoint, and Seeing AI are products that include Azure Computer Vision capabilities such as image captioning, which can provide descriptive text for images to make them more accessible to people who are blind or who have low vision. Image descriptions also improve search engine optimization (SEO) and provide alternatives for people listening to content, or in low-bandwidth environments.

In addition to the six use cases above, we are excited to see how customers leverage the Azure OpenAI Service to improve accessible experiences. Natural language interactions can help people of all abilities engage with technology in easier ways. For example, GitHub CoPilot is a generative coding assistant powered by Azure OpenAI to help developers build faster and more efficiently.

Customer evidence

Some top customers using Azure AI for accessibility include Swedish TV, which uses Azure AI to transcribe their video content and generate closed captioning; Peloton, which uses speech-to-text and translation technology for live subtitles in its live classes, improving accessibility for members who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing; and Gameloft, which uses Azure Translator to enable communication in different languages.

2023 Ability Summit

Microsoft is hosting its 13th annual Ability Summit on March 8, 2023, to showcase company and customer innovation in the world of accessibility and inclusive design. Leading up to the free event we are also broadcasting an AI Show on February 27, 2023, dedicated to accessible technology, and on March 6, 2023, to deep dive into a customer project to generate natural-sounding audiobooks at scale. We encourage you to register for these events, which will help you develop a plan to improve inclusion and accessibility within your organization.

Looking ahead

Microsoft and Azure AI are committed to helping organizations create more inclusive experiences for their users through a range of accessibility use cases. By leveraging these solutions, companies can make a positive impact on the lives of people with disabilities and help create a more accessible world. We look forward to seeing what you build on behalf of your customers and end users with Azure AI.
Quelle: Azure

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Secure Your Kubernetes Clusters with the Kubescape Docker Extension

Container adoption in enterprises continues to grow, and Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for deploying and operating containerized applications. At the same time, security is shifting left and should be addressed earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Security has morphed from being a static gateway at the end of the development process to something that (ideally) is embedded every step of the way. This can potentially increase the effort for engineering and DevOps teams.

Kubescape, a CNCF project initially created by ARMO, is intended to solve this problem. Kubescape provides a self-service, simple, and easily actionable security solution that meets developers where they are: Docker Desktop.

What is Kubescape?

Kubescape is an open source Kubernetes security platform for your IDE, CI/CD pipelines, and clusters.Kubescape includes risk analysis, security compliance, and misconfiguration scanning. Targeting all security stakeholders, Kubescape offers an easy-to-use CLI interface, flexible output formats, and automated scanning capabilities. Kubescape saves Kubernetes users and admins time, effort, and resources.

How does Kubescape work?

Security researchers and professionals codify best practices in controls: preventative, detective, or corrective measures that can be taken to avoid — or contain — a security breach. These are grouped in frameworks by government and non-profit organizations such as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, MITRE, and the Center for Internet Security.

Kubescape contains a library of security controls that codify Kubernetes best practices derived from the most prevalent security frameworks in the industry. These controls can be run against a running cluster or manifest files under development. They’re written in Rego, the purpose-built declarative policy language that supports Open Policy Agent (OPA).

Kubescape is commonly used as a command-line tool. It can be used to scan code manually or can be triggered by an IDE integration or a CI tool. By default, the CLI results are displayed in a console-friendly manner, but they can be exported to JSON or JUnit XML, rendered to HTML or PDF, or submitted to ARMO Platform (a hosted backend for Kubescape).

Regular scans can be run using an in-cluster operator, which also enables the scanning of container images for known vulnerabilities.

Why run Kubescape as a Docker extension?

Docker extensions are fundamental for building and integrating software applications into daily workflows. With the Kubescape Docker Desktop extension, engineers can easily shift security left without changing work habits.

The Kubescape Docker Desktop extension helps developers adopt security hygiene as early as the first lines of code. As shown in the following diagram, Kubescape enables engineers to adopt security as they write code during every step of the SDLC.

Specifically, the Kubescape in-cluster component triggers periodic scans of the cluster and shows results in ARMO Platform. Findings shown in the dashboard can be further explored, and the extension provides users with remediation advice and other actionable insights.

Installing the Kubescape Docker extension

Prerequisites: Docker Desktop 4.8 or later.

Step 1: Initial setup

In Docker Desktop, confirm that the Docker Extensions feature is enabled. (Docker Extensions should be enabled by default.)  In Settings | Extensions select the Enable Docker Extensions box.

You must also enable Kubernetes under Preferences. 

Kubescape is in the Docker Extensions Marketplace. 

In the following instructions, we’ll install Kubescape in Docker Desktop. After the extension scans automatically, the results will be shown in ARMO Platform. Here is a demo of using Kubescape on Docker Desktop:

Step 2: Add the Kubescape extension

Open Docker Desktop and select Add Extensions to find the Kubescape extension in the Extensions Marketplace.

Step 3: Installation

Install the Kubescape Docker Extension.

Step 4: Register and deploy

Once the Kubescape Docker Extension is installed, you’re ready to deploy Kubescape.

Currently, the only hosting provider available is ARMO Platform. We’re looking forward to adding more soon.

To link up your cluster, the host requires an ARMO account.

After you’ve linked your account, you can deploy Kubescape.

Accessing the dashboard

Once your cluster is deployed, you can view the scan output on your host (ARMO Platform) and start improving your cluster’s security posture immediately.

Security compliance

One step to improve your cluster’s security posture is to protect against the threats posed by misconfigurations.

ARMO Platform will display any misconfigurations in your YAML, offer information about severity, and provide remediation advice. These scans can be run against one or more of the frameworks offered and can run manually or be scheduled to run periodically.

Vulnerability scanning

Another step to improve your cluster’s security posture is protecting against threats posed by vulnerabilities in images.

The Kubescape vulnerability scanner scans the container images in the cluster right after the first installation and uploads the results to ARMO Platform. Kubescape’s vulnerability scanner supports the ability to scan new images as they are deployed to the cluster. Scans can be carried out manually or periodically, based on configurable cron jobs.

RBAC Visualization

With ARMO Platform, you can also visualize Kubernetes RBAC (role-based access control), which allows you to dive deep into account access controls. The visualization makes pinpointing over-privileged accounts easy, and you can reduce your threat landscape with well-defined privileges. The following example shows a subject with all privileges granted on a resource.

Kubescape, using ARMO Platform as a portal for additional inquiry and investigation, helps you strengthen and maintain your security posture

Next steps

The Kubescape Docker extension brings security to where you’re working. Kubescape enables you to shift security to the beginning of the development process by enabling you to implement security best practices from the first line of code. You can use the Kubernetes CLI tool to get insights, or export them to ARMO Platform for easy review and remediation advice.

Give the Kubescape Docker extension a try, and let us know what you think at cncf-kubescape-users@lists.cncf.io.
Quelle: https://blog.docker.com/feed/