Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Cost Management updates—April 2023

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

FinOps Foundation announces a new specification project to demystify cloud billing data.
Centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is generally available.
Scheduled alerts in Azure Government.
Register for Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure.
Register for Optimize your IT costs with Azure Monitor.
Cut costs with AI-powered productivity in Microsoft Teams.
3 ways to reduce costs with Microsoft Teams Phone.
What's new in Cost Management Labs.
New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.

Let's dig into the details.

FinOps Foundation announced a new specification project to demystify cloud billing data

Microsoft partnered with FinOps Foundation and Google to launch FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), a technical project to build and maintain an open specification for cloud cost data. As one of the key contributors and principal steering committee members for this project, we’re incredibly excited about the potential value this will bring for organizations of all sizes.

Some of the benefits you’ll see include the ability to:

Better understand how they’re being charged across services and especially cloud providers.
Reduce data ingestion and normalization requirements.
Streamline reporting and monitoring efforts, like cost allocation and showback.
Leverage shared guidance across the industry for how to monitor and manage costs.

FOCUS will play a major role in the evolution of the FinOps Framework and its guidance as it drives more consistency in how to analyze and communicate changes in cost, including anything from measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) to managing anomalies and commitment-based discounts to tracking resource utilization and more.

To learn more, read the FinOps Foundation announcement and join us at FinOps X, where we’ll announce an initial draft release. All FOCUS steering committee members will be on-site for deeper discussions about its roadmap and implementation.

Centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is generally available

If you’re migrating from on-premises to the cloud, Azure Hybrid Benefit should be part of your cost optimization plan. Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps customers significantly reduce the costs of running their workloads in the cloud. It works by letting customers use their on-premises licenses with active Software Assurance or subscription-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure. You can also leverage active Linux subscriptions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise server running in Azure. Traditionally, you would track available licenses that you’re using with Azure Hybrid Benefit internally and compare that with cost reports available from Cost Management Power BI reports, which can be tedious. With centralized management, you can assign SQL Server licenses to individual subscriptions or share them across an entire billing account to let the cloud manage the licenses for you, maximizing your benefit and sustaining compliance with less effort.

Centralized management of Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is now generally available.

To learn more, see Azure Hybrid Benefit documentation.

Scheduled alerts in Azure Government

Last month, you saw the addition of scheduled alerts for built-in views in Cost analysis. This month, we’re happy to announce that scheduled alerts are now available for Azure Government. Scheduled alerts allow you to get notified on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis about changes in cost by sending a picture of a chart view in Cost analysis to a list of recipients. You can even send it to stakeholders who don’t have direct access to costs in the Azure portal. To learn more, see subscribe to scheduled alerts.

Register for Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure

Did you know you can lower operating costs by up to 40 percent when you migrate Windows Server and SQL Server to Azure versus on-premises?1 Furthermore, you can improve IT efficiency and operating costs by up to 53 percent by automating management of your virtual machines in cloud and hybrid environments. To maximize the value of your existing cloud investments, you can utilize tools like Microsoft Cost Management and Azure Advisor. A recent study showed that our customers achieve up to 34 percent reduction in Azure spend in the first year by using Microsoft Cost Management. To learn more about how to achieve efficiency and maximize cloud value with Azure, join us and register for Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure, a free digital event on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

To learn more, see 5 reasons to join us at Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure.

Register for Optimize Your IT Costs with Azure Monitor

Join the Azure Monitor engineering team on May 17, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time, as they continue to listen and respond to feedback to ensure your corporate priorities are kept at the forefront!

The Azure Monitor team introduced some new pricing plans that can drive costs down without compromising performance. The team has taken some of the key points along with valuable guidance and best practices and will share it during this webinar.

In this webinar, you will learn:

New Azure Monitor pricing plans and different scenarios in which the new price plan can be applied.
Other levers that you can take advantage of to optimize your monitoring costs.
No regret moves you can implement today to start realizing cost savings.

Register for Optimize your IT costs with Azure Monitor and join us on May 17, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

Cut costs with AI-powered productivity in Microsoft Teams

As we face economic uncertainties and changes to work patterns, organizations are searching for ways to optimize IT investments and re-energize employees to achieve business results. Now—more than ever—organizations need solutions to adapt to change, improve productivity, and reduce costs. Fortunately, modern tools powered by AI hold the promise to boost individual, team, and organizational-level productivity and fundamentally change how we work, including intelligent recap for meetings in Microsoft Teams Premium with AI-augmented video recordings, AI-generated notes, and AI-generated tasks and action items, reusable meeting templates, and more.

To learn more, see Microsoft Teams Premium: Cut costs and add AI-powered productivity.

3 ways to reduce costs with Microsoft Teams Phone

As the way we work evolves, today’s organizations need cost-effective, reliable telephony solutions that help them support flexible work and truly bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Our customers are searching for products that help them promote an inclusive working environment and streamline communications. And they need solutions that simplify their technological footprint and cut the cost of legacy IT solutions and other non-essential expenses.

After examining the potential ROI that companies may realize by implementing Teams Phone, a recent study found that businesses could:

Reduce licensing and usage costs.
Minimize the burden on IT.
Help people save time and collaborate more effectively.

To learn more, including customer quotes, see 3 ways to improve productivity and reduce costs with Microsoft Teams Phone.

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Microsoft Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

New: Settings in the cost analysis preview—Enabled by default in Labs.
Get quick access to cost-impacting settings from the Cost analysis preview. You will see this by default in Labs and can enable the option from the try preview menu.
Update: Customers view for Cloud Solution Provider partnersCustomers view for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners—Now enabled by default in Labs.
View a breakdown of costs by customer and subscription in the Cost analysis preview. Note this view is only available for CSP billing accounts and billing profiles. You will see this by default in Labs and can enable the option from the Try preview menu.
Merge cost analysis menu items.
Only show one cost analysis item in the Cost Management menu. All classic and saved views are one-click away, making them easier than ever to find and access. You can enable this option from the try preview menu.
Recommendations view.
View a summary of cost recommendations that help you optimize your Azure resources in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using the try preview menu.
Forecast in the cost analysis preview.
Show your forecast cost for the period at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try preview.
Group related resources in the cost analysis preview.
Group related resources, like disks under virtual machinesVMs or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID.
Charts in the cost analysis preview.
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
View cost for your resources.
The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that resource.
Change scope from the menu.
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Microsoft Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal or Microsoft 365 admin center. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the last month! Here are 10 general availability offers you might be interested in:

Azure Kubernetes Service introduces new Free and Standard pricing tiers.
Spot priority mix for Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS).
More transactions at no additional cost for Azure Standard SSD storage.
Arm-based VMs now available in four additional Azure regions.
New General-Purpose VMs—Dlsv5 and Dldsv5.
Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL cluster compute start and stop.
New burstable SKUs for Azure Database for PostgreSQL—Flexible Server.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL—Flexible Server in Australia Central.
App Configuration geo-replication.

And six new preview offers:

New Memory Optimized VM sizes—E96bsv5 and E112ibsv5.
Azure HX series and HBv4 series virtual machines.
Azure Container Apps offers new plan and pricing structure.
Read-write premium caching for Azure HPC Cache.
In-place scaling for enterprise caches in Azure Redis Cache.
Azure Chaos Studio is now available in Brazil South region.

New videos and learning opportunities

Here’s one new video you might be interested in:

Optimize IT investments to maximize efficiency and reduce cloud spend (10 minutes).

Follow the Microsoft Cost Management YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Microsoft Cost Management.

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

New: Calculate Enterprise Agreement (EA) savings plan cost savings.
Updated: Understand usage details fields.
Updated: Group and allocate costs using tag inheritance.
Updated: Allocate Azure costs.
Updated: EA Billing administration on the Azure portal.
Updated: Create a Microsoft Customer Agreement subscription.
Updated: Change an Azure reservation directory.
Updated: Optimize Azure Synapse Analytics costs with a Pre-Purchase Plan.
22 updates based on your feedback.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @MSCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Microsoft Cost Management.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team. Stay safe and stay healthy.

1 Forrester Consulting, "The Total Economic Impact™ of Azure Cost Management and Billing", February 2021.
Quelle: Azure

Secure your cloud environment with Cloud Next-Generation Firewall by Palo Alto Networks, an Azure Native ISV Service—now in preview

To support our customers in accelerating their digital transformation journey and protecting their cloud environment against threats, Microsoft is committed to giving customers the best possible options for securing their applications. To accelerate that commitment, we are excited to announce the preview of Cloud Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) for Azure.

Cloud NGFW for Azure is Palo Alto Networks NGFW delivered as a managed service on Microsoft Azure. It enables you to easily utilize Palo Alto Networks best-in-class network security capabilities on Azure, and you can manage it using either Palo Alto Networks Panorama policy management solution or directly from the Azure portal. Cloud NGFW for Azure combines the scalability and reliability of Microsoft Azure with Palo Alto Networks deep expertise in network security.

“At Microsoft, we are dedicated to ensuring that Microsoft Azure is the most trusted and secure cloud platform. With the preview release of the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure, we are pleased to expand our ecosystem of native ISV solutions and provide customers and developers with more options to meet their security needs. This collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft combines the scalability and reliability of Azure with Palo Alto Networks expertise to help safeguard our customers against the latest threats.”—Julia Liuson President, Microsoft Developer Division at Microsoft.

"More and more of our customers are running their business critical applications in Azure and are looking to us to help keep those workloads secure. With Cloud NGFW for Azure we are excited to combine Palo Alto Networks best-in-class security with the scalability and reliability of Azure to provide our mutual customers the ability to run their applications with confidence. As a managed Azure Native ISV service, we are proud to deliver the ease of use customers expect from a cloud native experience.”—Lee Klarich, Chief Product Officer, Palo Alto Networks.

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall is available on Azure

Palo Alto Networks is a leader in cloud security and provides next-generation cybersecurity to thousands of customers globally, across all sectors. With the integration of Cloud NGFW for Azure into the Azure ecosystem we are delivering an integrated experience and empowering a growing ecosystem of developers and customers to help protect their organizations on Azure.

Cloud NGFW for Azure is offered through Azure Marketplace and offers many of the same capabilities as Palo Alto Networks hardware firewalls and virtualized next-generation firewalls as a managed service, making it easily scalable for cloud environments.

We are excited to work with Palo Alto Networks to provide powerful capabilities to Azure customers, including:

Security: Palo Alto Networks provides a rich set of security features thanks to its unique machine learning (ML) powered NGFW. Cloud NGFW for Azure uses AI and ML behind the scenes to detect and stop known, unknown, and zero-day threats, enabling customers to stay ahead of sophisticated adversaries. This advanced technology has allowed Palo Alto Networks to block nearly 5 billion events each day, demonstrating the effectiveness of this solution in providing robust security to customers.
Ease of Use: Cloud NGFW for Azure is designed to be incredibly easy to use, thanks to its Azure-native ISV Service architecture. This enables customers to procure and deploy the solution directly from the Azure portal in just a few minutes, providing instant protection against cyber threats. The solution is also very easy to operate as Palo Alto Networks takes care of scaling, resilience, and software updates. Furthermore, Cloud NGFW for Azure integrates seamlessly with Azure Virtual wide area network (WAN) deployments, enabling customers to protect traffic across their entire network. This integration provides customers with the agility and flexibility they need to manage their cloud security while focusing on their core business objectives.
Consistent Management from On-Prem to Cloud: Cloud NGFW for Azure is integrated with their Panorama policy management solution. This combination offers a host of benefits to our mutual customers. Firstly, it enables seamless security policy extension from on-prem to Azure, simplifying operations and reducing administrative workload and total cost of ownership. More importantly, this integration enforces the same high standards of security in the cloud, ensuring that customers’ cloud environments are secure and protected against cyber threats. Additionally, integration provides centralized visibility, providing valuable insights into the threats on their network from on-prem environments to the cloud. This enables customers to manage their security policies through their existing Panorama console, streamlining management, allowing their cloud teams to focus on application migration and new application development. 

Do more with less

We have invested in a deeply integrated experience with Palo Alto Networks on Azure including some of the key capabilities listed below to help you do more with less.

Seamless end user experience

We collaborated closely with Palo Alto Networks to develop Cloud NGFW for Azure, and tested it with our joint customers. Cloud NGFW for Azure provides a seamless and simplified end user experience for Cloud NGFW for Azure by integrating the deployment, management, billing, and support of the Palo Alto Networks solution on Azure, available via Azure Marketplace.

Cloud NGFW for Azure also provides integrated billing with Azure subscription invoicing, deep integrations with Azure services for role-based access control (RBAC) and identity management, and a unified support model. This service gives the user consistency in performance and security across their portfolio of on-prem and Azure cloud apps by using the same security solution and configurations everywhere. 

Deploy in minutes

Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW is deeply integrated into the Azure ecosystem. Through this deep integration, users can provision a new Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall in a matter of minutes, so they can quickly secure their Azure applications.

Run where you want

Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure can be deployed into both Virtual Networks and Virtual WAN hubs, and integrated with Azure Key Vault so even encrypted communications can be inspected for security. Cloud NGFW for Azure can be deployed into your Virtual Network automatically using a custom solution via service injection, and user-defined routing can be applied to route traffic to-and-from Cloud NGFW for Azure for inspection.

Customers who want a fully managed network-as-a-service with powerful routing can also choose to deploy the solution in a Virtual WA. Virtual WAN abstracts and simplifies the complexity of routing within a large hybrid network that spans on-premises and Azure at-scale. Configuring routing in Virtual WAN to send traffic to Cloud NGFW for Azure as a bump-in-the-wire solution requires just a single click with the Virtual WAN's intelligent routing engine handling the rest of the routing.

Getting started with Cloud NGFW for Azure

Discovery and procuring: Azure customers can find the Palo Alto Networks service listed on Azure Marketplace, review the different purchasing plans offered, and procure it directly with single billing enabled:

Provisioning the Palo Alto Networks resources: Within several clicks, you can deploy Palo Alto Networks service in your desired subscription and datacenter regions with your preferred plan.

Related posts 

Palo Alto Networks Press Release
Palo Alto Networks Announcement Blog
Learn more on Microsoft Learn
Get it now on Azure Marketplace
Read the Azure Virtual WAN announcement blog

Quelle: Azure

Azure Virtual WAN introduces its first SaaS offering

Today we are excited to announce the preview of Palo Alto Networks Cloud Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) for Azure, available as a software as a service (SaaS) offering in Azure Virtual WAN. Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN), networking as a service brings networking, security, and routing functionalities together to simplify networking in Azure. With ease of use and simplicity built in, vWAN is a one-stop shop to connect, protect, route traffic, and monitor your wide area network.

Virtual WAN’s deep integration with the Palo Alto Networks managed firewall service allows you to enjoy the simplicity of a SaaS security offering without the hassles of managing provisioning, scaling, resiliency, software updates, or routing. A SaaS model enables a customer to deploy a solution by simply supplying necessary parameters and abstracting themselves from the management of network virtual appliances.

In this blog, we will focus on the use case, followed by a brief overview of the behind-the-scenes secret sauce that makes it happen, and then understanding key Palo Alto Networks differentiating features.

The use case

Customers of Azure Virtual WAN can now use Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure to secure their traffic through their Virtual WAN deployments. Today, customers with virtual hubs across the globe can choose to protect their traffic destined to on-premises, by deploying an Azure Firewall or a third-party network virtual appliance (NVA). Customers now have the additional ability to be able to deploy Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW as a SaaS solution and secure any possible traffic flows in their vWAN deployment.

The different traffic flows that are supported by a customer’s vWAN deployment are illustrated below. Flows are numbered in the table below with the following assumptions:

‘B’ stands for a Branch which is a customer’s on-premises network connected to Azure through ExpressRoute circuits, Branch/Site-to-site VPN, or Remote user/Point-to-site connections.
‘V’ stands for VNet—Azure Virtual networks hosting customer services and connected to a Virtual WAN hub. It may also be referred to as spoke VNet.
‘I’ stands for internet, which means the customer traffic that originates from or terminates in the internet and traverses through Azure Virtual WAN.
‘H’ stands for Azure Virtual hub.
Traffic flows across a single hub are traffic flows originating and terminating on endpoints connected to the same virtual hub. These may also be referred to as Intra-hub flows.
Inter-hub flows are traffic flows that traverse across 2 virtual hubs to get to the destination.

Figure 1: Supported use case and traffic flows in Azure Virtual WAN with Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

User experience

Customers can add Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW to an Azure Virtual WAN Hub in the Azure portal. After a hub is created, click on the hub name and navigate to Third-party Providers -> SaaS solutions –> Create SaaS and choose the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW option.

Figure 2: Discover Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

After clicking “Create”, you’ll be taken to a wizard experience where you can configure and customize your Cloud NGFW SaaS deployment. You can customize key networking and security attributes of your SaaS such as selecting public Ips, DNS proxy settings, security policies, and security settings.

Figure 3: Create and set up security settings in Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

After the Cloud NGFW has been successfully provisioned, you can manage your SaaS Firewall by navigating to your Virtual Hub -> Third-party providers -> SaaS solutions -> Manage SaaS. Explore here for more information on available options.

How does this all work within Virtual WAN

As mentioned in the prior section, Virtual WAN supports multiple flows. To illustrate the behind-the-scenes workings in Virtual WAN, we will use East-West (V2V) traffic flows.

Figure 4: Traffic flows within Virtual WAN for East-West (V2V) traffic to-fro Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

As you can see, the complexities of traffic engineering, and infrastructure management are completely removed and the user gets to just focus on securing the right security policies for their network traffic.

Key highlights of the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure integration with Virtual WAN

Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure integrates with Azure Virtual WAN deployments, enabling customers to protect traffic across their entire network. While there are several cool and turn-key features built into the integration, a few that are worth calling out are below:

Machine learning powered NGFW: Cloud NGFW for Azure uses AI and machine learning to detect and stop known, unknown, and zero-day threats, enabling customers to stay ahead of sophisticated adversaries.
Consistent Security and Management from On-Premises to Azure: Cloud NGFW for Azure is integrated with Panorama, Palo Alto Networks policy management solution. The integration of Panorama with Cloud NGFW for Azure offers a host of benefits to customers. Firstly, it enables seamless security policy extension from on-prem to Azure, simplifying operations and reducing administrative workload and total cost of ownership. More importantly, this integration enforces the same high standards of security in the cloud, ensuring that customers’ cloud environments are secure and protected against cyber threats. Additionally, the integration provides centralized visibility, providing valuable insights into the threats on their network enabling customers to manage their security policies through their existing Panorama console, streamlining management, allowing their cloud teams to focus on application migration and new application development.
Ease of use: Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW is designed to be incredibly easy to use. Similar to Virtual WAN product principles for simplicity and ease of use, this Palo Alto Networks integrated solution allows customers to procure and deploy the solution directly from the Azure portal in just a few minutes, providing instant protection against cyber threats. The solution is also painless to operate as Palo Alto Networks takes care of scaling, resilience, and software updates. This integration gives customers the agility and flexibility they need to manage their cloud security while focusing on their core business objectives.

We want your feedback

We look forward to continuing to build out Azure Virtual WAN and adding more capabilities in the future. We encourage you to try out Azure Virtual WAN and the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW SaaS and look forward to hearing more about your experiences to incorporate your feedback into the product.

Learn more

For additional information, please explore these resources:

Get started with Azure Virtual WAN Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.
What's new in Azure Virtual WAN?
Virtual WAN Palo Alto Networks Solution.
Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW documentation.
Virtual WAN documentation.
Read the Azure Blog announcement.

Quelle: Azure

ISC 2023: Experience the power of HPC in the cloud with Microsoft Azure

The ISC High-Performance Event (ISC), formerly known as International Supercomputing Conference, is one of the most important events in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry, bringing together some of the world's most prominent researchers, developers, vendors, and users to discuss the latest advancements in HPC technology. Microsoft Azure has had a major presence at ISC for several years now, and this year's conference will be no exception.

Looking back at ISC 2022

At ISC 2022, we showcased the latest HPC solutions for Azure HPC, including the general availability of several new products. These solutions are designed to help organizations of all sizes take advantage of the power and flexibility of Azure for their HPC workloads.

Key themes for us in the past have been around showcasing our latest advancements in HPC and AI infrastructure, and how our solutions can help businesses accelerate their research, streamline their operations, and achieve their business goals. In addition, we demonstrated the value of our partnerships with various industry leaders and how we collectively enable customers to leverage the latest technologies in HPC and AI. We also highlighted our commitment to providing secure and scalable cloud solutions to meet the demands of the most complex workloads.

Key themes to help businesses at ISC 2023

As we look forward to the upcoming event, these key themes are even more important to discuss with customers and find ways for them to do more with less in this environment of macroeconomic uncertainty. Our experts combined with our key partners in this space are truly incredible at helping businesses optimize their cloud spend and leverage the best technology for the right ROI to get the fastest results possible.

AI is also a key theme in our current landscape, with big breakthroughs happening recently in this space, and will flow through into our presence at the event. Whether you’re working on image and speech recognition, natural language processing, or predictive modeling, a powerful infrastructure is needed to power and accelerate these workloads.

This year we’re a silver sponsor for the ISC 2023 event. We’ll have both a booth on-site (C318) and a virtual presence. We’ll have several presentations per day around key topics in the HPC and AI spaces, given by Microsoft experts and partners. We’ll also have some presentations from customers, where you can learn more about how other companies are accelerating their workloads on the cloud and ask questions.

Vendor Showdown

Antigoni Chrysostomou, Director Specialist Management, Microsoft.

Come hear about the following topics in this year’s Vendor Showdown:

Microsoft's strategy to continue investing in the newest CPUs and graphic processing units (GPUs) with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA—building genuine HPC and AI infrastructure at scale.
How we are running Linux on our HPC systems and we can run message passing interface (MPI) jobs on Azure.
How Azure is achieving world-class performance optimized often with special versions of CPUs not available on prem or with other cloud vendors on the market.
Microsoft’s strategy around AI infrastructure for training AI models.
Quantum Computing and the ability to run quantum use cases on today’s HPC infrastructure.
Examples of how we help customers achieve more.

HPC Solutions Forum

Hall H, Booth K1001—Ground Floor on Tuesday, May 23, 2023, from 1:40 PM to 2:00 PM CEST.

HPC infrastructure for AI outcomes: Learning at large scale—Monday, May 22, 2023. Time to be announced.

Gabrielle Davelaar

Senior AI Lead Global Black Belt, Microsoft.

Karl Podesta

Senior Specialist, Microsoft Azure HPC.

Microsoft Azure claims five entries in the top 50 supercomputers in the world (November 2022). These entries are each smaller parts of larger systems, at separate sites. As a part of public cloud infrastructure, they are used by customers all over the world for running both HPC and large AI models. They are also used by Microsoft itself. Our partnerships (such as with NVIDIA and OpenAI) help us to run some of the largest AI models in the world and bring this intelligence directly into the entire suite of Microsoft products, from Windows to Office to Bing (and Azure itself, too). Come and learn some of what we have learned from training, deploying, and running the world’s largest AI models, on some of the world’s largest HPC infrastructure—and our thoughts on how this relates to sustainability and powering the future.

Want to keep an eye on what’s happening? Check out our ISC 2023 website, which we’ll continue to update as plans are solidified.

Newest advancements since ISC 2022

Azure HBv4-series and HX-series virtual machines, now in preview

In November 2022, the latest advancements in purpose-built virtual machines targeted for HPC workloads brought the HBv4-series and HX-series, powered by long awaited, newest 4th Gen EPYCTM AMD processors, codenamed ‘Genoa.’ The HBv4-series is the next generation of our long running, flagship HB-series, and brings significant improvements to key workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis, frontend and backend electronic design automation (EDA), rendering, molecular dynamics, computational geoscience, weather simulation, AI inference, and financial risk analysis. The brand new HX-series is a significant step towards delivering the best platform for silicon design, with higher memory capacity and is designed to support ever growing models that are becoming more commonplace among chip designers.

Azure Managed Lustre, now in preview

In February 2023 we launched Azure Managed Lustre in preview, a new storage offering for Azure HPC. Lustre is an open-source parallel file system renowned for HPC and is adept at large-scale cluster computing. Azure Managed Lustre (preview) provides high-performance storage of Lustre with the control and consistency of Azure. As a result, customers can focus on their business goals, whether that’s building a fraud detection system based on statistical analysis system (SAS) analytics or decoding the human genome to create the next breakthrough in medicine.

Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines, now generally available

The new Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines became generally available in June 2022, featuring NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs and enhanced performance capabilities for graphics-intensive processing workloads. These virtual machines are ideal for graphics-intensive applications for CAD, architecture engineering and construction (AEC), gaming, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and provide customers with flexible, scalable solutions to meet their computing needs. With GPU partitioning (1/8 to 2 full GPUs available), these new virtual machines lower the barrier to entry for companies wanting to leverage GPUs, where a full GPU is not necessary. We encourage customers to explore the new capabilities of Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines and experience the benefits of advanced graphics processing for their business.

See what our customers have been up to

Moody’s Analytics

Moody's Analytics collaborated with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable cloud HPC solution to support its insurance financial intelligence platform. By leveraging Azure virtual machine scale sets and Azure HPC SKUs, Moody's was able to efficiently scale its infrastructure to support dynamic workloads, improve application performance, and reduce operational costs. As a result of this partnership, Moody's Analytics was able to enhance its customer experience and provide more accurate, reliable, and timely financial analysis to the insurance industry.

Climavision

Climavision partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable and reliable cloud solution to support its advanced weather forecasting technology. With Azure's AI and analytics capabilities, Climavision was able to improve its weather prediction accuracy and provide real-time, hyperlocal weather insights to its customers. By leveraging Azure's secure and flexible cloud platform, Climavision was able to enhance its operational efficiency and achieve significant business growth.

UD Trucks

UD Trucks collaborated with Microsoft to develop an advanced HPC and AI infrastructure to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its manufacturing processes. By leveraging Azure's HPC capabilities and machine learning algorithms, UD Trucks was able to streamline its supply chain operations and enhance its vehicle design process. With Azure's secure and scalable cloud platform, UD Trucks was able to achieve significant cost savings and position itself for future growth in the automotive industry.

Encina Chemicals

Encina Chemicals partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable, secure, and flexible cloud solution to optimize its manufacturing processes, reduce time to solution, and increase the possibility of running larger and more sophisticated domain models that incorporate more detailed physics and more complex chemical reactions. Azure's integrated AI and analytics capabilities enabled Encina Chemicals to automate quality control, optimize production, and reduce waste—leading to significant cost savings, increased efficiency, and better resource sustainability. Using Azure HPC allowed taking leaps in sustainability initiatives instead of slowly creeping forward with preexisting technology. The simulations generated precise, actionable data used in the design of a cutting-edge recycling facility allowing Encina Chemicals and other sustainability startups to use faster, less expensive modeling in Azure to help them deploy and scale modeling innovative ideas with confidence.

Learn more about Azure HPC and ISC 2023

Here are some key places for you to learn more about Azure HPC and our presence at the ISC High-Performance Event 2023:

Keep up on our presence at ISC 2023.
See what we have available for Azure high-performance computing.
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Quelle: Azure

Managing IP with Microsoft Azure and Cliosoft

This blog was co-authored by Fernando Aznar Cornejo, AMD Partner Development Manager; Nathaniel Lum, Senior Applications Engineer, Cliosoft; Amit Varde, Director – Solutions Engineering, Cliosoft.

Intellectual Property (IP) is a critical asset for technology companies, encompassing a company's patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. For technology companies, IP often refers to source code or design, which is the foundation of their products and services. Therefore, protecting IP is crucial to a company's success, and proper management of IP data and processes is equally essential.

As technology companies have grown and become more geographically diverse, managing IP data and processes have become more complex. Companies now need to be able to build geographically diverse teams and design centers, adding new complexity and challenges to IP data and process management. With the advent of cloud computing, companies are leveraging the power of the cloud for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. This move to the cloud has made effective and efficient IP data management a necessity.

Managing revisions of IPs is a fundamental requirement, but IP data governance, traceability, and security are equally important. These requirements have led to the development of IP management platforms, which are designed to meet the unique needs of technology companies. Ultimately, using an IP management system enables companies to collaborate efficiently with accuracy, secure their IP, track the expertise of their employees, and comply with regulatory requirements.

Companies that work on hardware, software, or both must manage IP data and processes holistically on a Unified IP Management Platform. This platform must provide revision and release control for geographically and functionally diverse teams of engineers and managers contributing to the company's intellectual property development process. This is where the power of using HPC platforms on the cloud is most apparent.

Knowing your key requirements for an IP management system

During the product design process, several features are needed to ensure companies are getting the most out of their IP management system. If you’re looking to implement an IP management system, look to ensure your system has the following elements.

Version control tools that provide three main features: reversibility, concurrency, and annotation, which help engineering teams manage their source code or design. Integrating version control with IP editor tools improves productivity for engineering teams by making data sharing more efficient and reducing errors. A centralized repository that helps engineers synchronize their work more frequently and improves collaborations by allowing engineers to see who is working on what and stay up-to-date on changes.
Technology design often has large files, so an IP management system needs to provide viable options to mitigate the problem and manage data management at scale powered with technology such as a network storage optimization.
IP traceability is a key feature of an IP management system, that helps with Bill of Materials (BOM) Management, IP Provenance tracking, and data analytics
IP Reuse: To maximize the company's return on invested time, money, and efforts, engineering teams need a central catalog of IPs to search and browse for all available IPs. Engineers need access to real-time, accurate information about the IP. The catalog of IPs must provide comprehensive dependency tracking. Engineers and managers must be able to report the Bill of Materials (BOM) for every project or IP in the catalog and provide an IP consumers' report, including detailed information on the products using the IP.
Long term return on investment (ROI) stemming from a system that can track IP over time.  Companies spend a lot of time, money and effort to develop the IP, so having a system that can access real-time and historical knowledge about IP is paramount.

Using Cliosoft on Microsoft Azure

Cliosoft’s Data and IP Management platform ensures teams can create, manage, and store their documents, scripts, methodologies, and ideas seamlessly. In addition, Cliosoft HUB addresses the size and complexities of today’s IP management. Used in combination, users can accurately manage their intellectual property.

Microsoft Azure’s purpose-built HPC platform offers industry-leading security, scalability, and flexible use models to meet the demands of the most complex high-performance computing workloads. The availability of Azure’s virtual machines means having large amounts of compute available, which gives companies the flexibility to scale up and down depending on their IP management needs.

By implementing a well-designed Cliosoft IP Source Code Management Platform on Microsoft Azure, enterprise customers can leverage the power of both systems to achieve high scalability, collaboration, availability, and reliability in their product development cycles. This solution provides companies with the tools they need to manage their IP data and processes holistically, ensuring that they can develop high-quality intellectual property while reducing development times and costs.

Moving Forward

IP is a critical asset for technology companies, and proper management of IP data and processes is essential for a company's success. The move to cloud computing has made effective and efficient IP data management a necessity. Cliosoft and Microsoft Azure provide a solution for managing IP source code in technology development, offering a platform that addresses the complexity and challenges of IP governance, traceability, and security. Companies that leverage this solution can achieve high scalability, availability, and reliability in their product development cycles, giving them a competitive advantage in achieving success.

To learn more about the technical details in simplifying your IP management, read the whitepaper.
Quelle: Azure

Choose the best global distribution solution for your applications with Azure

This post was co-authored by Dave Burkhardt and Sami Modak.

As part of your cloud journey, critical applications need to be deployed in multiple Azure regions to ensure high availability for your global customer base. When reviewing Azure’s various global traffic distribution solutions, ask yourself, “Which option is the best one for my application?”.

In this blog, you will learn about each global traffic distribution solution Azure offers, and which solution is the best one for your internet-facing cloud architecture. Currently, Azure offers different options for distributing global traffic. Microsoft Azure Front Door is a content delivery network (CDN) service with application layer load balancing capabilities. Azure cross-region Load Balancer is a global network layer load balancer. Finally, Azure Traffic Manager is a domain name service (DNS)-based traffic distribution solution. 

Choosing the right global traffic distribution solution

You will learn about three example companies—Contoso1, Contoso2, and Contoso3. For each company, we will dive into their application’s scenario and decide which global traffic distribution solution is the best one for them.

Customer scenario 1—wholesale distributor

Contoso1 is a large wholesale distributor that has locations all over the globe. Contoso1 has been going through a large technological transformation and has been migrating services to Azure. One of the applications being moved to Azure is their backend inventory management software. This application is responsible for providing users with information about inventory status and updating inventory records after a transaction has occurred. As part of their migration the team at Contoso1 has strict requirements that need to be met by a global distribution solution.

First, all traffic type will be layer 4 and must be served with ultra-low latency. In addition, the application requires a regional redundancy with automatic traffic fail-over in the event a region is down, to ensure high availability.
Second, the application requires a static IP address that the application’s frontend will consistently ping.
Finally, any updates made to regional deployments shouldn’t have an impact on the overall backend inventory application.

Given all the requirements laid out by Contoso1’s, Azure cross-region Load Balancer is a perfect solution for their application. Azure cross-region Load Balancer is highly optimized at serving layer-4 traffic with ultra-low latency. Furthermore, cross-region load balancer provides geo-proximity routing, which means all Contoso1’s stores traffic will be forwarded to the closest regional deployment to them. Azure cross-region Load Balancer also provides automatic failover. In the event one of Contoso1’s regional deployment is unhealthy, all traffic will be serviced by the next healthy regional deployment. In addition, cross-region load balancers provide users with a static globally anycast IP address, in which Contoso1 doesn’t have to worry about their IP address changing. Finally, Azure cross-region Load Balancer will allow Contoso1 to update its regional deployments behind a single global endpoint without any impact on its end users.

Customer scenario 2—social media company

Contoso2 is a global social media platform. As a social media site, they need to serve both interactive and static content to their users around the globe as quickly and reliably as possible. Most recently, due to Contoso2’s prominent status as a social media platform, they have experienced an outage with their on-premises hosted website because of a DDoS attack. That said, Contoso2 has the following strict requirements as they migrate to Azure:

A platform that can deliver both static and dynamic content to their consumers around the globe with the utmost performance and reliability.
Ability to route content to both their mobile and desktop users as quickly as possible.
Easily integrate with Azure’s DNS, Web Application, Storage, and Application Gateway products.
DDoS protection.
Reduce secure sockets layer (SSL) load on Contoso2’s application servers, and instead process SSL requests on the edge for faster user experience for Contoso2’s global clients.

Azure Front Door is an ideal solution to enable accelerated and highly resilient web application performance for optimal delivery of static and dynamic content around the globe:

Static Content—Contoso2’s cached static content can be served from Azure Front Door’s 185 global edge points of presence (PoP) locations. To ensure the utmost performance and resiliency, Azure Front Door utilizes the Anycast protocol to make sure the Contoso2’s client’s requests are served from the nearest global edge locations.
Dynamic Content—Azure Front Door has an arsenal of traffic acceleration features. Client to Azure Front Door PoP traffic is again optimized via the Anycast protocol. Although as it specifically pertains to dynamic workloads, edge PoP to customer’s origin connections are optimized via split TCP. This technique enables the traffic to terminate the TCP connection to the nearest edge PoP and uses long living connections over Microsoft’s global private wide area network (WAN) to reduce the round-trip-time (RTT). Additionally, in the event Cotoso2 deployed multiregional origin deployments, Azure Front Door utilizes health probes to fetch content from the least latent origin.

Moreover, Azure Front Door also has SSL offload capabilities which can improve performance further. In addition, Azure Front Door is highly optimized for HTTP and web-based applications. With Azure Front Door, customers are equipped with various layer 7 routing features. These features allow customers to apply business routing and advanced routing within Azure Front Door. For example, Azure Front Door can route requests to mobile or desktop versions of Contoso2’s web application based on the client device type. Additional examples include SSL offload, path-based routing, fast failover, caching, and more.

Today Azure provides end-to-end solutions for every aspect of application management. Azure Front Door provides seamless integration with other Azure services such as DNS, Web App, and Storage. These integrations allow customers to easily create powerful web applications built using the integration of multiple Azure services.

Finally, Azure Front Door provides built-in support for various security products to help protect customers’ web applications. For example, customers can secure their origins with layer 3, 4, and 7 DDOS mitigation, and seamlessly enable Azure Web Application Firewall protection.

Customer scenario 3—sustainable fashion retailor

Contoso3 is a large retail store focused on sustainable fashion items. Contoso3 has a large online presence and has historically been hosting all their applications on-premises. However, given the advantage of the cloud and Azure, Contoso3 has begun migrating their applications to Azure. One of these applications is their online store platform. As the team at Contoso3 is evaluating different Azure global traffic distribution solutions, they have outlined several requirements that must be addressed.

First, the team at Contoso3 will be doing a rolling migration where part of their application will remain on-premises and the other part will be hosted on Azure. Any viable solution should be able to direct traffic to on-premises servers to support this rolling migration plan.
Second, latency is critical for Contoso3 and client traffic needs to be routed to healthy endpoints in a timely manner. 
Finally, the solution needs to be able to direct users to the correct backend type based on their geographical location. Contoso3 caters to a wide range of customers and often has clothing items specific to certain geographical areas.

With all the requirements stated prior, Azure Traffic Manager would be the optimal solution for Contoso3. With Azure Traffic Manager, users can add on-premises servers in the backend to support burst-to-cloud, failover-to-cloud, and migrate-to-cloud scenarios. In addition, Azure Traffic Manager provides automatic failover and multi-region support, which all result in traffic being served with low latency. DNS name resolution is fast, and results are cached. The speed of the initial DNS lookup depends on the DNS servers the client uses for name resolution. Typically, a client can complete a DNS lookup within approximately 50 ms. The results of the lookup are cached for the duration of the DNS time-to-live (TTL). The default TTL for Traffic Manager is 300 seconds (about five minutes). The Traffic Manager can also help Contoso3 with their geofencing needs, specifically with the geographic routing feature. This feature will allow Contoso3 to direct users to the correct backend instance based on their geographical location.

Summary

The following section discusses common use cases for each load balancing solution, and what each solution is optimized for.  

 

Azure Front Door

Azure cross-region Load Balancer

Azure Traffic Manager

Traffic type

HTTP/HTTPS

TCP/UDP

DNS

Routing policies

Latency, priority, round robin, weighted round robin, path-based, advanced http rules engine

Geo-proximity and Hash Based

Geographical, latency, weighted, priority, subnet, multi-value

Supported environments.

Azure, non-Azure cloud, on-premises

Azure

Azure, non-Azure cloud, on-premises

Backend Types

Azure Application Gateway, Azure Load balancer, Azure Traffic Manger

Azure Load Balancer

Azure Application Gateway, Azure Load balancer, Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Front Door, Azure Cross Region Load Balancer

Session affinity

X

X

NA

Site acceleration

X

NA

NA

Caching

X

NA

NA

Static IP

NA

X

NA

Security

DDOS, Web Application Firewall, Private Link

Network Security Group

Azure Resource Logs, Azure Policies

SLA

99.99%

99.99%

99.99%

Pricing

Pricing

Pricing

Pricing

Learn More

To learn more about the products discussed in the blog please visit the following sites:

Azure cross-region Load Balancer
Azure Front Door
Azure Traffic Manager

Quelle: Azure

4 cloud cost optimization strategies with Microsoft Azure

We have seen many businesses make significant shifts toward cloud computing in the last decade. The Microsoft Azure public cloud offers many benefits to companies, such as increased flexibility, scalability, and availability of resources. However, with the increased usage of resources, implementing best practices in cloud efficiency is a necessity to validate spending and avoid waste.

What is cloud efficiency? It is the capacity to utilize cloud resources in the best possible way, and at the lowest possible cost while, at the same time, minimizing the waste of resources, and thus of energy and carbon emissions. It’s a combination of cost—how you handle and govern your cloud infrastructure, carbon—how you can keep carbon emissions at a minimum, and energy—how the application uses electricity, and how you can optimize these three areas to make the cheapest, more modern, efficient, and sustainable application. In this post, we will explore why you should immediately start your cloud cost management and governance process.

Cloud cost optimization is essential for companies as it directly impacts their bottom line and OPEX expenses. The cost of cloud computing can quickly add up, especially for businesses with a high volume of data or high traffic, and mission-critical applications.

Cloud cost optimization is what makes workloads more efficient, but what are its benefits?

Understanding, measuring, optimizing, and tracking your cloud costs. Having full control of your monthly bill should be your primary goal.

Reduce carbon emissions. Cloud computing consumes a significant amount of energy, and the increased usage of cloud resources has resulted in a substantial increase in carbon emissions. Cloud providers are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint, but businesses can also play a significant role in reducing carbon emissions by optimizing their cloud resources.

Improve the performance of applications. This can significantly impact user experience, as slow or unresponsive applications can lead to frustrated customers and lost revenue. By optimizing cloud resources, companies can ensure that their applications run smoothly, improving customer satisfaction, and decreasing cloud spend.

Saving on your application’s cost in a systematic way can give you a budget for additional features, refactoring, and innovation.

The four main cloud cost optimization strategies are usually:

1. Right sizing

Right-sizing is probably the most important aspect of controlling cloud costs. The impact is not simply saving money—in many cases, there is a balance between performance and spending and, more specifically, between meeting your internal customer service-level agreements (SLAs) efficiently. You need to find this balance to keep both your application managers, financial operations (finops) team, and cloud team happy.

2. Clean-up

Another important part of cloud computing cost saving is cleanup operations. When dealing with many workloads or complex projects, lots of resources are created just as a transitional step and are often forgotten about and paid for. This is particularly valid during lift and shift migration where customers choose to initially match resources that were in a fixed, non-flexible environment, ending up with overallocated services. Cleaning up unused items—as a first approach—represents one of the short-term, quick wins for cost-saving. When inserted into a recurring process, this will also help you uncover any unassigned or unutilized infrastructure (with operational downfalls) and, in general, uncover gaps in your processes that might have a wider impact than costs. You should plan to periodically assess the evolution of your infrastructure for any resources that may have been left unassigned and add this to your technical debt management operations.

3. Azure reservations and savings plans

These are a 1- or 3-year commitment to specific Microsoft Azure services or compute use. In exchange for this, significant cloud computing cost savings are granted. This is a very important area of cost governance, as it can amount to very large savings, even though it has practically zero impact on the carbon footprint. We recommend using reservations and savings plans once the right-sizing and cleanup processes have successfully started and periodically track and adjust their usage to match up to 100 percent of your requirements.

4. Database and application tuning

We often see customers migrate applications that rely on legacy databases. Sometimes, even cloud-native applications are developed using old data handling patterns, mostly because companies have a history that needs to be retained and cannot be wiped out by switching to a new database. But a large, stratified database that was doing well in an on-premises environment, has immediate drawbacks in the cloud—queries may be slow and resource-intensive, and data is uselessly exchanged and in large quantities which all adds up to the monthly bill. Optimizing the database so that the application is leaner and faster will also save you money by downsizing the original infrastructure and using fewer data and networking resources.

Having fully optimized your databases can, sometimes, not be enough. Your freshly migrated application came from one of the cloud migration patterns—lift and shift, refactor, rearchitect, and rebuild. Their cloud efficiency is higher when applications are designed for the cloud, as they will utilize all the flexibility and scaling of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) services, with the result of higher performance and lower costs. Investing some of the savings from your cloud cost reduction exercise will not only improve your application performance but in the end improve your overall cloud resource optimization.

What can you do to kickstart your cloud computing efficiency today:

Start your recurrent cloud cost management meeting this week. Make sure to invite all the stakeholders—the cloud and finops teams, your finance controller, and anyone in your company who is dealing with cloud costs directly or indirectly.

Search for quick wins (cleaning up, downsizing, optimizing logs or backups, and more) so that this will fund the upcoming wave of cost-saving tasks and the refactoring and innovation of your applications.

In conclusion, cloud computing efficiency is a crucial element for any company that is operating in the cloud. By adopting cloud spend optimization practices, businesses can reduce their overall cloud spend and carbon emissions, improve the performance of their applications, and finance future elements of innovation.

Learn more

If you’d like more on optimizing your Azure costs, download the full e-book The Road to Azure Cost Governance by Paola Annis and Giuliano Caglio.
Quelle: Azure

Isovalent Cilium Enterprise in Azure Marketplace

This post was co-authored by Narayan Annamalai, Partner PM Manager, Microsoft Azure.

In December 2022, Microsoft and Isovalent announced the collaboration to bring the Isovalent Cilium Enterprise offering onto Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) via Azure Marketplace. Today, we are happy to announce that Isovalent Cilium Enterprise offering is now available on the Azure Marketplace.

Isovalent Cilium Enterprise on Azure is a powerful tool for securing and managing Kubernetes’ workloads on Azure. Isovalent Cilium Enterprise's range of advanced features and easy-to-deploy ability makes it an ideal solution for organizations of all sizes looking to secure their cloud-native applications.

Enterprises realize that to achieve accelerated business growth, they can leverage AKS. However, as applications scale, there is increased complexity with security and networking. Isovalent Cilium Enterprise, which is built on top of the open-source Cilium project, addresses these gaps by providing additional functionality such as advanced observability and security policy enforcement across multiple layers of the stack. It uses eBPF technology to deliver network and application-layer security, while also providing observability and tracing for Kubernetes workloads. Isovalent Cilium Enterprise also provides seamless integration with popular Kubernetes platforms and tools, including Istio, Helm, and more, thereby making it a trusted offering among organizations. Azure Marketplace is an online store for buying and selling cloud computing solutions that allows you to deploy Isovalent Cilium Enterprise to Azure with ease.

With such a tight and native integration of Isovalent Cilium Enterprise with Azure Marketplace, customers can deploy and upgrade Isovalent Cilium Enterprise features to a new or existing AKS cluster (running Azure CNI powered by Cilium) with a few clicks. Isovalent Cilium Enterprise is built with native integration with the Azure networking platform to offer advanced features and capabilities with best-in-class performance and scale. Furthermore, customers can seamlessly perform lifecycle management of the application by receiving version updates, auto-upgrades, and vulnerability scans thus allowing them to achieve their business goals effectively. They also benefit from the simplified billing from Azure Marketplace. Whether customers are just getting started with AKS or have a large-scale production deployment, Isovalent Cilium Enterprise on Azure Marketplace will help them achieve better visibility, security, and compliance. The myriad benefits of a trusted and secure platform such as Azure Marketplace will accrue savings by limiting management overhead and driving productivity for enterprises at scale.

Key capabilities for Azure Kubernetes Services customers

To recapture, Isovalent Cilium Enterprise provides a range of advanced features built on Kubernetes networking, security, and observability. Here are just a few of the key capabilities that Isovalent Cilium Enterprise exposes to AKS customers:

•    Enhanced observability: Isovalent Cilium Enterprise provides deep visibility into your Kubernetes networking and security via Hubble. This includes detailed flow-level visibility, service mesh tracing, and more.

•    Advanced security: Isovalent Cilium Enterprise provides multi-layer security policy enforcement, including layer 7 application security policies. This allows you to protect your Kubernetes environment from advanced threats while also ensuring compliance with industry regulations.

•    Better Scalability: Isovalent Cilium Enterprise is designed to scale with your Kubernetes workloads, providing security and observability for large-scale Kubernetes clusters.

•    Enterprise-grade support: Isovalent Cilium Enterprise includes enterprise-grade support from Isovalent, including everyday support and access to patches and updates.

Start your journey with Isovalent Cilium Enterprise on Azure

To get started with Isovalent Cilium Enterprise on Azure, simply navigate to the Azure Marketplace from the Azure Portal and search for "Cilium Enterprise." You can choose between different options based on the number of nodes in your cluster and the level of support you require. Once you have selected your subscription and accepted the terms, you can deploy Isovalent Cilium Enterprise to your Kubernetes cluster with just a few clicks.

The benefits of Isovalent Cilium Enterprise through Azure Marketplace

The key benefits of using Isovalent Cilium Enterprise in the Azure Marketplace include:

•    Easy deployment: You can deploy Isovalent Cilium Enterprise on Azure with just a few clicks from the Azure Marketplace. You can either create a new AKS cluster or seamlessly upgrade an existing AKS cluster running Azure CNI powered by Cilium with the Isovalent Cilium Enterprise package.

•    Zero data path downtime while upgrading Cilium OSS to Isovalent Cilium Enterprise via Azure Marketplace.

•    Enhanced billing experience: Azure Marketplace provides a unified billing experience and an integrated experience for your Isovalent Cilium Enterprise usage.

•    Limited management overhead for customers in maintaining the upgrades. Azure Marketplace supports configurable auto-upgrades for minor versions.

Get started today

Try Isovalent Cilium Enterprise out today on the Azure Marketplace.

Read the blog post "Isovalent Cilium Enterprise now Available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace."

For more information on the Isovalent Cilium Enterprise product and capabilities, visit Isovalent Cilium Enterprise: Observability, security, networking.
Quelle: Azure