Discover the latest innovations at Azure Open Source Day 2023

This post has been coauthored by Nikisha Reyes-Grange and Katie Fritsch.

“Tech companies born with an open-source mentality get it. It’s our ability to work together that makes our dreams believable, and ultimately achievable; we must learn to build on the ideas of others.”—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

Microsoft has always been a developer-first organization, and we strive to make tools and platforms that serve developers. Open Source on Azure gives developers the freedom to build next-generation intelligent applications where they want, and when they want. Thanks to the power of open source, developers can now innovate faster and more securely on Azure. Microsoft helps you write more secure code, respond quickly to vulnerabilities in your software supply chain, and adopt the latest best practices to secure your development environments—all with a commitment to open source and support for all languages and frameworks.

By combining the most beloved coding and collaboration tools—Linux, GitHub, Visual Studio Code, along with the Azure platform—the open-source software in the Azure ecosystem aids developer productivity with best-in-class tools for code-to-cloud development.

Azure Open Source Day highlights Microsoft’s commitment to open source and focused on how Open Source technologies can be used to build intelligent apps faster and with more flexibility.

Opening panel: How open source and AI impact software development in the cloud

We are kicking off our show with a panel of thought leaders from Github, HashiCorp, Microsoft, and Redis to discuss how open source has continued to evolve software development, impacts on software supply chain and security, and how new AI capabilities may impact the future.

How Open Source on Azure builds an intelligent app

Today, we are excited to be showcasing a brand-new, intelligent, cloud-native application that connects owners with their lost pets using fine-tuned machine learning. Instead of printing posters, use an advanced machine learning image classification model, fine-tuned by the images on your camera roll. With this trained machine learning model, when a pet is found, you can instantly snap a photo that will match the model and connect you to the owner.

We are leveraging open source technologies to make sure that our application is using the latest and greatest technologies.

The app's frontend is a dotnet Blazor app,1 with a Python backend. The frontend and backend communicate using the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)2 that provides application programming interfaces (APIs) that simplify microservice connectivity. The backend uses a pre-built vision model from Hugging Face3, fine-tuned directly through Azure Machine Learning for model training and prediction. The whole app is deployed using Bicep4 templates and runs on Azure Kubernetes Service. The Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling (KEDA) is used to provide autoscaling capabilities based on the number of messages being sent through Dapr.

The app’s data layer was built with Azure Cosmos DB and takes advantage of the autoscale feature that matches database capacity with traffic demands. So as the app grows, the database automatically grows with it. With autoscale, the risk of rate-limiting and over-provisioning is eliminated, app performance is maintained, and the developer doesn’t have to monitor and manage database capacity manually. Developers using MySQL will soon enjoy similar benefits, with the general availability of IOPS Autoscaling in Azure Database for MySQL—flexible server, Business Critical tier coming next month. This feature will save time and money by resizing input/output operations per second (IOPS) depending on workload needs. We’ve also made it easier to develop low-code apps with MySQL data and visualize MySQL data with the integrations of Power Apps and Power BI Desktop with Azure Database for MySQL—flexible server, now in public preview and general availability respectively.

Developers using Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise can now use the RedisJSON module on active, geo-replicated caches. Currently in preview, this feature simplifies development and minimizes downtime by enabling a single operation to read, write, and store JSON documents while simultaneously syncing data across all active regions.

PostgreSQL users can now apply enhanced security to their databases, with the general availability of Microsoft Azure Active Directory and customer-managed keys in Azure Database for PostgreSQL—flexible server. Database user identities and access, along with encryption key permissions and life cycles, can now be centrally managed to make it easier to build secure apps.

Compute scaling in the demo is provided by Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) Flex to deploy GitHub Actions self-hosted runners on new Arm-based virtual machines. VMSS Flex allows you to easily manage and mix different virtual machine sizes and SKUs, including both Spot and standard virtual machines. Recent additions to the Azure portfolio include next-generation burstable Arm-based Bpsv2 virtual machines, which provide a low-cost option for workloads that typically run at a low to moderate baseline central processing unit (CPU) utilization, and Intel-based DIsv5 virtual machines that can deliver up to 30 percent increased performance and better price-performance than the Fsv2 virtual machines. Both virtual machine series feature broad support for Linux distributions.

The app uses a pre-trained vision transformer model obtained from Hugging Face for image classification tasks. Developers and data scientists can now use foundation models in Azure Machine Learning to easily start their data science works to fine-tune and deploy foundation models from Hugging Face using Azure Machine Learning components and pipelines. This feature, currently in preview, provides organizations with a comprehensive repository of popular large AI models from Hugging Face through the built-in Azure Machine Learning registries, supporting various tasks such as classification, summarization, question answering, and translation. It simplifies the process of data pre-processing and adaptation of model training scripts, freeing data scientists from the overhead of setting up and managing underlying infrastructure and environment dependencies. Read this blog to learn more about the latest open-source capabilities from Azure AI.

Unleashing the AI technology wave: Training large language models at scale

AI is changing every industry and is top of mind for developers. Most companies have leveraged AI to improve efficiency and costs. Large AI applications leveraging natural language processing (NLP), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-to-speech (TTS) are becoming prevalent, but what powers these applications is the underlying infrastructure optimized for large AI workloads. As mentioned in the post announcing the general availability of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure is the best place to build AI workloads. This session highlights the partnership between Microsoft and NVIDIA and how Azure’s AI infrastructure and Azure Machine Learning were built for speed.

Azure NDm A100 v4-series virtual machines are Azure’s flagship graphics processing unit (GPU) offerings and were used to run the model's new NVIDIA NeMo Megatron framework and test the limits of this series. Microsoft ran a 530B-parameter benchmark on 175 virtual machines, resulting in a training time per step of as low as 55.7 seconds. This benchmark measures the compute efficiency and how it scales by measuring the time taken per step to train the model after a steady state is reached, with a mini-batch size of one. The InfiniBand HDR provided superior communication between nodes without increased latency and was critical to the ludicrous speed performance.

The open source future with Web3

Azure Open Source Day will conclude with a fascinating fireside chat between Kathleen Mitford, CVP Azure Marketing and Donovan Brown, Partner Program Manager, Azure Open Source Incubations on the Open Source Future with Web3. The open and decentralized nature of Web3 can be a natural fit with open source philosophy, which is an exciting and developing space for new innovations.

Web3 refers to another evolution of the internet, which may be more decentralized. It is built on a blockchain, which is a distributed ledger technology that enables the creation of a secure and transparent way to transfer and store digital assets. Microsoft has first-party solutions and a rich partner ecosystem to help you build using Web3.

DevOps best practices are just as important, if not more important in the Web3 world as they are in the Web2 world. Azure has the key tools a developer needs—from Azure Static Web Apps, purposely built for your App, to GitHub Actions, and Azure DevOps, and Visual Studio Code. In the future, many organizations may build solutions with a combination of Web3 and Web2 working together. Go deeper into Web3 with Donovan Brown’s 10-part blog series on how to build a DevOps pipeline for the Ethereum Blockchain.

Also, with the power of AI, you can ask ChatGPT to create a "hello world" sample in any language and copy and paste the code into your project. When you go to modify the code, have GitHub copilot help you make the changes using all the best practices. You can do all of this inside a GitHub Codespace configured with all your favorite tools, frameworks, and Visual Studio Code extensions installed. Then, you can use Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions to deploy the application to Azure. If you choose to build a Web3 application, Microsoft has the best tools and cloud services to support you.

Upcoming developer community events

Local Azure Open Source Day events

Check out if there is a local Azure Open Source Day event near you.

Azure Cosmos DB Conf—8:00-11:00 AM PT, March 28, 2023

This free, virtual event for developers showcases what members of the community are building with Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra.

Citus Con: An event for Postgres 2023—April 18-19, 2023

A virtual developer event all about what you can do with the world's most advanced open source relational database. Over two days, you'll hear from open source users and experts in PostgreSQL and Citus about unique ways to use Postgres.

Watch Azure Open Source Day on-demand.

Learn more

Microsoft is working to collectively empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Whether it is contributing to projects, releasing new open source projects, or using open source to make our products and services work better, Microsoft is proud to be participating in open source communities more than ever before.

We are committed to open source at Microsoft. We contribute to Linux, Kubernetes, Visual Studio Code, and serve in open source organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) or Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). At Azure Open Source Day, we shared our latest work to enable developers to develop flexibly and innovate quickly on Azure.

Learn more about Open Source on Azure.

1dotnet Blazor

2Distributed Application Runtime

3Hugging Face

4Bicep

 
Quelle: Azure

Exploring open-source capabilities in Azure AI

This post was co-authored by Richard Tso, Director of Product Marketing, Azure AI

Open-source technologies have had a profound impact on the world of AI and machine learning, enabling developers, data scientists, and organizations to collaborate, innovate, and build better AI solutions. As large AI models like GPT-3.5 and DALL-E become more prevalent, organizations are also exploring ways to leverage existing open-source models and tools without needing to put a tremendous amount of effort into building them from scratch. Microsoft Azure AI is leading this effort by working closely with GitHub and data science communities, and providing organizations with access to a rich set of open-source technologies for building and deploying cutting-edge AI solutions.

At Azure Open Source Day, we highlighted Microsoft’s commitment to open source and how to build intelligent apps faster and with more flexibility using the latest open-source technologies that are available in Azure AI.

Build and operationalize open-source State-of-the-Art models in Azure Machine Learning

Recent advancements in AI propelled the rise of large foundation models that are trained on a vast quantity of data and can be easily adapted to a wide variety of applications across various industries. This emerging trend provides a unique opportunity for enterprises to build and use foundation models in their deep learning workloads.

Today, we’re announcing the upcoming public preview of foundation models in Azure Machine Learning. It provides Azure Machine Learning with native capabilities that enable customers to build and operationalize open-source foundation models at scale. With these new capabilities, organizations will get access to curated environments and Azure AI Infrastructure without having to manually manage and optimize dependencies. Azure Machine learning professionals can easily start their data science tasks to fine-tune and deploy foundation models from multiple open-source repositories, starting from Hugging Face, using Azure Machine Learning components and pipelines. This service will provide you with a comprehensive repository of popular open-source models for multiple tasks like natural language processing, vision, and multi-modality through the Azure Machine Learning built in registry. Users can not only use these pre-trained models for deployment and inferencing directly, but they will also have the ability to fine-tune supported machine learning tasks using their own data and import any other models directly from the open-source repository.

The next generation of Azure Cognitive Services for Vision

Today, Azure Cognitive Services for Vision released its next generation of capabilities powered by the Florence large foundational model. This new Microsoft model delivers significant improvements to image captioning and groundbreaking customization capabilities with few-shot learning. Until today, model customization required large datasets with hundreds of images per label to achieve production quality for vision tasks. But, Florence is trained on billions of text-image pairs, allowing custom models to achieve high quality with just a few images. This lowers the hurdle for creating models that can fit challenging use cases where training data is limited.

Users can try the new capabilities of Vision underpinned by the Florence model through Vision Studio. This tool demonstrates a full set of prebuilt vision tasks, including automatic captioning, smart cropping, classifying images and a summarizing video with natural language, and much more. Users can also see how the tool helps track movements, analyze environments, and provide real-time alerts.

To learn more about the new Florence model in Azure Cognitive Services for Vision, please check out this announcement blog.

New Responsible AI Toolbox additions

Responsible AI is a critical consideration for organizations building and deploying AI solutions. Last year, Microsoft launched the Responsible AI Dashboard within the Responsible AI Toolkit, a suite of tools for a customized, responsible AI experience with unique and complementary functionalities available on GitHub and in Azure Machine Learning. We recently announced the addition of two new open-source tools designed to make the adoption of responsible AI practices more practical.

The Responsible AI Mitigations Library allows practitioners to experiment with different mitigation techniques more easily, while the Responsible AI Tracker uses visualizations to demonstrate the effectiveness of different mitigations for more informed decision-making. The new mitigations library bolsters mitigation by offering a means of managing failures that occur in data preprocessing. The library complements the toolbox’s Fairlearn fairness assessment tool, which focuses on mitigations applied during training time. The tracker allows practitioners to look at performance for subsets of data across iterations of a model to help them determine the most appropriate model for deployment. When used with other tools in the Responsible AI Toolbox, they offer a more efficient and effective means to help improve the performance of systems across users and conditions. These tools are made open source on GitHub and integrated into Azure Machine Learning.

Accelerate large-scale AI with Azure AI infrastructure

Azure AI Infrastructure provides massive scale-up and scale-out capabilities for the most advanced AI workloads in the world. This is a key factor as to why leading AI companies, including our partners at OpenAI continue to choose Azure to advance their AI innovation on Azure AI. Our results for training OpenAI's GPT-3 on Azure AI Infrastructure using Azure NDm A100 v4 virtual machines with NVIDIA’s open-source framework, NVIDIA NeMo Megatron, delivered a 530B-parameter benchmark on 175 virtual machines, resulting in a scalability factor of 95 percent. When Azure AI infrastructure is used together with a managed end-to-end machine learning platform, such as Azure Machine Learning, it provides the vast compute needed to enable organizations to streamline management and orchestration of large AI models and help bring them into production.

The full benchmarking report for GPT-3 models with the NVIDIA NeMo Megatron framework on Azure AI infrastructure is available here.

Optimized training framework to accelerate PyTorch model development

Azure is a preferred platform for widely used open-source framework—PyTorch. At Microsoft Ignite, we launched Azure Container for PyTorch (ACPT) within Azure Machine Learning, bringing together the latest PyTorch version with our best optimization software for training and inferencing, such as DeepSpeed and ONNX Runtime, all tested and optimized for Azure. All these components are already installed in ACPT and validated to reduce setup costs and accelerate training time for large deep learning workloads. ACPT curated environment allows our customers to efficiently train PyTorch models. The optimization libraries like ONNX Runtime and DeepSpeed composed within the container can increase production speed up from 54 percent to 163 percent over regular PyTorch workloads as seen on various Hugging Face models.

The chart shows ACPT that combines ONNX Runtime and DeepSpeed can increase production speed up to 54 percent to 163 percent over regular PyTorch workloads.

This month, we’re bringing a new capability to ACPT—Nebula. Nebula is a component in ACPT that can help data scientists to boost checkpoint savings time faster than existing solutions for distributed large-scale model training jobs with PyTorch. Nebula is fully compatible with different distributed PyTorch training strategies, including PyTorch Lightning, DeepSpeed, and more. In saving medium-sized Hugging Face GPT2-XL checkpoints (20.6 GB), Nebula achieved a 96.9 percent reduction in single checkpointing time. The speed gain of saving checkpoints can still increase with model size and GPU numbers. Our results show that, with Nebula, saving a checkpoint with a size of 97GB in a training job on 128 A100 Nvidia GPUs can be reduced from 20 minutes to 1 second. With the ability to reduce checkpoint times from hours to seconds—a potential reduction of 95 percent to 99.9 percent, Nebula provides a solution to frequent saving and reduction of end-to-end training time in large-scale training jobs.

The chart shows Nebula achieved a 96.9 percent reduction in single checkpointing time with GPT2-XL.

To learn more about Azure Container for PyTorch, please check out this announcement blog.

MLflow 2.0 and Azure Machine Learning

MLflow is an open-source platform for the complete machine learning lifecycle, from experimentation to deployment. Being one of the MLflow contributors, Azure Machine Learning made its workspaces MLflow-compatible, which means organizations can use Azure Machine Learning workspaces in the same way that they use an MLflow tracking server. MLflow has recently released its new version, MLflow 2.0, which incorporates a refresh of the core platform APIs based on extensive feedback from MLflow users and customers, which simplifies the platform experience for data science and machine learning operations workflows. We’re excited to announce that MLflow 2.0 is also supported in Azure Machine Learning workspaces.

Read this blog to learn more about what you can do with MLflow 2.0 in Azure Machine Learning.

Azure AI is empowering developers and organizations to build cutting-edge AI solutions with its rich set of open-source technologies. From leveraging pre-trained models to customizing AI capabilities with new technologies like Hugging Face foundation models, to integrating responsible AI practices with new open-source tools, Azure AI is driving innovation and efficiency in the AI industry. With Azure AI infrastructure, organizations can accelerate their large-scale AI workloads and achieve even greater results. Read this blog and the on-demand session to take a deep dive into what open-source projects and features we’ve announced at Azure Open Source Day 2023.

We’d like to conclude this blog post with some outstanding customer examples that demonstrate their success strategy of combining open-source technologies and building their own AI solutions to transform businesses.

What is most important about these announcements is the creative and transformative ways our customers are leveraging open-source technologies to build their own AI solutions.

These are just a few examples from our customers.

Customers innovating with open-source on Azure AI

Elekta is a company that provides technology, software, and services for cancer treatment providers and researchers. Elekta considers AI as essential to expanding the use and availability of radiotherapy treatments. AI technology helps accelerate the overall treatment planning process and monitors patient movement in real-time during treatment. Elekta uses Azure cloud infrastructure for the storage and compute resources needed for their AI-enabled solutions. Elekta relies heavily on Azure Machine Learning, Azure Virtual Machines, and the PyTorch open-source machine learning framework to create virtual machines and optimize their neural networks.
Read full story

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is using AI and open-source technologies to enhance its fan experience. The NBA and Microsoft have partnered to create a direct-to-consumer platform that offers more personalized and engaging content to fans. The NBA uses AI-driven data analysis system, NBA CourtOptix, which uses player tracking and spatial position information to derive insights into the games. The system is powered by Microsoft Azure, including Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Machine Learning, MLflow, and Delta Lake, among others. The goal is to turn the vast amounts of data into actionable insights that fans can understand and engage with. The NBA also hopes to strengthen its direct relationship with fans and increase engagement through increased personalization of content delivery and marketing efforts.
Read full story

AXA, a leading car insurance company in the United Kingdom needed to streamline the management of its online quotes to keep up with the fast-paced digital marketplace. With 30 million car insurance quotes processed daily, the company sought to find a solution to speed up deployment of new pricing models. In 2020, the AXA data science team discovered managed endpoints in Azure Machine Learning and adopted the technology during private preview. The team tested ONNX open-source models deployed through managed endpoints and achieved a great reduction in response time. The company intends to use Azure Machine Learning to deliver value, relevance, and personalization to customers and establish a more efficient and agile process.
Read full story

Quelle: Azure

Azure VMware Solution in Microsoft Azure Government streamlines migration efforts

Today we are pleased to announce the public preview of Azure VMware Solution in Microsoft Azure Government.

With this release, we are combining VMware cloud technologies with world-class Azure infrastructure in Azure Government, which is designed, built, and supported by Microsoft to help meet the highest levels of government security and compliance. Azure Government delivers a dedicated cloud, enabling government agencies and their partners to streamline migrating mission-critical workloads to the cloud.

Azure VMware Solution is a fully managed service in Azure that customers can use to extend their on-premises VMware workloads more seamlessly to the cloud, while maintaining their existing skills and operational processes.

Azure VMware Solution is already available in Azure commercial for any customer, including public sector organizations. With this launch, we are extending the same benefits of Azure VMware Solution to Azure Government, where US Government customers and their partners can meet their security and compliance needs.

Continue reading to explore how to get started with Azure VMware Solution in Azure Government.

Accelerating the migration journey in Azure

​Azure VMware Solution delivers a VMware vSphere-based, single-tenant, private cloud in Azure Government. VMware workloads run on bare metal hardware in Azure datacenters. Customers can stand up a VMware environment with enhanced speed in Azure and more quickly gain access to their VM resources while also accessing Azure services, such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, or Log Analytics.

Microsoft operates and supports the Azure VMware Solution environment and all the necessary networking, storage, and management services, which includes benefits such as the following:

Seamlessly modernize over time with Azure services: With Azure VMware Solution, you can leverage Azure services and further modernize workloads on your timeline, such as Azure App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Traffic Manager, security, and analytics.
Better streamline migration efforts with familiar tools and services: With a unified Azure experience via the Azure Government portal, customers can integrate their existing processes and tools “as-is” and run familiar VMware technology, including VMware vSphere, VMware HCX, VMware NSX-T, and VMware vSAN. HCX Enterprise edition is available at no additional cost, which enables you to streamline data and applications to help accelerate large-migration efforts and reduce time.
Maintain business continuity and workloads more securely on Azure: Leverage Azure services on the public cloud for disaster recovery, backup, security, and more to safeguard your applications. Azure enables customers to integrate VMware workloads with best-in-class cloud security features, such as:

Azure Virtual Network integration provides perimeter network controls using solutions such as network and application security groups and network security solutions for applications such as the Azure Application Gateway.
Logging, monitoring, and alerting solutions, such as Azure’s security information and event management (SEIM) solution, Azure Sentinel, and threat detection using Defender for Cloud (formerly Azure Security Center).
Customer-managed keys provides enhanced control over encrypted VMware vSAN data using HSM (hardware security model) backed Azure Key Vault and certificate authority integration for automated certificate management.
End-to-end encryption safeguard data according to your company’s security and compliance needs with Azure Data Encryption at Rest with all Azure services.

Savings opportunities in Azure

Achieve savings in Azure with a managed infrastructure to expand or shrink your cloud environment on demand as your business needs change.

Savings opportunities on Windows Server and SQL Server with Azure Hybrid Benefit in Azure

Customers can leverage the value of existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses when migrating or extending to Azure. As a core Azure service, Azure VMware Solution supports Azure Hybrid Benefit, allowing customers to bring their existing Microsoft workloads running on-premises to the cloud.

Get extended security updates for Windows Server and SQL

Azure VMware Solution customers are also eligible for three years of Extended Security Updates on 2008/2012 versions of Windows Server and SQL Server. These pricing benefits are only available in Azure and foster greater simplicity and cost efficiency for your journey to cloud.

Benefit from the Microsoft and VMware partnership

VMware and Microsoft have a long-standing partnership, and now more than ever it is important we come together and help customers create business resiliency, efficiency, and agility.

"As public sector customers accelerate their modernization efforts, they need the flexibility and choice to select the right cloud for each application,” said Jennifer Chronis, Vice President, public sector at VMware. “Together with Microsoft, we are delivering a modern, more consistent cloud service that will provide US government customers and partners with new options to migrate or extend their on-premises VMware environments to the cloud.”

Get started with the preview today

There are several ways to learn more and get started with the public preview of Azure VMware Solution in Azure Government. Please reach out to your Microsoft account team for more details on the preview, to provide feedback on this release you can contact the team at AVSGov@microsoft.com, and to learn more about getting started on Azure VMware Solution you can visit the documentation page. 
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Cost Management updates—February 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:

Microsoft has joined the FinOps Foundation.
Updates for Azure pricing pages.
Tag inheritance using Settings API.
Group resources with the cm-resource-parent tag.
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.

Microsoft has joined the FinOps Foundation

In today’s economic times, the criticality of cost efficiency is at an all-time high. Organizations need high-quality guidance backed by products and services that help you achieve and maintain that efficiency. This is a large part of what we do today within the Cost Management team and the larger Commerce organization here at Microsoft. In that vein, we are excited to announce that Microsoft has joined the FinOps Foundation as a premier member and has joined the Governing Board, defining the strategy and vision of the organization. Together, we can deliver unparalleled guidance and innovative solutions that empower organizations to increase efficiency and accelerate growth.

As we look toward our future, we’re exploring five primary focus areas:

Defining specifications and evolving best practices.
Aligning our collective guidance.
Improving our products and services.
Advancing training and certification programs
Engaging with the community.

To learn more, see Microsoft joins the FinOps Foundation on the Azure blog.

Updates for Azure pricing pages

We've been working hard to make some changes to our Azure pricing experiences, and we're excited to share them with you. These changes will help make it easier for you to estimate the costs of your solutions.

You can now see on-demand, savings plan, and reservation pricing for various services in the pricing calculator, helping you choose the one that best suits your needs.
The virtual machines selector offers streamlined management of data disks that provide you with more flexibility and customization.
Explore new pricing offers like serverless compute and Hyperscale storage in SQL Database, Premium v3 SKUs for App Service, and the paid tier for Azure Kubernetes Service, as well as other new offers added to Azure Form recognizer, Azure Private 5G Core, Energy Data Services, Azure Communication Gateway, and more.
There are many content updates to various pages, including the IoT Hub, Azure Monitor, and Data Pipeline pricing pages; and, Defender for IoT and Azure Data Explorer in the pricing calculator.
Lastly, we also updated the Azure Hybrid Benefit landing page, making it easier for you to understand how you can save with our savings plan.

We're constantly working to improve our pricing tools and make them more accessible and user-friendly. We hope you find these changes helpful in estimating the costs for your Azure Solutions. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future improvements, please let us know!

Tag inheritance using Settings API

In November, we announced the tag inheritance preview that can be enabled from Cost Management in the Azure portal. It’s exciting to see organizations and teams of all sizes utilizing tag inheritance to streamline their cost monitoring and showback strategies. One of the main requests we’ve heard has been for the ability to programmatically enable tag inheritance, especially as part of onboarding new subscriptions.

This month, we’d like to share how you can automate enabling tag inheritance using the Settings API via a simple PUT request:

PUT https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/<subscription-id>/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/settings/taginheritance?api-version=2022-10-01-preview
{
   "kind": "taginheritance",
   "properties": { "preferContainerTags": false }
}

You can enable tag inheritance for your subscriptions or billing profiles. To learn more, see Group and allocate costs using tag inheritance.

Group resources with the cm-resource-parent tag

With the ease of provisioning cloud resources, it can be easy to lose track of the total cost as solutions grow. Instead of reviewing a flat list of the many resources that span different solutions, you need a smarter view that groups related resources together. Sonia Cuff explores how you can group your resources in the Cost analysis preview using the cm-parent-resource tag in Group your Azure resource costs with the cm-resource-parent tag. Learn how the tag works and how to apply it to your resources and let us know what you’d like to see next.

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: 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.

Remember preview features across sessions.
Select the preview features you're interested in from the Try preview menu and you'll see them enabled by default the next time you visit the portal. No need to enable this option—preview features will be remembered automatically in the preview portal.
Customers view for Cloud Solution Provider partners.
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 can enable this option from the Try preview menu.
Total KPI tooltip.
View additional details about what costs are included in the Cost analysis preview. 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 VMs 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

Here are a few new and updated offers you might be interested in:

Generally available: Azure Kubernetes Service introduces new Free and Standard pricing tiers.
Generally available: Cut costs and add AI-powered productivity with Teams Premium.
Generally available: Power Automate hosted machine groups for desktop flows (RPA).
Preview: Power Automate hosted machines desktop flows (RPA).
Preview: Making Dataverse available for all makers on Power Apps.

New videos and learning opportunities

Here are a few new videos you might be interested in:

Lessons learned optimizing Microsoft’s internal use of Azure (24 minutes).
Optimize your data protection costs with Azure Backup (21 minutes).
How-to: Deploy Azure VMware Solution with Azure NetApp Files datastore (16 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 couple documentation updates you might be interested in:

Updated: View your Azure usage summary details and download reports for EA enrollments.
Updated: Azure Enterprise REST APIs. Keep in mind these APIs are no longer being maintained. Please switch to Azure Resource Manager APIs.
Plus 14 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.
Quelle: Azure

Azure WAF guided investigation Notebook using Microsoft Sentinel for automated false positive tuning

With special thanks to Pete Bryan, Principal Security Research Manager, Microsoft Security.

The SQL injection attack remains one of the critical attacks in the OWASP Top 10, and it involves injecting a SQL query via the input data field into a web application without input validation. According to Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022, 67 percent of web application exploits include SQL injections.

Azure Web Application Firewall (Azure WAF) provides centralized protection of your web applications from exploits and vulnerabilities. It protects against OWASP Top 10 attacks, bot attacks, application layer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and other web attacks.

Azure WAF detects SQL injection attacks and blocks them by default. In certain instances, this could be a false positive that requires investigation and creation of Azure WAF exclusions. To complete a successful investigation, full context about the attack is needed and a process that guides you through the investigation is required.

We are pleased to announce a new Azure WAF guided investigation to tune WAF policy Notebook in preview. It guides you through an investigation experience to understand the Azure WAF incidents in Microsoft Sentinel, identify false positives, and automatically apply exclusions to WAF rules to address the false positives. This Notebook allows you to understand the WAF alert and pivot on key entities of the WAF event such as the request URI, client IP, hostname, and correlate with Threat Intelligence feeds to get a holistic view of the attack surface.

Azure WAF investigations powered by Microsoft Sentinel

Azure WAF is deeply integrated with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. Using the existing Azure WAF data connector, WAF logs are ingested and later analyzed for a variety of web application attacks and powerful visualizations pivoting on the full attack pattern are presented to you. This Notebook is built using Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center’s MSTICpy packages. With this Notebook, you can access rich historical contextual information using Microsoft Sentinel’s capabilities like incident generation, entity graph, and threat intelligence correlation, in conjunction with Azure WAF’s SQL injection detections based on OWASP rules and Microsoft Threat Intelligence rules.

Automated investigation and mitigation of web application attacks

Our new Azure WAF guided investigation to tune WAF policy Notebook provides an automated guided investigation for triaging Sentinel incidents triggered by Azure WAF SQL injection rules.

The solution includes the following components:

Azure WAF data connector in Microsoft Sentinel.
Microsoft Sentinel incidents that are generated due to SQL injection attack detected by the Microsoft Sentinel analytic rules.
Azure WAF Notebook that helps investigate Azure WAF logs and automatically applies WAF exclusions to the WAF policy.

A high-level diagram explaining the data flow is given below:

Let us look at two use case scenarios for using this Notebook:

Understanding the attack landscape when there is a true positive

Using the Notebook, you can pivot on various attack artifacts such as IP, URL, or domain threat intelligence, and understand the entity graph. This Notebook retrieves the WAF SQLi rule that generated the detection and looks up related SQLi rule events within the pre-selected time. Based on the above details, if you decide that the SQL injection attack is valid then you can update the incident severity and priority. In this scenario, the web application remains protected by Azure WAF.

Understand the attack pattern and create exclusions if there is a false positive

Using the Notebook, you can pivot on various attack artifacts such as IP, URL, or domain threat intelligence, and understand the entity graph. This Notebook retrieves the WAF SQLi rule that generated the detection and looks up related rule events. It also retrieves raw WAF logs to understand the relations between the request URI, client Ips, hostname entities and allows you to dynamically access the OWASP rule set in GitHub to understand the rule match pattern. Based on the investigations, if you decide this incident is a false positive, the process to automatically create granular exclusions is presented to you and the exclusions are applied to the Azure WAF policy using Azure WAF APIs.

The following personas would benefit from this Notebook:

Persona: Developer at SomeUnionFlight.com

Understanding SQL injection detection logic

Chris is a developer at SomeUnionFlight.com. His company hosts a website for users to search for flights and make flight reservations. They have hosted their website behind WAF with Azure Front Door (AFD) where AFD accepts user requests to search their website. SomeUnionFlight.com has an SQL backend where they store flight information. He notices that when users try to access the website, their access is getting blocked because the URL has “Union” keyword which is triggering the SQL injection rule. This detection is considered as a false positive because the “Union” keyword is used to mention a website name and not an SQL injection attack. He would like an investigation experience that helps him understand how to analyze this detection using Microsoft Sentinel and determine if it is a false positive. He would also like to automatically create exclusions for false positives for the URL without having to disable the entire rule.

Persona: SecOps analyst at Contoso.com

Understanding collateral attack vectors

Ashley is a Security Operations analyst at Contoso.com. Her company has purchased both Azure WAF and Microsoft Sentinel. She oversees analyzing WAF logs and identifying attack patterns. She would like to understand if the client IP or the request URI associated with the WAF rule that triggered the SQL injection are Indicators of Compromise (IoC). By understanding related Threat Intelligence Indicators of Compromises, she can prevent future attacks on her organization.

Get started today

SQL injection attacks are getting more prevalent by the day and Azure WAF protects web applications from these attacks. To enable a high-quality investigation experience for Azure WAF customers, we have created this new Azure WAF guided investigation Notebook that enables you quickly understand full attack surface and take actions on the incidents. You can follow our step-by-step instructions to learn how to use the Notebook.

This new Azure WAF Notebook can be found in Microsoft Sentinel under the Notebooks in the Threat Management section.

 
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft commercial marketplace: Spend smarter, move faster

Business-to-Business (B2B) commerce is experiencing a revolution driven largely by the mass adoption of cloud computing and the movement towards a simpler, more digital buying experiences. At the same time, cloud budgets are strong and mostly growing—IDC is predicting that cloud services will surpass USD1.7 trillion by 2026 while sustaining compound annual growth of almost 17 percent. But, with economic uncertainty, companies and organizations are challenged to “do more with less” and make the most of every dollar invested.

Cloud marketplaces offer you the ability to gain flexibility and control over your spending and make the most out of your cloud budget. This is why cloud marketplaces are expected to see a massive growth, from USD8 billion last year to USD50 billion by 20262 as predicted by Bessemer Venture Partners. To accelerate IT modernization and maximize the value of investments, we are innovating and improving Microsoft commercial marketplace to support your entire cloud portfolio.

The marketplace: Customized to your needs

There is often a misconception with cloud marketplaces that you lose touch with your vendors and are limited to “the sticker price.” We understand the complexities of enterprise deal making and the marketplace is a tool to help you simplify this process so you can focus on the innovation you need to deliver. While there is always the option to buy “off the shelf” solutions, we’re continuing to improve our custom dealmaking and private offer capabilities so you can spend smart and move fast.

With private offers, you can engage directly with partners, negotiate custom terms, pricing, and payment options, and get customized solutions delivered straight to your inbox. And with recent improvements in our marketplace, partners can create and deliver these private offers in less than 15 minutes—and eligible purchases can count towards your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). We are the only cloud provider that by default applies the entire purchase* towards your commitment (and there are thousands). As more and more customers look to maximize the value of their investments, we’ve seen over 300 percent increase in customers with a MACC buying through marketplace.

Plus, the marketplace saves you the hassle of onboarding new vendors and streamlines the complexity of purchasing so it is all invoiced directly on your Azure bill. This enables you to simplify procurement and reduce legal complexity by purchasing applications under a standard contract. All solutions using the standard contract contain the same terms and conditions, so your legal team only needs to review once.  And, when you purchase solutions through marketplace, you are working with the most trusted cloud and our extensive set of best-in-breed capabilities across app innovation, data and AI, infrastructure, and security.

More and more of our customers—and sellers—are thinking marketplace first when getting their cloud solution. By being marketplace first, you can cut down on time to value and manage costs based on usage. Whether you are new to the Microsoft commercial marketplace or if you’ve already been using it to find solutions for your business, we are excited to help you along your journey. Taking advantage of the resources and tools will streamline the transaction process, maximize the value of your cloud spend, and you can buy with confidence knowing that these solutions are backed by Microsoft.

These enhancements are removing the frictions in B2B commerce, and simultaneously helping you to make the most of every cloud dollar spent. Here’s how you make the most of this opportunity:

Maximizing value with partner solutions that count towards consumption commitments

You can shop for Azure solutions that qualify towards your consumption commitment on the Azure portal. All you need to do is:

Log into Azure
Go to the marketplace tab
Select “Azure benefit eligible”

From there you can further refine search results based on your criteria. We have thousands of solutions available, so when you purchase these through marketplace—the amount you spend can count towards your cloud consumption commitment. Here are examples of a few providers with MACC-eligible solutions:

Fortinet offers a comprehensive security fabric platform to help industries accelerate security, maximize productivity, preserve user experience, and lower total cost of ownership.

Featured solution: Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (VM)

Empowering users to unlock the value of their data with Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) solution on Azure.

Featured solution: Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud

MongoDB Atlas, the industry’s first unified developer data platform, allows you to accelerate and simplify how you build with data on Azure modern applications.

Featured solution: MongoDB Atlas 

Break through your bad data and get the insight you need to consolidate, clean up, and maintain your data with Profisee’s solutions.

Featured solution: Profisee MDM—SaaS 

Conquer your analytics challenges, from experimental to mission critical, with faster decisions in the cloud.

Featured solution: SAS® Viya® portfolio on SAS® Cloud

 

Get agentless scanning with complete visibility and actionable context for your multi-cloud environment in minutes so your teams can proactively identify, prioritize, remediate, and prevent risks.

Featured solution: WIZ Cloud Infrastructure Security Platform

More and more of our customers—and sellers—are thinking “marketplace first” when getting their cloud solutions. By managing your cloud portfolio through marketplace, you can cut down on time to value and manage costs based on usage.

Whether you are new to the Microsoft commercial marketplace or if you’ve already been using it to find solutions for your business, we are excited to help you along your journey. Take advantage of the resources and tools within the marketplace to increase your efficiency, buy with confidence, and spend smarter.

Learn more about Microsoft commercial marketplace

Shop marketplace
Learn about Azure consumption commitments 
Get a private Azure marketplace

1IDC, Worldwide Whole Cloud Forecast, 2022–2026: The Next Stage of the Shift to a Cloud-Centric Technology Industry; US49857122, December 2022.

2Bessemer Venture Partners, 2022 State of the Cloud report.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft commercial marketplace: empowering customized experiences to drive innovation

Business-to-Business (B2B) commerce is experiencing a revolution driven largely by the mass adoption of cloud computing and the movement towards a simpler, more digital buying experiences. At the same time, cloud budgets are strong and mostly growing—IDC is predicting that cloud services will surpass USD1.7 trillion by 2026 while sustaining compound annual growth of almost 17 percent. But, with economic uncertainty, companies and organizations are challenged to “do more with less” and make the most of every dollar invested.

Cloud marketplaces offer you the ability to gain flexibility and control over your spending and make the most out of your cloud budget. This is why cloud marketplaces are expected to see a massive growth, from USD8 billion last year to USD50 billion by 20262 as predicted by Bessemer Venture Partners. To accelerate IT modernization and maximize the value of investments, we are innovating and improving Microsoft commercial marketplace to support your entire cloud portfolio.

The Marketplace: Customized to your needs

There is often a misconception with cloud marketplaces that you lose touch with your vendors and are limited to “the sticker price.” We understand the complexities of enterprise deal making and the marketplace is a tool to help you simplify this process so you can focus on the innovation you need to deliver. While there is always the option to buy “off the shelf” solutions, we’re continuing to improve our custom dealmaking and private offer capabilities so you can spend smart and move fast.

With private offers, you can engage directly with partners, negotiate custom terms, pricing, and payment options, and get customized solutions delivered straight to your inbox. And with recent improvements in our marketplace, partners can create and deliver these private offers in less than 15 minutes—and eligible purchases can count towards your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). We are the only cloud provider that by default applies the entire purchase* towards your commitment (and there are thousands). As more and more customers look to maximize the value of their investments, we’ve seen over 300 percent increase in customers with a MACC buying through marketplace.

Plus, the marketplace saves you the hassle of onboarding new vendors and streamlines the complexity of purchasing so it is all invoiced directly on your Azure bill. This enables you to simplify procurement and reduce legal complexity by purchasing applications under a standard contract. All solutions using the standard contract contain the same terms and conditions, so your legal team only needs to review once.  And, when you purchase solutions through marketplace, you are working with the most trusted cloud and our extensive set of best-in-breed capabilities across app innovation, data and AI, infrastructure, and security.

More and more of our customers—and sellers—are thinking marketplace first when getting their cloud solution. By being marketplace first, you can cut down on time to value and manage costs based on usage. Whether you are new to the Microsoft commercial marketplace or if you’ve already been using it to find solutions for your business, we are excited to help you along your journey. Taking advantage of the resources and tools will streamline the transaction process, maximize the value of your cloud spend, and you can buy with confidence knowing that these solutions are backed by Microsoft.

These enhancements are removing the frictions in B2B commerce, and simultaneously helping you to make the most of every cloud dollar spent. Here’s how you make the most of this opportunity:

Maximizing Value with Partner Solutions that Count Towards Consumption Commitments

You can shop for Azure solutions that qualify towards your consumption commitment on the Azure portal. All you need to do is:

Log into Azure
Go to the marketplace tab
Select “Azure benefit eligible”

From there you can further refine search results based on your criteria. We have thousands of solutions available, so when you purchase these through marketplace—the amount you spend can count towards your cloud consumption commitment. Here are examples of a few providers with MACC-eligible solutions:

Fortinet offers a comprehensive security fabric platform to help industries accelerate security, maximize productivity, preserve user experience, and lower total cost of ownership.

Featured solution: Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (VM)

Empowering users to unlock the value of their data with Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) solution on Azure.

Featured solution: Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud

MongoDB Atlas, the industry’s first unified developer data platform, allows you to accelerate and simplify how you build with data on Azure modern applications.

Featured solution: MongoDB Atlas 

Break through your bad data and get the insight you need to consolidate, clean up, and maintain your data with Profisee’s solutions.

Featured solution: Profisee MDM—SaaS 

Conquer your analytics challenges, from experimental to mission critical, with faster decisions in the cloud.

Featured solution: SAS® Viya® portfolio on SAS® Cloud

Get agentless scanning with complete visibility and actionable context for your multi-cloud environment in minutes so your teams can proactively identify, prioritize, remediate, and prevent risks.

Featured solution: WIZ Cloud Infrastructure Security Platform

More and more of our customers—and sellers—are thinking “marketplace first” when getting their cloud solutions. By managing your cloud portfolio through marketplace, you can cut down on time to value and manage costs based on usage.

Whether you are new to the Microsoft commercial marketplace or if you’ve already been using it to find solutions for your business, we are excited to help you along your journey. Take advantage of the resources and tools within the marketplace to increase your efficiency, buy with confidence, and spend smarter.

Learn more about Microsoft commercial marketplace

Shop marketplace
Learn about Azure consumption commitments 
Get a private Azure marketplace

1IDC, Worldwide Whole Cloud Forecast, 2022–2026: The Next Stage of the Shift to a Cloud-Centric Technology Industry; US49857122, December 2022.

2Bessemer Venture Partners, 2022 State of the Cloud report.
Quelle: Azure

What's new in Azure Data & AI: Azure is the best place to build and run AI workloads

It’s not every day that you get to be a part of something being discussed at dinner tables around the world—and we’re hearing this from customers and partners too. They’re eager to reimagine how they do business, embracing generative AI to deliver the next generation of apps and experiences. New and inspiring use cases surface daily, as AI technologies and practitioner communities mature. It’s both an exciting and humbling time for our team.

That excitement and inspiration would not be possible without the purpose-built AI infrastructure that can support the successful deployment and scalability of AI systems for large models. The infrastructure must have the means to rapidly expand with enough parallel processing power, low latency, and interconnected GPUs to train and inference complex AI models. This is why AI innovation leaders like OpenAI and Meta, and other companies around the globe, make Azure the cornerstone of their AI infrastructure.

Bringing together purpose-built AI infrastructure and managed data and AI services into one environment streamlines management and automation, often reducing the complexity of building, training, and bringing AI models into production. For example, Azure Machine Learning helps accelerate time to value with industry-leading machine learning operations (MLOps), open-source interoperability, and integrated tools to support data privacy, security, and real-time data processing.

There’s much conversation to have regarding new frameworks and strategies to help define and derive business value from AI. I hope you’ll join us March 14th for a virtual conversation between Susan Etlinger, Director of Data & AI Marketing at Microsoft; Atefah “Atti” Riazi, Chief Information Officer of Hearst; and Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research as they share their unique perspectives on how business leaders can help their organization realize tangible return on investment (ROI).

I’m thrilled to share some of the new features and improvements helping our customers achieve more with data and AI this month.

Data is the fuel that powers AI

Our Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, says that data is the fuel that powers AI technology. Peak performance requires clean, integrated, and accessible data. Cloud solutions that are purpose-built to run AI models at scale also require operational databases, analytics, and governance solutions that work together—by design. To this end, the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is helping industry leaders like T-Mobile, BP, and Amadeus move beyond the cost and complexity of data fragmentation to a modern data estate built for AI innovation. Leveraging the platform opens opportunities for organizations to spend less time on data integration, and more time on value creation.

Benefits of Azure to on-premises and multi-cloud environments

Customers’ data management needs can vary widely depending on where they are on their digital transformation journey. Azure Arc extends the Azure platform to customers on-premises and multi-cloud scenarios for a unified hybrid environment. For example, Microsoft is partnering with Taoyuan City to deliver Taiwan's first municipal hybrid cloud platform with Azure Arc, Azure Synapse, and Power BI. The result is a hybrid environment that unlocks data insights while delivering control across their entire data estate, plus significant time and resources savings.

Be sure to explore pay-as-you-go licensing for Azure Arc-enabled SQL to provide on-premises SQL Server customers with a cloud billing model to only pay for what they use on a consumption-based meter. This is a great option for customers with seasonal needs that do not require a full license. To help optimize SQL Server running on-premises and in multi-cloud environments, we also recently announced general availability of the SQL best practice assessment on Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server for customers to diagnose potential issues more easily.

Migrating Windows Server and SQL Server to the cloud

Justifying the move to cloud is a crucial decision for a business, and it could be difficult to know where to start. In December, we introduced Azure Migrate business case to help organizations remove the guess work in migration cost planning with data-driven calculations. With just a few clicks, Azure Migrate Business Case will help you build a business proposal to understand how Azure SQL can bring the most value to your business, including: on-premise vs. Azure total cost of ownership analysis, year-on- year cashflow analysis, and resource utilization insights to identify servers and workloads that are ideal for cloud. It also helps identify quick wins for migration and modernization including end of support Windows OS and SQL versions. To get started, visit Azure Migrate.

Introducing Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview

Announced this month in preview, Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview leverages Insider Risk Management machine learning to understand how people are interacting with data. It helps identify risky activities that may result in data security incidents, then automatically tailors Data Loss Prevention (DLP) controls based on the risk detected. With Adaptive Protection, DLP policies become dynamic, ensuring that the most effective policy—such as blocking data sharing—is applied only to high-risk users, while low-risk users can maintain their productivity. This empowers security operations teams to operate more efficiently. Sign up for a free trial.

Innovate with industry-leading AI

While machine learning becomes more mainstream across industries, there are many challenges like data governance, security, data compliance, and auditability that companies need to consider when building and deploying models. Our approach to MLOps incorporates people, processes, and platform to deliver continuous value with fewer resources for machine learning—one of the reasons Microsoft was recently recognized as a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide for MLOps Platforms. Microsoft was also recently recognized as a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Computer Vision AI Software Platform Vendor Assessment. As unstructured data like images and videos become more ubiquitous in the digital era, Microsoft is well-positioned to help organizations of all sizes leverage the power of computer vision to improve productivity, efficiency, safety, sustainability, and inclusivity.

Evaluate machine learning models

Last month we announced the general availability of the Responsible AI dashboard within the Responsible AI Toolbox, a suite of popular tools to support responsible AI deployments. The capabilities are open source on GitHub or can be accessed directly through the Azure Machine Learning platform. This month, we’ve launched a blog tutorial series exploring how to use the responsible AI dashboard and guide you through the entire process.

Today, we’re excited to announce two key capabilities to the Responsible AI Toolbox, the Responsible AI mitigations library and the Responsible AI tracker. First, the mitigations library helps machine learning practitioners experiment with different mitigation techniques more easily and manage common failures that may occur in data preprocessing. The library complements the toolbox’s Fairlearn fairness assessment tool, which focuses on mitigations applied during model training. Second, the responsible AI tracker uses visualizations to demonstrate the effectiveness of different mitigations for easier model comparison and validation. Practitioners can compare the performance of data subsets across model iterations to determine the most appropriate model for production. With these tools, organizations are better equipped to evaluate models to reduce biases and increase fairness.

Accelerate AI innovation in Azure Machine Learning

Machine learning requires secure collaboration among data scientists, machine learning engineers, IT admins, and developers. Organizations in regulated industries, like Belgium-based Isabel Group, rely on Azure Machine Learning to offer seamless integration through every step of the data pipeline. Microsoft continually improves product and business capabilities across the entire machine learning lifecycle to empower people of different skillsets. Below are some recent enhancements to help organizations get their models into production faster while ensuring enterprise-grade security and compliance in Azure Machine Learning:

Secure workspaces with network isolation for managed online endpoints (generally available): Offers the ability to secure the ingress and egress of managed online endpoints to help ensure compliance with enterprise security standards. Learn more about accessing storage services.

Compartmentalize access to machine learning data with identity passthrough (generally available): Uses role-based access controls (RBAC) to grant or deny users access to specific data. For example, when a training job in identity passthrough mode is submitted, Azure Machine Learning uses that identity to authenticate against data storage. Additionally, administrators can also restrict access for each user based on storage accounts, folders, or files and auditors can trace storage access requests back to specific users. Learn more about accessing storage services.

Train models using AutoML in Designer (preview): Employs an easy drag-and-drop ability to hook your data up to an AutoML task and deploy the best resulting model. An ideal solution for no-code/low-code users who want to build enterprise-quality machine learning models. Learn more about model training and deployment.

Skill up with Data & AI events and education

Build in-demand data and AI technical skills with Microsoft

Jumpstart your career or bolster your credentials with skilling resources from Microsoft. The new Cloud Skills Challenge for Azure Database Administrators offers free, interactive learning modules and the opportunity to engage with peers through a global community forum. For those with eyes on Azure certifications, the Microsoft Azure Connected Learning Experience (CLX) is designed to support exam readiness with on-demand resources and hands-on labs as well as cram sessions hosted by industry experts. Recently expanded tracks for Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution and Administering Microsoft Azure SQL Solutions can help professionals build these in-demand skills.

For anyone interested in building apps with generative AI using Azure OpenAI Service, check out our new Introduction to Azure OpenAI Service learning course.

Join us for upcoming community events and skilling opportunities

I’d like to end my post by highlighting some of the upcoming events happening across Microsoft in March. These events are a great opportunity to meet other customers, partners, and technical experts across the Microsoft community to share stories and best practices. Please mark your calendars and join us.

Azure Open Source Day is a free on-demand virtual event on March 7th, bringing together developers, data scientists, and technical decision makers utilizing open source technologies. Presenters will explore open source projects like the Responsible AI Toolbox and collaborations with communities and technology partners like HuggingFace and NVIDIA. Register for Azure Open Source Day.

Microsoft Ability Summit is a free live digital event on March 8th where you can discover new accessible technologies and explore best practices to help everyone achieve more. In the meantime, you can also learn 6 ways to improve accessibility with Azure AI in our recent blog. Register for Microsoft Ability Summit.

Cosmos DB Conf is a free virtual developer event on March 28th co-organized by Microsoft and the Azure Cosmos DB community. Come and learn more about Azure Cosmos DB and see what others in the community are building. Register for Cosmo DB Conf.

Learn more about Azure Data and AI

Thanks so much for reading about the recent updates across our data and AI business over the last month. We have a lot of exciting things brewing and I can’t wait to share more product and service enhancements, customer stories, and upcoming news next month.
Quelle: Azure

Agile teams align and get to market faster with Mural and Microsoft

This blog post was authored by Jason Morris, Global Partner Technology Strategist and co-authored by Joyce Balas, Global Partner Development Manager and Ashley Kovich Ternan, Partner Marketing Specialist

During the last two years navigating changing economic climates and a global pandemic that shifted the way we work, we’ve learned that teams can continue to collaborate together productively and effectively in remote and hybrid settings. A recent Microsoft study shows that hybrid work works.1 The biggest risk of a hybrid workforce is not unproductive team members—it's that people are becoming burnt out from too many meetings and a lack of clear, defined priorities.

But it takes intention and leadership to design a company culture where collaboration workflows let everyone contribute equally in retrospectives, standups, planning, and other agile projects where bold ideas and clear alignment are critical to staying competitive in the market. Now, more than ever, agile teams, or any team focused on planning and strategizing are expected seamlessly connect and collaborate regardless of where everyone is working.

Microsoft, in partnership with Mural’s leading collaborative intelligence system, is filling a critical need. Powered by Microsoft Azure and integrated with Microsoft Teams, Mural enables dynamic meetings and teamwork turning ideas and insights into reality so remote work no longer inhibits co-creation. Mural's latest integration with the Microsoft ecosystem connects Azure DevOps to an intuitive workspace for teams to collaborate visually. Mural centers around a digital whiteboard and includes pre-built frameworks that guide and structure collaborative work, including templates for agile ceremonies and LUMA design thinking practices. Facilitation tools built into the product, like voting and a timer, make it intuitive for teams to work together intentionally and make it easier for everyone to contribute. Mural’s new integration with Azure DevOps is the connective tissue for agile teams, no matter where they’re working.

Level up your team’s next collaboration session with Mural and Azure DevOps

With Mural’s new integration, Mural and Azure DevOps customers can now save time and jumpstart collaboration by easily importing work items as sticky notes onto a Mural canvas. Teams can use Mural’s visual canvas and templates to refine work items in a backlog, review a sprint plan, break down a feature into smaller chunks of work, have a retrospective, or even build a program board. Having work items on the canvas where collaboration is happening keeps workflows connected and teams focused without incurring a toggle tax by switching between applications.2

93 percent of surveyed organizations who leverage agile experienced an increase in collaboration and productivity following the implementation of Mural.3

Everything from user story mapping to retrospectives are more productive, inclusive, and engaging when you connect Mural and Azure DevOps.

How Mural and Azure DevOps work

Connect Azure DevOps to your Mural account to view your projects and easily import work items as sticky notes. Use filters or run your own query to find the work items you want to import.

Design your import in Mural by choosing which fields, including custom fields, to import as tags on your sticky. Stickies are automatically color coded by work item type to visualize and organize next steps and prevent delays in decision making.

Be even more effective with Mural’s templates for hybrid agile ceremonies like program implement (PI) planning, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and more to level up collaboration and reduce time to market.

Partners in collaboration transformation

Mural is a Microsoft Partner of the Year award winner, which recognizes partners based on their commitment to customers, the impact of their solutions, and their exemplary use of Microsoft technologies. We are thrilled to collaborate with Mural, an ISV building the next generation of solutions with Azure technology, to help teams everywhere plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster. Integration with Azure DevOps improves agility and can optimize your existing cloud investments by helping decrease costs and saving developer time. With comprehensive security and compliance built in, Mural is paving the way for organizations to adopt a DevOps culture. Mural integration with Azure DevOps is truly a “better together” story as both teams recognized early on a need for the integration across both end users, DevOps, and developers. In the early stages of development, both Microsoft and Mural not only helped test the integration, but also incorporated it into their main development lifecycle of Azure DevOps, quickly realizing the full potential of both Mural and Azure DevOps as an all-in-one platform.

“In a hybrid, modern workplace, organizations need to collaborate and brainstorm with virtual teams to develop innovative solutions for their businesses. We’re thrilled to partner with Mural and deliver its latest integration with Azure DevOps to enable teams everywhere to do their best work using a shared collaboration space across platforms.”—Casey McGee, VP of Global ISV Sales and Digital Natives, Microsoft

If you’re already a Mural customer, check out the user guide to get started using the Azure DevOps integration. If you haven’t tried Mural yet, get started for free at the Mural website or connect with Mural to learn more about purchasing Mural through Azure Marketplace.

Sources

1 Microsoft Work Lab.

2 Harvard Business Review.

3 TechValidate.
Quelle: Azure

Azure private MEC delivers modern connected applications for industries

Since introducing Azure private multi-access edge compute (MEC) in public preview (June 2021), we have continued to further our mission of empowering enterprises and governments to achieve more with modern connected applications. Azure private MEC simplifies adoption of these applications by enterprises with cloud-managed edge infrastructure and services combined with edge networking. Private 5G is paving the way to unlock innovative Industry 4.0 services for enterprises worldwide. As part of our ongoing efforts, we are also introducing new capabilities to provide wider connectivity choices, increased reliability, unified management, and broader platform options to serve global enterprises at scale.

Azure private MEC is continually being built and delivered by an expanding set of operators, SIs, and ISV partners. Our partners serve a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, transportation, logistics, energy, retail, and defense. Enterprises now have a choice to select the right application, deploy quickly, and scale at their own pace. Click the logos to watch these digital transformation stories from our partners and their customers:

 

Enterprises customers in their own words

“NEXCOM understands that collaborating with partners is crucial to success. Inventec’s complete 5G end-to-end connectivity and Smart Factory solutions using Azure Private 5G Core perfectly complement our own offerings and fill the Communications Technology gap. What impressed us most is Inventec’s pioneering efforts to adopt the solutions in its own factory, with proven ROI. And with the high speed and ultra-low latency of a secured, private 5G network vs. Wi-Fi, the AMR can be deployed in our factory more efficiently, while improving productivity and overall operations.”—Clement Lin, CEO NEXCOM.

“Q-tainer is a rugged device that can withstand the harsh environment of construction sites. Rhomberg Sersa brings the know-how of construction to the table, and Datwyler helps solve our IT challenges, and enables us to support and scale the system globally. We have a long-standing relationship with Microsoft for their hardware and software solutions. We are using Azure Stack Edge and Azure Private 5G Core to integrate the Q-tainer) with our construction sites.”—Hubert Rhomberg, Co-Owner Rhomberg Sersa Rail.

Azure Private 5G Core is now generally available

Last year at MWC Barcelona, we introduced the public preview of Azure Private 5G Core—a simple, scalable, and secure deployment of a 5G standalone core network deployed on the Azure Stack Edge platform. Azure Private 5G Core enables deployment and management of 5G core network functions on a small footprint edge compute for a private mobile network on enterprise premises. It connects with 4G and 5G radio access networks, devices, SIM, and applications supplied by a growing list of solution partners.

We are pleased to announce that it is now generally available to deploy and manage core network deployments at any enterprise site around the world. This release includes a range of new and enhanced features: support for 4G LTE and 5G standalone radios, rapid deployment on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack Edge Pro with GPU, and multi-site deployment.

This release introduces a built-in metrics dashboard, enhanced availability (including a disconnected mode for increased resilience), advanced SIM security, custom policy with QoS support, and support for select Azure Stack Edge and HCI hardware platforms. Multi-slicing and multi-DNN capability provides granular integration with appropriate enterprise LAN or WAN data networks.

If you are ready to deploy a private 4G or 5G network, get started today with Azure Private 5G Core from Azure Marketplace.

Introducing Azure Edge Network Fabric

Operational technology (OT) devices require an enterprise to choose from a variety of access methods and physical network devices for network capabilities. However, a lack of unified lifecycle management, policy configuration, and troubleshooting make it complex for the enterprise to run such multi-access networks in support of their Industry 4.0 initiatives.

To solve these complex issues, Azure Edge Network Fabric provides secure, policy-based routing between multi-access devices at a customer’s premises to local applications, cloud, and edge networking like firewall or SD WAN, hosted on Azure private MEC. It is a high-performance, small footprint container network function, managed from the cloud, that simplifies private MEC deployments. At private preview, Azure Edge Network Fabric will converge traffic from IoT devices across both Wi-Fi and 5G connectivity into a common enterprise network environment.

In collaboration with CommScope, with their enterprise-grade Wi-Fi solution, and Azure Edge Network Fabric, private MEC now supports Wi-Fi and 5G access as one unified network, simplifying operation and management of private networks.

Introducing Radio Access Network (RAN) Observability

The flexibility to choose from pre-validated RAN vendors introduces complexity for monitoring multi-vendor networks. Today, this is solved either by vendor-specific implementations that create lock-ins, or with complex and non-standard implementations.

Now, we are introducing RAN Observability to collect, adapt, monitor, and analyze RAN Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the RAN elements with Azure Private 5G Core online dashboards. This provides our solution partners and enterprise customers with combined observability, network insights, and analytics capability for the complete private 4G/5G network from a single portal, simplifying multi-vendor, multi-site deployments.

We invite RAN vendors to the Azure private MEC ecosystem to conduct 3GPP functional inter-operability, to onboard network management software on Azure, and to integrate metrics to simplify the deployment and management of private networks by enterprises.

ISV program for Azure private MEC

The launch of the ISV Program for Azure private MEC gives enterprises access to a robust ecosystem of validated full-stack solutions, to unlock the value of their private 5G investments, and accelerate time-to-value. With this access, enterprises can quickly deploy validated low-latency and high-reliability ISV solutions that leverage 4G/5G networks and edge compute.

The program helps ISVs to accelerate the development of modern connected applications, as well as time-to-market. ISVs get technical guidance on best practices for integrating solutions with Azure private MEC, including testing and validation in the Azure private MEC ISV Lab.

Several innovative ISV solutions with a wide range of use cases that include robotics, Video AI, and IoT serving in different industries, have adopted Azure private MEC. Their solutions are available today on Azure Marketplace.

Watch this video to learn more about the ISV program.

Private MEC partner solution offers

Our telco partners—including AT&T, British Telcom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, STC, Tampnet, and Telefonica—offer private MEC solutions for their enterprise customers. The following SI and ISV partners are creating innovative Azure private MEC solutions, published on Azure Marketplace, to serve enterprises across multiple industries:

Manufacturing solutions

Accenture’s Manufacturing Quality Inspection on 5G Cloud Box delivers high-speed, flexible connectivity to high-definition wireless cameras, detecting in real-time any product defect on the production line.
Capgemini’s Computer Vision uses object recognition, crowd mobility analysis, and facial recognition to process real-time, mission-critical data necessary for operational insights.
Cognitiwe’s Health and Safety Monitoring provides in-line quality control, stock monitoring, and health and safety monitoring for manufacturers with real-time and predictive analysis.
Cognizant’s Vision AI for Worker Health & Safety enhances workforce safety by identifying when workers enter a hazardous work-zone and whereby taking proactive actions to protect workers from injury.
ILink Digital's built MIDAS, is a vision platform using AI and machine learning to perform real-time video processing and analytics for quick actions/triggers for object classification, object detection, or pattern matching on a real-time video that can be used for a wide variety of use cases to deliver revenue growth, operational efficiency, and process insights.
Inventec‘s factories with latency-sensitive edge AI and IoT applications such as Automated Optical Inspection, remote collaboration, image recognition, Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR), and Digital Twins.
RedViking’s Argonaut Industry 4.0 solution enables risk reduction and resilient operations through machine-to-machine communications, automated data traceability, and real-time decision-making features with 5G connected AGV systems.
Tech Mahindra’s private 5G solutions includes an AI-based video analytics solution to derive insights into factors causing variations in step and cycle times, as well as AR headsets to enable remote expert assist and training to line workers on a real-time basis.
TCS’s Cognitive Plant Operations Adviser helps to make plant operations more predictive, prescriptive, and self-aware with deep causal reasoning that reduces operations and maintenance costs, improves product quality, reduces emissions, increases throughput, and makes production lines more agile and safe.
weavix, the Internet of Workers platform, is a single source of truth that allows facility owners, manufacturers, and general contractors to realize the future of work.

Transportation and critical infrastructure

Amdocs’ Smart Lighting for Smart Cities delivers not only smart, efficient lighting services but also public/private internet access capabilities and real-time environmental and movement data for municipal analytical insights.
Avanade’s Private 5G-Enabled Utilities – Worker Safety Solution delivers connectivity, push-to-talk, and location tracking of utility workers across field sites.
Datwyler and Rhomberg Sersa Group have joined forces to develop the Q-tainer, a mobile data center that provides easy plug and play, state-of-the-art connectivity for edge computing within the construction industry.
HARMAN’s Real Time Cargo Tracking Solution is deployed at airports for tracking cargo movements from planes to warehouses to enable faster plane turnaround times and reduction in lost cargo
HCL’s 5G-Enabled Airports delivers innovative solution like Airport Ambulance Tracking to automate medical assistance and Water Uplifting to reduce airplane turnaround times that are impacted by delivery of high-quality water for roaming portable water trucks.
Ipsotek’s VI Suite of products provides edge-based AI and machine learning video analytics solutions for applications from intrusion detection, high-accuracy people counting, traffic analysis, and business intelligence for object tracking.
NTT AG’s Smart Airport solution is helping airports to digitally transform their operations, including baggage handling, passenger screening, and data transfer.
Tech Mahindra’s ContainerSight and DockSight video analytics solutions provide real-time visibility with data-driven decision making to reduce shipping container transport costs and optimize the use of trucking containers.
Sensing Feeling’s SensorMAXTM Edge helps owners and operators of real-world spaces better manage the risks, safety, and well-being of people who work in them and the assets they work with.

Retail and Entertainment

Cognitiwe’s Fresh Food Monitoring enables retailers to gain real-time insights and data-driven predictions to help retailers become more sustainable and ensures that products are always fresh and of the highest quality, while reducing the risk of fraud and shrinkage.
HCL 5G-Enabled Theme Park delivers an immersive guest experience comprising of a multi-drone light show performance; 5G-Enabled Casino uses real time video analytics to identify malicious behavior in order to maintain a safe environment for its players.
Neal Analytics, a Fractal company, accelerates retailers’ data-driven business transformation with proven edge-to-cloud, engineering, and AI expertise, showcased in their StockView solutions.

Private 5G connectivity

Accenture: 5G Cloud Box
British Telecom: Private 5G Networks
Capgemini: 5G Private Networks
Cognizant: Private 5G Network Solution
Compal: Private 5G sub6 and mmWave
HCL: Private 5G Consultancy Service
Infosys: Enterprise Private 5G-as-a-Service
Inventec: 5G Private Network Solution
NTT: P5G Private Wireless for Enterprise
Pegatron: 5G Private Network
Tech Mahindra: Private 5G Wireless Network

Learn more about Azure private MEC

It’s easy to get started with Azure private MEC.

As innovative use cases for private wireless networks continue to develop and digital transformation accelerates across many industries, we welcome ISVs, platform partners, operators, and SIs to learn more about Azure private MEC.

Enterprises interested in any of the solutions listed above can contact our partners via the Azure Marketplace listings, or by contacting the Azure private MEC team.

Operators, SIs, and networking and application ISVs interested in partnering with Microsoft to build solutions with private MEC can get started by registering here.

To learn more about how Microsoft can help organizations embrace 5G with modern connected applications, sign up for news and updates.
Quelle: Azure