The broadest range of cloud innovation across US Government data classifications

Today, we are announcing the expansion of our mission-critical cloud for US Government with new capabilities in Azure Government, the expansion of Azure Government Secret, and the announcement of a new cloud to serve customers with Top Secret classified data—Azure Government Top Secret.

Announcing Azure Government Top Secret

We have recently completed the buildout of new Azure Government Top Secret regions, and we are working with the US Government on accreditation. As part of our ongoing commitment to commercial parity as driven by government mission requirements, Azure Government Top Secret regions are designed to provide the same capabilities as Azure (commercial), Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret, enabling a continuum of compute from mission cloud to tactical edge.

The broad range of services will meet the demand for greater agility in the classified space, including the need to gain deeper insights from data sourced from any location as well as the need to enable the rapid expansion of remote work. Additionally, mission owners will benefit from greater choice in modernizing legacy systems, with a secure cloud platform that works on open standards and open frameworks with tools that work across a wide range of skill levels, from business analysts to developers to data scientists.

Azure Government Secret new functionality

Azure Government Secret continues to help mission owners unlock new insights, enable secure innovation, achieve greater agility, and further the mission. Customers including those in the US DoD, law enforcement, and other agencies are using Azure Government Secret today. Azure Government Secret is authorized by both Department of Defense Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503.

“Microsoft is focused on mission enablement. Missions are enabled with workloads. Workloads live within enclaves that house varied levels of data. Microsoft is enabling seamless, secure, cost-contained agility across mission workloads at scale.

The consistency between Azure (commercial), Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret is also starting to change the game as software development may happen from anywhere, while the code itself can be promoted to enclaves with higher classification levels. There it can interact with data of higher classification levels. At the end of the day, this means doing more for the mission at a lower overall cost." —Carroll Moon, CTO of CloudFit Software. 

Today, we are announcing several new services in Azure Government Secret; for application developers, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Container Instances help you deploy and manage containerized applications more easily. Intelligent security analytics services Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center are also now available in Azure Government Secret, enabling unified security across your digital estate and integrated, proactive threat management. Together with Azure Monitor, these services help you collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from your Azure and on-premises environments.

Azure Government Availability Zones, Windows Virtual Desktop availability, and expanded compliance

Events over the past year have highlighted the importance of securely maintaining critical government operations. We have designed and built our cloud platforms for high availability and resilience, and today, we are announcing Availability Zones in Azure Government, providing high availability for your most demanding mission-critical applications and data. Availability Zones are tolerant to datacenter failures through redundancy and logical isolation of services, assuring that critical customer services and workloads are available, anytime, and anywhere.

In addition to responding to unprecedented events, government agencies are rapidly responding to today’s imperative of remote work, and we’ve seen high demand for solutions that allow teams to work from anywhere while keeping relevant data within a securely managed environment. We recently announced the availability of Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) in Azure Government with FedRAMP High accreditation, enabling agencies to adopt WVD for mission-critical workloads and empowering more secure and productive work-from-anywhere scenarios.

As new services are brought into each of our government-only cloud regions, we are working with our accreditors to ensure these services are authorized at the right level for your workloads. We now offer 137 Azure Government services at FedRAMP High and 97 services at Department of Defense Impact Level 5 (IL5) across all Azure Government regions.

Total flexibility at the tactical edge

Today, we are announcing updates to our tactical edge portfolio for US Government customers. Together, these new first-party edge devices help you to do more for the mission, whether that is pre-processing data for low latency response times, bringing AI and machine learning (ML) to the far edge, or harnessing satellite data more rapidly to enable decision-making in disconnected environments.

Modular Datacenter generally available at Impact Level 5 and 6 with high availability options

The recently announced Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) provides datacenter scale compute and storage resources for areas in which adverse conditions, disrupted network availability, and limited access to specialized infrastructure would typically prohibit cloud computing. The MDC can run separate security enclaves, allowing mission users to operate workloads across multiple data classifications at the same time in a single unit, and like the other ruggedized devices, can operate in fully connected, occasionally connected, or fully disconnected scenarios. The MDC allows government customers to deploy a single piece of critical infrastructure to meet the needs of a wide variety of mission workloads at various levels of classification, all in a self-contained footprint that reduces logistics overhead.

Today we are announcing:

◉ The network high availability (HA) module for the MDC that provides network resiliency through multiple satellite communication partners in different orbits. Network resiliency is delivered via SATCOM links through our continuously growing ecosystem of SATCOM partners like SpaceX and SES, for continuity of operations (COOP) during fiber failover.

◉ The high availability power module, which adds resiliency where customers need it, providing an on-demand way to add additional power stability resources in a form factor that is as transportable as the MDC. For deployments with intermittent or unreliable power, transitioning between multiple power sources will keep MDC workloads up and running.

Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized

Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized from Microsoft is an Azure Hardware and Software solution that brings a cloud-consistent approach to operating environments while addressing limited or no network connectivity, harsh conditions requiring military specifications, and high security requirements with optional connectivity to any Azure cloud. Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized is now generally available for customers in Azure Government and Azure Government Secret.

Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Mini R

The Azure Stack Edge appliances Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Azure Stack Edge Mini R enable you to run applications and leverage hardware-accelerated AI and ML solutions to analyze, transform, and filter data at the edge, right where data is created and collected. You can then aggregate data in Azure for further analytics, with common app logic across both. The appliances also act as a cloud storage gateway, enabling eyes-off data transfers to Azure while retaining local access to files. Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Mini R are generally available for customers in Azure Government and Azure Government Secret.

Source: microsoft.com

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Our commitment to customers and Microsoft cloud services continuity

Over the past several weeks, all of us have come together to battle the global health pandemic. During this time, organizations around the world are adjusting the way they manage their daily work and how their workforce continues in the face of extraordinary changes to their professional and personal lives.

With this blog we wanted to share a bit about what we have learned over the last few weeks, resources to help organizations manage through these times, support for critical first responders and emergency organizations, and the criteria we have put in place to manage cloud services capacity to support critical operations. 

We will continue to communicate regularly and openly, so you can have insight into what we are seeing, learning and doing.

As companies operationalize to address new and unique challenges, we have mobilized our global response plan to help customers stay up and running during this critical time. We are actively monitoring performance and usage trends 24/7 to ensure we are optimizing our services for customers worldwide, while accommodating new demand. We are working closely with first responder organizations and critical government agencies to ensure we are prioritizing their unique needs and providing them our fullest support. We are also partnering with governments around the globe to ensure our local datacenters have on-site staffing and all functions are running properly.

In response to health authorities emphasizing the importance of social distancing, we are supporting many large-scale corporations, schools, and governments in the mobilization of remote workforces. Microsoft Teams is helping millions of people adapt to remote work. Organizations have been using Dynamics 365 Customer Service to help contact center employees provide consistent, personalized support while working remotely. Ensuring government and organizational functions can continue while keeping safe distances is critical to our society today.

As demand continues to grow, if we are faced with any capacity constraints in any region during this time, we have established clear criteria for the priority of new cloud capacity. Top priority will be going to first responders, health and emergency management services, critical government infrastructure organizational use, and ensuring remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of Teams. We will also consider adjusting free offers, as necessary, to ensure support of existing customers. 

We will continue to communicate with customers proactively and transparently about our cloud policies through the Microsoft Trust Center and we are committed to supporting every customer through this difficult period.

These are certainly unprecedented and challenging times. It is not business as usual. But, together, we can and will get through this. We will be back in touch soon. In the meantime, if you have any immediate questions or needs, please refer to the following resources.

◉ Azure Service Health – for tracking and understanding your Azure service health

◉ Microsoft 365 Service health and continuity – tools and resources for understanding your Microsoft 365 service health

Source: microsoft.com

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Why Opt for Microsoft AZ-303 and How You Can Prepare for It with Practice Test?

Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies (AZ-303) exam is best for applicants who have the skills and expertise to design and implement solutions running on Microsoft Azure, comprising domains like compute, network, storage, and security. There are different responsibilities for an Azure Solution Architect that includes advising stakeholders and translating business requirements into scalable, secure, and reliable cloud solutions. An Azure Solution Architect partners with the cloud administrators, cloud DBAs, and clients for carrying out the solutions.

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Azure Firewall Manager now supports virtual networks

We introduced Microsoft Azure Firewall Manager preview for Azure Firewall policy and route management in secured virtual hubs. This also included integration with key Security as a Service partners, Zscaler, iboss, and soon Check Point. These partners support branch to internet and virtual network to internet scenarios.

Today, we are extending Azure Firewall Manager preview to include automatic deployment and central security policy management for Azure Firewall in hub virtual networks.

Azure Firewall Manager preview is a network security management service that provides central security policy and route management for cloud-based security perimeters. It makes it easy for enterprise IT teams to centrally define network and application-level rules for traffic filtering across multiple Azure Firewall instances that spans different Azure regions and subscriptions in hub-and-spoke architectures for traffic governance and protection. In addition, it empowers DevOps for better agility with derived local firewall security policies that are implemented across organizations.

Figure one – Azure Firewall Manger Getting Started page

 

Hub virtual networks and secured virtual hubs

Azure Firewall Manager can provide security management for two network architecture types:

◉ Secured virtual hub—An Azure Virtual WAN Hub is a Microsoft-managed resource that lets you easily create hub-and-spoke architectures. When security and routing policies are associated with such a hub, it is referred to as a secured virtual hub.

◉ Hub virtual network—This is a standard Azure Virtual Network that you create and manage yourself. When security policies are associated with such a hub, it is referred to as a hub virtual network. At this time, only Azure Firewall Policy is supported. You can peer spoke virtual networks that contain your workload servers and services. It is also possible to manage firewalls in standalone virtual networks that are not peered to any spoke.

Whether to use a hub virtual network or a secured virtual depends on your scenario:

◉ Hub virtual network— Hub virtual networks are probably the right choice if your network architecture is based on virtual networks only, requires multiple hubs per regions, or doesn’t use hub-and-spoke at all.

◉ Secured virtual hubs— Secured virtual hubs might address your needs better if you need to manage routing and security policies across many globally distributed secured hubs. Secure virtual hubs have high scale VPN connectivity, SDWAN support, and third-party Security as Service integration. You can use Azure to secure your Internet edge for both on-premises and cloud resources.

The following comparison table in Figure 2 can assist in making an informed decision:

	Hub virtual network	Secured virtual hub
Underlying resource	Virtual network	Virtual WAN hub
Hub-and-Spoke	Using virtual network peering	Automated using hub virtual network connection
On-prem connectivity	VPN Gateway up to 10 Gbps and 30 S2S connections; ExpressRoute	More scalable VPN Gateway up to 20 Gbps and 1000 S2S connections; ExpressRoute
Automated branch connectivity using SDWAN	Not supported	Supported
Hubs per region	Multiple virtual networks per region	Single virtual hub per region. Multiple hubs possible with multiple Virtual WANs
Azure Firewall – multiple public IP addresses	Customer provided	Auto-generated (to be available by general availability)
Azure Firewall Availability Zones	Supported	Not available in preview (to be available by general availability)
Advanced internet security with 3rd party Security as a service partners	Customer established and managed VPN connectivity to partner service of choice	Automated via Trusted Security Partner flow and partner management experience
Centralized route management to attract traffic to the hub	Customer managed UDR; Roadmap: UDR default route automation for spokes	Supported using BGP
Web Application Firewall on Application Gateway	Supported in virtual network	Roadmap: can be used in spoke
Network Virtual Appliance	Supported in virtual network	Roadmap: can be used in spoke

Figure two – Hub virtual network vs. secured virtual hub

Firewall policy

Firewall policy is an Azure resource that contains network address translation (NAT), network, and application rule collections as well as threat intelligence settings. It's a global resource that can be used across multiple Azure Firewall instances in secured virtual hubs and hub virtual networks. New policies can be created from scratch or inherited from existing policies. Inheritance allows DevOps to create local firewall policies on top of organization mandated base policy. Policies work across regions and subscriptions.

Azure Firewall Manager orchestrates Firewall policy creation and association. However, a policy can also be created and managed via REST API, templates, Azure PowerShell, and CLI.

Once a policy is created, it can be associated with a firewall in a Virtual WAN Hub (aka secured virtual hub) or a firewall in a virtual network (aka hub virtual network).

Firewall Policies are billed based on firewall associations. A policy with zero or one firewall association is free of charge. A policy with multiple firewall associations is billed at a fixed rate.

The following table compares the new firewall policies with the existing firewall rules:

	Policy	Rules
Contains	NAT, Network, Application rules, and Threat Intelligence settings	NAT, Network, and Application rules
Protects	Virtual hubs and virtual networks	Virtual networks only
Portal experience	Central management using Firewall Manager	Standalone firewall experience
Multiple firewall support	Firewall Policy is a separate resource that can be used across firewalls	Standalone firewall experience
Pricing	Billed based on firewall association	Free
Supported deployment mechanisms	Portal, REST API, templates, PowerShell, and CLI	Portal, REST API, templates, PowerShell, and CLI
Release Status	Preview	General Availability

Figure three – Firewall Policy vs. Firewall Rules

Source: microsoft.com

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Build resilient applications with Kubernetes on Azure

Welcome to KubeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. While we won’t be able to see each other in person at KubeCon EU this year, we're excited that this new virtual format of KubeCon will make the conference more accessible than ever, with more people from the amazing Kubernetes community able to join and participate from around the world without leaving their homes.

With everything that has been happening, the last year has been an up and down experience, but through it all I’m incredibly proud of the focus and dedication from the Azure Kubernetes team. They have continued to iterate and improve our Kubernetes on Azure that provides enterprise-grade experience for our customers.

Kubernetes on Azure (and indeed anywhere) delivers an open and portable ecosystem for cloud-native development. In addition to this core promise, we also deliver a unique enterprise-grade experience that ensures the reliability and security your workloads demand, while also enabling the agility and efficiency that business today desires. You can securely deploy any workload to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to drive cost-savings at scale across your business. Today, we're going to tell you about even more capabilities that can help you along on your cloud-native journey to Kubernetes on Azure.

Improving latency and operational efficiency

One of the key drivers of cloud adoption is reducing latency. It used to be that it took days to get physical computers and set them up in a cluster. Today, you can deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Azure in less than five minutes. These improvements benefit the agility of our customers. For customers who want to scale and provision faster, we are announcing a preview of ephemeral OS disk support which makes responding to new compute demands on your cluster even faster.

Latency isn’t just about the length of time to create a cluster. It’s also about how fast you can detect and respond to operational problems. To help enterprises improve their operational efficiency, we’re announcing preview integration with Azure Resource Health which can alert you if your cluster is unhealthy for any reason. We’re also announcing the general availability of node image updates which allow you to upgrade the underlying operating system to respond to bugs or vulnerabilities in your cluster while staying on the same Kubernetes version for stability.

Finally, though Kubernetes has always enabled enterprises to drive cost savings through containerization, the new economic realities of the world during a pandemic mean that achieving cost efficiency for your business is more important than ever. We’ve got a great exercise that can help you learn how to optimize your costs using containers and the Azure Kubernetes Service.

Secure by design with Kubernetes on Azure

One of the key pillars of any enterprise computing platform is security. With market-leading features like policy integration and Azure Active Directory identity for Pods and cloud-native security have always been an important part of the Azure Kubernetes Service. I’m excited about some new features we’ve added recently to further enhance the security of your workloads running on Kubernetes.

Though Kubernetes has built-in support for secrets, most enterprise environments require a more secure and more compliant implementation. In the Azure Kubernetes Service, being enterprise-grade means providing integration between Azure Key Vault and the Azure Kubernetes service. Using Key Vault with Kubernetes enables you to securely store your credentials, certificates, and other secrets in state of the art, compliant secret store, and easily use them with your applications in an Azure Kubernetes cluster.

It’s even more exciting that this integration is built on the back of an open Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver that the Azure team built and open sourced for the entire Kubernetes community. Giving back to open source is an important part of what it means to be a community steward, and it was exciting to see our approach get validated as it was picked up and used by the HashiCorp Vault team for their secrets integration. Our open source team has been hard at work on improving many other parts of the security ecosystem. We’ve enhanced the CSI driver for Windows, and worked on cgroups v2 and containerd. If you want to learn more about how to secure your cloud-native workloads and make sure that your enterprise is following Microsoft’s best practices, check out our guide to Kubernetes best practices. They will teach you how to integrate firewalls, policy, and more to ensure you have both security and agility in your cloud-native development.

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Azure Machine Learning—what’s new from Build 2020

Machine learning (ML) is gaining momentum across a number of industries and scenarios as enterprises look to drive innovation, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning empowers developers and data scientists with enterprise-grade capabilities to accelerate the ML lifecycle. At Microsoft Build 2020, we announced several advances to Azure Machine Learning across the following areas: ML for all skills, Enterprise grade MLOps, and responsible ML.

ML for all skills

New enhancements provide ML access for all skills.

Enhanced notebook in preview

Data scientists and developers can now access an enhanced notebook editor directly inside Azure Machine Learning studio. New capabilities to create, edit, and collaborate make remote work and sharing easier for data science teams and the notebook is fully compatible with Jupyter.

◉ Boost development productivity with features like IntelliSense, inline error highlighting, and code suggestions from VSCode, which deliver the best-in-class coding experience in Jupyter notebooks.

◉ Access real-time co-editing (coming soon) for seamless remote collaboration or pair debugging.

◉ Inline controls to start, stop, and create a new compute using GPU or CPU Compute Instance inside notebooks.

◉ Add new kernels to the notebook editor and quickly switch between different kernels like Python and R.

Real-time notebook co-editing with three users and IntelliSense.

Reinforcement learning support in preview

New reinforcement learning support in Azure Machine Learning enables data scientists to train agents who interact with the real world, such as control systems and game characters. To train agents on Azure Machine Learning, data scientists can use the SDK, studio UI, or command line interface (CLI). Azure Machine Learning simplifies running reinforcement learning at scale on remote compute clusters, including tracking experiment results in Tensorboard and Azure Machine Learning studio UI.

An agent successfully navigates the maze in Minecraft.

Data labeling in preview

Projects that have a computer-vision component, such as image classification or object detection, generally require labels for thousands of images. Data labeling in Azure Machine learning gives you a central place to create, manage, and monitor labeling projects. Use it to coordinate data, labels, and efficiently manage labeling tasks. The new ML assisted labeling feature helps trigger automatic machine learning models to accelerate the labeling task and is available for image classification (multi-class or multi-label) and object detection tasks.

Enterprise-grade MLOps

New features for MLOps designed to deliver innovation faster.

Azure Private Link for network isolation in preview

To enable secure model training and deployment, Azure Machine Learning provides a strong set of data and networking protection capabilities. These include support for Azure Virtual Networks, dedicated compute hosts and customer managed keys for encryption in transit and at rest. In addition, we are enabling Private Link for network isolation to access Azure Machine Learning over a private endpoint in your virtual network, so the Azure Machine Learning workspace will not be accessible to the internet. This is critical for many scenarios in regulated industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare.

Azure Cognitive Search integration in preview

Many enterprises have a large corpus of documents and can build cognitive search solutions to search for specific terms and find relevant results to improve productivity. To build an effective solution, often customized models are needed to enrich the search experience. Using Azure Machine Learning, developers can deliver custom search solutions by training and deploying models and now, seamlessly integrating the end points into the Azure Cognitive Search skillset.

Responsible ML

In collaboration with the Aether Committee and its working groups, we are bringing the latest research in responsible AI to Azure. The new responsible ML capabilities in Azure Machine Learning and our open-source toolkits empower data scientists and developers to understand ML models, protect people and their data, and control the end-to-end ML process.

Source: microsoft.com

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Six reasons customers trust Azure to run their SAP solutions

As global organizations across every industry adjust to the new normal, SAP solutions are playing an increasingly vital role in addressing immediate needs and paving a path to a resilient future. Now more than ever, companies are realizing the value of running their SAP solutions in the cloud. While some are using advanced analytics to process their SAP data to make real-time business decisions, others are integrating their SAP and non-SAP data to build stronger supply chains. Whether it’s meeting urgent customer needs, empowering employees to make quick decisions, or planning for the future, customers running SAP solutions in the cloud have been well prepared to face the new reality. Check out how Walgreens delivers superior customer service with SAP solutions on Microsoft Azure.

Many organizations running their SAP solutions on-premises have become increasingly aware of the need to be more agile and responsive to real-time business needs. According to an IDC survey, 54 percent of enterprises expect the future demand for cloud software will increase. As global organizations seek agility, cost savings, risk reduction, and immediate insights from their ERP solutions, here are some reasons many of the largest enterprises choose Microsoft Azure as their trusted partner when moving their SAP solutions to the cloud.

1. Running SAP solutions on Azure delivers immediate insights and increased agility

Organizations running SAP solutions on Azure gain real-time and predictive insights that empower them to break into new ways of doing business. Azure offers the ability to tap into more than 100 cloud services, access SAP Cloud Platform, apply intelligent analytics, and also integrate with an organization’s existing productivity and collaboration tools such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Apps, and Microsoft Power BI.

With Azure, organizations can integrate their SAP and non-SAP data through an extensive portfolio of Azure data services and create real-time dashboard views of the current operations using SAP and Microsoft business intelligence tools. Using intelligent analytics deepens real-time and predictive insights to improve decision-making by responding dynamically as business conditions change, and how that change impacts your customers or products. Integration with Teams and Microsoft 365 improves team collaboration and enhances user experience and productivity. Using Microsoft Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI, organizations can create customized workflows, apps, and business insight reports without having to write any code.

2. An ever-evolving and growing set of Azure cloud services drives continuous innovation

While Zuellig Pharma is building an app that uses Azure blockchain services and data from the SAP Business Suite on HANA to track and capture counterfeit products and illegal parallel imports in its region, Walgreens plans to use AI and machine learning to develop new customer offerings quickly and respond in real time to changes in the marketplace.

Customers such as Rio Tinto are using Azure’s secure and scalable IoT applications to pilot a solution to take real-time data from trucks, drills, smelters, and other equipment and analyze it to gain equipment health, preemptive maintenance, supply chain efficiency, and other operational intelligence. Additionally, with DevOps with GitHub and Azure Kubernetes Service, customers can build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network.

3. Running SAP solutions on Azure offers costs savings

A Forrester study showed customers achieved more than 100 percent ROI, a 50 percent reduction in data center costs, and a 100 percent reduction in SAP release delays by migrating their SAP systems to Azure. Moving to Azure not only eliminates capital expenditure and cost of underutilized hardware, but it also offers cost management tools such as on-demand scaling during peak usage periods, using cheaper storage, and optimizing disaster recovery environments.

By running SAP solutions on Azure, organizations replace expensive, manual, and error-prone processes with automated, flexible processes, and with a single ticket-to-solution experience, enterprises empower employees to focus on value-added activities by putting data in their hands.

4. Running SAP solutions on Azure offers immense flexibility and scalability

Customers across every industry run their largest production SAP landscapes on Azure because it is a proven cloud platform certified by SAP to run their most mission-critical SAP applications. Azure offers the industry’s most performant and scale-able cloud infrastructure—offering 192 GB to 12 TB SAP HANA certified VMs in more regions than any other public cloud provider along with support for both Linux and Windows OS. Azure offers on-demand scalability and agility that reduces the time to market —customers can spin up or spin down resources as needed. For instance, Daimler AG reduced operational costs by 50 percent and increased agility by spinning up resources on-demand in 30 minutes with SAP S/4HANA and Azure. 

Azure also offers access to more than 1,000 pre-built integrations, out-of-the-box business services, SAP HANA services, and apps built by SAP and our partners. Customers such as Tate and Lyle appreciate that with Azure, they get access to compute, network, and storage resources preconfigured for SAP HANA that they didn’t have to build, install, or manage.

5. SAP solutions on Azure offer best-in-class security, compliance, and business continuity

Azure’s intelligent security services are backed by a $1 billion annual investment in enterprise-grade security and compliance offers and 3,500 cybersecurity professionals. Azure has the most compliance offerings of any public cloud. Azure offers the best-in-class security services such as Azure Sentinel for SIEM, Azure security center for threat monitoring, and Azure Active Directory for identity management. Additionally, customers can leverage built-in availability and recovery options such as Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery to ensure business continuity and data protection. Microsoft teams work closely with partners to ensure that critical systems remain online during migration and offer a robust set of joint planning workshops, migration programs such as FastTrack, POCs, and training and certifications.

6. Organizations benefit from the trusted partnership between SAP and Microsoft

After decades of working together to serve our customers, SAP and Microsoft deepened their relationship by signing the Embrace initiative. As part of Embrace, SAP will lead with Azure to move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA customers to the cloud through industry-specific best practices, reference architectures, and cloud-delivered services. Our engineering teams co-residing in Germany and Redmond, Washington work together to develop joint reference architectures, product integration roadmaps, and best practices; our industry teams are jointly developing industry-specific transformation roadmaps, and our support teams have developed collaborative support models.

SAP and Microsoft have been partners for more than 25 years and are also mutual customers. Microsoft is the only cloud provider that’s been running SAP for its own finance, HR, and supply chains for the last 20 years, including SAP S/4HANA. Likewise, SAP has chosen Azure to run a growing number of its own internal system landscapes, including those based on SAP S/4HANA. Microsoft IT and SAP IT generously share their learnings from running SAP solutions on Azure with our customers.

More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies run their business on Azure. Our experience and history give us a powerful understanding of the needs of enterprise customers. Together with SAP, customers have trusted us with their most critical workloads for decades because we understand what it takes to support our customers in their journey to the cloud.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft Certified Professional | Roles and Responsibilities

For many years, Microsoft has been entering the forefront for not incompletely developing world-class software and programs and validation courses to tour with them.

The Microsoft certification you take is dependant on your current position or planned career path. Microsoft certifications are designed to take advantage of specific skills and improve your expertise. Certificates are offered in five areas, each with specialization tracks. Whether you are an application developer, systems engineer, technical consultant, or network administrator, there are certifications for you.

Microsoft Certified Professional

A Microsoft Certified Professional is a trained and certified professional technician accountable for managing an organization’s software programs and technology. Microsoft experienced techs address client issues, set up plans, and respond to customer queries regarding the manufacturer's software products.

Generally, these technicians specialize in setting up, operating, and maintaining client Microsoft applications and programs. Businesses in the Telecom and IT sectors need either full time or freelance certified professionals to assure business productivity.

Certified experts in Microsoft professional give technical support to the organization in different areas such as client operating systems, systems, web design, desktop support, and more. The Microsoft technicians provide constant and qualified support for client-run Microsoft products, servers, clouds, and networks.

The Microsoft Certification professional continues vital for companies and network centers to perform their day-to-day responsibilities.

Basics of What and Who is a Microsoft Certified Professional?

• A Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) is an individual who makes a professional certification program by Microsoft.
• Individuals will become Microsoft certified professionals as soon as they pass one of Microsoft's professional certification exams.
• It is a certification that proves IT professionals and developer technical expertise through rigorous, industry-proven, and industry-recognized exams.
• MCP exams cover a wide variety of Microsoft products, technologies, and solutions.
• Microsoft certified professionals are certified individuals who practice in Microsoft information technology programs and applications.

How to Become a Microsoft Certified Professional?

Microsoft Certified Professionals must first own a degree in computer science, information technology, or related areas. Apart from this specialized degree, the candidate offers a formal training program specializing in the job position and getting this certification by passing a thorough exam. The exam must be prepared for and scheduled in advance.

Microsoft Certification can ease the edge out candidates during a job interview. Companies in a wide range of industries use Microsoft programs, making a certification valuable even through career changes. Professionals in IT to coordinator role in large corporate companies can benefit from certifications to help them stand out from their colleagues.

Besides giving students a better start when job hunting, earning a certification provides students with additional skills to run programs with greater productivity and save time on vital, repetitive tasks. In addition to landing a new job and having more robust skills, those who earn certifications also report making more money.

By earning a certification, students can discover how to build better and professional documents, charts, or presentations. While it is appealing to the eye to have professional-looking documents, it can help win business. Even with all the right points and numbers in an inexperienced looking deck, it can be hard to win new business.

Roles and Responsibilities of Microsoft Certified Professional

Microsoft Certified Professionals include a kind of different computer and technology-related duties as set by organizational policy.

Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP) are accredited professionals who concentrate on Microsoft information technology plans and applications. Specialists in Microsoft programs focus their technical maintenance skills in different areas, starting from operating systems to web development.

The traditional roles and responsibilities of Microsoft Certified Professionals include the accompanying:

• Manage IT departments and work as liaisons with applicable departments to recommend software and system upgrades.
• Provide IT support to private employees across the enterprise.
• Perform new employee, workstation setups.
• Complete hands-on fixes at the desktop level via installing and upgrading software and configuration systems and applications.
• Document IT-related rules and workflows.
• Evaluate IT processes and suggest changes.
• Create and maintain historical records by the documentation of hardware and software modifications and revisions.

Conclusion

As we understand, in the fast-growing field of information technology, where technical knowledge and new technologies are consistently growing, getting Microsoft certification shows that the developer maintains up-to-date knowledge and skills that meet industry standards worldwide.

Becoming certified also gives you a way to the Microsoft Certified Professional member site that allows an introduction to career resources, interaction with other certified professionals, and Microsoft's continuing education.

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5 ways to save costs by running .NET apps on Azure

Digital transformation is accelerating at an incredible rate for consumers and employees alike, and the way we live and work has drastically changed. As a result, digital demand is surging, often past the capacity of existing infrastructure due to online demand for goods, services, and information. Businesses are shifting overnight from a physical first approach, to a digital first model putting strain on legacy web apps—both internal and external.

Leveraging our deep expertise in Windows, Visual Studio, and ASP.NET, we designed App Service and Azure SQL Database as the home in the cloud for .NET applications and the databases that power them. Thus, you can be confident with Azure you are hosting your .NET web apps and data on the most cost-effective cloud.

GigaOm recently conducted an independent analyst study, Costs and Benefits of .NET Application Migration to the Cloud, which found that Azure is the most cost effective and performant environment to run ASP.NET web workloads. Azure is up to 54 percent less expensive than on-premises and up to 30 percent less expensive than AWS. In addition, Azure is the best destination for your Windows Server, SQL Server, and .NET workloads with unparalleled price-performance across our application and database destinations, both IaaS and PaaS. While there are many ways to save on costs when you choose Azure, here are five ways that can help when migrating your web applications to the cloud.

Costs and Benefits of .NET Application Migration to the Cloud

Use Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to bring your existing on-premises licenses, such as Windows Server and SQL Server, over to Azure. With Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can save up to 85 percent compared to standard pay-as-you-go rates and achieve the lowest cost of ownership when you combine Azure Hybrid Benefit, reservations savings, and extended security updates. Azure Hybrid Benefit also applies to SQL on Azure and Azure Dedicated Host. Additionally, it provides 180 days of dual-use rights so you can maintain your on-premises operation while migrating to Azure.

Leverage App Service Reserved Instance pricing

Azure’s App Service Reserved Instance pricing is another great way to save on costs. Azure App Service customers can now save up to 35 percent with a 1-year commitment and up to 55 percent for a 3-year commitment, compared to pay-as-you-go prices.

Take advantage of Azure Dev/Test pricing

With Azure Dev/Test pricing, you can get discounted rates up to 71 percent for your ongoing development and testing needs. Using serverless tools like Azure Logic Apps and Functions, you can also eliminate custom code and third-party, helping you to increase development productivity by up to 50 percent. We have also extended our Dev/Test pricing discounts to Premium v3 as well as Premium v2, making it more affordable (especially for Visual Studio subscribers) to test workloads that require virtual network (VNet) connectivity before deploying.

Lower your operational costs

Azure can manage your .NET web apps and databases, so you don’t have to.

Our end-to-end web hosting platform can free up your team to focus on what matters most. Plan on running your applications with confidence, while letting Azure handle auto-patching for database, OS and runtimes, automated database backup, configurable alerts, and logging. You can easily add custom domains, SSL certificates, single sign-on (SSO), and identity-service integration to your apps.

You can also reduce regulatory and compliance costs by automating or simplifying over 30 percent of monitoring work versus on-premises hosted applications. Azure’s AI-powered SQL optimization enables automatic tuning and adaptive query optimization. With application insights providing you with rich out-of-the-box monitoring for ASP.NET applications, you can analyze how increased traffic and upstream dependencies affect the response times of your .NET web applications. Furthermore, Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations that can help you improve availability, security, and performance while reducing costs.

Enable autoscaling

With Microsoft Azure, you only use the servers you need when you need them. Azure can help optimize your application and underlying database’s performance to meet the peaks and troughs of demand. Azure surfaces opportunities to save with out-of-the-box monitoring for ASP.NET applications while automatically scaling resources to meet workload demand with SQL serverless and Hyperscale databases. Azure is built to be elastic to help you be as cost-effective as possible. But don’t just take our word for it. 

Get started with free Azure migration tools for .NET web apps

You can start reducing your costs today with Azure, the only end to end web hosting platform designed from the ground up to build and manage .NET web applications. With the Azure App Service Migration Assistant and SQL Database Migration Assistant, it has never been easier to get started migrating your applications to the cloud.

Source: microsoft.com

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Defining roles and responsibilities for cloud cost optimization

Today’s challenging economic climate has driven many IT organizations to launch cost optimization initiatives. If you’re participating in one such initiative, you’ve discovered that cloud cost management is a journey, with many factors to consider and steps to take to improve cloud spending behaviors.

If you’re already running in the cloud, the best way to jumpstart your cost optimization initiative is by making sure you have the right governance in place, which will give you immediate cost benefits. Then you can circle back to the process outlined in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure: define your cloud strategy, create your cloud adoption plan, ready your cloud environment, migrate and innovate cloud workloads, then manage and govern your environment. Each step of your cloud journey—from documenting your strategy to setting up ongoing operations—has a cost impact. Our get started guide to managing cloud costs will help you understand the cost implications for each step along the way.

In this blog, we’re zooming in on the first step—governance—to help you hit the ground running. We’ll outline best practices, both in assigning roles and responsibilities to your teams, and how those teams should take joint action to create a more cost-efficient cloud environment.

The three key teams involved in cost management

You might call them by slightly different names or have a slightly different organizational model (team structure is a journey too), but fundamentally, based on our conversations with customers who are having the most success managing costs, there should be three key teams involved in cost management and optimization:

1. The cloud strategy team defines motivations and business outcomes for cloud investments and aligns business priorities and cloud adoption efforts.

2. The cloud governance team mitigates the risks associated with cloud investments by converting those risks into sound corporate policies.

3. Cloud adoption teams (or cloud workload teams) implement technical solutions in the cloud to deliver on the cloud strategy, in alignment with policy.

Fundamentally, these teams play the following roles in a cost-conscious organization:

1. The cloud strategy team builds cost consciousness into cloud efforts at the leadership level, for example, by establishing budgets and reviewing spend and return on investment (ROI) across cloud investments.

2. The cloud governance team manages costs across the cloud portfolio, for example, delivering reliable cost reporting and performance telemetry, and optimizing the cloud environment to address budget deviations.

3. The cloud adoption teams (or cloud workload teams) serve as the first lines of defense against overspending by understanding cost goals and how their implementation decisions affect those and by collaborating with the cloud governance team to optimize workloads.

Operational cost management best practices

There are areas of cost management where the cloud governance team takes the lead, areas where the cloud adoption teams (or cloud workload teams) take the lead, and areas of close collaboration among them.

Typically, the cloud governance team is responsible for operational cost management best practices, for example, patching and maintenance. This set of best practices is usually handled centrally. Examples include:

◉ Tagging: Ensuring all your cloud resources are tagged properly.

◉ Licensing: Leading a well-planned license acquisition and utilization strategy, including taking advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit, Azure Reservations, Azure Spot Virtual Machines, and other buying strategies that can rapidly reduce costs across your entire cloud portfolio.

◉ Bulk shutdowns: Identifying large numbers of resources that are no longer being used and working with owners to shut them down.

◉ Bulk right-sizing: Finding mass opportunities for right-sizing resources to the smallest stock-keeping units (SKUs) that can support performance requirements.

We provide tools to help you follow these best practices. For example, you can establish, audit, and enforce proper resource tagging with Azure Policy, and find a list of opportunities to shut down and right-size resources with Azure Advisor. Azure Cost Management and Billing gives you a full set of cloud cost management capabilities so you can better understand and control your spending.

Workload cost management best practices

The cloud adoption team (or cloud workload team) is typically responsible for following workload-level cost management best practices. The cloud workload team might consult with the cloud governance team (or receive training or coaching from them), or handle these items independently. These best practices include:

◉ Granular re-sizing and shutdown: Finding more nuanced opportunities (beyond those large-scale opportunities identified by the central cloud governance team) to shift resource SKUs or shut down resources altogether.

◉ Horizontal-over-vertical scale: Using multiple small instances rather than fewer large instances to scale, often resulting in cost efficiencies.

◉ Autoscaling: Taking advantage of automation to more closely match workload demand to resource counts and sizes.

◉ Revising architecture: Revisiting early architectural decisions for cost efficiencies, such as through serverless technologies.

To guide decisions in this area, we recommend consulting the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, which can help you design, build, deploy, and manage high-quality cloud workloads across five key pillars: security, reliability, performance efficiency, operational excellence, and cost optimization. To get started, check out the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review, which you can use to assess your workloads against the Well-Architected Framework, including the cost optimization pillar. The Well-Architected Review provides a holistic view into cost optimization guidance for your deployed workloads, and actionable recommendations to help you optimize them.

Working towards a cost-conscious organization

Creating a cost-conscious organization that delivers on your financial goals is a team sport. Everyone has a role to play to ensure you meet your business objectives.

Source: microsoft.com

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Harness analytical and predictive power with Azure Synapse Analytics

Since its preview announcement, we’ve witnessed incredible excitement and adoption of Azure Synapse from our customers and partners. We want to sincerely thank everyone that provided feedback and are now helping us bring the power of limitless analytics to all.

Unified experience

Azure Synapse brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics—at cloud scale. The unification of these workloads enables organizations to massively reduce their end-to-end development time and accelerate time to insight. It now also provides both no-code and code-first experiences for critical tasks such as data ingestion, preparation, and transformation.

With this release, the management and monitoring of your analytics system becomes significantly easier. With one click, teams can secure their entire analytics system and prevent data exfiltration by simply selecting the managed virtual network feature when creating a Synapse workspace. This gives valuable time back to teams hired to discover insights—rather than investing considerable time securing connections between services, building firewalls, or managing subnets.

Unified analytics

Over the past years, we’ve set out to rearchitect and create the next generation of query processing engine and data management to meet the needs of the modern, high-scale data workloads. The result is the new, cloud-native, distributed SQL engine that powers Azure Synapse. It can scale from queries on a handful of cores to thousands of nodes—all depending on your workload needs.

Azure Synapse enables a level of productivity and collaboration among data professionals that previously wasn’t possible by deeply integrating Apache Spark and its new SQL engine. And it supports popular languages that developers prefer including T-SQL, Python, Scala, and Java.

The new flexible service model for query processing allows data teams to use both serverless and dedicated options. Organizations can now choose the most cost-effective option for each use case—enjoying the advantages of a data lake for quick data exploration with pay-per-query pricing and/or a dedicated data warehouse for more predictable and mission-critical workloads.

Unified data teams

Azure Synapse is also deeply integrated with Microsoft Power BI and Azure Machine Learning.

With Power BI directly integrated in the Synapse Studio, BI professionals can work in the same service that houses data pipelines, data lakes, and data warehouses—reducing the time it takes to access clean and secure data for dashboards. And for lightning fast query performance, the new Power BI performance accelerator for Azure Synapse automates the creation and optimization of materialized views with just a few clicks.

For predictive analytics, teams can deploy machine learning models from the Azure Machine Learning model registry directly to Azure Synapse using a simple, guided user experience—no data movement required. The in-engine ML scoring can generate millions of predictions in seconds all while maintaining full data security as data doesn’t leave the platform. And with AutoML, all data teams—even organizations without highly trained data scientists—can automatically apply machine learning models to their data and generate predictive insights.

The code-free and programmatic integration—including CI/CD support with Git integration—enables seamless version control, collaboration, and code management between data engineers, data scientists, and BI professionals, allowing them to be highly productive across a variety of use cases.

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Virtual Build spotlights IoT updates and rollouts

As people around the globe adapt to new ways of working, the Microsoft Build 2020 conference took a new approach as well. Rather than gathering the developer community in person as planned, Microsoft shifted gears and put together 48 hours of streaming content for a virtual event.

Despite the new format, Microsoft Build’s goals remained the same: Connect our developers with the best of Microsoft so they can bring their ideas to life. For IoT, that included a lot of new innovations and training for developers, all geared toward simplifying IoT and empowering developers to build new breakthrough solutions.

On the training side, we’re especially excited to launch a new IoT certification to help build skills in the community and unlock the creativity of developers. We’ve also added some industry-leading capabilities with an all-new Azure Digital Twins release that can model just about any scenario.

New IoT certification for developers

One of the biggest challenges for developers building IoT applications is acquiring the skills to do so. Microsoft offers multiple training options that empower developers to increase technical skills and prepare for Microsoft Certifications.

At Microsoft Build 2020, we announced the general availability of a recent addition to the Microsoft Certification portfolio: The Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification. Earning this certification can help developers become recognized as experts and advance their careers by validating technical knowledge and ability.

Developers can start the IoT learning and certification journey at Microsoft Learn, with free online, self-paced courses covering all the essentials like provisioning and managing devices, processing data, deploying cloud workloads to the edge, securing the solution, and more.

Azure Digital Twins: New preview features

A “digital twin” is a digital replica of real-world things—assets, environments, business systems—designed to understand, control, simulate, analyze, and improve how those things work in the real world.

At Microsoft Build 2020, we announced the next iteration of Azure Digital Twins, making it even easier for developers to build these dynamic virtual replicas. New capabilities include rich and flexible modeling that supports full graph topologies, a live execution environment, easy integration with other Azure services, and broad query APIs.

To drive openness in building IoT applications, the new Azure Digital Twins also uses an open modeling language called the Digital Twins Definition Language, based on the JSON-LD standard. This will provide great flexibility, ease of use, and easy integration into other Azure platform offerings such as IoT Hub and Time Series insights.

It also allows for expanded integration outside Azure, so partners can use Digital Twins as part of their existing modeling frameworks and third-party systems. The new features are expected to be out in the coming months.

We also highlighted two partners using new capabilities in exciting ways. Pennsylvania-based ANSYS is building physics-based simulations that can aid in designing large physical assets. Another partner, Bentley Systems, is creating a digital representation of major infrastructure including road and rail networks, public works and utilities, industrial plants, and commercial and institutional facilities to help customers better design, build, and operate.

Finally, as part of our commitment to openness and interoperability, we announced that Microsoft has joined Dell, Ansys, and LendLease in founding the Digital Twin Consortium, where we will work to build an open community that promotes best practices and standard digital twin models for all businesses and industry domains.

IoT Plug and Play: New preview features

IoT Plug and Play is an open approach that dramatically accelerates IoT by making it much easier to develop software on devices, connect them quickly to IoT solutions, and update each independently. Since our initial preview last year, we have been busy responding to customer feedback and at build we announced a set of new preview features which will be available soon:

◉ Alignment with Digital Twins: IoT Plug and Play and Azure Digital Twins now share the same modeling language: the Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL). This makes it simple to connect an IoT Plug and Play device to Azure Digital Twins and have the device appear instantly as a Digital Twin. 

◉ Support for existing devices: we have made it easy to update existing devices to be IoT Plug and Play compatible, developers can simply author a DTDL document that describes the interaction model of their device, make targeted code changes, and then send the model when the device connects.

We will also be enabling our device providers to start their final certifications ahead of our IoT Plug and Play general availability.

Azure Time Series Insights: New features general availability

Traditionally comparing historical trends with time series data has meant spending days normalizing the data before analyzing it. With Azure Time Series Insights, developers can process, analyze, and get data insights in just minutes.

This year at Microsoft Build, we announced that new features for Azure Time Series Insights will be generally available in the coming months.

Several months ago we announced a preview of Azure Time Series Insights features, including an enhanced analytics user experience through Time Series explorer, seamless integration with advanced machine learning platforms and analytics tools, a native connector to Power BI, semantic model support for metadata, and more.

This version builds on our commitment to deliver a truly flexible analytics platform with the introduction of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 support. By combining customer-owned Azure Data Lake Storage with our native support for the open source, highly-efficient Apache Parquet, customers can gain insights over decades of IoT data. They can also integrate with other analytics tools of their choice to unlock significant business value and operational intelligence.

When our customers use Azure Time Series Insights together with Azure Digital Twins, they gain highly contextualized representations of their connected environments to better understand how assets, customers, and processes interact.

Azure Maps: Creator feature in preview

Azure Maps is an enterprise location platform that enables developers to add spatial analytics and mobility to their IoT applications.

At Microsoft Build, we announced Azure Maps Creator in preview, which offers a fundamental shift in building and managing private map data, and moving geographic information systems (GIS) data management into Azure cloud.

With Azure Maps Creator, developers can upload private map information such as indoor floorplans, spaces, and physical assets into a customer-controlled, highly-secure, and fully-compliant geospatial storage system within Azure Maps.

Azure Maps Creator also helps Azure Digital Twins customers by handling private map data associated with Digital Twins for private spaces like building interiors, campuses, factories, and more. The combination of Azure Maps Creator and Azure Digital Twins helps customers manage, monitor, and track IoT assets within their environments through the Azure Maps interface.

Azure IoT Central: First-class support for Azure Sphere and Azure IoT Edge

IoT Central is a fully managed software as a service (SaaS) IoT app platform that allows developers to easily create IoT applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. Developers can either use existing IoT Central industry templates or create customized solutions of their own design. Of particular note during our current public health crisis is IoT Central’s continuous patient monitoring health template designed to accelerate the assembly and deployment of healthcare wearables and patient monitoring solutions.

At Microsoft Build, IoT Central announced several new features, including first-class support for both Azure Sphere and Azure IoT Edge.

Integrating IoT Edge with IoT Central allows developers to deploy cloud workloads such as artificial intelligence and machine learning on edge devices. It dramatically increases the possibilities for IoT applications by allowing developers to deploy Edge software modules, find insights from them, and take actions—all from within IoT Central.

Pairing IoT Central with Azure Sphere’s integrated security solution provides the foundation needed to build, monitor, and safely manage IoT devices and products. It allows application builders to ensure device-to-cloud security through simplified security management from a single pane of glass. Developers can also model Azure Sphere devices in IoT Central using device templates integrated with Azure Sphere cloud services to facilitate secure error and device status reporting.

Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge: New breakthrough capabilities for enterprise-grade IoT

At Microsoft Build, we announced another industry first: Azure IoT Hub now supports Azure Private Link for device connectivity as well as Managed Identity for securely connecting to locked-down Azure resources. As a result, customers can now bring IoT Hub into their Azure Virtual Network (VNET) and secure their IoT solution by eliminating exposure to the public internet.

We also announced new industry-leading features that elevate Azure IoT Edge to the most sophisticated, production-grade edge platform in the industry:

◉ IoT Edge added X.509 certificate attestation for IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service (DPS). This takes advantage of X.509 certificate chains to automate device provisioning, allowing for greater scale.

◉ Additional features will make supportability and debugging quick and easy. A new feature called Support Bundle reduces the work required to debug issues across IoT Edge components. This feature allows collection of module, IoT Edge security manager, and container engine logs, along with iotedge check output and other useful debug information, in a single compressed file with a single command.

◉ IoT Edge, together with IoT Hub Automatic Device Management, allows layered deployments that enable reuse of the same module in different combinations, reducing the number of unique deployments that need to be created.

◉ Azure IoT Edge also works on Kubernetes, and we recently added new features for this support. These include an integrated, production-grade security architecture, a built-in lightweight proxy to deploy IoT Edge modules on Kubernetes with no code changes, integration of loT Edge features like automatic provisioning using IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service, and application model extensions that allow the use of select Kubernetes primitives in an edge deployment manifest.

And we are not done—based on our customers’ needs, we are working on the following new features that will be released soon as part of IoT Edge release 1.0.10 in the coming months:

◉ Priority messages and Time-to-Live (TTL) support, which will allow greater control over network usage in constrained and expensive networking environments by letting our customers choose which data they want to receive first from an IoT Edge device.

◉ IoT Edge runtime will be enhanced to emit rich operational metrics in an industry-standard Prometheus format, enabling powerful monitoring and alerting features both locally and remotely.

Azure RTOS

Getting intelligent, reliable hardware products to market can be time-consuming and complex. Azure RTOS is an embedded IoT development suite that includes a lightweight real-time operating system for microcontrollers (MCUs) and microprocessors (MPUs) to streamline the process of building high-performing devices.

At Microsoft Build we announced the general availability of Azure RTOS, the fastest, smallest, industry-grade RTOS on the planet. We also announced that Microsoft now supports Azure RTOS on development kits from ST, Renesas, NXP, and Microchip. This turnkey integration helps simplify many steps in the development cycle.

Full source code for all Azure RTOS components is now available on GitHub for developers to freely test and explore. Azure RTOS includes a preview integration of an Azure Security Center module. Later this year we will offer an add-on industrial certification package to help developers get to market even faster.

Azure Sphere

Azure Sphere is a device security solution purpose-built with Azure Sphere-certified hardware—a highly secured OS and a cloud security service, with more than a decade of ongoing, on-chip security improvements.

Since we announced its general availability in February 2020, Microsoft has relied on Azure Sphere in our own datacenters to securely connect the critical infrastructure that delivers cloud services at scale. 

At Microsoft Build, we demonstrated Azure Sphere and Azure RTOS’s collective capability to address critical needs across the full spectrum of MCU and embedded-class IoT devices, enabling developers to build highly secure devices with real-time processing capabilities.

Windows for IoT: A broad range of updates, including something for every developer

At Microsoft Build, we also laid out the road map for the continued integration of IoT capabilities into Windows.

Customers love the security and manageability of Windows for IoT, and we are making it even easier to integrate with Azure and to access Linux modules by enabling the Linux version of Azure IoT Edge on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. We are also creating new market opportunities for device builders by shrinking the footprint of Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, enabling NXP’s i.MX8 silicon, and adding new features for appliance scenarios and business models.

Our partners continue to build innovative solutions with Windows IoT. Democracy Live and Dover Fueling Solutions are examples of partners enabling secure, accessible, and empowered solutions with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. It is also exciting to see Clearpath Robotics adding support for Robot Operating System (ROS) on Windows, and HIWIN enabling speech and vision cognition capabilities for robots running ROS on Windows.

Source: microsoft.com

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