7 Ways AZ-900 Practice Test Can Help You Achieve Exam Success

The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam is the first stepping stone on the Microsoft Azure cloud certification track.

All About Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 Exam

In brief, the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam is the first Azure exam that aims to prove basic-level knowledge of the Microsoft Azure cloud.

When it comes to the structure of Microsoft exam AZ-900, it consists of around 40-60 questions. The time given to finish Microsoft Azure Fundamentals is 60 minutes. The AZ-900 exam questions types are multiple-choice, case study, active screen, best answer, mark review, short answer, drag & drop, hot area, and so on. To pass the exam, you have to obtain a score of 700 out of 1000. Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 exam cost is $99.

Overview of the Microsoft AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals Exam

This Microsoft exam is designed for both technical and non-technical individuals. Having prevalent IT knowledge and practical experience will help you learn the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals syllabus topics smoothly. Passing this one Microsoft exam will give you the Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals certification.

The exam demands you to prove high-level knowledge of the Azure cloud and its different service offerings across four key domains:

• Understanding general cloud concepts (15-20%)
• Understanding core Azure services (30-35%)
• Understanding security, privacy, compliance, and trust (25-30%)
• Understanding Azure pricing and support (25-30%)

Breaking through the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 Exam

As a beginner’s exam, you will be measured with your fundamental knowledge of cloud concepts and different Azure services. Furthermore, this certification does not need any previous experience as a programming wizard, and however, you should have an idea of what you are up to.

Microsoft provides free learning resources to ensure that you pass the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam with a flying score. These include the essential information on the required topics. On top of that, instructors deliver courses that will help intensify your knowledge of the Azure Portal. But more than these free modules and training courses, what’s most crucial to have throughout your preparation is the AZ-900 practice test! AZ-900 practice test are your saving grace to complement your exam resources.

7 Ways AZ-900 Practice Test Can Help You Achieve Exam Success

There are multiple advantages of giving an AZ-900 practice test before the actual exam, and it helps you reinforce your Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam preparation. In the long shot that you need more motivation to convince yourself why you should give a practice test before Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam, keep on reading!

1. Helps in Identifying Weak Areas

AZ-900 practice tests are an ideal way to identify your weak areas. While you appear in a practice exam, you run over definite AZ-900 exam questions you don't have a hint about the answer for. These AZ-900 exam topics are your weak points. You can write down these points and focus on the corresponding, so you have to work upon exam topics when you sit in the genuine exam.

2. Helps in Practice and Preparation

Practice makes an individual perfect! A similar saying spreads all over. The more you take the AZ-900 practice test, the more chances you should pass with a flying score. A practice test comprises questions like the genuine AZ-900 exam. Giving multiple AZ-900 practice tests will help you practice such inquiries and become an equivalent expert.

3. Boost Your Confidence to face challenges and AZ-900 Exam

AZ-900 practice test helps you explore various methods that you apply while you sit for the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam and choose which one fits you the best.

4. Helps you in Improving Your Score

Practicing AZ-900 practice tests multiple times will help you improve your actual exam score. The more practice questions you answer, the more experience you will acquire in managing such, and this will, therefore, help you enhance your score.

5. Improves Time Management Skills

When you answer many AZ-900 exam practice questions, your exam-taking and time management skills will improve. By taking the AZ-900 practice test, again and again, your brain will get used to dealing with them, and you won't set aside much effort to answer.

Giving a lot of AZ-900 practice tests will help you foster your strategy to address the difficulty. You can try different things with multiple approaches to tackle the exam and see which one works the best for you.

7. Gives Space for Self-Assessment

You become acquainted with your outcome after each counterfeit test, which furnishes you with a chance to self-assess—correcting your missteps after each mock test assists you with accomplishing the best form of yourself to introduce in the AZ-900 exam. The applicants can receive scores after each practice test. Toward the month's end, examining this score can help you keep tabs on your development and know in what segments have you performed well and what areas require more exertion.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is a sought-after skill that can be mastered with constant effort and patience. By passing the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 exam, you don’t just earn the coveted Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals certification but also get proof of a brighter IT career. All you require is to study smart and use practice tests and relevant study materials such as training courses and study guides!

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Unleashing the true potential of 5G with cloud networks

For many, the intersection of 5G wireless and the Internet offers very little by way of new information, just from a quick, surface-level glance. However, things look very different when considered in light of the 5G New Radio (NR) standard.

For example, consider a new technology in the 5G NR called URLLC—which is short for ultra-reliable low-latency communications. Designed for mission-critical and latency-sensitive Internet services, URLLC is a configuration and technology feature that enables a new class of applications and services. These services include things such as remote control of robots; thin, tether-less augmented reality headsets, smart car collision avoidance systems, traffic control on roads, and entertainment services such as fast-action multi-player multi-region gaming.

The delay specification delivered by URLLC can be anywhere from one to four msec on-air latency, well within the required hard limit of the latency required by these applications. However, in many ways, this delay specification is simply not sufficient in light of the fact that many of these latency-sensitive applications only make sense in the context of the Internet. Interacting with users, devices, and cloud services over long distances forces one to think about the end-to-end latency characteristics that include the Internet.

Stretching the reach of low-latency applications

No one network can encompass all end-users and cloud services, so every network operator ultimately depends on the Internet at some point. Based on the locations of the source and destination, Internet latencies can vary anywhere from a single order to several orders of magnitude more than on-air 5G wireless latencies. This high latency can effectively remove all the benefits of the low-latency properties offered via the 5G network. As a result, the scope of the services that people enthusiastically look forward to gets reduced considerably.

Beyond URLLC, 5G traffic in general (voice and high-resolution video calls) will demand performance and reliability from both the wireless and Internet paths, even more so than traditional web and enterprise traffic.

Operators spend a lot of money to manage and maintain their networks and peering relationships, but so does Microsoft. The question then is, why are two massive industries doing the same thing? Because both parties move packets around, doesn’t it make more sense for them to collaborate?

Here, the well-managed, reliable, and performant Azure network should be thought of as the backbone that operators trust. With this shift in thinking will come all the advantages of innovation that IT companies like Microsoft are rapidly bringing in.

For example, large operators that run extensive national backbones can get tremendous benefit from extending their wide-area network (WAN) with Azure’s WAN. In this example, a 5G network that spans both will allow 5G devices to more effectively reach cloud services deployed on Azure datacenters. This includes first-party services such as, Xbox cloud gaming, as well as third-party services that Azure customers run. Smaller operators (or new operators) that do not have their own national backbones can save resources including time, human capital, and money, and instead leverage Azure’s extensive investment to build a unique 5G network on top of something that has already been proven reliable.

Azure’s planet-scale WAN

Azure maintains a massive WAN with significant capacity and one that is continuously growing. We have over 175,000 miles of lit fiber optic and undersea cable systems. This connectivity covers close to 200 network points of presence (PoPs) over 60 regions, across 140 countries.

Azure’s network is connected to many thousands of ISPs and other networks with significant peering capacity. Our global network is well-provisioned, with redundant fiber paths that can handle multiple simultaneous failures, it also has massive reserve capacity in unlit dark fiber. These optical fibers are fully owned or leased by Microsoft, and all traffic between and among Azure datacenters within a region or across regions is automatically encrypted at the physical layer.

This combination of redundant capacity to handle failures, dark capacity for significant growth, and research advancements being made in increasing transmission speeds means that we have a massive amount of spare capacity to serve 5G traffic to a broad array of new operators.

Challenges related to carrying 5G traffic over a cloud WAN

Figure 1 illustrates how packets can move from one client (in 5G terminology, a “User Equipment” (UE)) to another over the Azure cloud network, with extremely low latency.

Figure 1: Unified platform.

With 5G, there is an intense amount of pressure on traditional metrics that include latency, jitter, throughput, reachability, and loss, by which transport quality is typically judged. With on-air 5G latencies reaching close to the sub-ms range, wired transport latency will likely dominate end-to-end performance. However, with on-air 5G throughputs in the tens of Gbps range in Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) mode, just a small number of UEs could overwhelm a single peering link that today would typically have a capacity of tens to hundred Gbps.

Beefing up capacity at the peering surface area and on backbone links that support them remains an expensive endeavor. Finding efficient paths through the maze of WAN links is also crucial to achieving business success. Outages are a fact of life for any cloud network, but 5G experiences will be more sensitive to packet loss and reachability than traditional web and enterprise traffic.

Reliability will need to be increased. This will happen by guarding against peering outages and overload, and by verifying configuration changes. The performance will also need to be increased. This includes supporting streaming audio and video services by actively reducing jitter and access queuing delays. Additional factors such as cost, safety, reachability, and regulatory and business policies also must be addressed.

Further, there will be a need to orchestrate wired transport for 5G deployments. 5G networks will deploy many network functions in a distributed fashion. Rigorous needs around scale-out and fault tolerance will make these deployments more complex than typical enterprise application deployments. Orchestrating cloud network capabilities, such as Virtual Networks, Virtual Network Peering, Virtual WAN, and private endpoints, all while meeting performance and policy constraints (business and regulatory), represents a new challenge.

Making Azure WAN great for 5G traffic

For many years, Microsoft researchers and engineers have been working on a hybrid-global traffic orchestrator for routing network packets across Azure’s WAN. Our orchestrator takes control away from classic Internet protocols and instead moves that control into software that we build and control for 5G traffic. We place the 5G flows that demand high performance on low-latency, high bandwidth paths to and from the Internet. Network flows that are cost-sensitive are instead routed through cheaper paths.

In effect, we have developed a fast-forwarding mechanism to build a 5G overlay on our existing WAN, thereby supporting a variety of 5G network slices with different wired transport properties, while avoiding interference with the operation of the underlying enterprise cloud network.

We have also extended our state-of-the-art network verification capability to cover complex network topologies by modeling Virtual WAN, Virtual Networks, and other network function virtualizations (NFVs), as well as modeling reachability using formal methods. Using fast solvers, we can verify reachability constraints on customer topologies, at deployment time or when undergoing a config change.

We have applied machine learning to predict the impact of peering link outages and congestion mitigation strategies and use the data to improve the availability of the WAN peering surface area.

Our expertise in optimization algorithms has been shown to ultimately reduce cloud networking spend. Techniques like these will be invaluable in carving out 5G paths on the overlay that are cost-efficient, but still meet the performance needs of every network slice.

Figure 2: 5G WAN technical architecture. This is how we envision the different technical components will need to come together to serve 5G operators.

The significant upside for operators

To reiterate, Microsoft is heavily invested in running a well-managed, always-available global network. We have been incorporating multiple groundbreaking technologies, including scalable optimization, formal verification of routing policies, machine learning, and AI. We envision operators to not only be able to use our WAN to transfer 5G packets, with low latency, but also to benefit from multiple network services such as DDoS protection, firewalls, traffic accelerators, connection analytics, load balancers, and rate limiters, many of which we use in running existing Azure network workloads.

At Microsoft, we bring the full power of research and engineering leadership into our networks, rapidly incorporating innovation and new features to provide reliable, low-latency, low-cost service. In turn, this effort will open up the significant potential of next-generation services and applications as envisioned by the community at large. It is no understatement to say that collaboration between operators and Azure is key to unleashing the true power of 5G.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft named a Leader in 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud DBMS Platforms

We are pleased to share that Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems. This placement reflects our completeness of vision and ability to execute, and we feel is a testament to our ongoing innovation and the integration of a comprehensive cloud data management ecosystem into Microsoft’s end-to-end data platform.

Today’s organizations are modernizing their data platforms as part of a broader digital transformation and need to rely on data as a strategic asset and competitive differentiator. Azure offers a full range of solutions for businesses seeking to accelerate their recovery from economic uncertainty. Gartner evaluates these use cases across 15 distinct criteria to determine their Magic Quadrant placements.

Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems.

An end-to-end data platform

Nearly thirty years ago, Microsoft released the first version of SQL Server. Since then, we’ve delivered a steady stream of innovation that consistently provides value to our customers. Today, we’ve evolved to offer a complete end-to-end data platform that focuses on three core capabilities businesses need for successful digital transformations:

◉ Limitless database performance and scale.

◉ Unmatched analytics and insights.

◉ Unified data governance.

In fact, our recent announcement of SQL Server 2022 in preview showcases our most Azure-enabled SQL Server release yet, with Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Purview integrations in a single product.

We continue to invest in our Azure SQL family of databases to provide flexible options for app migration, modernization, and development. With up to 16 TB of storage, memory-optimized hardware, and native Azure Virtual Network support, SQL Managed Instance enables organizations to modernize their most mission-critical workloads onto a fully managed service—while providing the best of on-premises SQL Server features and functionality. What’s more, Hyperscale and serverless compute on SQL Database make it easy to cost-effectively future-proof applications.

Azure is also the best cloud for NoSQL and open-source databases. Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database built to support production applications at any size or scale. We make it simple for developers to independently and elastically scale applications across any Azure region. New deployment options in our open source databases provide customers with maximum control alongside built-in capabilities for cost optimization and increased productivity.

We’re building a complete analytics continuum, with the goal of making intelligent, real-time data insights accessible to people across every organization. Since the debut of Azure Synapse Analytics, the number of Azure customers running petabyte-scale workloads has increased fivefold. Shortly after, we introduced Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB, which created a simple, cloud-native HTAP solution for real-time business insights. Going one step further, we recently announced the general availability of Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse. This service enables immediate insights with high-value Microsoft Dynamics data.

Unified data governance is mission-critical to today’s businesses. Azure Purview, our unified data governance service, helps organizations manage and govern their on-premises, multicloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data. With over 57 billion data assets discovered by customers already, Azure Purview ensures your Microsoft data estate is governed through deep integrations with data services in Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and more.

Building your applications on Microsoft’s comprehensive and connected platform means more of your data is immediately available to deliver more insights that can make your business smarter, creating a flywheel to help propel your business forward.

Global insights and momentum

According to Gartner, among the segments making up enterprise public cloud services, database platform as a service and cloud infrastructure and platform services saw the fastest growth in 2020, with 50.8 percent and 43.2 percent year on year, respectively. This growth is driven primarily by ongoing application migrations to the cloud, data center consolidations, and digital business initiatives.

Data and analytics play central roles in how organizations conduct business through a digital lens. In fact, Chief Data Officers (CDO) who successfully demonstrate return on investment from their data and analytics investments are 1.7 times more likely to consistently produce clear business value. In addition, they are 2.3 times more likely to reduce time to market and 3.5 times more likely to monetize their data. Gareth Herschel, Research Vice President at Gartner, wrote, “As enterprises look to recover from the profound disruptions of the last year, D&A [data and analytics] can help with tasks such as enabling business model transformation, optimizing resource allocation, or figuring out new ways to connect employees, customers and other stakeholders.”

Source: microsoft.com

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What is Databricks Data Science & Engineering?

Databricks Data Science & Engineering (sometimes called simply "Workspace") is an analytics platform based on Apache Spark. It is integrated with Azure to provide one-click setup, streamlined workflows, and an interactive workspace that enables collaboration between data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers.

For a big data pipeline, the data (raw or structured) is ingested into Azure through Azure Data Factory in batches, or streamed near real-time using Apache Kafka, Event Hub, or IoT Hub. This data lands in a data lake for long term persisted storage, in Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage. As part of your analytics workflow, use Azure Databricks to read data from multiple data sources such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, or Azure SQL Data Warehouse and turn it into breakthrough insights using Spark.

Apache Spark analytics platform

Databricks Data Science & Engineering comprises the complete open-source Apache Spark cluster technologies and capabilities. Spark in Databricks Data Science & Engineering includes the following components:

◉ Spark SQL and DataFrames: Spark SQL is the Spark module for working with structured data. A DataFrame is a distributed collection of data organized into named columns. It is conceptually equivalent to a table in a relational database or a data frame in R/Python.

◉ Streaming: Real-time data processing and analysis for analytical and interactive applications. Integrates with HDFS, Flume, and Kafka.

◉ MLlib: Machine Learning library consisting of common learning algorithms and utilities, including classification, regression, clustering, collaborative filtering, dimensionality reduction, as well as underlying optimization primitives.

◉ GraphX: Graphs and graph computation for a broad scope of use cases from cognitive analytics to data exploration.

◉ Spark Core API: Includes support for R, SQL, Python, Scala, and Java.

Apache Spark in Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks builds on the capabilities of Spark by providing a zero-management cloud platform that includes:

◉ Fully managed Spark clusters

◉ An interactive workspace for exploration and visualization

◉ A platform for powering your favorite Spark applications

Fully managed Apache Spark clusters in the cloud

Azure Databricks has a secure and reliable production environment in the cloud, managed and supported by Spark experts. You can:

◉ Create clusters in seconds.

◉ Dynamically autoscale clusters up and down and share them across teams.

◉ Use clusters programmatically by invoking REST APIs.

◉ Use secure data integration capabilities built on top of Spark that enable you to unify your data without centralization.

◉ Get instant access to the latest Apache Spark features with each release.

Databricks Runtime

Databricks Runtime is built on top of Apache Spark and is natively built for the Azure cloud.

Azure Databricks completely abstracts out the infrastructure complexity and the need for specialized expertise to set up and configure your data infrastructure.

For data engineers, who care about the performance of production jobs, Azure Databricks provides a Spark engine that is faster and performant through various optimizations at the I/O layer and processing layer (Databricks I/O).

Workspace for collaboration

Through a collaborative and integrated environment, Databricks Data Science & Engineering streamlines the process of exploring data, prototyping, and running data-driven applications in Spark.

◉ Determine how to use data with easy data exploration.

◉ Document your progress in notebooks in R, Python, Scala, or SQL.

◉ Visualize data in a few clicks, and use familiar tools like Matplotlib, ggplot, or d3.

◉ Use interactive dashboards to create dynamic reports.

◉ Use Spark and interact with the data simultaneously.

Enterprise security

Azure Databricks provides enterprise-grade Azure security, including Azure Active Directory integration, role-based controls, and SLAs that protect your data and your business.

◉ Integration with Azure Active Directory enables you to run complete Azure-based solutions using Azure Databricks.

◉ Azure Databricks roles-based access enables fine-grained user permissions for notebooks, clusters, jobs, and data.

◉ Enterprise-grade SLAs.

Integration with Azure services

Databricks Data Science & Engineering integrates deeply with Azure databases and stores: Synapse Analytics, Cosmos DB, Data Lake Store, and Blob storage.

Integration with Power BI

Through rich integration with Power BI, Databricks Data Science & Engineering allows you to discover and share your impactful insights quickly and easily. You can use other BI tools as well, such as Tableau Software.

Source: microsoft.com

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Your hybrid, multicloud, and edge strategy just got better with Azure

One of the things I love most about being on the Azure team is the excitement around new innovations and how our customers use them to seize new opportunities. In the last few years, we’ve all faced unexpected challenges that have changed the way we work and how we think about digital transformation. Now, more than ever, digital technology is at the core of addressing the way our customers do business. That’s one reason why I was eager to join the Azure team and why I’m so excited about this year’s Microsoft Ignite. As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, we at Microsoft see tremendous opportunity to help our customers drive innovation across their businesses and improve their own customers’ experiences.

With the Microsoft Cloud, we strive to provide the most trusted and comprehensive cloud to make this innovation and transformation happen. That’s why organizations of all types—from small businesses, governments, and non-profits to Fortune 500 companies—trust Microsoft as their technology provider. Since joining the team earlier this year, I’m inspired every day by seeing our customers develop products and services that seemed unthinkable and out of reach even just a few years ago.

During Microsoft Ignite this week, we’ll highlight the latest features and innovations in hybrid, multicloud, and edge computing. From end-to-end data capabilities and cloud-native applications to cross-functional collaboration, Microsoft cloud technologies help our customers deliver solutions and services faster to meet their own customers’ rapidly changing needs.

Today in this blog, I have the pleasure of sharing announcements across every one of these areas. Read on to learn more about what’s new today and how Microsoft Cloud and Azure are empowering our customers to innovate—and empowering the innovation to happen exactly where they need it most.

Bring comprehensive Azure capabilities to hybrid and multicloud environments with Azure Arc

Our customers have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers, diverse applications, and databases in multiple locations spread across on-premises, edge, and multicloud environments. One of their key challenges is securing and managing their distributed environments consistently and building innovative applications using cloud-native technologies.

With Azure Arc, customers can take advantage of Azure’s comprehensive security, governance, and management capabilities for their Windows, Linux, SQL Server, and Kubernetes deployments in their datacenters, at the edge, or multicloud. Azure Arc also enables customers to build innovative, intelligent applications in any environment with first-party Azure application, data, and machine learning services.

I am thrilled that thousands of customers use Azure Arc today across a diverse set of scenarios. Royal Bank of Canada, the largest bank in Canada, is using Azure Arc-enabled data services to take advantage of always up-to-date cloud-native data services to modernize its large data estate. MAPFRE, a global insurance company with a presence on five continents, chose Azure Arc to secure and govern thousands of Windows and Linux servers spread across datacenters around the world.

At Microsoft Ignite, we’re announcing several new capabilities to our hybrid and multicloud products:

◉ Azure Arc on VMware vSphere and Azure Stack HCI: Customers with VMware vSphere and Azure Stack HCI systems can secure and govern existing virtual machines (VMs) and Kubernetes with Azure Arc. Today, we’re announcing the preview of lifecycle management of VMs on VMware vSphere and Azure Stack HCI deployments on-premises from the Azure Portal. This means customers migrating their on-premises deployment to Azure VMware Solutions can also do lifecycle management of VMs from the Azure Portal.

◉ Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning capabilities update: Customers can train their machine learning models anywhere using Azure Machine Learning enabled by Azure Arc. Now, we’re adding in preview the ability to do inferencing to enable predictions using ML models anywhere.

◉ Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance update: We’re making directly connected mode through Azure Arc generally available to help customers deploy, manage, and secure their databases from Azure. With this, we offer customers the flexibility to run Azure Arc-enabled databases in connected and disconnected modes.

◉ Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI: For customers who want a modern cloud-based desktop and app virtualization solution on-premises for latency or regulatory reasons, we are pleased to announce the preview of Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI.

◉ Microsoft Defender for multicloud scenarios: Microsoft Defender for Cloud now extends Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Workload Protection capabilities to Amazon Web Services (AWS) allowing customers to secure their multicloud environments from a single place.

◉ Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) to support Azure Arc scenarios: Thousands of customers have accelerated their cloud journey with AMMP, and the program announced Azure Arc will be a supported scenario.

Transform business and prepare for the future with comprehensive Azure data features

Azure provides end-to-end data capabilities to empower innovation anywhere and transform any business. We have several announcements this week to help our customers be future-ready and ensure transformational success:

◉ Enhanced capabilities within Azure Synapse (preview): The general availability of Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse, enabling immediate insights with high-value Microsoft Dynamics 365 data, and the preview of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022. Azure Synapse Data Explorer is now part of Azure Synapse's unified analytics platform, so customers can easily access machine and user data to help improve business decisions.

◉ Azure Purview for unified data governance: To meet the increasing need for a comprehensive data governance service, Azure Purview helps organizations achieve a complete understanding of their data, wherever it’s located. Since its general availability, Azure Purview has helped customers discover over 57 billion data assets already. 

◉ Introducing SQL Server 2022 (gated preview): SQL Server 2022, the most flexible, scalable, cloud-connected SQL Server release yet, is now available in gated preview. SQL Server 2022 offers easier cloud integration than ever before and comes with choice and flexibility across language and platform, including Linux, Windows, and Kubernetes.

Build resilient, scalable, innovative applications from the cloud to the edge

With Microsoft technology, developers can address the real-world needs of their customers and businesses, using best-in-class tools and platforms that reduce the time from idea to value. Cloud-native development facilitates distributed applications that are more resilient and dynamically scalable while enabling portability in the cloud and at the edge. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Cosmos DB, and our exciting new cloud-native Azure Container Apps service, empower you to drive innovation at scale.

For example, Walmart’s e-commerce platform generates billions of dollars in annual revenue and grew 79 percent last year. The company needed a cloud-native database that could provide millisecond latency at a petabyte-scale and handle billions of daily requests with five nines (99.999 percent) availability during their busy holiday season. Walmart.com used Azure Cosmos DB for online transactions, utilizing multi-region writes for extremely high availability and sub-10-ms latency, providing millions of customers with the items they wanted and the experience they expect.

Create fusion teams to boost cross-functional collaboration and deliver apps faster

Efficiently delivering apps and services is top of mind within IT organizations. The speed and cost of developing those apps can force trade-off decisions about what gets delivered and what doesn’t. Introducing fusion teams into an organization can solve the app gap challenge and get users the apps they want and need. Fusion teams connect IT professionals with pro developers and makers in the business to build low-code apps more quickly than traditional development.

To enable fusion teams, key new features in Microsoft Power Platform are now available to enhance collaboration between makers and developers, accelerate code through Microsoft Power Fx, distribute branded apps natively on the app stores in Power Apps, and allow customers to use Azure subscriptions to distribute Power Apps without needing to acquire pre-paid licenses.

Using Power Platform with Microsoft Teams and key Azure services—like Functions and API Management—can increase an organization’s low-code application development value with faster ROI, accelerated time to market, and a reduction in overall development costs.

Source: microsoft.com

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Simplify connectivity, routing, and security with Azure Virtual WAN

Over the past few months, we added several new capabilities to Azure Virtual WAN which customers can embrace to significantly simplify routing design and management in Azure, and secure traffic flows. Before we introduce these new capabilities, let us revisit what Azure Virtual WAN is.

Azure Virtual WAN is a unified hub and spoke-based architecture providing Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) for connectivity, security, and routing using the Microsoft Global Backbone. Customers transforming their networks by migrating to Azure cloud or utilizing hybrid deployments shared between Azure and their traditional data center or on-premises networks, take advantage of Azure Virtual WAN for scalability, ease of deployment, reduced IT costs, low latency, transit functionalities, high performance, and advanced routing.

Customers architect networks for their services by defining the requirements along with three design aspects—connectivity, security, and routing, and then adopting key capabilities Azure Virtual WAN brings together, as shown in the figure below.

Today, we are announcing new features that customers can utilize when they are applicable to their scenarios.

New partner solutions integrated with Azure Virtual WAN

We are excited to announce that two new partners are integrated with Azure Virtual WAN.

◉ Fortinet FortiGate is the first dual-role SD-WAN and security-enabled Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) to be integrated natively with the Azure Virtual WAN hub, greatly improving the end-to-end experience and life-cycle management of using FortiGate NVAs in Azure.

Customers can select from a carefully curated menu of configurations and throughputs, and with a few simple clicks, can easily deploy and configure FortiGate in Azure. No more do you have to worry about setting up load balancers, user-defined routing and choosing the right virtual machine configurations and networking settings. With a few clicks in a managed application and a few quick configurations in the Azure Virtual WAN portal to configure our new routing model (Routing Intent and Routing Policies), you can easily configure your on-premises and virtual networks to send traffic to an Azure Virtual WAN hub hosted FortiGate next-generation firewall (NGFW) for inspection.

Customers can also rest assured that Azure Virtual WAN and FortiGate are built with high availability and resiliency in mind, allowing you to focus on running your business.

◉ Versa SASE integration with Azure Virtual WAN hub allows customers to take advantage of its top-notch SD-WAN capabilities with Azure Virtual WAN's signature any-to-any routing, all in one place for easy configuration and deployment. With this integration, customers can now deploy the Versa in the virtual hub for a central connectivity point into Azure and utilize Microsoft's backbone while blending network, security, and application awareness from Versa. 

Branch connectivity (Site-to-Site VPN)

The following features are now available for configuring connectivity from on-premises (also referred to as branches) to Site-to-Site VPN gateway in a virtual hub.

Custom traffic selectors

Customers using policy-based VPN may now specify custom traffic selectors on the VPN gateways in virtual hub, to assure pre-defined and consistent routing across site-to-site connections. Custom traffic selectors allow for specifying exact, wide, or narrow traffic selectors that the VPN gateway proposes or accepts during internet key exchange (IKE) negotiations.

Packet Capture

Connectivity and performance-related problems are often complex. It can take significant time and effort just to narrow down the cause of the problem. Packet capture on Azure Virtual WAN VPN gateway captures all packets across all connections for a holistic view. This can help you determine whether the problem is within the on-premises network or Azure, or somewhere in between. The niche filtering capability allows the user to focus on specific behaviors, packet types, source and destination subnets, and more to efficiently debug the issue.

Remote user connectivity (Point-to-Site VPN)

The resources that customers host in Azure or on-premises are made available to their remote users through Azure Virtual WAN by enabling Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) or OpenVPN-based VPN connectivity to Point-to-Site VPN gateway in virtual hub. The design for managing authentication for users is now more flexible with the new feature below.

Remote or on-premises RADIUS servers

Users connecting to virtual hub can now be authenticated during VPN connection set up, using RADIUS servers located on-premises or in a remote spoke virtual network. Until today, only those RADIUS servers deployed in a virtual network connected to a virtual hub, could be used to authenticate users connected to that virtual hub.

This capability simplifies RADIUS deployments, reduces management overhead, and provides high-availability design options by using RADIUS servers across Azure regions or across Azure and on-premises. This capability will be available in early 2022.

Advanced Routing

Below are the new routing capabilities of a virtual hub.

Hub to hub preference over ExpressRoute (in gated preview)

In some Azure Virtual WAN scenarios, customers choose to connect their on-premises to Azure using one ExpressRoute circuit connection to multiple hubs. When there is a VNET-to-VNET traffic flow between virtual networks connected to different hubs, the traffic flow traverses the multi-tenant routers, called MSEE, in Microsoft points-of-presence (POPs) where the ExpressRoute circuit terminates.

When customers enable the new feature for their Virtual WAN, the same traffic would then take an optimal path directly between the hubs, and therefore experience improved latencies. The new path is shown in the diagram using blue arrows. This will become the default behavior once the feature is generally available.

To access the preview, contact previewpreferh2h@microsoft.com with your Virtual WAN ID, Subscription ID, and Azure Region.

BGP peering with Azure Virtual WAN hub (in gated preview)

Enterprises using Azure in hybrid infrastructure model often have SD-WAN appliances in their on-premises that connect to compatible Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs) in spoke virtual networks of a virtual WAN. In such scenarios, the NVAs serve as the gateways to Azure for their on-premises networks and routing information exchange between them is configured using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Customers establish connectivity between NVA and virtual hub using static routes, to access services deployed in virtual networks connected to hub, and to reach their on-premises connected to hub through ExpressRoute, until today.

With the BGP endpoint in virtual hub, the routing information from NVA to virtual hub can now be exchanged using BGP. This eliminates the need for complex static route configuration between NVA and virtual hub. In addition, all network changes within the on-premises networks that resulted in manual updates to such static routes in the past can now be dynamically advertised from NVA to hub through BGP, which further simplifies maintenance.

Routing Intent and Policies enabling inter-hub security (in gated preview)

Customers securing traffic using Azure Firewall manager are required to set up policies manually to identify the flows. This applies to all traffic which is internet-bound or private—that is, between on-premises to virtual networks across Point-to-Site, Site-to-Site, and ExpressRoute connections and virtual hub. Using Routing Intent, customers can achieve this without complex manual configuration by simply specifying whether the virtual hub forwards internet-bound, private, or inter-hub traffic flow route through Azure Firewall or not. Furthermore, customers can configure their deployments to inspect all flows (East-West, North-South, and Azure as internet edge) using an Azure Firewall or Network Virtual Appliance (such as Fortinet) deployed in the Azure Virtual WAN hub.

In conclusion, the needs of every organization are unique and as their networks are migrated from traditional data centers or on-premises to cloud-only, or hybrid model, the journey involves complex design decisions. Azure Virtual WAN aims at making this journey smooth with NaaS services that are simple to use and efficient. Each new capability discussed so far makes Azure Virtual WAN more beneficial to our customers.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise iPaaS, 2021

We are thrilled to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), 2021. Azure Integration Services consisting of Logic Apps, API Management, Event Grid, and Service Bus helps customers connect applications, data, and services on-premises and in the cloud, helping enterprises create new revenue opportunities with an API-driven partner and developer ecosystem and boost productivity with secure and automated workflows. Forrester credits Microsoft for providing a high-end developer experience to every kind of organization, from large enterprises to smaller ones, supporting varying integration requirements with flexible pricing options.

Our vision is to empower all kinds of organizations and users, from citizens to professional developers, to use Azure Integration Services to enable a composable enterprise. We believe that integration is an essential part of modern applications and should be available and accessible to all kinds of users; citizens to professional developers. We reach out to developers at the platform of their choice with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions, support for Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Application Insights, and Azure Monitor, offering an intuitive user experience and increasing developer productivity. With Power Automate and its Windows-integrated robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities, we enable citizen developers to leverage integration without writing code. In addition to that, more than 450 out-of-the-box connectors such as Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SAP, and Twitter, help customers connect data, events, and resources across applications, and systems, fast and easy, without writing any code.

With the ability to run Azure’s application services on Kubernetes or any cloud through Azure Arc, Azure Integration Services enables customers to create, deploy, and manage integrations wherever they make the most sense to run, in on-premises data centers, or Azure and multicloud, or in the edge, or any combination of the above. Azure Arc enabled integration services offer customers better control to develop and deploy their integration solutions while providing the benefits of our iPaaS and the flexibility of hosting it anywhere.

Azure Integration Services has a vast and global customer base with more than 43,000 customers using our integration services to connect applications, systems, and services. Learn how customers use Azure Logic Apps and Azure API Management to connect business applications, data, and processes to digitally transform their businesses. We also have a vast partner network across all geographies to help enterprises modernize existing on-premises integration solutions, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server, or build modern integration platforms spanning cloud and on-premises.

Source: microsoft.com

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Updates to Azure Files: NFS v4.1, higher performance limits, and reserved instance pricing

Azure Files offers fully managed, simple, secure, and serverless enterprise-grade cloud file shares. On the Azure Files team, our mission is to expand Azure Files to more platforms and workloads. We recently took a huge step in workload expansion by announcing the general availability of our NFS v4.1 shares. This greatly expands the workloads you can run on Azure file shares by providing POSIX compatible file systems for Linux virtual machines and container-based workloads. This blog provides information on the general availability of NFS v4.1 shares, increased performance for all premium file shares, and reserved instance pricing for premium file shares to lower your costs.

NFS v4.1 shares are now generally available

In November we announced the general availability of Azure Files support for NFS v4.1. Now you can deploy these fully POSIX compliant, distributed NFS file shares in your production environments for a wide variety of Linux and container-based workloads.

We saw strong interest in the preview with participation from companies of all sizes, ranging from emerging startups to Fortune 100s, running a plethora of workloads. Some examples of workloads include SAP application layer, enterprise messaging, user home directories, custom line-of-business applications, database backups, database replication, AI and machine learning user directories, DevOps pipelines, and many more industry-specific workloads such as the solution from EDF Energy below.

EDF Energy uses Azure file shares as part of its asset management solution:

“At EDF Energy, Nuclear Safety is our overriding priority. As part of our Asset Management solution used to control work, maintenance, and defect resolution to support site license conditions, we needed a performant shared file system between multiple Linux Application Servers—such as an NFS share. We used NFS v4.1 on Azure Files in the preview and have now taken full dependency on it. The NFS system is working very well for us, persisting our files and keeping our IaaS requirements to a minimum.”

—Cathy Handley, AMS Upgrade Programme Manager, EDF Energy—Helping Britain Achieve Net Zero

Customers running critical systems such as SAP have told us that synchronous zonal redundancy is a game-changer for them to achieve high availability for their application layer. With Azure premium file shares you can choose between Locally redundant storage (LRS) or Zonal Redundant Storage (ZRS) redundancy. With ZRS, data is synchronously replicated to three different availability zones within an Azure region. This means your applications’ access to the data will not be disrupted, even in the unlikely event of an entire zone failure. SAP storage administrators gave us great feedback including: “easy to use”, “good performance”, and “better cost optimization.”

Unlike the lower versions of NFS, locking is inbuilt into NFS v4.1. Hence, software like IBM MQ relies on locking support from NFS v4.1 to keep data consistent within a distributed system. While in preview, we enhanced our locking support and implemented locking upgrades and downgrades.

The Azure Files CSI driver (now generally available) makes it easy to access your Azure File shares from Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The fast attach-detach times of Azure Files have been appealing to applications that require rapid scale up and scale down.

NFS v4.1 is available in all regions where the premium tier of Azure Files exists. For the full list, see the Azure service availability page. You can now get started using NFS by following these simple step-by-step instructions.

Improved performance

Today, we are announcing more IOPS and throughput for all premium file shares (SMB and NFS).

All shares now provide a minimum of 3000 IOPS, up from the previous 400 IOPS baseline. We are also increasing the minimum burst IOPS such that even the smallest shares can burst up to 10,000 IOPS. Just as before, you will continue to linearly scale IOPS up to 100,000 as the share size increases.

You can now use 100 percent of the provisioned throughput towards either reads or writes. This means you can get up to 10GB/s of read or write traffic. Previously, premium shares used allocated throughput with a 40:60 write:read ratio resulting in max write of 4GB/s and max read of 6GB/s.

These performance enhancements will apply to all existing and new shares across all regions including public and sovereign cloud at no extra cost.

Lower cost with Reserved Instances

All premium file shares (SMB and NFS) now support capacity reservations which provide up to 36 percent discount, by pre-committing to storage utilization.

Reserved instances are also supported for the hot and cool Azure file shares (SMB only).

Get involved

You can put all the updates mentioned in this blog together for NFS v4.1 shares with higher throughput and more IOPS at a lower price. Of course, the performance improvements and reserved instances apply to both NFS and SMB shares. We continue to increase investments in Azure Files and look forward to getting the next wave of updates released.

Source: microsoft.com

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New satellite connectivity and geospatial capabilities with Azure Space

Figure 1: Azure Space ecosystem showing multi-orbits and geospatial capabilities through Machine Learning.

Last year, Microsoft announced Azure Space, bringing together the possibilities of Space with the power of the cloud to help people and organizations achieve more on and off the planet.

Today we are announcing new partnerships and capabilities for Azure Space including:

◉ Azure Orbital reaches preview—now anyone can communicate and control satellites, from our owned and partnered ground-stations around the world—with no backhaul costs into Azure.

◉ Innovations built on Azure are “seeing” through the clouds with SpaceEye, and enhancing imagery with Project Turing.

◉ Our new partnership with Airbus is bringing the world’s leading high-resolution satellite imagery and elevation data into Azure, to further transform our understanding of the world.

◉ A virtualization partnership with iDirect, one of the largest satellite modem providers, is creating modern and flexible solutions for customers.

◉ New geospatial and data analytics partnerships with Esri, Blackshark.ai, and Orbital Insight on Azure are enabling new insights for our customers.

The power of extracting and leveraging data collected from space can transform entire industries and create new paradigms. Azure Space, through partnerships, space data, our collaboration tools, and Microsoft services and capabilities, unlock powerful possibilities for customers.

Manage Satellite Data at cloud scale with Azure Orbital

The need for low latency, high capacity ground infrastructure is becoming more critical as the public and private sectors launch large numbers of satellites and new constellations into space. Microsoft is bringing its world-leading ground infrastructure alongside partners to support this industry.

Microsoft is announcing the next milestone for Azure Orbital with the preview of a service that enables satellite operators to eliminate the technical, scheduling, and cost challenges of building a dedicated ground station network. The scale and scope of global ground stations through Azure Orbital and our partner network makes coverage more accessible for satellite providers at a lower cost, enabling high reliability and resiliency around the world ensuring support for any mission profile.

The Azure Orbital preview includes support for Microsoft and KSATlite ground stations. Starting this month, customers can use Azure Orbital APIs or the Azure Portal to communicate with their satellites using Microsoft and KSAT antennas. This network will continue to expand early next year with support for ground station partners ViaSat and USEI.

This significant step in the Microsoft and KSAT partnership allows customers to benefit from expansive global coverage free of the integration and data-delivery costs associated with typical multi-network solutions facilitating access to the power of the Microsoft Cloud to process, store, and extract insights from spaceborne data.

“Over the past year, we have worked hard here at KSAT to continue our collaboration with Azure Orbital integrating our worldwide satellite ground network with Microsoft to provide seamless, global support for transporting, processing, and storing space-based data. Being able to deliver satellite data and run resource-intensive computing such as machine learning techniques and other applications using cloud-based solutions will not only change the way we deliver our services but also how our customers will be able to utilize this information in the future. Through this partnership, our goal is to continue to provide our customers with the most technically advanced solutions for their missions”—Rolf Skatteboe, CEO KSAT

New innovations enhance satellite images through Azure

SpaceEye—“seeing” through the Clouds

67 percent of the world is covered in clouds—a major challenge for Earth observation from space is that much of the Earth is covered by opaque clouds. Built on Azure by Microsoft Research, SpaceEye is an AI-based system that generates daily cloud-free optical and multispectral imagery for the planet.

SpaceEye uses the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instrument from the Sentinel-1 mission as a baseline data source—as radar data is not affected by cloud cover. Space Eye then combines this radar data with historical optical imagery to generate an AI image prediction of what it looks under the clouds. This can unlock significant use cases in agriculture, land-use monitoring and disaster response among others.

Project Turing—increase human perception of overhead imagery

Microsoft Azure is also being used to prepare and enhance geospatial data for better human interoperability. Using Microsoft’s Turing research, we have brought the fictional “enhance image” feature from Hollywood to reality. Turing’s semantic super-resolution allows us to use satellite imagery and increase the resolution to be comparable to aerial, greatly aiding human perception of overhead imagery. Today, this technology is running on Azure to enhance Bing Maps worldwide, covering over 50 percent of all user requests.

View high-resolution satellite imagery of anywhere on the planet in partnership with Airbus

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RWQcuG

Microsoft is expanding on its mission to make Azure Space the platform and ecosystem of choice for the space community through a new partnership with Airbus and the general availability of their premium satellite imagery and elevation data in Microsoft Azure Maps. Through this partnership, Airbus will feed Azure Maps with its SPOT 1.5m, Pléiades 50cm, and Pléiades Neo 30cm resolution satellite imagery and WorldDEM4Ortho elevation data.

“We are thrilled to be a part of the Microsoft Azure community,” said François Lombard, director of the intelligence business at Airbus Defense and space. “Azure Maps users, eager for accurate and top-quality imagery, will be able to rely on Airbus’ premium data services to develop new applications and turn their innovative ideas into reality.”

Virtualization brings a new era to Space connectivity

Traditionally, connectivity from a satellite to a ground station has depended on expensive and inflexible radio hardware. Azure Orbital takes advantage of virtualization, which moves functionality from proprietary hardware into software that can be deployed on general-purpose hardware to deliver a more scalable and cost-efficient solution for customers.

Another significant challenge for the space community is the lack of standardization. We are working with the industry through the Digital IF Interoperability (DIFI) consortium for which Microsoft is a founding board member to create standards to support the space ecosystem, such as the new IEEE-ISTO Std 4900-2021: Digital IF Interoperability Standard for streaming data between digitizers and virtualized modems. Together, virtualization and open standards enable customers to harness the power of the cloud to usher in a new era in the space industry.

Leveraging our Azure software radio tools for virtualized space and satellite communications (which are available on GitHub), Microsoft is excited to add ST Engineering iDirect, one of the most widely deployed and trusted satellite platforms, to our list of Azure Orbital ground segment partners. Through our development partnership, ST Engineering iDirect and Microsoft will collaborate to bring ST Engineering iDirect’s satcom solutions to Azure as virtualized modems that can be readily deployed and used by Azure Orbital customers. iDirect and Microsoft are transforming satellite ground stations into a fully virtualized digital platform enabling Satellite operators to achieve the economies of scale and software efficiencies of cloud scale operation.

Geospatial partnerships enable seamless analysis of space data on Azure

Today, we are also announcing new geospatial and data analytics partnerships with Esri, Blackshark.ai, and Orbital Insight on Azure enabling new insights for our customers.

Esri

Microsoft is teaming up with Esri—the global market leader in geographic information system software (GIS), location intelligence and mapping—to provide geospatial analytic workflows on spaceborne data natively to the Azure cloud.

“Microsoft continues to provide cloud innovation in support of partner opportunity enablement. Azure Orbital and Esri will streamline spaceborne data workflows to empower Azure customers with access to near-real time satellite data combined with Esri’s ArcGIS geospatial analytics software.”—Richard Cooke, VP, Esri, Imagery and Remote Sensing

Esri will bring ArcGIS Image, a dedicated single tenant SaaS offering, to Azure customers enabling end to end geospatial data management and analytics for near-real-time spaceborne data. ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online is a multi-tenant SaaS offering designed to help customers manage, interpret, analyze, and share imagery and derived insights from customers’ existing imagery data. Customers will be able to easily host imagery in the Azure cloud, eliminating the need to manage their own infrastructure, and perform advanced analytics on that data at scale.

Blackshark.ai

Microsoft and Blackshark.ai are partnering to bring Blackshark.ai's advanced geospatial intelligence and 3D synthetic environments at scale to empower commercial and government customers with data, insights, and a digital twin of our planet on Microsoft Azure.

Orbital Insight

Additionally, Microsoft is partnering with Orbital Insight, a world-leading geospatial analytics software company that helps organizations understand what's happening on and to the Earth, to make Orbital Insight GO platform available on Microsoft Azure. With GO on Azure, enterprises and governments can unlock insights on patterns of life, make supply chains visible, find anomalies, monitor facilities, and detect military movements, empowering decision-makers to act confidently.

Source: microsoft.com

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