Any developer can be a space developer with the new Azure Orbital Space SDK

Earlier this year, we announced our vision to empower any developer to become a space developer through Azure. With over 90 million developers on GitHub, we have created a powerful ecosystem and we are focused on empowering the next generation of developers for space. Today, we are announcing a crucial step towards democratizing access to space development, with the preview release of Azure Orbital Space SDK (software development kit)—a secure hosting platform and application toolkit designed to enable developers to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit.

By bringing modern cloud-based applications to spacecrafts we not only increase the efficiency, value, and speed of insights from space data but also increase the value of that data through the optimization of ground communication.

Many of the fundamental technological improvements that have accelerated the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) in the past decade remain untapped by space development missions today. With the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we will help bring those improvements to space through modern agile software deployment, container-based development, use of higher-level languages, and cloud-managed networking. Extending the power of the Azure cloud into space means that spacecraft development will take less time, cost less, and bring more people into the space development ecosystem.

What is the Azure Orbital Space SDK?

The Azure Orbital Space SDK was created to be able to run on any spacecraft and provide a secure hosting platform and application kit to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit. This "host platform" runs onboard the spacecraft including a containerized, scalable compute infrastructure with resource and schedule management capabilities.

The application kit provides a set of templates, samples, and documentation to make it easy to get up and running as a space developer with template applications for common workload patterns, such as earth observation image processing. There is also a "virtual test harness" that allows developers to easily test their applications on the ground against an instance of the host platform.

How the Azure Orbital Space SDK is changing what’s possible

By moving the application onboard the spacecraft through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we enable time and cost savings while radically altering and expanding the capabilities of the spacecraft.

Remote sensing

Remote sensing from space provides the perspective we need to better understand our world and powers commercial, economic, humanitarian, intelligence, and military scenarios—from damage assessments after weather events, to vessel detection, to crop monitoring and land classification.

Most remote sensing satellites have limited connectivity windows and bandwidth to communicate data back to the ground. As the fidelity of sensors increases, the amount of data they generate eclipses the available bandwidth. Being able to prioritize images that are useful, or even being able to send insights rather than the raw data down to the ground significantly reduces costs, accelerates speed, and fundamentally increases the value of the satellite.

Through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, developers can write and host more intelligent applications on-board satellites, meaning that they can capture data and use time more efficiently, and even autonomously reconfigure applications at the ultimate edge. Instead of building a unique solution each time developers deploy a spacecraft application, the Azure Orbital Space SDK creates a common template for performing imaging tasks, making it easier to transfer models and applications from one satellite configuration to another.

Communications

Satellite communications is one of the most well-known and widely used space capabilities. It allows us to watch live events around the world, provides internet and cloud connectivity to remote locations both on earth and in space, and supports the backbone of cellular networks. By bringing applications and intelligent computing on board satellites through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we enable a more sophisticated management of satellite communications - resulting in lower costs and higher efficiency for satellite-based communication networks

Telecommunications networks have transitioned to software-defined networks and application–centric approaches to manage their communications infrastructures. The inclusion of satellites in 5G standards is the push for satellite networks to follow the same digital transformation. The Azure Orbital Space SDK will provide a compute fabric with networking capabilities for hosting telecommunication workloads, allowing operators to move applications more easily from ground-based cell sites to satellites in orbit, enabling better resiliency and network utilization.

Ultimately, by combining the Azure Orbital Space SDK with our portfolio of Azure Orbital products, we are bringing the power of cloud networking to the edge in space.

Azure Orbital Space SDK Partnerships

In April, we launched the Azure Space Partner Community and unveiled our initial cohort of space community partners, including Loft Orbital, Ball Aerospace and Thales Alenia Space. Today, we are announcing the newest member of our partner community—Xplore—who will help us continue to shape the future of space technologies and services.

Xplore

Xplore provides unique data including optical, video, and hyperspectral imagery via the XCRAFT, its highly capable, multi-sensor satellite. The XCRAFT's sophisticated sensors produce terabytes of data per day and will utilize powerful compute, storage, and communication solutions to deliver the unique insights derived to customers.

Microsoft and Xplore are partnering to use Azure Orbital Space SDK to gather new insights into how edge computing solutions can better enable both government and commercial customers to achieve their mission objectives. Together, our teams will investigate numerous on-orbit compute use-cases from downlink optimization to multi-sensor data fusion.

Loft Orbital

Loft Orbital is a space infrastructure and services company providing customers rapid, reliable, and simplified access to space. Loft has developed a highly modular satellite platform that enables them to provide a truly plug and play path to orbit for customer payloads and missions.

The Microsoft and Loft Orbital partnership will enable developers to easily develop, test, and deploy software-only “virtual payloads” to the Loft Orbital infrastructure. Together we are developing new technologies and products that will enhance the flexibility of on-orbit operations and provide seamless connectivity to the terrestrial cloud.

Earlier this year Microsoft and Loft conducted a successful test of demonstrating the integration of Loft spacecraft with the Azure Orbital Ground station.  Next year, we’ll build upon this success with the launch of YAM-6, a dedicated free-flying orbital testbed for customers to explore how our joint space infrastructure, connectivity, and on-orbit compute technologies will make access to space even easier than before.

Ball Aerospace

Ball Aerospace is a systems integrator with a heritage of designing and building government satellite programs and mission applications. Ball continues to innovate on behalf of its customers by combining their long expertise in exquisite satellite systems with modern tools and processes, enabling a more agile approach to space mission development and operations.

Together, Ball Aerospace and Microsoft are collaborating on the execution of series of on-orbit testbed satellites showcasing this highly agile future. These missions will leverage the Azure Orbital Space SDK to demonstrate modular and reconfigurable on-orbit processing technologies, necessary to support the complex missions for the United States Government.  The new software and hardware technologies demonstrated in these testbeds will unlock new capabilities for customers, granting the ability to support future concepts for smaller, agile, multi-mission capabilities across all federal space programs.

Thales Alenia Space

Thales Alenia Space is a leader in orbital infrastructures and is developing high-power, edge-computing solutions for space.

Microsoft is partnering with Thales Alenia Space to demonstrate and validate on-orbit compute technologies for multiple remote-sensing applications.   Our team’s future orbital testbed, launching to the International Space Station (ISS) in late 2023, brings together Thale’s edge computing hardware and Microsoft’s Azure Orbital Space SDK platform with visible and hyperspectral sensors, empowering the next generation to explore how space and on-orbit compute can improve our world. Developers on our platform will explore different on-orbit compute use cases, from AI-based hyperspectral image processing and to multi-sensor fusion algorithms, both computationally demanding workloads that benefit from Thales Alenia’s high-performance edge compute architecture.

In collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR), Microsoft, and Thales Alenia Space, we are reducing the barriers for research in space through a range of outreach initiatives. One such initiative is the new Azure Space Academic Outreach program, that will work with research teams in remote sensing, computer vision, and climate science to demonstrate the potential of next-generation on-orbit compute for Earth observation. The first pilots exploring this program are the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center; however, we hope to open this up to more participants over the coming year.

Source: microsoft.com

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Announcing Azure DNS Private Resolver general availability

A successful hybrid networking strategy demands DNS services that work seamlessly across on-premises and cloud networks. Azure DNS Private Resolver now provides a fully managed recursive resolution and conditional forwarding service for Azure virtual networks. Using this service, you will be able to resolve DNS names hosted in Azure DNS private zones from on-premises networks as well as DNS queries originating from Azure virtual networks that can be forwarded to a specified destination server to resolve them.

This service will provide a highly available and resilient DNS infrastructure on Azure for a fraction of the price of running traditional IaaS VMs running DNS servers in virtual networks. You will be able to seamlessly integrate with Private DNS Zones and unlock key scenarios with minimal operational overhead.

We are excited to share that Azure DNS Private Resolver is now in general availability.

A quick overview of Azure DNS

We offer two types of Azure DNS Zones—private and public—for hosting your private DNS and public DNS records. In the preceding illustration, multi-region workloads running on Azure with Azure DNS Private Resolver are provisioned in two regional, centralized virtual networks with one or more spokes peered to each centralized virtual network. These virtual networks have inbound and outbound endpoints provisioned. From on-premises, there are two distinct locations (East and West) and each location connects via Express Route to the centralized virtual network where Private Resolver is provisioned. These on-premises locations have one or more local DNS servers configured to do conditional forwarding to the inbound endpoint of Private Resolver. The local DNS servers in East have the IP address of the East inbound endpoint as the primary DNS target, and the West inbound endpoint as secondary. Alternatively, the local DNS servers in West have the IP address of the West inbound endpoint as the primary DNS target, and the East inbound endpoint as secondary. There is a single private DNS zone linked to both regions and both on-premises locations can resolve names from this zone even in the event of a regional failure.

◉ Azure Private DNS: Azure Private DNS provides a reliable and secure DNS service for your virtual network. Azure Private DNS manages and resolves domain names in the virtual network without the need to configure a custom DNS solution. By using private DNS zones, you can use your own custom domain name instead of the Azure-provided names during deployment.

◉ Azure Public DNS: DNS domains in Azure DNS are hosted on Azure's global network of DNS name servers. Azure DNS uses anycast networking. Each DNS query is answered by the closest available DNS server to provide fast performance and high availability for your domain.

What is being announced today?

Azure DNS Private Resolver enables you to query Azure DNS private zones from an on-premises environment and vice versa without deploying virtual machine-based DNS servers.

Azure DNS Private Resolver general availability is being announced to all customers and will have regional availability in the following regions:

◉ East US

◉ East US 2

◉ Central US

◉ South Central US

◉ North Central US

◉ West Central US

◉ West US 3

◉ Canada Central

◉ Brazil South

◉ West Europe

◉ North Europe

◉ UK South

◉ France Central

◉ Sweden Central

◉ Switzerland North

◉ East Asia

◉ Southeast Asia

◉ Japan East

◉ Korea Central

◉ South Africa North

◉ Australia East

 

What will customers be able to do with Azure Private Resolver?

Apart from the features which were announced earlier in preview, customers will now be able to leverage the following additional functionality and content:

◉ Additional architectural guidance for higher resiliency and enabling disaster recovery scenarios.

◉ In-depth information on how to configure conditional forwarding rules.

◉ Configuring hybrid name resolution from on-premises.

In the following diagram, an on-premises network connects to Azure via ExpressRoute and has on-premises DNS servers configured to conditionally forward queries to the private IP address of the inbound endpoint. The inbound endpoint then resolves names available on Azure Private DNS zones which are linked to the virtual network where private resolver is provisioned. If there is no matching private DNS zone in the virtual network, it will use the outbound endpoint and resolve using the ruleset rules via longest suffix match. If no match in the ruleset is found it will recurse to the internet for public name resolution.

Features and benefits

◉ Cross-subscription support to link virtual networks from different subscriptions to rulesets.

◉ Resource Health Check Integration to provide visibility of endpoint health to our customers.

◉ Visibility of query metrics per endpoint to plan for future capacity:

◉ PrivateLink enabled services integration in conditional forwarding to exclude Azure infra zones from being resolved on-premises.

Private Resolver general availability is also available to use via PowerShell, CLI, .NET, Java, Python, REST, Typescript, Go, ARM, and Terraform.

Key use cases for this service

◉ Conditionally forward from on-premises with Azure ExpressRoute/VPN and resolve names hosted on Azure Private DNS Zones via private IP address.

◉ Seamlessly resolve Private Endpoints which are registered in Azure Private DNS Zones.

◉ Configure default DNS servers and forward all DNS queries to either a Protective DNS service or other target DNS servers with a wildcard rule.

◉ Conditionally forward to any reachable target DNS server using a simple rule.

◉ Access resources on-premises with Azure Bastion using names hosted on DNS servers on-premises or Azure Private DNS zones.

Fully managed

Built-in high availability, zone redundancy, and low latency name resolution.

Reduces cost

Reduce operating costs and run at a fraction of the price of traditional IaaS solutions.

Private access to your Private DNS Zones

Conditionally forward from your Virtual Networks to any reachable DNS server and from on-premises to Azure Private DNS Zones.

Scalability

High performance per endpoint.

Highly available

Availability Zone aware and resilient to failures within a region. Service-legal agreement (SLA) of 99.99 percent during general availability.

DevOps-friendly

Build your pipelines with Terraform, ARM, or Bicep.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management

We are excited to share that Gartner® has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management. This year’s placement marks the third consecutive year Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader. We believe our placement is a testament to our deep understanding of customer needs, strong customer adoption, positive feedback, and continued investments in building a differentiated platform.

Powering our customers’ digital transformation initiatives

APIs are critical to drive digital transformations in modern organizations. Thousands of the world’s largest enterprises trust Azure API Management to build, secure, and scale their API initiatives. With over a million APIs published on the Azure API Management platform today - it is a battle-hardened, production-ready, and highly scaled platform that stretches from on-premises to multicloud. Our customer use cases span a broad range from modernizing legacy applications to adopting API-first strategies to deliver innovations faster, create new revenue streams, and generate value for their customers and partners. Wegmans, a supermarket chain that re-invented the shopping experience in less than eight weeks, and Vipps, a leading Norwegian mobile payment provider that made mobile payments a norm, are examples of customers that are supercharging their digital transformation journey with the Azure API Management platform.

Delivering new capabilities for Azure API Management

Here are a few highlights of our latest features that are helping drive superior business outcomes for our customers around the world:

◉ Support for new API types: Customers can now publish existing WebSocket and GraphQL backends as APIs in Azure API Management with high-fidelity experience in both Azure and the developer portal.

◉ Support for hybrid and multicloud API management: To allow our customers to harness the power of hybrid or multicloud, we’ve enhanced the self-hosted gateway feature making it easier to efficiently and securely manage APIs hosted on-premises and across clouds from a single API Management service in Azure.

◉ Security enhancements: Security is top of mind for all our customers, and we have added several new features—private links, managed certificates, authorizations to configure, store and swap authorization tokens, and more additions that help fortify their security and compliance posture.

◉ Geographic expansion of existing Azure API Management availability regions: We have added four more regions to Europe and China, making Azure API Management available across 58 Azure regions.

Source: microsoft.com

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Expanding AI technology for unstructured biomedical text beyond English

The health industry is embracing the power of big data, cloud computing, and clinical analytics, harnessing data to deliver insights that can improve care and efficiency. Still, unstructured text remains a challenge—made even more complex by barriers of language. Doctors’ notes and other unstructured text are often left unreferenced, are hard to parse and learn from, and are difficult to extract insights from, which leads to missed opportunities for diagnosis and better care.

Microsoft recognizes the need to enable healthcare organizations worldwide to gather insights from this data—for better, faster, and more personalized care, and to improve health equity. With Text Analytics for Health, a part of Azure Cognitive Services, healthcare organizations around the world can now extract meaningful insights from unstructured text in seven languages and process it in a way that enables clinical decision support like never before. Moving beyond English, Text Analytics for Health has now released six additional languages in preview—Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Hebrew—making this groundbreaking technology that helps extract insights from multilingual unstructured clinical notes accessible to more health organizations globally. This marks the first of its kind Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that holistically supports analysis of unstructured biomedical data in multiple languages and was developed with a federated learning approach. Most health technology is limited to the English language, making it inaccessible to millions of people and countries where English is not the primary language. Releasing NLP technology in multiple languages is a huge step forward in bridging the gaps in health equity created by language barriers and ensuring that access and quality of health care is not determined by one’s ability to speak and understand English.

Text Analytics for Health uses powerful NLP to detect and identify medical terms in text, classify them and associate them with standard clinical coding systems, as well as infer semantic relationships and assertions in the data, enabling deeper contextual understanding. This opens a world of possibilities for providers, payors, life sciences, and pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to unify data points from unstructured text with structured data, and enabling them to surface key insights, identify risks, automate form-filling, or match clinical trials to patients for better sourcing of candidates—based on comprehensive data including unstructured clinical text.

Training the NLP model for different languages

One of the challenges for an NLP service comes in moving past English—in aiming to analyze text from different languages. This is what Microsoft’s team aimed to do—the goal was to empower all health organizations, no matter the language their text is in. The unique challenges come from the need to train AI models for multiple languages, as well as adjust to country-specific needs. Syntax is different between languages, especially when it comes to non-Latin languages. Languages have different semantics and boundaries, especially those with rich morphology or compound words. Vocabularies are different, jargon is country-specific, and even coding systems differ by country. Words are often borrowed from other languages, leading to text that contains a mixture of multiple languages. Written text is a mixture of colloquialisms, local medical terms, and shorthand that is country-specific. Training models to understand these differences and then evaluating those models required significant amounts of clinical data and working with subject matter experts in different languages.

Leumit Health Services, one of the four national health funds in Israel, worked closely with Microsoft's R&D team to train the TA4H model for the Hebrew language. Israel has a unique and robust healthcare system where every individual’s records are stored in electronic medical records (EMR) and all citizen residents are required to join one of the four designated HMOs as per law. The health data available is rich, diverse, and provides a great starting point for research and analysis.

Leumit Health Services had over 130 million patient records in their EMR that could be used for training the Text Analytics for Health multilingual model for Hebrew. The challenge was—how to allow Microsoft access to de-identified data for training purposes in a manner that protected the privacy and security of the customer’s health information. The answer was in a Federated Learning approach—meaning data never left Leumit’s trust boundary and Microsoft was never exposed to patient’s health information. Leumit created a separate subscription in Azure with strict access permissions where Microsoft installed its federated learning infrastructure and tools. Leumit then put in de-identified data needed for the research and Microsoft developers triggered the model training in a federated learning setup on that de-identified data—all the while, this data never left their subscription, and the developers were never able to see any identifying details of the data.

Leumit then became one of the first customers to test the Text Analytics for Health model for clinical Hebrew, which is challenging since it often includes Hebrew and English words in the same sentence. The use case was trying to see if the Text Analytics for Health model could analyze free text from medical visits to identify predictors of strokes in patients. Preliminary results are very encouraging and positive—showing the model has ability to parse through both the Hebrew and English clinical statements and analyze them in a way that could help identify various potential indicators of stroke. This could help care providers set up early warning mechanisms and provide more personalized care for a variety of acute conditions.

“Using Microsoft’s Hebrew NLP, we will be able to analyze our 20 years of EMR data and patient-to-doctor messages to develop tools that will save physicians time and will reduce their burnout in a post-Covid-19 world."—Izhar Laufer, Head of Leumit Start.

Figure 1: Analysis of Hebrew unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

Figure 2: Analysis of Hebrew unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

Analyzing unstructured text for Real-World Data

The challenge of unstructured data is even greater in the research world with the use of Real-World Data (RWD). In Brazil, amongst other places, the lack of a standard for interoperability and data collection leads to a lot of unstructured data—field reports, doctors' notes, and even laboratory exam results. This slows down the process of research and analysis for providers such as Grupo Oncoclínicas. Founded in 2010, Grupo Oncoclínicas is the largest oncology treatment provider in the private sector in Brazil, with 129 units in 33 cities—including clinics, genomics and pathology laboratories, and integrated cancer treatment centers.

With the help of Dataside, a Microsoft partner in Brazil, OncoClinicas is using Microsoft’s Text Analytics for Health to extract data from non-structured fields like medical notes, anatomic pathology, and genomic and imaging reports like MRIs. This data is then used for various use cases such as clinical trial feasibility, a better understanding of the scenarios for pharmacoeconomics, and gaining a deeper understanding of group epidemiology and outcomes of interest.

Figure 3: Analysis of Portuguese unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

“Text Analytics for Health was a turning point for Grupo Oncoclínicas to scale our processes and to structure our clinical notes, exam reports and field analysis, which previously only depended on manual curation. Having a solution that works in Portuguese is key—most global solutions tend to only cater to English, thereby neglecting other languages. Accuracy in the native Portuguese allowed us to maintain a high level of accuracy while analyzing the unstructured text.”—Marcio Guimaraes Souza, Head of Data and AI at Groupo OncoClinicas.

Analysis and structuring to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®)

The Italian Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital are building the healthcare of the future by leveraging Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence(AI) services. With Text Analytics for Health, the hospitals can classify, standardize, and analyze the enormous amount of clinical data available at the hospital in order to create an innovative digital platform for data management. Using this platform, the hospital’s physicians can gain important clinical insights about their patients and provide more personalized care. One of the use cases that is currently being developed using this data platform is for allowing the selection of patients eligible for immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer. Medical staff can leverage the analysis of AI solutions to increase the success rate of therapy by matching the relevant treatment to the most eligible patients.

“Text Analytics for Health has played a key role in analyzing the enormous amount of unstructured clinical data that we have at the hospital. We are also using the FHIR structuring capability, which allows greater interoperability with other hospital systems. Having Text Analytics for Health available in Italian now allows us to expand our capabilities even further to offer our patients the best possible care.”—Professor Carlo Tacchetti, Professor of Human Anatomy, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, and coordinator of the project.

Figure 4: Analysis of Italian unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

Do more with your data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With Text Analytics for Health, health organizations can transform their patient care, discover new insights and harness the power of machine learning and AI by leveraging unstructured text. Microsoft is committed to delivering technology that enables your data for the future of healthcare innovation with new features in the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Source: microsoft.com

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AI and the need for purpose-built cloud infrastructure

The progress of AI has been astounding with solutions pushing the envelope by augmenting human understanding, preferences, intent, and even spoken language. AI is improving our knowledge and understanding by helping us provide faster, more insightful solutions that fuel transformation beyond our imagination. However, with this rapid growth and transformation, AI’s demand for compute power has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing Moore’s Law’s ability to keep up. With AI powering a wide array of important applications that include natural language processing, robot-powered process automation, and machine learning and deep learning, AI silicon manufacturers are finding new, innovative ways to get more out of each piece of silicon such as integration of advanced, mixed-precision capabilities, to enable AI innovators to do more with less. At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and with Azure’s purpose-built AI infrastructure we intend to deliver on that promise.

Azure high-performance computing provides scalable solutions

The need for purpose-built infrastructure for AI is evident—one that can not only scale up to take advantage of multiple accelerators within a single server but also scale out to combine many servers (with multi-accelerators) distributed across a high-performance network. High-performance computing (HPC) technologies have significantly advanced multi-disciplinary science and engineering simulations—including innovations in hardware, software, and the modernization and acceleration of applications by exposing parallelism and advancements in communications to advance AI infrastructure. Scale-up AI computing infrastructure combines memory from individual graphics processing units (GPUs) into a large, shared pool to tackle larger and more complex models. When combined with the incredible vector-processing capabilities of the GPUs, high-speed memory pools have proven to be extremely effective at processing large multidimensional arrays of data to enhance insights and accelerate innovations.

With the added capability of a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect fabric, scale-out AI-first infrastructure can significantly accelerate time to solution via advanced parallel communication methods, interleaving computation and communication across a vast number of compute nodes. Azure scale-up-and scale-out AI-first infrastructure combines the attributes of both vertical and horizontal system scaling to address the most demanding AI workloads. Azure’s AI-first infrastructure delivers leadership-class price, compute, and energy-efficient performance today.

Cloud infrastructure purpose-built for AI

Microsoft Azure, in partnership with NVIDIA, delivers purpose-built AI supercomputers in the cloud to meet the most demanding real-world workloads at scale while meeting price/performance and time-to-solution requirements. And with available advanced machine learning tools, you can accelerate incorporating AI into your workloads to drive smarter simulations and accelerate intelligent decision-making.

Microsoft Azure is the only global public cloud service provider that offers purpose-built AI supercomputers with massively scalable scale-up-and-scale-out IT infrastructure comprised of NVIDIA InfiniBand interconnected NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Optional and available Azure Machine Learning tools facilitate the uptake of Azure’s AI-first infrastructure—from early development stages through enterprise-grade production deployments.

Scale-up-and-scale-out infrastructures powered by NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking rank amongst the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Microsoft Azure placed in the top 15 of the Top500 supercomputers worldwide and currently, five systems in the top 50 use Azure infrastructure with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Twelve of the top twenty ranked supercomputers in the Green500 list use NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Source: Top 500 The List: Top500 November 2022, Green500 November 2022.

With a total solution approach that combines the latest GPU architectures, designed for the most compute-intensive AI training and inference workloads, and optimized software to leverage the power of the GPUs, Azure is paving the way to beyond exascale AI supercomputing. And this supercomputer-class AI infrastructure is made broadly accessible to researchers and developers in organizations of any size around the world in support of Microsoft’s stated mission. Organizations that need to augment their existing on-premises HPC or AI infrastructure can take advantage of Azure’s dynamically scalable cloud infrastructure.

In fact, Microsoft Azure works closely with customers across industry segments. Their increasing need for AI technology, research, and applications is fulfilled, augmented, and/or accelerated with Azure’s AI-first infrastructure. Some of these collaborations and applications are explained below:

Retail and AI

AI-first cloud infrastructure and toolchain from Microsoft Azure featuring NVIDIA are having a significant impact in retail. With a GPU-accelerated computing platform, customers can churn through models quickly and determine the best-performing model. Benefits include:

◉ Deliver 50x performance improvements for classical data analytics and machine learning (ML) processes at scale with AI-first cloud infrastructure.

◉ Leveraging RAPIDS with NVIDIA GPUs, retailers can accelerate the training of their machine learning algorithms up to 20x. This means they can use larger data sets and process them faster with more accuracy, allowing them to react in real-time to shopping trends and realize inventory cost savings at scale.

◉ Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for large data science operations.

◉ Increase ROI for forecasting, resulting in cost savings from reduced out-of-stock and poorly placed inventory.

With autonomous checkout, retailers can provide customers with frictionless and faster shopping experiences while increasing revenue and margins. Benefits include:

◉ Deliver better and faster customer checkout experience and reduce queue wait time.

◉ Increase revenue and margins.

◉ Reduce shrinkage—the loss of inventory due to theft such as shoplifting or ticket switching at self-checkout lanes, which costs retailers $62 billion annually, according to the National Retail Federation.

In both cases, these data-driven solutions require sophisticated deep learning models—models that are much more sophisticated than those offered by machine learning alone. In turn, this level of sophistication requires AI-first infrastructure and an optimized AI toolchain.

Customer story (video): Everseen and NVIDIA create a seamless shopping experience that benefits the bottom line.

Manufacturing

In manufacturing, compared to routine-based or time-based preventative maintenance, proactive predictive maintenance can get ahead of the problem before it happens and save businesses from costly downtime. Benefits of Azure and NVIDIA cloud infrastructure purpose-built for AI include:

◉ GPU-accelerated compute enables AI at an industrial scale, taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of sensor and operational data to optimize operations, improve time-to-insight, and reduce costs.

◉ Process more data faster with higher accuracy, allowing faster reaction time to potential equipment failures before they even happen.

◉ Achieve a 50 percent reduction in false positives and a 300 percent reduction in false negatives.

Traditional computer vision methods that are typically used in automated optical inspection (AOI) machines in production environments require intensive human and capital investment. Benefits of GPU-accelerated infrastructure include:

◉ Consistent performance with guaranteed quality of service, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

◉ GPU-accelerated compute enables AI at an industrial scale, taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of sensor and operational data to optimize operations, improve quality, time to insight, and reduce costs.

◉ Leveraging RAPIDS with NVIDIA GPUs, manufacturers can accelerate the training of their machine-learning algorithms up to 20x.

Each of these examples require an AI-first infrastructure and toolchain to significantly reduce false positives and negatives in predictive maintenance and to account for subtle nuances in ensuring overall product quality.

Customer story (video): Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA gives BMW the computing power for automated quality control.

As we have seen, AI is everywhere, and its application is growing rapidly. The reason is simple. AI enables organizations of any size to gain greater insights and apply those insights to accelerating innovations and business results. Optimized AI-first infrastructure is critical in the development and deployment of AI applications.

Azure is the only cloud service provider that has a purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure comprised of Mellanox InfiniBand interconnected NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs for AI applications of any scale for organizations of any size. At Azure, we have a purpose-built AI-first infrastructure that empowers every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Come and do more with Azure!

Source: microsoft.com

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Announcing new capabilities for Azure Firewall

We are happy to share several key Azure Firewall capabilities that are now generally available as well as updates on recent important releases into general availability (GA) and preview.

◉ New GA regions in Qatar central, China East, and China North

◉ IDPS Private IP ranges now generally available.

◉ Single Click Upgrade/Downgrade now in preview.

◉ Enhanced Threat Intelligence now in preview.

◉ KeyVault with zero internet exposure now in preview.

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native firewall as a service offering that enables customers to centrally govern and log all their traffic flows using a DevOps approach. The service supports both application and network-level filtering rules and is integrated with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed to filter known malicious IP addresses and domains. Azure Firewall is highly available with built-in auto-scaling.

New GA regions in Qatar central, China East, and China North

We are happy to announce that Azure Firewall Standard, Azure Firewall Premium, and Azure Firewall Manager are now generally available in three new regions: Qatar Central, China East, and China North.

With these three new regions, Azure Firewall is now available in 38 regions worldwide!

IDPS Private IP ranges now GA

A network intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) allow you to monitor network activities for malicious activity, log information about this activity, report it, and optionally attempt to block it.

In Azure Firewall Premium IDPS, Private IP address ranges are used to identify traffic direction (inbound, outbound, or internal) to allow accurate matches with IDPS signatures. By default, only ranges defined by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) RFC 1918 are considered private IP addresses. To modify your private IP addresses, you can now easily edit, remove, or add ranges as needed.

Single Click Upgrade/Downgrade (preview)

With this new capability, customers can easily upgrade their existing Firewall Standard SKU to Premium SKU as well as downgrade from Premium to Standard SKU. The process is fully automated and has zero service downtime.

In the upgrade process, users can select the policy to be attached to the upgraded Premium SKU. Either by using an existing Premium Policy or by utilizing their existing Standard Policy. Customers can utilize their existing Standard policy and let the system automatically duplicate, upgrade to Premium Policy, and attach it to the newly created Premium Firewall.

This new capability is available through the Azure portal as seen in the screenshot below, as well as via PowerShell and Terraform.

Enhanced Threat Intelligence (preview)

Threat Intelligence is information an organization uses to understand the threats that have, will, or are currently targeting the organization. This info is used to prepare, prevent, and identify cyber threats looking to take advantage of valuable resources. Azure Firewall Threat intelligence information is sourced from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed, which includes multiple sources including the Microsoft Cyber Security team.

Threat Intelligence-based filtering can be enabled for your firewall to alert and deny traffic from/to known malicious IP addresses and FQDNs. With the new enhancement, Azure Firewall Threat Intelligence has more granularity for filtering based on malicious URLs. This means that customers may have access to a certain domain through a specific URL in this domain will be denied by Azure Firewall if identified as malicious.

For optimal granularity, customers can utilize Threat Intelligence allow list to bypass threat intelligence validation on trusted FQDNs, IP addresses, ranges, and subnets.

In HTTPS, the URL is encrypted, thus customers can utilize Azure Firewall Premium TLS inspection to allow URL-based Threat Intelligence also for their encrypted traffic.

With Azure Firewall IDPS, Threat Intelligence, and TLS inspection, customers can improve their security posture to become better protected against future threats.

KeyVault with zero internet exposure (preview)

In Azure Firewall Premium TLS inspection, customers are required to deploy their intermediate CA certificate in Azure KeyVault. Now that Azure firewall is listed as a trusted Azure KeyVault service, customers can eliminate any internet exposure of their Azure KeyVault.

At Microsoft, we are constantly evolving Azure Firewall to meet our customers’ needs and help them strengthen their security and gain efficiencies. Last month, we announced the preview of Policy Analytics for Azure Firewall, which helps improve your security posture by providing critical insights and recommendations for optimizing firewall rules. We also recently announced the preview of Azure Firewall Basic, a new SKU of Azure Firewall designed to meet the needs of SMBs by providing enterprise-grade protection of their cloud environment at an affordable price point. We plan to share further enhancements to Azure Firewall very soon, including new troubleshooting capabilities. Please stay tuned!

Source: microsoft.com

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How IoT, AI, and Digital Twins are helping achieve sustainability goals

Organizations striving to improve their sustainability can make progress toward those goals by using the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI technology that monitors and analyzes their use of resources and resulting emissions. However, businesses adopting IoT for other reasons often improve their sustainability as a side benefit as well.

Nearly three-fourths of IoT adopters with near-term sustainability goals view IoT solutions as “very important” for reaching those goals. The combination of sensor devices, edge and cloud computing, and AI and machine learning can provide data and analytical insights into how resources are being used, where leaks or faults are occurring and affecting consumption, and where efficiency can be improved. Additionally, Digital Twins technology can create digital models of real-world equipment, buildings, or even smart cities for more detailed insights into how they can be run more sustainably.

Our recently published e-book, “Improving sustainability and smarter resource use with IoT technology” goes further in-depth on the following insights and case studies about IoT and AI solutions and sustainability.

How digital technology can aid sustainability efforts

With greater awareness of climate change and increasing regulation around activities related to emissions and resource usage, sustainability efforts are becoming an urgent priority at many organizations. Microsoft has established transparent goals and tracking of its progress toward carbon-neutral operations and offers a software solution to help others record and report their environmental impact.

We're also using Microsoft Azure IoT platform tools, to help power solutions in the following sustainability categories:

◉ Efficient energy production and distribution: Digital tools are being applied to help electricity production plants—a significant source of air emissions—operate as efficiently and cleanly as possible. Utilities are using IoT solutions to monitor and manage electricity transmission and distribution grids to achieve maximum efficiency, route additional power as demand fluctuates, and detect outages faster. They’re also helping to remotely control renewable energy facilities such as wind farms. Our customer smartPulse offers a solution designed to manage electricity distribution and trading to give utilities the ability to manage imbalances in a financially favorable way.

◉ Creating smarter, carbon-neutral buildings: The construction and operation of buildings create 38 percent of total energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide around the world, creating an enormous opportunity for smart building solutions to make a notable impact on the carbon footprint of buildings. IoT technology, Digital Twins modeling, and AI have proven especially useful in managing buildings by automating lighting and climate-control systems, as well as modeling the environmental effects of any design or operational changes. Vasakronan, a global leader in sustainability, has adopted IoT and Azure Digital Twins solutions for its commercial and office properties across Sweden, leading to notable energy cost savings.

◉ Improving public infrastructure: Updating infrastructure with IoT technology can make it more sustainable and create other livability improvements, such as increasing safety and reducing excess light pollution. The city of Valencia in Spain saw this when city officials launched a public lighting upgrade. The project included replacing lighting in a national park, where too much light can disrupt wildlife and plants. Light solution provider Schréder and Codit, a cloud integration solutions provider, teamed to upgrade more than 100,000 lighting fixtures and tie in Azure IoT technologies. The city reduced its electricity consumption, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and saving millions of euros annually.

◉ Agriculture and food production: Data-gathering and analytical technology informs decisions that lead to better environmental practices involving planting, watering, and pesticide use. Computer Vision can detect when weeds or pests are threatening a growing area. Related technology is contributing to the development of more automation at a time when farm labor shortages are becoming more common. The N.C. State Plant Sciences Initiative, for example, is using faster and more efficient data management to tackle agriculture’s biggest challenges, with the aim of creating better predictive food analytics, increasing food safety, and making more productive crops.

Improving business performance at the same time

Beyond the benefits of reducing consumption of natural resources and reining in emissions, sustainability efforts can generate business value. Forty percent of survey respondents in a recent survey said they expect their company’s sustainability programs to generate modest or significant value in the next five years. That value primarily comes from saving energy costs, cutting back on needed materials, and improving operational efficiency.

Get started with sustainable IoT solutions

By combining sustainability goals with innovative solutions, businesses and people can limit their everyday impact on the planet’s resources. Azure IoT can help transform businesses to be more efficient, manage renewable energy production, reduce waste, or accelerate the development and launch of sustainably oriented apps. A range of end-to-end solutions from our ecosystem of partners addresses sustainability in a variety of ways as well.

Source: microsoft.com

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Announcing more Azure VMware Solution enhancements

I’m writing to you today from VMware Explore in Barcelona, where my team and I are presenting to and meeting with customers and partners in person! When we launched Azure VMware Solution two years ago amid a pandemic, IT agility became a top priority as organizations scrambled to enable remote work and ensure business resilience via cloud solutions. In today’s economic climate most organizations want to do more with less. They recognize that by running workloads in the cloud, they can respond more rapidly and reduce IT infrastructure costs.

"I can definitely say that Azure—and in particular Azure VMware Solution—is the right solution for us. It allows us to seamlessly move from on-premises to the cloud, thereby freeing up resources and capital investments that can be used where they are needed more.”—Giorgio Veronesi, Sr. Vice President of ICT Infrastructure, Snam.

Given that TCO is top priority for most companies in the current economic climate, migrating your VMware workloads to Azure is a great way to reduce the cost of maintaining an on-premises VMware environment. Because every customer starts their cloud journey at a different place, we help enable customers to migrate to the cloud on their terms and maintain support for the business platforms and investments they have today.  Azure VMware Solution is an easy way to extend and migrate existing VMware Private Clouds to run them natively on Azure. Azure VMware Solution offers symmetry with on-premises environments, which helps to accelerate datacenter migrations, so customers recognize the benefits of the cloud sooner.

"With help from Microsoft and Mobiz, we were able to deliver a fully qualified landing zone in Azure in one-third the time and at one-third the budget compared to previous cloud efforts."—Sam Chenaur: Vice President and Global Head of Infrastructure, Sanofi.

In keeping with the goal of doing more with less, Microsoft’s unique Azure Hybrid Benefit and Extended Security Updates for Windows Server and SQL Server, Azure VMware Solution is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to seamlessly migrate and run VMware in the cloud.

Check out what’s new in Azure VMware Solution

I am excited to share some of the recent updates we’ve made to Azure VMware Solution.

◉ Stretched Clusters for Azure VMware Solution, now in preview, provides 99.99 percent uptime for mission critical applications that require the highest availability. In times of availability zone failure, your virtual machines (VMs) and applications automatically failover to an unaffected availability zone with no application impact.

◉ Azure NetApp Files Datastores is now generally available to run your storage intensive workloads on Azure VMware Solution. This integration between Azure VMware Solution and Azure NetApp Files enables you to create datastores via the Azure VMware Solution resource provider with Azure NetApp Files NFS volumes and attach the datastores to your private cloud clusters of choice.

◉ Customer-managed keys for Azure VMware Solution is now in preview, both supporting higher security for customers’ mission-critical workloads and providing you with control over your encrypted vSAN data on Azure VMware Solution. With this feature, you can use Azure Key Vault to generate customer-managed keys as well as centralize and streamline the key management process.

◉ New node sizing for Azure VMware Solution. Start leveraging Azure VMware Solution across two new node sizes with the general availability of AV36P and AV52 in AVS. With these new node sizes organizations can optimize their workloads for memory and storage with AV36P and AV52.

◉ Microsoft Azure native services let you monitor, manage, and protect your virtual machines (VMs) in a hybrid environment (Azure, Azure VMware Solution, and on-premises). Here are some of the existing Azure services: Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Update Management, and Log Analytics Workspace.

Source: microsoft.com

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Improve your energy and carbon efficiency with Azure sustainability guidance

This week at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, we’re collectively focused on how to measure progress, build markets, and empower people across the globe to deliver a just, sustainable future for everyone on the planet.

It’s a pivotal moment for the world to come together to drive meaningful action to address and combat global climate change. It’s also an important event for Microsoft, where we will highlight our work to advance the sustainability of our business, share sustainability solutions for operational and environmental impact, and support the societal infrastructure for a sustainable world.

The customer signal is clear—sustainability is now a business imperative. In a study of over 1,230 business leaders across 113 countries, 81 percent of CEOs have increased their sustainability investments. Sustainability is a top-10 business priority for the first time ever, and carbon emissions are forecasted to become a top-three criterion for cloud purchases by 2025. The number of large cities with net zero targets has doubled since December 2020—from 115 to 235 and the global market for green data centers is projected to grow to more than $181.9B by 2026.

Customers and partners are asking for help to understand how to meet and plan for rapidly evolving sustainability requirements, incentives, and regulations. At the same time, they’re dealing with rising energy costs and an uncertain economic environment. We’re hearing specific questions about building sustainable IT in the cloud: How to reduce current energy usage and costs, as well as carbon emissions? How can moving to the cloud help us achieve greater efficiency? What tools are available to make this easier?

To support you in navigating this learning curve, we’re announcing technical guidance and skilling offerings that can help you plan your path forward, improve your sustainability posture, and create new business value while reducing your operational footprint. And this is just the beginning – stay tuned for more announcements in the months ahead.

Accelerate your sustainability progress with Azure

Our recent On the Issues blog, Closing the Sustainability Skills Gap: Helping businesses move from pledges to progress underscores the importance of equipping companies and employees with a broad range of new skills to enable sustainable transformation. We’re investing across the company to support this skill development in myriad ways, including a broad range of technical guidance and skilling initiatives to help you achieve your sustainability goals with Azure. This week we’re announcing a set of architectural guidance resources to help you get started:

◉ Azure Well-Architected Framework sustainability guidance: this documentation set describes workload optimizations for Green IT within Azure, building on the industry leadership of the Green Software Foundation and aligned to their green software principles. Because sustainability considerations apply to all five pillars: security, reliability, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost optimization, we approach the topic as a lens across workloads rather than a standalone pillar.

◉ Azure Well-Architected Framework sustainability self-assessment: as you plan your cloud workloads, use this self-assessment to review the potential impact of your design decisions and how to optimize them for carbon and energy efficiency. You’ll also receive specific recommendations you can act on, whether you’re implementing or deploying an application or reviewing an existing application.

◉ Sustainable software engineering practices in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): the guidance found in this article is focused on AKS services you're building or operating and includes design and configuration checklists, recommended design, and configuration options. Before applying sustainable software engineering principles to your application, we recommend reviewing the priorities, needs, and trade-offs of your application.

Supporting your sustainability journey in the cloud

With Azure, customers and partners can compound their benefits at each stage of the cloud journey, from migrating to the cloud to save on energy, carbon, and infrastructure costs, to optimizing in the cloud to achieve operational excellence, to reinvesting savings into new initiatives that will provide enduring business value.

Across industries, organizations are optimizing their cloud investments by aligning to patterns and practices in the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Well-Architected Framework. They’re also achieving market leadership through reinvesting to drive innovation. Sweden’s largest real estate company and a global leader in sustainability, Vasakronan, adopted an IoT and Digital Twins solution using Azure and expects to realize a year-on-year savings of six million kronor (USD 700,000) in energy consumption costs alone.

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to promote sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally, our Azure guidance complements solutions such as Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft cloud services. We’ll continue to work with customers, partners, and industry leaders, such as the Green Software Foundation to build, maintain, and promote best practices for green IT and innovation that further resilient, thriving, and just economies. From an industry-leading training company:

“This is the missing ingredient in our business; it gives purpose and meaning. If you could put an overlay on your environment or applications and say here are 20 recommendations to make it optimally sustainable, reduce carbon emissions, give the data so you can make incremental improvements over the years, and manage it—that’s huge!”— Todd Fine, Chief Strategy Officer, Atmosera.

As we continue to build out our guidance to help our customers achieve their sustainability goals using Azure, our goal is to meet you where you are and help you do more with less, whether you’re building cloud-native applications, operating in hybrid environments, or evaluating solutions for organization-wide emissions reporting.

Driving sustainability skilling across your organization

Research shows that cloud skilling programs can improve business outcomes and individual career advancement, as well as accelerate success in the cloud. For this reason, we’ve published a set of resources to provide a starting place to help your people and teams understand how they can contribute to their organization’s sustainability goals while developing highly relevant skills and expertise.

◉ Azure sustainability guidance Cloud Skills Challenge: Azure sustainability guidance Cloud Skills Challenge: this fun, no-cost, interactive program helps skill individuals and teams on Microsoft cloud technologies via a gamified experience utilizing Microsoft Learn content. Teams can access a custom leaderboard, and individuals can compete with industry peers.

◉ Azure sustainability guidance Microsoft Learn Collection: developed as a starting point to help you find relevant learning content on Azure sustainability initiatives, share this with friends and colleagues today and check back for updates in the weeks and months ahead. You can also make it yours—we invite you to copy this collection, personalize it, and share it with your network.

◉ Principles of Sustainable Software Engineering course: This Microsoft Learn module provides a primer on the eight principles of Sustainable Software Engineering, covering a wide range of topics such as electricity and carbon efficiency, carbon intensity, and how to think through the trade-offs required for optimization. Accessible to any level of learner familiar with basic computing concepts.

Source: microsoft.com

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