Azure multicloud networking: Native and partner solutions

Enterprise customers are increasingly adopting multiple cloud providers—per a recent Gartner Survey, By 2027, over 90% of enterprises will adopt multicloud models, up from 80% in 2023, for differentiated capabilities and interoperability and to mitigate vendor lock-in risks. The intentional drivers for this trend include data sovereignty, which refers to the legal requirement to store data within a specific geographic location, and cost optimization, which allows businesses to select the most cost-effective cloud provider for each workload. The other intentional drivers include product selection, geographical reach, while the unintentional drivers include shadow IT, line of business (LOB) owner-driven cloud selection, and mergers and acquisitions.

This multicloud strategy demands enterprise cloud architects to design and enable hybrid clouds that can connect, operate, and govern multiple cloud environments securely and efficiently.

Microsoft Azure has long anticipated such an evolution and has been building and evolving its networking services, such as Azure ExpressRoute and Azure Virtual WAN and management and orchestration solutions, such as Azure Arc, to provide seamless, multicloud connectivity as well as centralized management of multicloud resources.

With Azure’s multicloud enabled networking and management services, Azure enterprise customers can evolve their enterprise cloud network architecture from hybrid cloud to hybrid multicloud and with Azure as their “hub” cloud while the other connected clouds as their “spoke” clouds.

Azure Arc for multicloud orchestration and management

Azure Arc is a hybrid and multicloud management solution, enabling customers to take advantage of Azure management services (Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Update Management, Azure Monitor, and more) no matter where the environment is running. Since its launch in November 2019, Azure Arc is being leveraged by thousands of enterprises to manage their servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, and applications across on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments, providing customers with a single way to manage their infrastructure.

Microsoft is investing more in this space with the goal of making it easy for customers to discover, visualize, and manage their multicloud estate. These additional Azure Arc multicloud capabilities are leveraged by other services such as Azure Virtual WAN and Defender for Cloud, so customers can easily connect and secure their multicloud environments.

Azure networking services for enabling multicloud connectivity

Azure networking services span the full breadth of cloud networking capabilities, features, and functions, covering cloud network virtualization and segmentation, private, high-performance hybrid networking, secure application delivery, and network security, and they serve as the important building block for an enterprise cloud architecture and means for enterprise cloud consumption.

While these services help enterprises optimally leverage Azure with highest security, performance, and reliability, enterprises can now leverage Azure’s network services and management tools to access, interconnect, and consume workloads across other clouds.

For connectivity to and from other CSPs (AWS, GCP, OCI, Alibaba), Azure offers three fundamental services offered with a wide range of speeds and feeds.

1. Direct internet peering

2. Azure VPN and Virtual WAN

3. Azure ExpressRoute

Figure 1: Azure as a hub cloud

Direct internet peering with other CSPs

Many workloads depend on cross cloud connectivity over Public IP. Microsoft operates one of the largest wide area networks in the world. With more than 200 edge point of presence (PoPs) and more than 40,000 peering connections, Microsoft is deeply connected to other clouds and service providers providing best in class Public IP to Public IP connectivity. Microsoft connects to AWS and GCP in 50 different locations across the world with multiple terabits of capacity in some locations. All the traffic between other clouds and Microsoft is carried within Microsoft global backbone until it is handed off or back to the destination CSPs network. Traffic between other clouds and Microsoft goes via dedicated private network interconnect (PNI). This private network interconnect is built on high availability architecture, providing both low latency and higher reliability.

Microsoft is also working with other cloud and service providers to build next-generation solutions, which would increase the capacity significantly, reduce the time to provision capacity, and remove the single location dependency. Recently we announced our partnership with Lumen on Exa-Switch program. This technology is built to deliver high-capacity networks while reducing the time to deliver the capacity between clouds and service providers.

Azure VPN and Virtual WAN for multicloud connectivity

One of the most common and prevalent ways to interconnect resources between public clouds is over the internet using a site-to-site VPN. All public cloud providers offer IPSec VPN gateway as a service and this service is widely used by Azure customers  to set up a private cloud-to-cloud connection. As an example, interconnecting resources in Azure Virtual Networks using Azure VPN Gateway and AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPCs) using AWS virtual private gateway is described in this how to guide by Azure.

Azure Virtual WAN is an Azure native networking service that brings many networking, security, and routing functionalities together to provide a single operational interface for Azure customers to build a managed global transit cloud network, interconnecting and securing customers’ Azure Virtual Networks and on-premises sites using various network connectivity services such as site-to-site and point-to-site VPN, virtual network (VNet) connections, ExpressRoute, and Azure Firewall.

Using Azure Virtual WAN’s site-to-site VPN, Azure customers can connect VPCs in other CSPs to the Azure Virtual WAN Hub. While this type of VPN connection currently needs to be set up manually, Azure Virtual WAN is extending and enhancing this site-to-site VPN connection service to enable managed multicloud VPN connections for VWAN hub.

In addition, Azure Virtual WAN integrates and supports many independent software vendors (ISV) partners’ software defined wide area network (SDWAN) and VPN services under the Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) in VWAN hub partner program and the combined solutions can be used to build multicloud connections between Azure and other CSPs such as AWS and GCP. Some of these partner offers are described in the multicloud partners solution section below.

Azure ExpressRoute service for multicloud

Azure ExpressRoute lets you extend your on-premises networks into the Microsoft Cloud over a private connection via a connectivity provider (ExpressRoute Provider Model) or directly (ExpressRoute Direct model). ExpressRoute has a constantly growing ecosystem of connectivity providers and systems integrator partners. 

Azure currently offers a native multicloud connectivity service to interconnect Azure and Oracle Clouds. While this native service was built to support Azure customers that want highspeed, secure connections between their Oracle applications on Oracle Cloud and Azure Cloud, this type of native multicloud highspeed interconnection service to other CSPs is currently being planned.

Meanwhile, many of the ExpressRoute partners offer innovative multicloud interconnect service offers such that Azure customers could cross-connect Azure ExpressRoute with other CSP’s highspeed private connection services. Some of these partner offers are described below by the partners themselves.

Azure partner solutions for enabling multicloud connectivity

Alongside Azure native network services there are a number of Azure Networking ISV, Cloud Exchange Platform (CXP), and Marketplace Partners that offer many innovative services that are able to fulfill the diverse multicloud networking needs of our enterprise customers.

While this blog does not cover all of the ISV and CXP partners (Azure marketplace for a full list of multicloud ISV and CXP solutions), here are some partners in no particular order, that offer  multicloud networking solutions that are leveraged by a number of our customers to build connectivity between their workloads in Azure and workloads in other CSPs.

Aviatrix

The Aviatrix Secure Cloud Networking Platform enables Azure customers to securely interconnect workloads in Azure with workloads in other CSPs and on-premises workloads. Aviatrix solves common customer challenges around optimizing cloud costs for data transfer, accelerating M&A customer onboarding, and providing distributed security enforcement with consistent policies across multicloud environments. 

Alkira

For customers using Azure, Alkira offers an elegant approach for onboarding cloud applications onto their network. Alkira achieves this through its Cloud Exchange Point (CXP) hosted in Azure, which not only helps onboarding VNETs in Azure but it can also onboard workloads running in other CSPs.

Prosimo

Prosimo’s Full Stack Cloud Transit is built for enterprises to connect networks, applications, platform as a service (PaaS), and users into a unified network fabric across public and private clouds. The solution provides a transformative set of tools to rapidly adopt native services from cloud service providers and elevate them to meet the sophisticated requirements for enterprises with advanced networking features such as overlapping IP addresses, service insertion, and namespace segmentation. The solution is delivered as a service yet under the enterprise’s own control, with an elastic scaling approach that meets their operational flexibility and compliance needs.

Arrcus

Azure cloud customers can use Arrcus FlexMCN solution to build secure connectivity with micro-segmentation between their workloads in Azure VNets to other CSPs such as AWS and ensure a consistent network policy across clouds. Arrcus FlexMCN solution allows segment routing-based traffic engineering (SR-TE) to deliver application aware performance and route optimization.

Cisco Systems

Cisco enables control and security while driving agility and innovation across multicloud and hybrid environments.  Catalyst SD-WAN’s Cloud OnRamp simplifies, automates, and optimizes cloud connectivity while ensuring secure connections to Azure. It leverages built-in automation with Azure Virtual WAN for interregional, branch to cloud, and hybrid-cloud/mulitcloud connectivity.

Equinix

Equinix Fabric Cloud Router makes it easy to connect applications and data across different clouds—solving the hard problems enterprises face today.

Cloud-to-cloud—gain the performance benefits of a private network without the hassle and costs of a physical router, spin up routing virtually with reliable, high bandwidth connections between multiple cloud providers and avoid backhauling traffic.

Megaport

The Megaport platform enables private access from Azure to hundreds of services across the globe including AWS, Oracle, Google, and IBM Cloud. Common multicloud architectures for Azure include connectivity to your private data center environments, as well as cloud-to-cloud peering with other hyperscalers and cloud service providers. Easily connect at one of more than 850 Megaport-enabled data center locations to ensure your network is no longer a cumbersome but necessary evil, but a simple and flexible way to drive innovation across your business.

Azure’s multicloud networking services

In conclusion, as enterprises increasingly adopt a multicloud strategy, Azure, along with its ecosystem partners, provides flexible solutions for connecting and consuming cloud resources from other CSPs. Azure’s multicloud networking services, such as ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, and Azure Arc, enable seamless, secure, and high-performance connections between Azure and other CSPs. Additionally, Azure’s partner solutions offer innovative services to meet the diverse multicloud networking requirements of enterprise customers. By using Azure as the hub cloud of their enterprise cloud architecture, customers can benefit from Azure’s multicloud capable networking and management services to transform their enterprise cloud network architecture from hybrid cloud to hybrid multicloud.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management

Cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes are the future of application development. That’s why we’re honored to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management. We believe that this recognition validates our end-to-end approach for developing and deploying enterprise-grade, cloud-native apps that run on Azure, in datacenters, or at the edge.

Figure 1. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management. Source: Gartner (September 2023). 

Gartner recognition of Microsoft as a Leader in this Magic Quadrant, we feel, highlights the broad and deep integration of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with other Azure services. Customers tell us that using AKS for container management helps them modernize existing apps in stages, as time and budget permit, and creates a roadmap for new, cloud-native development that takes advantage of Azure scale, security, performance, and cost optimization. Developers rely on autoscaling AKS clusters to meet the most challenging performance demands, while fully managed Azure services free teams from time-consuming infrastructure management tasks.

Customers have diverse environments and they want to run containers anywhere. Our customers run AKS on Azure and in hybrid configurations, using Azure Stack HCI on-premises and Azure Arc to manage it all.

Scaling up means skilling up

Recently, we presented at KubeCon North America 2023 and at Microsoft Ignite, where we introduced Microsoft Copilot for Azure (in preview). This AI-powered assistant makes it easy for developers to get the answers they need and to work more efficiently, including AKS.

Many developers at the conferences told us that the integration support in AKS makes adoption easier as their organizations roll out ambitious digital transformation projects. Even though Kubernetes is designed to manage the complexity of many moving parts, that complexity has a learning curve. Container-related expertise is still limited, as the Gartner report points out.

“As Kubernetes continues to become pervasive, a lot of teams find themselves at different steps of their adoption, skill set, or learning stage”

AKS Principal PM Lead Jorge Palma recently posted. Gartner even cautions enterprises against deploying container management “without deep knowledge of developer requirements.” 

Tools like Copilot for Azure help developers do more with Azure and AKS. Microsoft offers many additional resources to help developers—no matter where they are in the adoption cycle. Here are just a few ideas: 

• If you’re at the blank page stage, get real-world examples and solution ideas from our solution architectures.
• Explore Kubernetes solutions and services in Azure Marketplace, where you can find click-through deployments to the Kubernetes platform and flexible billing models. 
• To get inspired, read how the development team behind Forza Horizon 5 converted services to AKS in about a month—without any prior Kubernetes experience—fueling the biggest first week in Xbox Games Studio history. 
• To boost skills, consider one of the professional learning paths provided by Microsoft Learn, such as Introduction to Kubernetes on Azure or Administer containers in Azure.
• To stay on top of your deployment, review these developer best practices. 

Powering the AI revolution with AKS

Generative AI continues to rocket across the landscape—and it’s often built on top of Kubernetes. Cloud-native and AI are working together to fuel innovation at scale, and AKS is part of this revolution of intelligent apps. Developers can build apps in AKS that consume Azure OpenAI Service as part of the architecture. 

AI applications often come with bigger container images, so AKS recently added artifact streaming. Container images can be streamed directly to the nodes where they’re running a high-performance, on-demand protocol. That means pods are scheduled faster and start running more quickly. 

AI applications also push the limits of scale, making cost management a top priority. Microsoft recently announced that teams can get more visibility and transparency into cluster costs right in the Azure portal. The cost analysis add-on for AKS (in preview) uses OpenCost to break down underlying cluster infrastructure costs into specific Kubernetes units, such as cluster and namespace.

In addition, organizations can run specialized machine learning workloads, like large language models (LLMs), on AKS more cost effectively and with less manual configuration. The new AI toolchain operator, a managed add-on based on Kaito, simplifies the process of hosting and distributing open-source AI models and customized inferencing on AKS clusters. Another option for improving cluster efficiency and costs is to use the new open-source provider for running Karpenter on AKS. 

Microsoft also recently announced support for Kubernetes fleets, enabling platform administrators to manage multiple AKS clusters at scale. Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager addresses the challenge of staging updates across clusters in a safe and predictable way. 

DevOps makes the wheels go round 

As the Gartner report explains, “the combination of DevOps and container technology can be a powerful enabler for application development agility and speed, making DevOps skills the critical factor to deployment success.” DevOps drives quality and promotes consistency with provisioning and management practices, including continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Yet building distributed applications can still be a complex business, which is why the AKS team continues to look for ways to help streamline this process. For example, Draft for AKS (in preview) helps streamline Kubernetes deployment, and new smart defaults speed up cluster configuration. In June 2023, we added Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) APIs that help developers write and implement simple, portable, resilient, and secured microservices. To automate builds and deploy them to AKS clusters, Azure Pipelines provides CI/CD. 

Developers using Azure Container Apps will find it even easier to deploy code to the cloud and to run AI workloads. New “code-to-cloud” integrated cloud build productivity helps any developer build and run their apps on Azure Container Apps—no container knowledge required. In addition, the recently released landing zone accelerator provides a valuable reference for builders of cloud-native apps and microservices. And for compute-heavy workloads, like model training and batch inferencing, dedicated GPU workload profiles (in preview) provide the power. 

Protecting everything 

According to Gartner, by 2026, the adoption of CSP-native platforms will propel 75% of container instances to be deployed within public cloud environments, up from 50% in 2023. At KubeCon and Ignite, we heard IT, ops, and cybersecurity experts from around the world share their approach to security in the cloud. At Microsoft, we’re committed to providing our customers with the tools and resources they need to protect everything. For containers, that means security measures all along the pipeline—from development to runtime—and across hybrid and multicloud deployments.

At Ignite 2023, we announced that new multicloud container security is coming soon to Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Defender cloud security posture management (CSPM) will extend its advanced agentless scanning, data-aware security posture, cloud security graph, and attack path analysis capabilities to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing a single contextual view of cloud risks across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments. 

Security admins will also have better visibility into the state of containerized applications so they can prioritize misconfigurations and exposures in their deployments of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Google Kubernetes Engine clusters. 

Source: microsoft.com

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What’s new in Azure Data, AI, & Digital Applications: Modernize your data estate, build intelligent apps, and apply AI solutions

I write this blog each month to help navigate through the intense pace of news and innovation we’re releasing for customers. And what a year we’ve had! We witnessed incredible advances at breathtaking speed as AI reshaped what’s possible across industries, organizations, and our day-to-day lives.

Personally, I’m loving the features and capabilities of Copilot for Microsoft 365, especially meeting summaries after a Teams call so I can quickly access the most important points and any actions. We’re still experimenting with AI to craft marketing narratives across my team and it’s exciting to see how AI enhances our own creativity.

AI technology is not brand new. It’s been improving experiences across applications and business processes for some time but, the broad availability of generative AI models and tools this year was a watershed moment.  

Customers and partners made quick pivots to bring AI into their transformation roadmaps, and within months were deploying applications and services powered by AI. I have never seen a new technology generate such profound change at this pace. It shows how ready many organizations were for this moment; how investments made in the cloud, data, DevOps, and creating transformation cultures set the stage for AI adoption. This year Microsoft introduced hundreds of resources, models, services, and tools to help customers and partners maximize AI.

This month, I’m pleased to expand this blog’s scope and bring in what’s new for digital applications for a holistic look at everything we’re delivering to help customers modernize their data estate, build intelligent applications, and apply AI technologies to help achieve their business goals. Let’s go.

New models and multimodal capabilities available in Azure AI

Our focus is to deliver the most cutting-edge open and frontier models available so developers can build with confidence and unlock immediate value across their organization.  

Last month we announced a significant expansion of Azure OpenAI Service and introduced Models as a Service (MaaS). This is a way for model providers to offer their latest open and frontier LLMs on Azure for generative AI developers to integrate into their applications.

And just last week, we announced the availability of MaaS for Llama 2. With MaaS for Llama 2, developers can integrate with their favorite LLM tools like Prompt Flow, Semantic Kernel, and LangChain with a ready-to-use API and pay-as-you go billing based on tokens for LLMs. This allows generative AI developers to access Llama 2 via hosted fine-tuning without provisioning GPUs, greatly simplifying the model set up and deployment process. Then they can offer their custom applications utilizing Llama 2, purchased through and hosted on the Azure Marketplace.

Model catalog in Azure AI Studio Preview

We continue to advance our Azure OpenAI Service and recently launched several multimodal AI capabilities that empower businesses to build generative AI experiences with image, text and video, including:

• DALL·E 3, in preview: Generate images from text descriptions. DALL·E 3 is a remarkable AI model that does just that. Users describe an image, and DALL·E 3 will be able to create it.
• GPT-3.5 Turbo model with a 16k token prompt length, generally available, and GPT-4 Turbo, in preview: The latest models in Azure OpenAI Service enable customers to extend prompt length and bring more control and efficiency to their generative AI applications.
• GPT-4 Turbo with Vision (GPT-4V), in preview: When integrated with Azure AI Vision, GPT-4V enhances experiences by allowing the inclusion of images or videos along with text for generating text output, benefiting from Azure AI Vision enhancement like video analysis.
• Fine-tuning of Azure OpenAI Service models: Fine-tuning is now generally available for Azure OpenAI Service models including Babbage-002, Davinci-002, and GPT-35-Turbo. Developers and data scientists can customize these Azure OpenAI Service models for specific tasks.
• GPT-4 updates: Azure OpenAI Service has also rolled out updates to GPT-4, including the ability for fine-tuning. Fine-tuning will allow organizations to customize the AI model to better suit their specific needs. It’s akin to tailoring a suit to fit perfectly, but in the world of AI. Updates to GPT-4 are in preview.

Steering at the frontier: Extending the power of prompting

The power of prompting in GPT-4 continues to amaze! A recent Microsoft Research blog discusses promptbase, an approach to prompting GPT-4 that harnesses its powerful reasoning abilities. Across a wide variety of test sets (including the ones used to benchmark the recently announced Gemini Ultra), GPT-4 gets better results than other AI models (including Gemini Ultra). And it does this with zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting.

Infuse Responsible AI (RAI) tools and practices in your LLMOps

As AI adoption matures and companies put their AI apps into production, it’s important to consider the safety boundaries supporting the short- and long-term ROI of those applications. This month, we continued our series on LLMOps for business leaders with an article focused on how to infuse responsible AI into your AI development lifecycle. We highlight best practices and tools in Azure AI Studio to help development teams put their principles into practice.

Azure AI Advantage offer

Azure Cosmos DB is the cloud database for the Era of AI. It supports built-in AI, including natural language queries, AI vector search capabilities, and simple AI integration with Azure AI Search. We’re investing in helping customers discover these benefits with our new Azure AI Advantage offer, which helps new and existing Azure AI and GitHub Copilot customers save when using Azure Cosmos DB by providing 40,000 Request Units per second (RU/s) of Azure Cosmos DB for 90 days.

What’s new in the Azure data platform—because AI is only as good as your data

Every intelligent app starts with data so a modern data and analytics platform is essential for any AI transformation.

One example of this how multinational law firm Clifford Chance leverages new technologies to benefit their clients. The firm built a solid data platform on Azure to innovate with new technologies, including the new generation of large language models, Azure OpenAI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Early innovations are already delivering value with cognitive translation proving to be one of the fastest growing products their IT team has ever released.

And Belfius, a Belgian insurance company, built on the Microsoft intelligent data platform using services like Azure Machine Learning and Azure Databricks to reduce development time, increase efficiency, and gain reliability. As a result, their data scientists can focus on creating and transforming features and the company can better detect fraud and money laundering. 

Azure and Databricks: Co-innovation for powerful AI experiences

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie (left) and Arun Ulagaratchagan (right) with Databrick’s Co-Founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi (center) at Ignite

At Microsoft Ignite 2023 in November the benefits of maturing AI tools and services were in full view as customers and partners shared how Microsoft is empowering them to achieve more. 

Databricks is of one of our most strategic partners with some of the fastest growing data services on Azure. We recently showcased our co-innovation, including Azure Databricks interoperability with Microsoft Fabric, and how Azure Databricks is taking advantage of Azure OpenAI to deliver AI experiences for Azure Databricks’ customers. This means customers can take advantage of LLMs in Azure OpenAI as they build AI capabilities like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications on Azure Databricks, and then use Power BI in Fabric to analyze the output.

If you missed Databricks’ CEO Ali Ghodsi on stage with Scott Guthrie at Ignite, I encourage you to check out the replay of Scott’s full segment Microsoft Cloud in the era of AI. If you only have a few minutes, his wrap up on LinkedIn is a great option, too. It’s a helpful overview of how the Microsoft Cloud is uniquely positioned to empower customers to transform by building AI solutions and unlocking data insights using the same platform and services that power all of Microsoft’s comprehensive solutions.

And for a closer look at our latest work with Databricks, check out the click-thru version of the Modern Analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks DREAM Lab from Ignite.

Now in preview: Azure AI extension for Azure Database for PostgreSQL 

The new Azure AI extension allows developers to leverage large language models (LLMs) in Azure OpenAI to generate vector embeddings and build rich, PostgreSQL generative AI applications. These powerful new capabilities combined with existing support for the pgvector extension, make Azure Database for PostgreSQL another great destination for building AI-powered apps. 

Azure Arc brings cloud innovation to SQL Server anywhere

This month, we’re introducing a new set of enhanced manageability and security capabilities from SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc. With Monitoring for SQL Server, customers can gain critical insights into their entire SQL Server estate and optimize for database performance. Customers can also view and manage Always On availability groups, failover cluster instances, and backups directly from the Azure portal, with better visibility and simplicity. Lastly, with Extended Security Updates as a service and automated patching, customers can always keep their apps secure, compliant, and up to date at all times. 

Lower pricing for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale compute

New pricing on Azure SQL Database Hyperscale offers cloud-native workloads the performance and security of Azure SQL at the price of commercial open-source databases. Hyperscale customers can save up to 35% on the compute resources they need to build scalable, AI-ready cloud applications of any size and I/O requirement. The new pricing is now available.

Digital applications deliver transformational operations and experiences

This era of AI is brought to life through digital applications developed and deployed by companies putting AI to work to enhance their operations and experiences—like a personalized app experience for employees or a customized chatbot for end customers. Here are some recent updates that help make all this innovation possible.

The seven pillars of modern AI development: Leaning into the era of custom copilots

Copilots are generating a lot of excitement and with Azure AI Studio in public preview, developers have a platform purpose-built for generative AI application development. As we lean into this new era, it’s important for businesses to carefully consider how to design a durable, adaptable, and effective approach. How can AI developers ensure their solutions enhance customer engagement? Here are seven pillars to think through when building your custom copilot.

AKS is a leading platform for modern cloud native and intelligent applications

The future of app development is at the intersection of AI and cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. Cloud-native and AI are deeply rooted together in fueling innovation at scale and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides the scale customers need to run their compute intensive workloads like AI and machine learning. Check out Brendan Burn’s recent blog from KubeCon to learn how Microsoft is building and servicing open-source communities that benefit our customers.

There are no limits to your innovation with Azure

It has been amazing to see the tech community and customer response to our recent news, resources, and features across the portfolio, particularly digital applications. 

Resources like the Platform Engineering Guide launched in with Ignite have been incredibly popular, demonstrating the demand and appetite for this kind of training material.  

Seeing how organizations innovate with the technology is what it’s all about.   

Here are a couple of customer stories that caught my attention recently.

Modernizing interactive experiences across LEGO House with Azure Kubernetes Service

We’re collaborating with The LEGO House in Denmark—the ultimate LEGO experience center for children and adults—to migrate custom-built interactive digital experiences from an aging on-prem data center to Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to improve stability, security, and the ability to iterate and collaborate on new guest experiences. This shift to the cloud enables LEGO House to more quickly update these experiences as they learn from guests. As the destination modernizes it hopes to share learnings and technologies with the broader LEGO Group ecosystem, like LEGOLAND and brand retail stores. 

Gluwa chose Azure for a reliable, scalable cloud solution to bring banking to emerging, underserved markets and close the financial gap

An estimated 1.4 billion people lack access to basic financial services because they live in a country with limited financial infrastructure, making it difficult to get credit or personal and business loans. Gluwa with Creditcoin uses blockchain technology to differentiate their business through borderless financial technology and chose Azure as the foundation to support it. Using a wide combination of our services and solutions—.NET framework, Azure Container Instances, AKS, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, and more—Gluwa has a strong platform to support their offerings. The business has also boosted operational efficiency with reliable uptime, stable services, and rich product offerings. 

CARIAD creates a service platform for Volkswagen Group vehicles with Azure and AKS

With the automotive industry shifting to software defined vehicles, CARIAD, the Volkswagen Group software subsidiary, collaborated with Microsoft using Azure and AKS to create the CARIAD Service Platform for providing automotive applications to brands like Audi, Porsche, Volkswagen, Seat and Skoda. This platform powers and accelerates the development and service of vehicle software by CARIAD’s developers, helping software become an advantage for the Volkswagen Group in the next generation of automotive mobility.

DICK’S Sporting Goods creates an omnichannel customer experience using Azure Arc and AKS

To create a more consistent, personalized experience for customers across its 850 stores and its online retail experience, DICK’S Sporting Goods envisioned a “one store” technology strategy with the ability to write, deploy, manage, and monitor its store software across all locations nationwide—and reflect those same experiences through its eCommerce site. DICK’S needed a new level of modularity, integration, and simplicity to seamlessly connect its public cloud environment with its computing systems at the edge. With the help of Microsoft, DICK’s Sporting Goods is migrating its on-premise infrastructure to Microsoft Azure and creating an adaptive cloud environment comprised of Azure Arc and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Now the retailer can easily deploy new applications to every store to support a ubiquitous experience. 

Azure Cobalt delivers performance and efficiency for intelligent applications

Azure provides hundreds of services supporting the performance demands of cloud native and intelligent applications. Our work to maximize performance and efficiency now extends to the silicon powering Azure. We recently introduced Azure Maia, our first custom AI accelerator series to run cloud-based training and inferencing for AI workloads, and our custom in-house CPU series, Azure Cobalt, the first CPU designed by us, specifically for the Microsoft Cloud. 

Cobalt 100, the first generation in the series, is a 64-bit 128-core chip that delivers up to 40% performance improvement over current generations of Azure Arm chips and can power services such as Microsoft Teams and Azure SQL.

With Cobalt, we will deliver performance and economics to meet the demands of resource-intensive workloads like intelligent applications using generative AI for at-scale workloads. Our customized silicon and system features include dynamic power capabilities that can be tuned per-core based on the workload, leveraging the co-optimization of hardware with software to deliver best-in-class performance efficiency. 

Don’t just take it from me and Omar. Rani Borkar, CVP, Azure Hardware Systems shares how Cobalt delivers differentiated performance—and can even help drive toward achieving sustainability goals:

“We’re building sustainability into every part of our hardware for the cloud, from our silicon to the servers. This starts in the design phase, and on Cobalt we made those intentional design choices to be able to control performance and power consumption per core and on every single VM. We’re pleased with the performance we’ve seen testing Cobalt on internal workloads like Teams and Azure SQL, and looking forward to rolling this out more widely to customers as a VM offering next year.”

Grow your data, AI, and intelligent applications understanding and skillset

I often use December downtime to do a deep dive into a new technology or learn a new skill. I’m a data geek, and I have fond memories from a few years ago when I worked through more than a dozen Power BI trainings and loved every minute of it. Demystifying AI and helping customers build the right skillsets is just one way Microsoft is empowering AI transformation. Here are some new learning resources if you are like me and plan to end the year learning something new!

AI in a Minute: Looking for help ramping your teams on generative AI? Or maybe you want to go to end of year gatherings prepared to discuss AI and its possibilities? Our new “AI in a Minute” video series explains generative AI basics in short, snackable bites anyone can digest, regardless of job tile, level, or industry.

GenAI for beginners: This free 12-lesson course is designed to teach beginners everything they need to know to start building with generative AI. 

Microsoft Learn Cloud Skills Challenge—Microsoft Ignite Edition: Skill up for in-demand Data & AI tech scenarios and enter to win a VIP pass to the next Microsoft Ignite or Microsoft Build by completing a challenge by January 15, 2024. 

Cloud Workshop for the SQL Professional—If you missed this workshop at the PASS Data Summit, the labs are available to go through at your own pace. Our next workshop will be in March at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, so be sure to register and come see us in Las Vegas.

Accelerate your AI journey with key solution accelerators—Get started building intelligent apps on Azure with newly-published demos, GitHub repos, and Hackathon content to create AI-powered, intelligent apps. Customers and partners can “Build Your Own Copilot” using a click-through demo, sellers and partners can run a Hackathon with customers, and developers can leverage a code repo to quickly build solutions in their Azure account.

What will you build in 2024? Transform your business with a trusted partner

The ability of AI to accelerate transformation across industries, organizations, and daily life will certainly continue at an intense pace in 2024. Microsoft is proud to be your trusted partner in this era of AI and we’re committed to helping you achieve more for your business. I am excited to see how data, AI, and digital applications innovation unfolds for your business in the new year!

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft Azure delivers purpose-built cloud infrastructure in the era of AI

This year’s Microsoft Ignite brings us together to experience AI transformation in action. AI is driving a new wave of innovation, rapidly changing what applications look like, how they’re designed and built, and how they’re delivered. At the same time, business leaders continue to face challenges, needing to juggle various priorities to offset rising costs, be sustainable, and outmaneuver economic uncertainty. Today’s customers are looking for AI solutions that will meet all their needs.

At Ignite, we’re announcing innovation in Microsoft Azure that is powering more AI capabilities for our customers and helping enterprises with their cloud management and operations. We’re committed to bringing your AI ambitions to production and meeting you where you are. Whether you choose to build hybrid, cloud-native, or open source solutions, we’re rapidly expanding our infrastructure and adding intuitive tools for customers to help take your ideas to production safely and responsibly in this new era of AI. 

With Azure, you can trust that you are on a secure and well-managed foundation to utilize the latest advancements in AI and cloud-native services. Azure is adaptive and purpose-built for all your workloads, helping you seamlessly unify and manage all your infrastructure, data, analytics, and AI solutions. 

Powering groundbreaking AI solutions

The era of AI has largely been shaped by an exponential growth in the sophistication of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT trained on trillions of parameters and groundbreaking generative AI services like Bing Chat Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot used by millions of people globally. The leadership by Azure in optimizing infrastructure for AI workloads in the cloud is pioneering this innovation and why customers like OpenAI, Inflection, and Adept are choosing Azure to build and run AI solutions.

In this new era of AI, we are redefining cloud infrastructure, from silicon to systems, to prepare for AI in every business, in every app, for everyone. At Ignite, we’re introducing our first custom AI accelerator series, Azure Maia, designed to run cloud-based training and inferencing for AI workloads such as OpenAI models, Bing, GitHub Copilot, and ChatGPT. Maia 100 is the first generation in the series, with 105 billion transistors, making it one of the largest chips on 5nm process technology. The innovations for Maia 100 span across the silicon, software, network, racks, and cooling capabilities. This equips the Azure AI infrastructure with end-to-end systems optimization tailored to meet the needs of groundbreaking AI such as GPT.

Alongside the Maia 100, we’re introducing our first custom in-house central processing unit series, Azure Cobalt, built on Arm architecture for optimal performance or watt efficiency, powering common cloud workloads for the Microsoft Cloud. From in-house silicon to systems, Microsoft now optimizes and innovates at every layer in the infrastructure stack. Cobalt 100, the first generation in the series, is a 64-bit 128-core chip that delivers up to 40 percent performance improvement over current generations of Azure Arm chips and is powering services such as Microsoft Teams and Azure SQL. 

Networking innovation runs across our first-generation Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips. From hollow core fiber technology to the general availability of Azure Boost, we’re enabling faster networking and storage solutions in the cloud. You can now achieve up to 12.5 GBs throughput, 650K input output operations per second (IOPs) in remote storage performance to run data-intensive workloads, and up to 200 GBs in networking bandwidth for network-intensive workloads. 

We continue to build our AI infrastructure in close collaboration with silicon providers and industry leaders, incorporating the latest innovations in software, power, models, and silicon. Azure works closely with NVIDIA to provide NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core (GPU) graphics processing unit-based virtual machines (VMs) for mid to large-scale AI workloads, including Azure Confidential VMs. On top of that, we are adding the latest NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU to our fleet next year to support larger model inferencing with no reduction in latency. 

As we expand our partnership with AMD, customers can access AI-optimized VMs powered by AMD’s new MI300 accelerator early next year. This demonstrates our commitment to adding optionality for customers in price, performance, and power for all of their unique business needs. 

These investments have allowed Azure to pioneer performance for AI supercomputing in the cloud and have consistently ranked us as the number one cloud in the top 500 of the world’s supercomputers. With these additions to the Azure infrastructure hardware portfolio, our platform enables us to deliver the best performance and efficiency across all workloads.

Being adaptive and purpose-built for your workloads

We’ve heard about your challenges in migrating workloads to the public cloud, especially for mission-critical workloads. We continue to work with the technology vendors you’ve relied on to run your workloads and ensure Azure is supporting your needs such as SAP, VMware, NetApp, RedHat, Citrix, and Oracle. We’re excited about our recent partnership to bring Oracle Database Services into Azure to help keep your business efficient and resilient.

At Ignite, we’re announcing the general availability of Oracle Database@Azure in the US East Azure region as of December 2023. Customers will now have direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) deployed in Azure data centers. The new service will deliver all the performance, scale, and workload availability advantages of Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI combined with the security, flexibility, and best-in-class services of Azure. Microsoft is the only other hyper scaler to offer OCI Database Services to simplify cloud migration, multicloud deployment, and management.

As we’ve observed through our interactions the durable state of the cloud is evolving to one where customer workloads need to be supported wherever they’re needed. We realize that cloud migration is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and that’s why we’re committed to meeting you where you are on your cloud journey. An adaptive cloud enables you to thrive in dynamic environments by unifying siloed teams, distributed sites, and sprawling systems into a single operations, application, and data model in Azure.  

Our vision for adaptive cloud builds on the work we’ve already started through Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, customers can project their on-premises, edge, and multicloud resources to Azure, deploy Azure native services on those resources, and extend Azure services to the edge.  

We’re excited to make some new announcements that will help customers implement their adaptive cloud strategies. For VMware customers, we’re announcing the general availability of VMware vSphere enabled by Azure Arc. Azure Arc brings together Azure and the VMware vSphere infrastructure enabling VM administrators to empower their developers to use Azure technologies with their existing server-based workloads and new Kubernetes workloads all from Azure. Additionally, we’re delighted to share the preview of Azure IoT Operations enabled by Azure Arc. By using Azure IoT Operations, customers can greatly reduce the complexity and time it takes to build an end-to-end solution that empowers them to make near real-time decisions backed by AI-driven insights to run agile, resilient, and sustainable operations with both Microsoft and partner technologies.

Amplifying your impact with AI-enhanced operations

Every day, cloud administrators and IT professionals are being asked to do more. We consistently hear from customers that they’re tasked with a wider range of operations, collaborating and managing more users, supporting more complex needs to deliver on increasing customer demand and integrating more workloads into their cloud environment. 

That’s why we’re excited to introduce the public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Azure, a new solution built into Azure that helps simplify how you design, operate, or troubleshoot apps and infrastructure from cloud to edge.

Enabling limitless innovation in the era of AI

Delivering on the promise of advanced AI for our customers requires high computing infrastructure, services, and expertise—things that can only be addressed with the scale and agility of the Microsoft Cloud. Our unique equipment and system designs help us and customers like you meet the challenges of the ever-changing technological landscape. From increasing the lifecycle of our hardware and running efficient supply chain operations to providing purpose-built infrastructure in this new era of AI, we can ensure we’re always here to bring your ideas to life in a safe and responsible way.

Source: microsoft.com

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The Power of Azure Arc: Revolutionizing Cloud Infrastructure

In the fast-paced world of modern technology, where businesses are continually seeking innovative solutions to streamline their operations and enhance efficiency, the importance of a robust and adaptable cloud infrastructure cannot be overstated. Enter Azure Arc, a game-changing platform developed by Microsoft that is poised to revolutionize the way organizations manage their cloud resources. In this article, we will delve deep into the world of Azure Arc, exploring its capabilities, benefits, and the impact it can have on your cloud infrastructure. Buckle up, as we embark on a journey to uncover the power of Azure Arc.

What is Azure Arc?

Before we dive into the specifics, let's establish a fundamental understanding of what Azure Arc is. In essence, Azure Arc is a hybrid and multicloud service offered by Microsoft Azure that extends Azure's management capabilities to other cloud platforms and on-premises environments. This means that with Azure Arc, you can seamlessly manage and govern your resources, irrespective of their location, using a unified control plane.

The Key Features of Azure Arc

Azure Arc comes armed with a plethora of features that make it a compelling choice for organizations seeking to optimize their cloud infrastructure. Here are some of the standout features:

1. Unified Management

Azure Arc offers a unified management experience, allowing you to manage resources across various cloud platforms and on-premises environments from a single, centralized interface. This simplifies the management of complex and distributed infrastructures, enhancing operational efficiency.

2. Resource Organization

With Azure Arc, you can organize your resources into logical groups, making it easier to manage and monitor them. This hierarchical structure provides a clear view of your resource hierarchy, facilitating efficient resource governance.

3. Policy Enforcement

One of the standout features of Azure Arc is its policy enforcement capabilities. You can define and enforce policies consistently across all your resources, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and security best practices.

4. Data Protection and Backup

Azure Arc offers robust data protection and backup solutions, allowing you to safeguard your critical data and applications. Automated backup processes ensure that your data is secure and easily recoverable in case of unforeseen events.

5. Security and Compliance

Security is paramount in the digital age, and Azure Arc takes it seriously. It provides advanced security and compliance features, including threat detection, identity and access management, and vulnerability assessment, to safeguard your infrastructure against cyber threats.

Benefits of Azure Arc

Now that we've explored some of the features of Azure Arc, let's delve into the tangible benefits it can bring to your organization.

1. Flexibility and Scalability

Azure Arc's hybrid and multicloud capabilities offer unparalleled flexibility. You can seamlessly extend your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and vice versa, allowing for easy scalability based on your organization's evolving needs.

2. Cost Optimization

By providing a unified management experience, Azure Arc helps optimize costs by eliminating the need for multiple management tools and reducing operational overhead. This, in turn, leads to significant cost savings in the long run.

3. Enhanced Security

With Azure Arc's comprehensive security and compliance features, your organization can stay ahead of security threats and ensure that your data and applications are protected at all times. This peace of mind is invaluable in today's threat landscape.

4. Streamlined Governance

Azure Arc simplifies resource governance by offering centralized policy enforcement and resource organization. This ensures that your organization can maintain compliance and governance standards consistently across all environments.

Real-World Applications

To truly understand the power of Azure Arc, let's take a look at some real-world applications that showcase its versatility and impact.

1. Retail Industry

In the retail sector, where data-driven decisions and seamless customer experiences are paramount, Azure Arc enables retailers to manage their inventory and customer data efficiently. It allows for the seamless integration of both physical and online stores, ensuring a consistent shopping experience for customers.

2. Healthcare Sector

The healthcare industry requires robust data management and security. Azure Arc assists healthcare providers in securely managing patient records, ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations, and enabling telemedicine services, all while maintaining the highest standards of data protection.

3. Financial Services

Financial institutions deal with vast amounts of sensitive data daily. Azure Arc empowers these organizations to securely manage their data, implement stringent security policies, and facilitate remote work, all while ensuring the utmost data integrity.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Azure Arc is more than just a tool for managing cloud resources; it is a transformative platform that empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their cloud infrastructure. Its unified management, policy enforcement, and security features make it an invaluable asset in today's digital landscape. By embracing Azure Arc, your organization can achieve greater flexibility, cost optimization, and enhanced security, ultimately paving the way for innovation and growth.

As technology continues to evolve, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. Azure Arc is your ticket to a future-proof cloud infrastructure that can adapt to your organization's changing needs. Don't just keep up with the times—lead the way with Azure Arc.

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