Azure Virtual Desktop: The flexible cloud VDI platform for the hybrid workplace

When we launched Windows Virtual Desktop nearly two years ago, no one predicted a global pandemic would force millions of workers to leave the office and work from home. Organizations around the world migrated important apps and data to the cloud to gain business resilience and agility. And to support the new remote workforce, many of you turned to Windows Virtual Desktop to give remote users a secure, easy to manage, productive personal computing experience with Windows 10 from the cloud. It has been humbling to work alongside you as you pivoted your operations to meet new challenges—from supporting frontline healthcare workers at NHS to engineers at Petrofac to educators and students—hear from some of the top UK universities on their experience with Azure Virtual Desktop.

Read More: DA-100: Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI

Going forward, organizations will need to support an evolving set of remote and hybrid work scenarios. To help our customers and partners meet these new hybrid work demands, we are expanding our vision to become a flexible cloud VDI platform for nearly any use case—accessible from virtually anywhere. A modern VDI platform needs to be secure, scalable, and easy to manage, while delivering a seamless, high-performance experience to end users. It should also empower organizations with the flexibility to customize and build solutions with its core technology.

To support this broader vision and the changing needs of our customers, today we are announcing new capabilities, new pricing for app streaming, and changing the name of the Windows Virtual Desktop service to Azure Virtual Desktop.

New platform capabilities for security and management

We are continually adding new capabilities to the core Azure Virtual Desktop platform. Today we are also pleased to announce the public preview of new features that will help you onboard and better manage your Azure Virtual Desktop deployment.

◉ Enhanced support for Azure Active Directory (coming soon in public preview): Azure Active Directory is a critical service used by organizations around the world to manage user access to important apps and data and maintain strong security controls. We are pleased to announce that you’ll soon be able to join your Azure Virtual Desktop virtual machines directly to Azure Active Directory (AAD) and connect to the virtual machines from any device with basic credentials. You’ll also be able to automatically enroll the virtual machines with Microsoft Endpoint Manager. For certain scenarios, this will help eliminate the need for a domain controller, help reduce cost, and streamline your deployment. While this is a major milestone, it’s just the beginning of the journey towards full integration with Azure Active Directory. We will continue adding new capabilities such as support for single sign-on, additional credential types like FIDO2, and Azure Files for cloud users.

◉ Manage Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session virtual machines with Microsoft Endpoint Manager (available now in preview): Microsoft Endpoint Manager allows you to manage policies and distribute applications across devices. You can now enroll Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session Azure Virtual Desktop virtual machines in Microsoft Endpoint Manager and manage them in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center the same way as shared physical devices. This simplifies management and provides a centralized view across both physical devices and virtual desktops.

◉ Deploy in minutes with new QuickStart experience (coming soon in preview): We are pleased to offer a streamlined onboarding experience for Azure Virtual Desktop in the Azure portal. This new experience will validate requirements, kick off an automated deployment, and will also implement best practices. With only a few clicks, you can set up a full Azure Virtual Desktop environment in your Azure subscription. You will find this new experience under “Quickstart” in the Azure Virtual Desktop blade in the Azure portal.

New pricing options for remote app streaming

Many organizations are using Azure Virtual Desktop to stream apps to their own employees who are covered by existing license entitlements. But many organizations also want to use Azure Virtual Desktop to deliver applications “as-a-service” to customers and business partners as well.

Today we are pleased to announce a monthly per-user access pricing option for organizations to use Azure Virtual Desktop to deliver apps from the cloud to external (non-employee) users. For example, this would enable software vendors to deliver their app as a SaaS solution that can be accessed by their customers. In addition to the monthly user price for Azure Virtual Desktop, organizations also pay for Azure infrastructure services based on usage.

Here's what one ISV had to say about the new pricing option:

“Sage is trusted by millions of customers worldwide to deliver innovative business solutions to manage finances, operations and people. Streaming applications with Azure Virtual Desktop makes it easy to streamline user access to our solutions on the Azure cloud for a great online customer experience.” James Westlake, Director of Product Management, Sage.

Try it during our promotional period

The new per-user access pricing option will be effective on January 1, 2022. To help organizations get started now, we are pleased to offer a special promotion with no charge to access Azure Virtual Desktop for streaming first-party or third-party applications to external users. This promotion is effective from July 14, 2021, to December 31, 2021.

Pricing for monthly user access rights effective on January 1, 2022, will be:

•    $5.50 per user per month (Apps)

•    $10 per user per month (Apps + Desktops)

This promotion only applies to external user access rights. Organizations would continue to pay for the underlying Azure infrastructure. Organizations should continue to use existing Windows license entitlements, such as Microsoft 365 E3 or Windows E3 and higher, for app streaming to their employees. 

Expanding partner ecosystem

As a cloud VDI platform, we work closely with our partners and empower them to build solutions that meet your needs. For example, Citrix and VMware provide desktop and app virtualization solutions that leverage the Azure Virtual Desktop platform capabilities, such as Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session, and allow you to maximize your existing investments and use the tools and solutions with which you are already familiar. We are also proud of our ecosystem of hundreds of partners who build custom solutions and provide technical consulting to help you deploy with confidence.

Source: microsoft.com

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Advancing in-datacenter critical environment infrastructure availability

There are many factors that can affect critical environment (CE) infrastructure availability—the reliability of the infrastructure building blocks, the controls during the datacenter construction stage, effective health monitoring and event detection schemes, a robust maintenance program, and operational excellence to ensure that every action is taken with careful consideration of related risk implications.

Read More: MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams

In addition to leading the industry in designing, constructing, commissioning, and operating a high availability CE infrastructure, Microsoft also invests in developing and implementing best practices in the reliability engineering field—aiming to elevate and sustain CE infrastructure availability. In general terms, "reliability engineering" in this blog refers to the engineering discipline that focuses on proactively identifying and assessing time-latent risks which can impact system functionality during its expected useful life—with various failure modes, effects, and mechanisms. As one simple example, when a datacenter is cooled using more energy-efficient free air cooling, we make sure that it’s the CE infrastructure that will deliver a controlled temperature, humidity, and air quality environment. One of the purposes is to prevent corrosion-related failures since electrical shorts or opens can occur under inappropriate conditions such as for the printed circuit board assembly.

The CE for hyperscale cloud datacenters is typically constructed with a blend of off-the-shelf components from a diverse vendor base—equipment like uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), power distribution units (PDU), automatic transfer switches (ATS), air handling units (AHU), and generators. This multi-vendor, multi-technology environment introduces intrinsic complexity as well as variations in robustness, mostly dependent on vendor competencies and experience. The monitoring of the CE infrastructure health is also limited, for example, due to insufficient information about these off-the-shelf components. Monitoring therefore mostly relies on high-level “failure effect” detection, such as from an electrical power management system (EPMS) or a building automation system (BAS).

However, failure effect-based detection schemes generally make it challenging to detect and pinpoint the offending element quickly, thus potentially delaying the rapid recovery of services when failures do occur. The scale of global operations adds further challenges—as variations in local conditions can result in different stresses on the equipment—posing challenges for the effectiveness of the typically time-based preventive maintenance approach. Since some geographic areas experience more notable changes in temperature, humidity, or air quality, a time-based maintenance approach could become wasteful or miss the opportunity to “refresh” system reliability if it does not account for the rate of degradation under the corresponding environmental stress conditions.

Investing in CE reliability engineering

To address these kinds of challenges, Microsoft has invested in establishing the CE reliability engineering function. Many of the related reliability engineering and technologies have emerged from the electronics industry in the last few decades, and there are ample opportunities to adapt, expand, and innovate reliability best practices and solutions for the datacenter CE infrastructure. For example, for off-the-shelf CE components, we have sought a close partnership with CE vendors in application-specific reliability risk evaluations during our equipment selection and qualification stages. During the operation stage, we also closely collaborate with our vendor base to drive continuous improvement through in-depth physical and data analytics—ranging from root cause analyses for individual cases to fleet-wide health behavior data analytics. These partnerships help both Microsoft and our vendors to have clear, data-driven visibility into the related reliability trends, areas of potential risks, and underlying contributing factors, all so that effective resolutions can be introduced, often proactively before more consequential impact occurs. While improving the understanding of potential CE infrastructure risks, reliability engineering is also focused on Research and Development (R&D) efforts that can result in more proactive and effective infrastructure health sensing, such as by capturing parameters correlated with the failure modes and mechanisms for high criticality areas. Internal, as well as external partnerships, have been established in the R&D of relevant approaches, from data mining and machine learning to Physics-of-Failure (PoF) methodologies.

As Microsoft continues to introduce innovations into the CE space, reliability engineering is playing a central role in ensuring the robustness of these solutions by driving both designed-in and built-in reliability through early-stage risk analysis and mitigations. For instance, the Microsoft Sphere-based IoT solution is developed to acquire data securely from the mechanical and electrical power CE system. Reliability engineering closely works with internal and external product design and manufacturing partners in applying both analytical- and PoF-based testing approaches throughout the solution concept, prototype, design, process development, and product deployment stages. One case in point is the concern about electronics’ packaging-related defects, during its manufacture or assembly, or its usage lifecycle. A simulation tool based on finite element analysis (FEA) was employed to identify thermal-mechanical stress points, even when the design is still just a drawing on paper, as these stress points can result in failures within the expected useful life. These points are then closely tracked and characterized (for example, with strain gauges) during environmental stress tests or during manufacturing process steps that can introduce the related thermo-mechanical stresses. Even if the system may still be functional after experiencing these stresses, samples are physically cross-sectioned in critical junctions to identify any early initiation of defects. These in-depth analyses enable concurrent product or process design changes to eliminate the failure likelihood, thereby elevating eventual system availability.

Similar design-for-excellence (DFX) strategies are also being explored for the complex CE infrastructure itself to enable proactive risk identification and prevention opportunities—and prior to the physical deployment of the infrastructure wherever feasible. These CE-related investments and technology advances in the reliability engineering discipline will help Microsoft’s CE infrastructure to build additional robustness mechanisms, in order to meet our customer’s availability expectations for a world-class cloud computing service.

Source: microsoft.com

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Deliver Java apps quickly using Custom Connectors in Power Apps

In 2021, each month we will be releasing a monthly blog covering the webinar of the month for the Low-code application development (LCAD) on Azure solution. LCAD on Azure is a new solution to demonstrate the robust development capabilities of integrating Low-code Microsoft Power Apps and the Azure products you may be familiar with.

More Info: MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams

In this blog, I will briefly recap Low-code application development on Azure, how the app was built with Java on Azure, app deployment, and building the app’s front end and user interface (UI) with Power Apps.

What is Low-code application development on Azure?

Low-code application development (LCAD) on Azure was created to help developers build business applications faster with less code, leveraging the Power Platform, and more specifically Power Apps, yet helping them scale and extend their Power Apps with Azure services.  

For example, a pro developer who works for a manufacturing company would need to build a line-of-business (LOB) application to help warehouse employees track incoming inventory. That application would take months to build, test, and deploy. However, with Power Apps’ it can take hours to build, saving time and resources. 

However, say the warehouse employees want the application to place procurement orders for additional inventory automatically when current inventory hits a determined low. In the past, this would require another heavy lift by the development team to rework their previous application iteration. Due to the integration of Power Apps and Azure, a professional developer can build an API in Visual Studio (VS) Code, publish it to their Azure portal, and export the API to Power Apps integrating it into their application as a custom connector. Afterward, that same API is re-usable indefinitely in the Power Apps’ studio for future use with other applications, saving the company and developers more time and resources.

Java on Azure Code

In this webinar the sample application will be a Spring Boot application, or a Spring application on Azure, that is generated using JHipster and will deploy the app with Azure App service. The app’s purpose is to catalog products, product descriptions, ratings, and image links, in a monolithic app. During the development of the API Sandra used H2SQL, and in production, she used MySQL. She then adds descriptions, ratings, and image links to the API in a JDL studio. Lastly, she applies the API to her GitHub repository prior to deploying to Azure App service.

Deploying the Sample App

Sandra leverages the Maven plug-in in JHipster to deploy the app to Azure App service. After providing an Azure resource group name due to her choice of ‘split and deploy’ in GitHub Actions, she only manually deploys once, and any new Git push from her master branch will be automatically deployed. Once the app is successfully deployed, it is available at myhispter.azurewebsites.net/V2APIdocs, where she copies the Swagger API file into a JSON, which will be imported into Power Apps as a custom connector.

Front-end Development

The goal of the front-end development is to build a user interface that end-users will be satisfied with, to do so the JSON must be brought into Power Apps as a custom connector so end users can access the API. The first step is to import the open API into Power Apps; note that much of this process has been streamlined via the tight integration of Azure API management with Power Apps.

After importing the API, you must create a custom connector and connect that custom connector with the Open API the backend developer built. After creating the custom connector, Dawid used Power Apps logic formula language to collect data into a dataset, creating gallery display via the collected data. Lastly, Dawid will show you the data in a finalized application and walk you through the process of sharing the app with a colleague or making them a co-owner. Lastly, once the app is shared, Dawid walks you through testing the app and soliciting user feedback via the app.

Source: microsoft.com

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Azure announces general availability of scale-out NVIDIA A100 GPU Clusters: the fastest public cloud supercomputer

Azure announces the general availability of Azure ND A100 v4 Cloud GPU instances—powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs—achieving leadership-class supercomputing scalability in a public cloud. For demanding customers chasing the next frontier of AI and high-performance computing (HPC), scalability is the key to unlocking improved Total Cost of Solution and Time-to-Solution.

Simply put, ND A100 v4—powered by NVIDIA A100 GPUs—is designed to let our most demanding customers scale up and scale out without slowing down.

Benchmarking with 164 ND A100 v4 virtual machines on a pre-release public supercomputing cluster yielded a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 16.59 petaflops. This HPL result, delivered on public cloud infrastructure, would fall within the Top 20 of the November 2020 Top 500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, or top 10 in Europe, based on the region where the job was run.

Measured via HPL-AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-focused High-Performance Linpack variant, the same 164-VM pool achieved a 142.8 Petaflop result, placing it among the world’s Top 5 fastest known AI supercomputers as measured by the official HPL-AI benchmark list. These HPL results, utilizing only a fraction of a single public Azure cluster, rank with the most powerful dedicated, on-premises supercomputing resources in the world.

And today, as ND A100 v4 goes to general availability, we’re announcing the immediate availability of the world’s fastest public cloud supercomputers on-demand, near you, through four Azure regions: East United States, West United States 2, West Europe, and South Central United States.

The ND A100 v4 VM series starts with a single virtual machine (VM) and eight NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based A100 Tensor Core GPUs, and can scale up to thousands of GPUs in a single cluster with an unprecedented 1.6 Tb/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM delivered via NVIDIA HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand links: one for each individual GPU. Additionally, every 8-GPU VM features a full complement of third generation NVIDIA NVLink, enabling GPU to GPU connectivity within the VM in excess of 600 gigabytes per second. 

Built to take advantage of de-facto industry standard HPC and AI tools and libraries, customers can leverage ND A100 v4’s GPUs and unique interconnect capabilities without any special software or frameworks, using the same NVIDIA NCCL2 libraries that most scalable GPU-accelerated AI and HPC workloads support out-of-box, without any concern for underlying network topology or placement. Provisioning VMs within the same VM Scale Set automatically configures the interconnect fabric.

Anyone can bring demanding on-premises AI and HPC workloads to the cloud via ND A100 v4 with minimal fuss, but for customers who prefer an Azure-native approach, Azure Machine Learning provides a tuned virtual machine (pre-installed with the required drivers and libraries) and container-based environments optimized for the ND A100 v4 family. Sample recipes and Jupyter Notebooks help users get started quickly with multiple frameworks including PyTorch, TensorFlow, and training state-of-the-art models like BERT. With Azure Machine Learning, customers have access to the same tools and capabilities in Azure as our AI engineering teams.

Each NVIDIA A100 GPU offers 1.7 to 3.2 times the performance of prior V100 GPUs out-of-the-box and up to 20 times the performance when layering new architectural features like mixed-precision modes, sparsity, and Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) for specific workloads. And at the heart of each VM is an all-new 2nd Generation AMD EPYC platform, featuring PCI Express Gen 4.0- for CPU to GPU transfers twice as fast as prior generations.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll build, analyze, and discover with the new Azure ND A100 v4 platform.

Size	Physical CPU Cores	Host Memory (GB)	GPUs	Local NVMe Temporary Disk	NVIDIA InfiniBand Network	Azure network
Standard_ND96asr_v4	96	900 GB	8 x 40 GB NVIDIA A100	6,500 GB	8 x 200 Gbps	40 Gbps

Source: azure.microsoft.com

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Progress on our commitment to sustainable backup power in datacenters by 2030

In July 2020, we announced our goal to eliminate our dependence on diesel fuel for backup power in our datacenters by 2030. This is in addition to our commitment to having a 100 percent supply of renewable energy procured for our datacenter operations by 2025. Reliable backup power is essential to our customer promise—delivering highly available, reliable, and scalable cloud services. Many critical industries, governments, and institutions depend on the Microsoft cloud to support essential operations, even when events such as extreme weather interrupt the primary energy supply.

More Info: MB-500: Microsoft Dynamics 365 - Finance and Operations Apps Developer

Generators at datacenters, most often powered by petroleum-based diesel, play a key role in delivering reliable backup power. Each of these generators is used for no more than a few hours a year or less at our datacenter sites, most often for routine maintenance or for backup power during a grid outage. Diesel fuel accounts for less than 1 percent of Microsoft’s overall emissions, but finding solutions to reduce reliance on traditional diesel fuels represents a substantial contribution to the technology pathways necessary for deep decarbonization. The most immediate opportunity to reduce the use of traditional diesel fuels is to validate and implement alternative, lower-carbon fuel sources for our generators.

Today we are announcing that Microsoft’s datacenter region in Sweden, which will be available to customers later this year, will be the first to use lower-carbon renewable fuel for backup power. The datacenter generators run on Preem Evolution Diesel Plus, the world’s first Nordic Eco-labelled fuel, which contains at least 50 percent renewable raw material, and nearly an equivalent reduction in net carbon dioxide emissions compared with standard fossil diesel blends. Microsoft has collaborated with both Preem and Caterpillar, a world-leading provider of backup gensets, to ensure that the Evolution Diesel Plus product offers the same technical performance as traditional fuels, with fewer net emissions. The use of Evolution Diesel Plus at Microsoft datacenters in Sweden is a step on the path toward the commercial and technological innovations necessary for cleaner, 100 percent renewable synthetic fuels applicable for the decarbonization of hard-to-abate industries.

Generators provide the most reliable source of backup power on a global scale—but they are not the only source for backup power. We are innovating and piloting other backup power sources in our datacenter regions, which could in the future provide viable replacements to generators. Batteries already supply short-term backup power needs, filling the roughly 30-second gap between a potential outage on the grid and the time it takes to power up the diesel generators. In the future, batteries with a longer duration could replace the role diesel generators play today. With TOTAL, we recently announced a collaboration as strategic partners to assess the long-term feasibility of deploying large batteries as backup power for critical infrastructure and continuing research and development in this area.

Lastly, we are looking ahead to how we can source viable green energy for backup power through hydrogen fuel cells. Last year, we announced a worldwide first—hydrogen fuel cells powering a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours. This successful pilot provides a proof of concept for supporting backup power needs that could be implemented once batteries reach their capacity.

On the path to 2030, we are continuing to innovate and partner to create and implement viable solutions to eliminate dependency on traditional diesel fuels. We look forward to sharing more progress on this journey along the way.

Source: microsoft.com

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New Azure capabilities to simplify deployment and management

Customers around the world take advantage of Microsoft Azure to build, deploy, and manage business-critical applications at scale. We continuously innovate to help customers simplify their app deployment and management experience so they can spend more time building great solutions.

Simplify your declarative deployment experience in Azure with Bicep

With developers depending heavily on cloud infrastructure to run the apps they create, we continuously strive to simplify the infrastructure setup experience so they can stay focused on the actual innovation and experiences they are crafting within their apps. Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are extremely powerful; however, they can be complex. Bicep, an open-source, domain-specific language (DSL), further simplifies developers’ declarative deployment experience in Azure. Bicep makes it much easier to both read and write infrastructure-as-code in Azure.

More Info: MB-500: Microsoft Dynamics 365 - Finance and Operations Apps Developer

Bicep allows customers to deploy Azure resources with many of the conveniences of modern programming languages—now indispensable to any app developer’s workflow. It supports first-class tooling with Visual Studio Code integration and has features such as type safety, modularity, and concise, readable syntax. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM templates, which means everything you can do in ARM templates, you can do in Bicep. It also means that all Azure resource types are supported as soon as they are released, and there are no state files required. Since its v0.3 release in March, Bicep has been production-ready and supported by Microsoft Support plans.

With Bicep v0.4 available June 2, 2021, developers can enjoy better day-to-day authoring as well as overall quality and improved stability, with the following additional capabilities:

◉ A Bicep linter to catch a customizable set of authoring best practices. The linter is designed to be extensible so new rules can continue to be added over time by either the Bicep team or the community.

◉ Integration of new resource snippets as well as a “resource scaffolding” capability. Scaffolding will insert all required properties of any resource type to help you declare resources faster—even from scratch.

◉ Transition all our Bicep examples to the ARM Template QuickStart GitHub repo, giving us a richer testing suite to ensure Bicep examples are of the highest possible quality.

Save time by using Elastic natively, right in the Azure portal

Our customers run large-scale mission-critical workloads with Linux and open source services on Azure. However, for these organizations’ developers, it is important to prioritize their focus on building amazing apps, not infrastructure management and maintenance—which can require technical knowledge and expertise in both specific services and Azure infrastructure overall. That’s why we partnered with Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash, to reduce operational complexity by rolling out a native Azure experience.

Now in preview, you can find, deploy, and manage Elastic from within the Azure portal and start connecting your app and the Azure services you use with just a few clicks. The integration allows you to add powerful search and visualization capabilities to find information, monitor applications and workloads, and protect it all within your own Azure environment—while being able to gain the technical support from Elastic to help you troubleshoot. Additionally, billing management is also simplified and integrated with your Azure bill.

Increase efficiency and onboard more easily with additional Azure Monitor capabilities

Many customers use Azure Monitor to track the health of their applications, diagnose issues, optimize performance, and create an efficient environment from coding to shipping. The following capabilities in Azure Monitor provide customers with greater flexibility, improved sharing, and end-to-end diagnostics to make managing Azure resources easier across the board:

◉ Azure Monitor Agent and data collection rules, in preview, greatly simplify the customer experience as well as improving flexibility when collecting logs and metrics from managed resources. In addition, as part of the agent, there is multi-homing on Linux and Windows and event filtering. And coming soon are new capabilities, part of general availability, that includes support for private links and direct proxies for advance networking scenarios.

◉ The ability to create and share query packs of log analytics queries within your organization, now in preview, allows for easier collaboration between teams.

◉ Enhanced out-of-the-box observability for your cloud resources, with auto instrumentation of more app types, is now in preview. You can now automatically onboard Java apps on both Linux and Windows App Services to application insights without making any code changes, providing easy access to application performance monitoring for app diagnostics and optimization.

Source: microsoft.com

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Search made simple: native Elastic integration with Azure—now in preview

With the ever-increasing adoption of cloud-based solutions, and the incredibly complex make-up of the application architectures; the ability to effectively manage, orchestrate, and monitor the scenarios for search, security, and operations are becoming very critical for the success of the businesses.

As part of Microsoft Azure’s commitment to empowering customers to migrate and modernize their applications and run in the cloud, we work with partners to achieve this vision. We are announcing the preview release of the Elastic offering on Azure, which will be available in preview on May 25, 2021. We worked closely with Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash, which provides observability, search, and security tools for users to monitor and understand the health and performance of their applications across their cloud and on-premises environments.

Read More: MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams

Customers use Elasticsearch in all industries, applying the search and monitoring functionality across their VM resources, machine data, and more. They use Elastic to retrieve service logs, metrics, and visualize the data in Kibana for better decision making.

Configuring the Elastic stack on Azure can be a time-consuming process, which requires the knowledge and technical understanding of both the Elastic solution and Azure. Based on inputs from customers in the Open Source community and other users of the Elastic offering, we worked with Elastic to provide a seamless experience of their SaaS offering by integrating the deployment, billing, and support of the Elastic solution on the Azure cloud platform, made available through Azure Marketplace on May 25.

"The partnership with Elastic to integrate the Elastic workloads with Azure enables frictionless migration and operation of Elastic on Azure, customers not only get the benefit of a single portal experience, but can also centralize the management, billing and get support from Elastic for their Azure deployment."—Julia Liuson, Corporate Vice President, Developer Division.

Ease of deploying and managing logs through Elastic on Azure

This integration offers customers the ability to use the Elastic SaaS solution from the Azure Control plane. Customers will be able to provision a new Elastic service and configure their Azure resources to automatically send logs and metrics to Elastic. With an automated log-forwarding process, customers can easily configure their resource logs with Elastic through the resources Diagnostic Settings in the Azure portal. In addition, customers have the ability to manage the Elastic agent on Azure Virtual Machine extensions to configure logs and metrics emitted from their VM hosts.

Security and managing virtual network communication

Security and the ability to control traffic through virtual networks is a critical consideration for our customers. Private Link access allows customers to securely connect from their Azure Virtual Network into the virtual network on Elastic Cloud. With single-sign-on (SSO) implemented in the solution, customers can seamlessly transition between Azure and the Elastic Cloud with a unified Azure credential. Finally, these integrations are also complemented with unified billing for the Elastic service through Azure subscription invoicing.

"This integration allows customers to set up their Elastic with Azure resources easily and reduce the operational overhead. Customers can find, deploy, and manage Elastic from within the Azure Portal, apply search, monitoring real-time data for any workloads and applications and protect all the data within their own Azure environment while leveraging Azure’s global presence, flexibility, security, and compliance for the best user experience at scale."—Shay Banon, CEO of Elastic

Getting started with Azure Elastic service

Discovery and provisioning: Azure customers can find the service listed on Azure Marketplace and review the different plans offered and purchase it directly with single billing enabled. Within few clicks, you can deploy Elastic service in your desired subscription and datacenter regions with a preferred plan.

In Azure portal experience: Start using the Elastic service after provisioning, all Azure logs and applications can be easily connected. You can determine which Azure resource logs and metrics are sent to the Elastic resource.

Configuring logs: Configure resources to automatically send logs to your Elastic deployment.

Source: microsoft.com

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