Microsoft Azure

Do you need rugged, compact-sized hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) enabled servers to run your branch office and edge workloads? Do you want to modernize your applications and IoT functions with container technology? Do you want to leverage Azure’s hybrid services such as backup, disaster recovery, update managment, monitoring, and security compliance?   Microsoft and Lenovo have teamed … Read more Microsoft has validated the Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 edge server for Azure Stack HCI

Since the general availability of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 in February 2019, customers have been getting insights at cloud scale faster than ever before. Integration to analytics engines is critical for their analytics workloads and equally important is the ability to programmatically ingest, manage, and analyze data. This ability is critical for key areas … Read more Extended filesystem programming capabilities in Azure Data Lake Storage

Many customers have questions when it comes to managing cloud operations. How can I implement real-time cloud governance at scale? What’s the best way to monitor my cloud workloads? How can I get help when I need it? Azure offers a great deal of guidance when it comes to optimizing your cloud operations. At the … Read more Achieve operational excellence in the cloud with Azure Advisor

This post was co-authored by Omar Aftab, Partner Director of Program Management, Power Virtual Agents. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling organizations to improve their business in areas like customer service and employee engagement by automating some of the most commonly requested services, which frees up employees to take on more value-adding activities. While the … Read more Enabling collaborative bot development across your organization for any user

Over a million on-premises SQL Server databases have moved to Azure, representing a massive shift in where customers are collecting, storing, and analyzing their data. Modernizing your databases provides the opportunity to transform your data architecture. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines allows you to maintain control over your database and operating system while still … Read more Faster and cheaper: SQL on Azure continues to outshine AWS

Whether you’re a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Azure Cost Management comes in. We’re always looking for … Read more Azure Cost Management updates – November 2019

Azure Media Services provides a platform with which you can broadcast live events. You can use our APIs to ingest, transcode, and dynamically package and encrypt your live video feeds for delivery via industry-standard protocols like HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and MPEG-DASH. You can also use our APIs to integrate with CDNs and deliver to … Read more Preview: Live transcription with Azure Media Services

We are excited to announce the general availability of multi-protocol access for Azure Data Lake Storage. Azure Data Lake Storage is a unique cloud storage solution for analytics that offers multi-protocol access to the same data. This is a no-compromise solution that allows both the Azure Blob Storage API and Azure Data Lake Storage API … Read more Multi-protocol access on Data Lake Storage now generally available

This post is co-authored by Anny Dow, Product Marketing Manager, Azure Cognitive Services. In an age where low-latency and data security can be the lifeblood of an organization, containers make it possible for enterprises to meet these needs when harnessing artificial intelligence (AI). Since introducing Azure Cognitive Services in containers this time last year, businesses … Read more A year of bringing AI to the edge

Multi-language speech transcription was recently introduced into Microsoft Video Indexer at the International Broadcasters Conference (IBC). It is available as a preview capability and customers can already start experiencing it in our portal. More details on all our IBC2019 enhancements can be found here. Multi-language videos are common media assets in the globalization context, global … Read more Multi-language identification and transcription in Video Indexer

As SQL Server 2019 continues to push the boundaries of availability, performance, and data intelligence, a centrally managed, enterprise-scale backup solution is imperative to ensure the protection of all that data. This is especially true if you are running the SQL Server in the cloud to leverage the benefits of dynamic scale and don’t want … Read more Azure Backup support for SQL Server 2019 and Restore as files

Change feed support for Microsoft Azure Blob storage is now available in preview. Change feed provides a guaranteed, ordered, durable, read-only log of all the creation, modification, and deletion change events that occur to the blobs in your storage account. This log is stored as append blobs within your storage account, therefore you can manage … Read more Change feed support now available in preview for Azure Blob Storage

Organizations face challenges when it comes to extracting insights, finding meaning, and uncovering new opportunities in the vast troves of content at their disposal. In fact, 82 percent of organizations surveyed in the latest Harvard Business Review (HBR) Analytic Services report say that exploring and understanding their content in a timely manner is a significant … Read more How AI can supercharge content understanding for businesses

HBv2 Virtual Machines for HPC, Azure’s most powerful yet, now in preview Azure HB v2-series Virtual Machines (VM) for high-performance computing (HPC) are now in preview in the South Central US region. HBv2-series Virtual Machines are Azure’s most advanced HPC offering yet, featuring performance and Message Passing Interface scalability rivaling the most advanced supercomputers on … Read more Azure high-performace computing at SC’19

Historically, data has been protected at rest through encryption in data stores, and in transit using network technologies, however as soon as that data is processed in the CPU of a computer it is decrypted and in plain text. New confidential computing technologies are game changing as they provide data protection, even when the code … Read more Bringing confidential computing to Kubernetes

Today’s question and answer style post comes after I had the chance to sit down with Bryan Heymann, Head of Cloud Architecture at Finastra, discussing his experience with Azure Site Recovery. Finastra builds and deploys technology on its open software architecture, our conversation focused on the organization’s journey to replace several disparate disaster recovery (DR) technologies … Read more Finastra “did not expect the low RPO” of Azure Site Recovery DR

The next wave of analytics is here with Azure Synapse Analytics! Simply unmatched and truly limitless, we’re excited about this launch and want to share the highlights with you. Please join us for the Analytics in Azure virtual event on Tuesday, December 10, 2019 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time. Be among the … Read more Learn how to accelerate time to insight at the Analytics in Azure virtual event

Over the last couple of years, deep learning has become widely adopted across the Bing search stack and powers a vast number of our intelligent features. We use natural language models to improve our core search algorithm’s understanding of a user’s search intent and the related webpages so that Bing can deliver the most relevant … Read more Bing delivers its largest improvement in search experience using Azure GPUs

As a company, we work every day to empower every person on the planet to achieve more. As part of that, we’re committed to investing in IoT and intelligent edge, two technology trends accelerating ubiquitous computing and bringing unparalleled opportunity for transformation across industries. We’ve been working hard to make our Azure IoT platform more … Read more Forrester names Microsoft a leader in Wave report for Industrial IoT Software Platforms

This post was co-authored by Mikhail Shilkov, Software Engineer, Pulumi. Pulumi is reinventing how people build modern cloud applications, with a unique platform that combines deep systems and infrastructure innovation with elegant programming models and developer tools. We live in amazing times when people and businesses on different continents can interact at the speed of … Read more How to build globally distributed applications with Azure Cosmos DB and Pulumi

One of the most dynamic landscapes embracing Internet of Things (IoT) is the modern city. As urbanization grows, city leaders are under increasing pressure to make cities safer, accessible, sustainable, and prosperous. Underlying all these important goals is the bedrock that makes a city run: infrastructure. Whether it be water, electricity, streets, traffic lights, cities … Read more Democratizing Smart City solutions with Azure IoT Central

Over the past few years, we’ve seen significant changes in how an application is thought of and developed, especially with the adoption of containers and the move from traditional monolithic applications to microservices applications. This shift also affects how we think about modern application monitoring, now with greater adoption of open source technologies and the … Read more Improving observability of your Kubernetes deployments with Azure Monitor for containers

The Azure Container Registry (ACR) team is rolling out the preview of repository scoped role-based access control (RBAC) permissions, our top-voted item on UserVoice. In this release, we have a command-line interface (CLI) experience for you to try and provide feedback. ACR already supports several authentication options using identities that have role-based access to an entire registry. However, for … Read more Azure Container Registry: preview of repository-scoped permissions

We’ve just released our newest Azure Blueprints for the important US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certification at the moderate level. FedRAMP is a key certification because cloud providers seeking to sell services to US federal government agencies must first demonstrate FedRAMP compliance. Azure and Azure Government are both approved for FedRAMP at … Read more FedRAMP Moderate Blueprints helps automate US federal agency compliance

If data-access challenges have been keeping you from running high-performance computing (HPC) jobs in Azure, we’ve got great news to report! The now-available Microsoft Azure HPC Cache service lets you run your most demanding workloads in Azure without the time and cost of rewriting applications and while storing data where you want to—in Azure or … Read more Announcing the general availability of the new Azure HPC Cache service

Today, more and more organizations are focused on delivering new digital solutions to customers and finding that the need for increased agility, improved processes, and collaboration between development and operation teams is becoming business-critical. For over a decade, DevOps has been the answer to these challenges. Understanding the need for DevOps is one thing, but … Read more Sharing the DevOps journey at Microsoft

We’re constantly working to improve your user experience in the Azure portal. Our goal is to offer you a productive and easy-to-use single-pane-of glass where you can build, manage, and monitor your Azure services, applications, and infrastructure. In this post, I’d like to share the highlights of our latest experience improvements, including: Improved portal home … Read more 10 user experience updates to the Azure portal

On November fourth, we announced Azure Synapse Analytics, the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. Azure Synapse brings … Read more Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now Azure Synapse Analytics

Over the past few years, we have seen many examples of organizations applying conversational AI in meaningful ways. Accenture and Caesars Entertainment are making their employees more productive with enterprise bots. UPS and Asiana Airlines are using bots to deliver better customer service. And finally, BMW and LaLiga have built their own branded voice assistants, … Read more Delivering increased productivity for bot development and deployment

APIs are everywhere. The broad proliferation of applications throughout enterprises often results in large silos of opaque processes and services, making it hard for IT to manage and govern APIs in a systematic way, and for development teams to gain visibility into and make use of APIs that already exist. Entire industries, such as financial … Read more Secure and compliant APIs for a hybrid and multi-cloud world

At Microsoft Ignite, we are sharing a wealth of new products and business news, across Microsoft’s unique technology stack—spanning on-premises, client, server, and cloud. For Microsoft Azure, we have always believed in building products and programs that help our customers invent with purpose. Our announcements reinforce this belief and deliver on our promises of helping … Read more Growing partner opportunity with Azure innovation

There are incredible transformations happening across industries through the application of AI. We have a front row seat with customers who are successfully digitizing core business processes and creating more engaging and personalized customer experiences. With Microsoft’s AI platform, Azure AI, our vision continues to center on helping our customers innovate with purpose, using productive, … Read more Companies of all sizes tackle real business problems with Azure AI

This blog will cover the design, technology, and recommendations for setting up disaster recovery (DR) for an enterprise customer, to achieve best in class recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) with an SAP S/4HANA landscape. This post was co-authored by Sivakumar Varadananjayan, Global Head of Cognizant’s SAP Cloud Practice. Microsoft Azure provides … Read more Disaster recovery for SAP HANA Systems on Azure

Whether you’re a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management comes in! We’re always looking for ways … Read more Azure Cost Management updates – October 2019

Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) that supports thousands of mission-critical customer applications powered by real-time insights. Out-of-the-box integration with numerous other Azure services enables developers and data engineers to build high-performance, hot-path data pipelines within minutes. The key tenets of Stream Analytics include Ease of use, Developer productivity, … Read more New in Stream Analytics: Machine Learning, online scaling, custom code, and more

Access to Diagnostic Logs is essential for any healthcare service where being compliant with regulatory requirements (like HIPAA) is a must. The feature in Azure API for FHIR that makes this happen is Diagnostic settings in the Azure Portal UI. For details on how Azure Diagnostic Logs work, please refer to the Azure Diagnostic Log … Read more Enabling Diagnostic Logging in Azure API for FHIR®

This post is co-authored by Abe Omorogbe, Program Manager, Azure Machine Learning, and John Wu, Program Manager, Azure Machine Learning Congratulations to the TensorFlow community on the release of TensorFlow 2.0! In this blog, we aim to highlight some of the ways that Azure can streamline the building, training, and deployment of your TensorFlow model. … Read more TensorFlow 2.0 on Azure: Fine-tuning BERT for question tagging

For decades our Microsoft services partners have fostered digital transformation at customer organizations around the world. With deep expertise in both on-premises and cloud operating models, our partners are trusted advisers to their customer, helping shape migration decisions. Partners give customers hands-on support with everything from initial strategy to implementation – giving them a unique … Read more Why customers choose Azure to run Windows Server workloads: Microsoft partner perspective

Weather: the bane of many motorists, transporters, agriculturalists, retailers, or just about anyone who has to deal with it—which is all of us. That said, we can embrace weather and use weather data to our advantage by integrating it into our daily lives. Azure Maps is proud to share the preview of a new set … Read more Rain or shine: Azure Maps Weather Services will bring insights to your enterprise

This post was co-authored by Mike Emard Principal Program Manager, Azure Storage.  SQL Server on Azure virtual machines brings cloud agility, elasticity, and scalability benefits to SQL Server workloads. SQL virtual machine offers full control on the operating system, virtual machine size, storage subsystem, and the level of manageability needed for your workload. Preconfigured SQL Server image from Azure … Read more Leverage Azure premium file shares for high availability of data

This post was co-authored by Tina Coll, Sr Product Marketing Manager, Azure Cognitive Services. Innovate at no cost to you, with out-of-the box AI services that are newly available for Azure free account users. Join the 1.3 million developers who have been using Cognitive Services to build AI powered apps to date. With the broadest … Read more Start building with Azure Cognitive Services for free

Providing our customers with choice and flexibility is central to our mission around blockchain in Azure. Today, we are pleased to introduce that we’re bringing managed Corda Enterprise to Azure Blockchain Service. The road to Corda Enterprise on Azure as a managed service In 2016, Microsoft and R3 worked together to bring Corda Enterprise to … Read more Introducing Corda Enterprise on Azure Blockchain Service

This post was co-authored by Jamie Reding, Senior Program Manager, Sadashivan Krishnamurthy, Principal Architect, and Bob Ward, Principal Architect. Today, most applications are running online transactional processing (OLTP) transactions. Online banking, purchasing a book online, booking an airline ticket, sending a text message, and telemarketing are examples of OLTP workloads. OLTP workloads involves inserting, updating, … Read more Gain on OLTP price-performance with Azure SQL Virtual Machines

Welcome back to another release of the unified Azure Data client libraries. For the most part, the API surface areas of the SDKs have been stabilized based on your feedback. Thank you to everyone who has been submitting issues on GitHub and keep the feedback coming. Please grab the October preview libraries and try them … Read more October 2019 unified Azure SDK preview

Today, Microsoft becomes the first cloud with a fully managed, first-party service to ingest, persist, and manage healthcare data in the native FHIR format. The Azure API for FHIR® is releasing today in generally availability to all Azure customers. The core mission in healthcare is to deliver better health outcomes, and the data standard fueling … Read more Azure API for FHIR® moves to general availability

Better scale and more power for IT professionals and developers! We’re excited to announce the general availability of larger, more powerful standard file shares for Azure Files. Azure Files is a secure, fully managed public cloud file storage with full range of data redundancy options and hybrid capabilities using Azure File Sync. Here is a … Read more Announcing the general availability of larger, more powerful standard file shares for Azure Files

This is the final blog in our four-part series on Designing A Great SAP on Azure Architecture. Robust SAP on Azure Architectures are built on the pillars of Security, Performance and Scalability, Availability and Recoverability, and Efficiency and Operations. Within this blog we will a cover a range of Azure services and a new GitHub … Read more SAP on Azure–Designing for Efficiency and Operations

Can you trust your cloud provider? That’s a question being asked a lot of these days, and with the newest version of our popular white paper Trusted Cloud: Microsoft Azure security, privacy, compliance, resiliency, and protected IP we’ve worked to provide you answers. When we first published Trusted Cloud in 2015, the paper was 13 … Read more Trusted Cloud: security, privacy, compliance, resiliency, and IP

We are excited to share the winners of the first Microsoft Azure AI Hackathon, hosted on Devpost. Developers of all backgrounds and skill levels were welcome to join and submit any form of AI project, whether using Azure AI to enhance existing apps with pre-trained machine learning (ML) models or by building ML models from … Read more Microsoft Azure AI hackathon’s winning projects

Application Insights from Azure Monitor empowers developers and IT professionals to observe, debug, diagnose, and improve their distributed services hosted on the cloud, on-premises, and through hybrid solutions. The release of the Application Insights for ASP.NET Core 2.8.0 for web applications and the Application Insights for .NET Core Worker Service 2.8.0 for non-web applications delivers new value to developers including: … Read more Azure Monitor adds Worker Service SDK, new ASP.NET core metrics