Microsoft Azure Blog

New and upcoming capabilities with Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service

Vikas Singhvi — Wed, 10 May 2023 15:00:29 Z

Microsoft and Elastic partnered together in 2020 to build an Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service to create cloud native deeply integrated experiences for all Azure and Elastic customers to power their digital transformation. Since general availability, thanks to you, this service is growing rapidly while improving efficiency for all its customers.

Case in point is that Mr. Turing’s cognitive intelligence software as a service (SaaS) product “Alan”, greatly benefited from the native Elasticsearch offering on Azure and deep integration between products like Azure, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code, as elaborated in their story here:

“On Microsoft Azure, Alan is twice as fast and less costly to operate compared to when he was running on our previous cloud provider. In addition, because of the strong integration between Azure, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code, we can deliver new features faster than we could before.”—Marcelo Noronha, Chief Executive Officer of Mr. Turing (October ’2022).

Microsoft and Elastic are continuously striving to bring more delightful experiences to our customers and enable newer capabilities to usher an era of superfast speed, massive scale, and trustworthy reliability.

Better together with Azure and Elastic Cloud

The core setup of Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service makes it simpler for developers and IT administrators to manage their Elastic deployments right from Azure. Users no longer must go through multiple manual steps to integrate Azure with Elastic or manage their own infrastructure.

While this is immensely beneficial, the true power relies on when we can continue to bring Elastic’s newer capabilities natively for Azure customers.

Here are a few of the newest capabilities added since announcing general availability:

Elastic 8.X version support

The Elastic 8.X versions bring enhancements to Elasticsearch’s vector search capabilities, native support for natural language processing models, increasingly simplified data onboarding, and a streamlined security experience. This helps people and teams connect quickly and search enterprise content to find relevant information and insights, enable observability to keep mission critical applications and infrastructure running, and protect entire digital ecosystems from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. New Elastic deployments created using the Azure native service are automatically set up with the latest Elastic version, so that customers can leverage these enhanced capabilities easily out of the box.

Cluster and user management

Setting up Elastic clusters using the Azure native service ensures provisioning of the right configuration as part of deployment itself. Apart from automated cluster provisioning, we have also enabled user management capabilities where the primary owner or creator of the initial cluster can now add multiple users from the organization to manage the deployments. This helps ensure easy management of production workloads, even when the primary owner changes roles or moves out of the organization.

Private link

For customers who are interested in sending Azure resource and subscription logs to Elastic clusters setup at private link endpoint inside an Azure VNet, we have enabled easy configuration to set this up from right within the native experience. Users have the ability to set traffic filters for Azure private links, to manage how Elastic deployments can be accessed.

Observability resource types

We are constantly working to support all resource categories on Azure Monitor to ship logs to Elastic. For customers who have setup monitoring tag rules in an Azure subscription, new resource types and categories get automatically enrolled for logs shipping, without the need for customers to manually do any changes to enable new resource types. As of now, the Azure native service supports logs shipping from 126 resource types to flow to Elastic.

Region expansion

Azure and Elastic teams have been continuously partnering to add additional regions support, to be available closer to where customers need the native offering and data residency. As of now, we support 16 Azure regions (including four new regions—South Africa North, Central India, Brazil South and Canada Central) for the Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service, and we are on the path to grow to additional regions.

Looking at the future

Here are some of the key capabilities that Microsoft and Elastic teams are working together to bring to you in the next six months:

Elastic version selection

Currently, the Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service automatically takes care of setting up Elastic with the right configuration and the latest cluster version. We heard from customers that there might be situations where the user consciously wants to create new resources leveraging an older Elastic version to support compatibility with their overall technology architecture. We are planning to address that by offering the flexibility to customers to select the Elastic version from right within the Azure portal experience.

Billing visibility enhancements

Given that today we support Elastic deployments to be set up across multiple Azure subscriptions—while still retaining the ability for customers to receive a unified bill—we are planning multiple enhancements on the native offering experience to bring visibility and transparency to billing resource and deployments that the usage and billing correspond to, so that customers can correlate better, optimize costs, or raise requests for support in case something is out of place.

Native experience for Elastic customers on standard Azure marketplace listing

Customers who started using Elastic on Azure by subscribing to the standard marketplace offer before the native offering went live, are missing out on the deep integration capabilities that the native Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch service) brings to the table. Microsoft and Elastic teams are working together to migrate these customers to the Azure native service seamlessly, so that customers can get the added integration benefits.

There are many more exciting capabilities being planned for customers beyond the next six months, stay up to date with the latest news on the Microsoft Azure blog.

Next steps

Subscribe to the Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service from Azure marketplace.
To learn more about the Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service, check out our documentation on the Elastic integration with Azure.
Watch the Microsoft Ignite session The Elastic on Microsoft Azure Native Integration Story: Helping Customers Turn Challenges to Advantages presented by Elastic.
Share additional information about how you use resource and subscription logs to monitor and manage your cloud infrastructure and applications by responding to this survey.

What’s new with Azure Files

Jurgen Willis — Wed, 10 May 2023 14:00:29 Z

Azure Files provides fully managed file shares in the cloud that you can access from anywhere using standard protocols such as Server Message Block (SMB) or Network File System (NFS).

Since announcing the general availability of support for the Network File System (NFS) v4.1 protocol back in December 2021, we have seen customers leveraging this capability for a wide variety of important use cases including enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, development and test environments (devops), content management systems (CMS), and mission critical workloads like SAP. We’re thrilled to share that SAP ECS has adopted Azure Files NFS as the default choice for deploying SAP NetWeaver servers and SAP HANA shared directories on Azure. SAP’s decision to include Azure file shares is a testament to the fact that they’re a cost-effective choice for mission critical workloads requiring high performance and high availability. We’ve also continued to listen to customer feedback and are very excited to announce several highly anticipated features, including a 99.99 percent uptime SLA, snapshot support, and nconnect.

NFS Azure file shares are now the default option for SAP Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) deployments

Azure file shares provide the functionality, performance, and reliability required to keep your SAP applications running smoothly. Being a fully managed service brings simplicity and more cost effectiveness than alternatives, such as building NFS cluster (DRDB) file shares, especially when considering redundancy. SAP and Microsoft partnered to rigorously validate the use of Azure Files in high-availability deployments for Azure SAP RISE, where it is now offered by default for deployment of SAP NetWeaver servers and SAP HANA shared directories. We’re excited that SAP themselves have chosen Azure Files to help power many of the world’s largest and most complex workloads.

“Partnering with Microsoft and the Azure Files team was very productive. Our teams worked closely together to enable new highly available solutions around NFS shares and lower cost structures. The zonal replication capabilities that Azure Files provides strengthen and simplify SAP RISE architectures on Azure beyond what we could deploy with any other technology on Azure. We expect to reduce costs both directly and indirectly by using this service. With the lower time-to-market now achieved with this simplified architecture, we can bootstrap more deployments rather quickly and earn new business.”—Lalit Patil, Chief Technology Officer, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services.

To learn more about running SAP workloads on Azure, see the following articles:

Additionally, you can use Azure Center for SAP Solutions (Preview) to deploy a highly available S4/HANA system with NFS on Azure Files.

One such customer, Germany-based Munich Re benefited from using Azure Files NFS with its SAP deployments. Munich Re, one of the world's leading insurance companies, runs one of the largest SAP environments in Europe. Munich Re took a keen interest in Azure Files and has been using it in production since the NFS protocol became generally available. With Azure Files, they can quickly deploy a file share with just a few clicks. It used to take Munich Re from four to six months to add resources, but with SAP on Azure and their infrastructure automation, they can now do it within an hour.

“We love how easy Azure Files is to use and manage, and we certainly appreciate its interoperability with other Azure services. And having a fully managed service eliminates the burden and costs of managing NFS servers.”—Matthias Spang, Technical Architect for SAP Solutions, Munich Re.

High-availability (HA) SAP solutions need a highly available file share for hosting sapmnt, transport, and interface directories. You can use Azure Files premium NFS with availability sets and availability zones.

Figure 1 - High-availability (HA) SAP NetWeaver system with Azure Files.

A highly available SAP HANA system in a scale-out configuration with HANA system replication (HSR) and Pacemaker needs shared file systems for storing shared files between all hosts in an SAP HANA system. You can use Azure Files premium NFS for satisfying this usecase.

Figure 2 - Azure Files NFS for SAP HANA scale-out system with Pacemaker cluster. Note: Azure Files is used for /hana/shared and not used for storing DBMS or logs.

New SLA of 99.99 percent uptime for Azure Files Premium Tier is generally available

In today's world of digital business, downtime is not an option. Azure Files now offers a 99.99 percent SLA per file share for its Premium Tier. The new 99.99 percent uptime SLA applies to all Azure Files Premium shares, regardless of protocol (SMB, NFS, and REST) or redundancy type (Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) or Zonally Redundant Storage (ZRS)). This means that you can benefit from this SLA immediately, without any configuration changes or extra costs.

With this new SLA, you can be confident that your data is highly available. If the availability drops below the guaranteed 99.99 percent uptime, you’re eligible for service credits.

Furthermore, Azure Files offers a ZRS solution with twelve 9's durability. This means you can trust that your data is safe, even in the face of hardware failures or other unexpected events.

With the new 99.99 percent uptime SLA for Azure Files Premium Tier, you can have a high level of confidence and assurance that your data is always available. By leveraging the latest in cloud technologies and features, Azure Files delivers a reliable and durable storage solution that can meet the needs of even the most demanding workloads.

Snapshot support for NFS file shares (Preview)

While it's rare, data corruption or accidental deletion can happen to anyone, and you need to be protected. File share snapshots protect your data from these events by ensuring you have a crash consistent dataset to recover from. File share snapshots capture the share state at a point in time, are immutable (read-only), and are differential (delta copies to keep your TCO low).

Snapshots are easy to manage and use in Azure Files. The creation of a snapshot is instantaneous. Once created, you can manage snapshots using the Azure portal, REST API, Azure CLI, or PowerShell. Enumeration of snapshots, browsing of file or folders, and copying of data is supported from within the NFS clients under the “.snapshots” folder which is present at the root of the mountpath.

Figure 3 - List, browse, and copy from your snapshots from any connected client.

Data protection is a key enterprise promise and a compliance requirement for many organizations. To date, our customers have fulfilled this requirement by doing their own replication or using one of our backup partners to copy the primary data from the share to another location. You can use snapshots to enhance these solutions. By replicating from snapshots instead of the primary share, you can ensure that the data being copied is all from a specific point in time.

Are you as excited as we are? If so, you can fill out the enrollment form to get informed of the availability of this preview feature in the region of your choice.

Boosting per-client performance with NFS nconnect is generally available

Azure Files recently announced support for nconnect on its NFS shares. By using nconnect, you can improve a multi-core client’s throughput and IOPS up to four times without making any changes to the app itself. Previously, applications were limited by the bandwidth of a single core using a single TCP connection. Nconnect is ideal for throughput-intensive scenarios like data ingestion, analytics, machine learning, devops, ETL pipelines, batch processing, and more. For example, financial services performing Value at Risk (VaR) Monte Carlo or machine learning model data simulations running on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Azure Files can now perform more risk calculations with fewer client machines in their AKS node pools. With the parallelism that nconnect enables, you can complete your throughput-intensive simulations in less time, allowing you to scale down the compute resources sooner and reduce overall TCO.

In addition to delivering higher performance, nconnect enhances fault tolerance by allowing the client to switch to an alternative TCP connection in the event of a connection failure. By enabling the client to use multiple connections, nconnect provides greater flexibility and load balancing for machines with multiple network paths.

Using nconnect is simple. For example, to use four channels on a Linux VM, simply add “-o nconnect=4” parameter to the mount command. You can use nconnect with your AKS cluster as a persistent volume by using the same Azure Files NFS CSI driver and adding “-nconnect=4” under “mountoptions”. Nconnect is available in all regions where NFS is supported at no additional cost. Please visit our product page to learn more.

Up to 1100 MiB/s single client write throughput

Up to 1700 MiB/s single client read throughput

Learn more

Learn how to create an NFS Azure file share.

Check out NFS FAQ for more information.

With these new features, Azure Files NFS is poised to power even more of the world's largest and most complex workloads, delivering superior functionality, performance, and reliability to customers across a range of industries and use cases. We believe that the new 99.99 percent SLA, snapshot capabilities, and higher performance with nconnect will unlock many more use cases and applications. We’re excited to see how you take advantage of these new capabilities!

If you have a feature request or feedback, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Azure Files team by emailing azurefiles@microsoft.com or filling out this form.

Insights from the 2023 Open Confidential Computing Conference

Mark Russinovich — Mon, 08 May 2023 09:00:05 Z

I had the opportunity to participate in this year's Open Confidential Computing Conference (OC3), hosted by our software partner, Edgeless Systems. This year's event was particularly noteworthy due to a panel discussion on the impact and future of confidential computing. The panel featured some of the industry's most respected technology leaders including Greg Lavender, Chief Technology Officer at Intel, Ian Buck, Vice President of Hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA, and Mark Papermaster, Chief Technology Officer at AMD. Felix Schuster, Chief Executive Officer at Edgeless Systems, moderated the panel discussion, which explored topics such as the definition of confidential computing, customer adoption patterns, current challenges, and future developments. The insightful discussion left a lasting impression on me and my colleagues.

What is confidential computing?

When it comes to understanding what exactly confidential computing entails, it all begins with a trusted execution environment (TEE) that is rooted in hardware. This TEE protects any code and data placed inside it, while in use in memory, from threats outside the enclave. These threats include everything from vulnerabilities in the hypervisor and host operating system to other cloud tenants and even cloud operators. In addition to providing protection for the code and data in memory, the TEE also possesses two crucial properties. The first is the ability to measure the code contained within the enclave. The second property is attestation, which allows the enclave to provide a verified signature that confirms the trustworthiness of what is held within it. This feature allows software outside of the enclave to establish trust with the code inside, allowing for the safe exchange of data and keys while protecting the data from the hosting environment. This includes hosting operating systems, hypervisors, management software and services, and even the operators of the environment.

Regarding what is not confidential computing, it is not other privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) like homomorphic encryption or secure multiparty computation. It is hardware rooted, trusted execution environments with attestation.

In Azure, confidential computing is integrated into our overall defense in depth strategy, which includes trusted launch, customer managed keys, Managed HSM, Microsoft Azure Attestation, and confidential virtual machine guest attestation integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Customer adoption patterns

With regards to customer adoption scenarios for confidential computing, we see customers across regulated industries such as the public sector, healthcare, and financial services ranging from private to public cloud migrations and cloud native workloads. One scenario that I'm really excited about is multi-party computations and analytics where you have multiple parties bringing their data together, in what is now being called data clean rooms, to perform computation on that data and get back insights that are much richer than what they would have gotten off their own data set alone. Confidential computing addresses the regulatory and privacy concerns around sharing this sensitive data with third parties. One of my favorite examples of this is in the advertising industry, where the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has set up a clean room solution where they take merchant purchasing data and combine it with their information around the consumers credit card transactions to get a full picture of what the consumer is doing. Using these insights, RBC’s credit card merchants can then offer their consumer very precise offers that are tailored to them, all without RBC seeing or revealing any confidential information from the consumers or the merchants. I believe that this architecture is the future of advertising.

Another exciting multi-party use case is BeeKeeperAI’s application of confidential computing and machine learning to accelerate the development of effective drug therapies. Until recently, drug researchers have been hampered by inaccessibility of patient data due to strict regulations applied to the sharing of personal health information (PHI). Confidential computing removes this bottleneck by ensuring that PHI is protected not just at rest and when transmitted, but also while in use, thus eliminating the need for data providers to anonymize this data before sharing it with researchers. And it is not just the data that confidential computing is protecting, but also the AI models themselves. These models can be expensive to train and therefore are valuable pieces of intellectual property that need to be protected.

To allow these valuable AI models to remain confidential yet scale, Azure is collaborating with NVIDIA to deploy confidential graphics processing units (GPUs) on Azure based on NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU.

Current challenges

Regarding the challenges facing confidential computing, they tended to fall into four broad categories:

Availability, regional, and across services. Newer technologies are in limited supply or still in development, yet Azure has remained a leader in bringing to market services based on Intel^® Software Guard Extensions (Intel^® SGX) and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP). We are the first major cloud provider to offer confidential virtual machines based on Intel^® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel^® TDX) and we look forward to being one of the first cloud providers to offer confidential NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. We see availability rapidly improving over the next 12 to 24 months.

Ease of adoption for developers and end users. The first generation of confidential computing services, based on Intel SGX technology, required rewriting of code and working with various open source tools to make applications confidential computing enabled. Microsoft and our partners have collaborated on these open source tools and we have an active community of partners running their Intel SGX solutions on Azure. The newer generation of confidential virtual machines on Azure, using AMD SEV-SNP, a hardware security feature enabled by AMD Infinity Gaurd and and Intel TDX, lets users run off-the-shelf operating systems, lift and shift their sensitive workloads, and run them confidentially. We are also using this technology to offer confidential containers in Azure which allows users to run their existing container images confidentially.

Performance and interoperability. We need to ensure that confidential computing does not mean slower computing. The issue becomes more important with accelerators like GPUs where the data must be protected as it moves between the central processing unit (CPU) and the accelerator. Advances in this area will come from continued collaboration with standards committees such as the PCI-SIG, which has issued the TEE Device Interface Security Protocol (TDISP) for secure PCIe bus communication and the CXL Consortium which has issued the Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) specification for the secure sharing of memory among processors. Open source projects like Caliptra which has created the specification, silicon logic, have read-only memory (ROM), and firmware for implementing a Root of Trust for Measurement (RTM) block inside a system on chip (SoC).

Industry awareness. While confidential computing adoption is growing, awareness among IT and security professionals is still low. There is a tremendous opportunity for all confidential computing vendors to collaborate and participate in events aimed at raising awareness of this technology to key decision-makers such as CISOs, CIOs, and policymakers. This is especially relevant in industries such as government and other regulated sectors where the handling of highly sensitive data is critical. By promoting the benefits of confidential computing and increasing adoption rates, we can establish it as a necessary requirement for handling sensitive data. Through these efforts, we can work together to foster greater trust in the cloud and build a more secure and reliable digital ecosystem for all.

The future of confidential computing

When the discussion turned to the future of confidential computing, I had the opportunity to reinforce Azure's vision for the confidential cloud, where all services will run in trusted execution environments. As this vision becomes a reality, confidential computing will no longer be a specialty feature but rather the standard for all computing tasks. In this way, the concept of confidential computing will simply become synonymous with computing itself.

Finally, all panelists agreed that the biggest advances in confidential computing will be the result of industry collaboration.

Microsoft at OC3

In addition to the panel discussion, Microsoft participated in several other presentations at OC3 that you may find of interest:

Finally, I would like to encourage our readers to learn about Greg Lavender’s thoughts on OC3 2023.

All product names, logos, and brands mentioned above are properties of their respective owners.

Microsoft Cost Management updates—April 2023

Michael Flanakin — Wed, 03 May 2023 09:00:04 Z

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

FinOps Foundation announces a new specification project to demystify cloud billing data.
Centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is generally available.
Scheduled alerts in Azure Government.
Register for Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure.
Register for Optimize your IT costs with Azure Monitor.
Cut costs with AI-powered productivity in Microsoft Teams.
3 ways to reduce costs with Microsoft Teams Phone.
What's new in Cost Management Labs.
New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.

Let's dig into the details.

FinOps Foundation announced a new specification project to demystify cloud billing data

Microsoft partnered with FinOps Foundation and Google to launch FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), a technical project to build and maintain an open specification for cloud cost data. As one of the key contributors and principal steering committee members for this project, we’re incredibly excited about the potential value this will bring for organizations of all sizes.

Some of the benefits you’ll see include the ability to:

Better understand how they’re being charged across services and especially cloud providers.
Reduce data ingestion and normalization requirements.
Streamline reporting and monitoring efforts, like cost allocation and showback.
Leverage shared guidance across the industry for how to monitor and manage costs.

FOCUS will play a major role in the evolution of the FinOps Framework and its guidance as it drives more consistency in how to analyze and communicate changes in cost, including anything from measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) to managing anomalies and commitment-based discounts to tracking resource utilization and more.

To learn more, read the FinOps Foundation announcement and join us at FinOps X, where we’ll announce an initial draft release. All FOCUS steering committee members will be on-site for deeper discussions about its roadmap and implementation.

Centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is generally available

If you’re migrating from on-premises to the cloud, Azure Hybrid Benefit should be part of your cost optimization plan. Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps customers significantly reduce the costs of running their workloads in the cloud. It works by letting customers use their on-premises licenses with active Software Assurance or subscription-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure. You can also leverage active Linux subscriptions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise server running in Azure. Traditionally, you would track available licenses that you’re using with Azure Hybrid Benefit internally and compare that with cost reports available from Cost Management Power BI reports, which can be tedious. With centralized management, you can assign SQL Server licenses to individual subscriptions or share them across an entire billing account to let the cloud manage the licenses for you, maximizing your benefit and sustaining compliance with less effort.

Centralized management of Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is now generally available.

To learn more, see Azure Hybrid Benefit documentation.

Scheduled alerts in Azure Government

Last month, you saw the addition of scheduled alerts for built-in views in Cost analysis. This month, we’re happy to announce that scheduled alerts are now available for Azure Government. Scheduled alerts allow you to get notified on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis about changes in cost by sending a picture of a chart view in Cost analysis to a list of recipients. You can even send it to stakeholders who don’t have direct access to costs in the Azure portal. To learn more, see subscribe to scheduled alerts.

Register for Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure

Did you know you can lower operating costs by up to 40 percent when you migrate Windows Server and SQL Server to Azure versus on-premises?¹ Furthermore, you can improve IT efficiency and operating costs by up to 53 percent by automating management of your virtual machines in cloud and hybrid environments. To maximize the value of your existing cloud investments, you can utilize tools like Microsoft Cost Management and Azure Advisor. A recent study showed that our customers achieve up to 34 percent reduction in Azure spend in the first year by using Microsoft Cost Management. To learn more about how to achieve efficiency and maximize cloud value with Azure, join us and register for Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure, a free digital event on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

To learn more, see 5 reasons to join us at Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure.

Register for Optimize Your IT Costs with Azure Monitor

Join the Azure Monitor engineering team on May 17, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time, as they continue to listen and respond to feedback to ensure your corporate priorities are kept at the forefront!

The Azure Monitor team introduced some new pricing plans that can drive costs down without compromising performance. The team has taken some of the key points along with valuable guidance and best practices and will share it during this webinar.

In this webinar, you will learn:

New Azure Monitor pricing plans and different scenarios in which the new price plan can be applied.
Other levers that you can take advantage of to optimize your monitoring costs.
No regret moves you can implement today to start realizing cost savings.

Register for Optimize your IT costs with Azure Monitor and join us on May 17, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

Cut costs with AI-powered productivity in Microsoft Teams

As we face economic uncertainties and changes to work patterns, organizations are searching for ways to optimize IT investments and re-energize employees to achieve business results. Now—more than ever—organizations need solutions to adapt to change, improve productivity, and reduce costs. Fortunately, modern tools powered by AI hold the promise to boost individual, team, and organizational-level productivity and fundamentally change how we work, including intelligent recap for meetings in Microsoft Teams Premium with AI-augmented video recordings, AI-generated notes, and AI-generated tasks and action items, reusable meeting templates, and more.

To learn more, see Microsoft Teams Premium: Cut costs and add AI-powered productivity.

3 ways to reduce costs with Microsoft Teams Phone

As the way we work evolves, today’s organizations need cost-effective, reliable telephony solutions that help them support flexible work and truly bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Our customers are searching for products that help them promote an inclusive working environment and streamline communications. And they need solutions that simplify their technological footprint and cut the cost of legacy IT solutions and other non-essential expenses.

After examining the potential ROI that companies may realize by implementing Teams Phone, a recent study found that businesses could:

Reduce licensing and usage costs.
Minimize the burden on IT.
Help people save time and collaborate more effectively.

To learn more, including customer quotes, see 3 ways to improve productivity and reduce costs with Microsoft Teams Phone.

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Microsoft Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

New: Settings in the cost analysis preview—Enabled by default in Labs.
Get quick access to cost-impacting settings from the Cost analysis preview. You will see this by default in Labs and can enable the option from the try preview menu.
Update: Customers view for Cloud Solution Provider partnersCustomers view for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners—Now enabled by default in Labs.
View a breakdown of costs by customer and subscription in the Cost analysis preview. Note this view is only available for CSP billing accounts and billing profiles. You will see this by default in Labs and can enable the option from the Try preview menu.
Merge cost analysis menu items.
Only show one cost analysis item in the Cost Management menu. All classic and saved views are one-click away, making them easier than ever to find and access. You can enable this option from the try preview menu.
Recommendations view.
View a summary of cost recommendations that help you optimize your Azure resources in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using the try preview menu.
Forecast in the cost analysis preview.
Show your forecast cost for the period at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try preview.
Group related resources in the cost analysis preview.
Group related resources, like disks under virtual machinesVMs or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID.
Charts in the cost analysis preview.
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
View cost for your resources.
The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that resource.
Change scope from the menu.
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Microsoft Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal or Microsoft 365 admin center. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the last month! Here are 10 general availability offers you might be interested in:

And six new preview offers:

New videos and learning opportunities

Here’s one new video you might be interested in:

Optimize IT investments to maximize efficiency and reduce cloud spend (10 minutes).

Follow the Microsoft Cost Management YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Microsoft Cost Management.

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

New: Calculate Enterprise Agreement (EA) savings plan cost savings.
Updated: Understand usage details fields.
Updated: Group and allocate costs using tag inheritance.
Updated: Allocate Azure costs.
Updated: EA Billing administration on the Azure portal.
Updated: Create a Microsoft Customer Agreement subscription.
Updated: Change an Azure reservation directory.
Updated: Optimize Azure Synapse Analytics costs with a Pre-Purchase Plan.
22 updates based on your feedback.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @MSCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Microsoft Cost Management.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team. Stay safe and stay healthy.

¹ Forrester Consulting, "The Total Economic Impact™ of Azure Cost Management and Billing", February 2021.

Preparing for future health emergencies with Azure HPC

Rudeon Snell — Wed, 03 May 2023 08:00:31 Z

A once-in-a-century global health emergency accelerates worldwide healthcare innovation and novel medical breakthroughs, all supported by powerful high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities.

COVID-19 has forever changed how nations function in the globally interconnected economy. To this day, it continues to affect and shape how countries respond to health emergencies. COVID-19 has demonstrated just how interconnected our society is and how risks, threats, and contagions can have global implications for many aspects of our daily lives.

COVID-19 was the largest global health emergency in over a century, with nearly 762 million cases reported as of the end of March 2023, according to the World Health Organization. The National Centre for Biotechnology Information points out the frequency and breath of new variants that continues to emerge at regular intervals. In response to this intricate health crisis, the global healthcare community quickly mobilized to better understand the virus, learn its behavior, and work toward preventative treatment measures to minimize the damage to lives across the world. Globally, nations mobilized resources for frontline workers, offered social protection to those most severely affected, and provided vaccine access for the billions who need it.

Recent technological innovations have provided the medical community with access to capabilities, such as HPC, that equipped healthcare professionals to better study, understand, and respond to COVID-19. Globally, healthcare innovators could access unprecedented computing power to design, test, and develop new treatments, faster, better, and more iteratively, than ever before.

Today, Azure HPC enables researchers to unleash the next generation of healthcare breakthroughs. For example, the computational capabilities offered by the Azure HPC HB-series virtual machines, powered by AMD EPYCTM CPU cores, allowed researchers to accelerate insights and advances into genomics, precision medicine, and clinical trials, with near-infinite high-performance bioinformatics infrastructure capabilities.

Since the beginning of COVID-19, companies have been leveraging Azure HPC to develop new treatments, run simulations, and testing at scale—all in preparation for the next health emergency. Azure HPC is helping companies unleash new treatments and health cure capabilities that are ushering in the next generation of treatments and healthcare capabilities, across the entire industry.

High-performance computing making a difference

A leading immunotherapy company partnered with Microsoft to leverage the capabilities of Azure HPC’s high-performance computing, in order to perform detailed computational analyses of the spike protein structure of SARS-CoV-2. Due to the critical nature of the spike protein structure and the role it plays in allowing the invasion of human cells, targeting it for study, analyses, and insights, is a crucial step in the development of treatments to combat the virus.

The company’s engineers and scientists collaborated with Microsoft, and quickly deployed HPC clusters on Azure, containing over 1250 core graphic processing units (GPUs). These GPUs are specifically designed for machine learning and similarly intense computational applications. The Azure HPC clusters augmented the company’s existing GPU clusters—which was already optimized for molecular modelling of proteins, antibodies, and antivirals—bringing a truly high-powered scaled engagement approach to fruition.

By collaborating with Microsoft in this way and making use of the massive, networked computing capabilities and advanced algorithms enabled by Azure HPC, the company was able to generate working models in days rather than the months it would have taken by following traditional approaches.

The incredible amount of computing power will help bolster drug discovery and therapeutic developments. By joining forces and bringing together the incredible power of Azure HPC and cutting edge immunotherapies, it helped contribute to the development of models that allowed researchers to better understand the virus, find novel binding sites to fight the virus, and ultimately guide the development of future treatments and vaccines for the virus.

Powering pharmaceutical research and innovation

The healthcare industry is making remarkable strides in the development of cutting-edge treatments and innovations that are geared towards solving some of the world's greatest healthcare challenges.

For example, researchers are leveraging HPC to transform their research and development effort as well as accelerating the development of new life-saving treatments.

Using a technique producing amorphous solid dispersions (ASD), drug researchers break up active pharmaceutical ingredients and blend them with organic polymers to improve the dissolution rate, bioavailability, and solubility of drug delivery systems. Although a wonder of modern medicine, it is a highly complicated, often lab-based process that can take months.

Swiss-based Molecular Modelling Laboratory (MML), a leader in ASD screening, wanted to pivot its drug research and development to small organic and biomolecular polymers. This approach determines ASD stability prior to formulation, reveals new ASD combinations, enhances drug safety, and helps reduce drug development costs as well as delivery times.

MML chose to leverage Azure HPC resources on more than 18,000 Azure HBv2 virtual machines and to optimize high-throughput drug screening and active pharmaceutical ingredient solubility limit detection, with the aim to alleviate common development hurdles.

The adoption of Azure HPC has helped MML shift from a small start-up to an established business working with some of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world—all in a very short time.

For the global healthcare community, the computational power and scalability of Azure HPC presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate pharmaceutical, medical, as well as health innovation. Azure HPC will continue playing a leading role in supporting the healthcare industry to respond optimally to any future global health emergency that may arise.

Next steps

To request a demo, contact HPCdemo@microsoft.com.
Learn more about Azure HPC.
High-performance computing documentation.
View our HPC cloud journey infographic.

Azure Virtual WAN introduces its first SaaS offering

Reshmi Yandapalli — Tue, 02 May 2023 09:00:17 Z

Today we are excited to announce the preview of Palo Alto Networks Cloud Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) for Azure, available as a software as a service (SaaS) offering in Azure Virtual WAN. Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN), networking as a service brings networking, security, and routing functionalities together to simplify networking in Azure. With ease of use and simplicity built in, vWAN is a one-stop shop to connect, protect, route traffic, and monitor your wide area network.

Virtual WAN’s deep integration with the Palo Alto Networks managed firewall service allows you to enjoy the simplicity of a SaaS security offering without the hassles of managing provisioning, scaling, resiliency, software updates, or routing. A SaaS model enables a customer to deploy a solution by simply supplying necessary parameters and abstracting themselves from the management of network virtual appliances.

In this blog, we will focus on the Virtual WAN use case, followed by a brief overview of the behind-the-scenes secret sauce that makes it happen, and then understanding key Palo Alto Networks differentiating features.

The use case

Customers of Azure Virtual WAN can now use Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure to secure their traffic through their Virtual WAN deployments.

The different traffic flows that are supported by a customer’s vWAN deployment are illustrated below. Flows are numbered in the table below with the following assumptions:

‘B’ stands for a Branch which is a customer’s on-premises network connected to Azure through ExpressRoute circuits, Branch/Site-to-site VPN, or Remote user/Point-to-site connections.
‘V’ stands for VNet—Azure Virtual networks hosting customer services and connected to a Virtual WAN hub. It may also be referred to as spoke VNet.
‘I’ stands for internet, which means the customer traffic that originates from or terminates in the internet and traverses through Azure Virtual WAN.
‘H’ stands for Azure Virtual hub.
Traffic flows across a single hub are traffic flows originating and terminating on endpoints connected to the same virtual hub. These may also be referred to as Intra-hub flows.
Inter-hub flows are traffic flows that traverse across 2 virtual hubs to get to the destination.

Figure 1: Supported use case and traffic flows in Azure Virtual WAN with Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

User experience

Customers can add Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW to an Azure Virtual WAN Hub in the Azure portal. After a hub is created, click on the hub name and navigate to Third-party Providers -> SaaS solutions –> Create SaaS and choose the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW option.

Figure 2: Discover Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

After clicking “Create”, you’ll be taken to a wizard experience where you can configure and customize your Cloud NGFW SaaS deployment. You can customize key networking and security attributes of your SaaS such as selecting public Ips, DNS proxy settings, security policies, and security settings.

Figure 3: Create and set up security settings in Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

After the Cloud NGFW has been successfully provisioned, you can manage your SaaS Firewall by navigating to your Virtual Hub -> Third-party providers -> SaaS solutions -> Manage SaaS. Explore here for more information on available options.

How does this all work within Virtual WAN

As mentioned in the prior section, Virtual WAN supports multiple flows. To illustrate the behind-the-scenes workings in Virtual WAN, we will use East-West (V2V) traffic flows.

Figure 4: Traffic flows within Virtual WAN for East-West (V2V) traffic to-fro Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW.

As you can see, the complexities of traffic engineering, and infrastructure management are completely removed and the user gets to just focus on securing the right security policies for their network traffic.

Key highlights of the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure integration with Virtual WAN

Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure integrates with Azure Virtual WAN deployments, enabling customers to protect traffic across their entire network. While there are several cool and turn-key features built into the integration, a few that are worth calling out are below:

Machine learning powered NGFW: Cloud NGFW for Azure uses AI and machine learning to detect and stop known, unknown, and zero-day threats, enabling customers to stay ahead of sophisticated adversaries.
Consistent Security and Management from On-Premises to Azure: Cloud NGFW for Azure is integrated with Panorama, Palo Alto Networks policy management solution. The integration of Panorama with Cloud NGFW for Azure offers a host of benefits to customers. Firstly, it enables seamless security policy extension from on-prem to Azure, simplifying operations and reducing administrative workload and total cost of ownership. More importantly, this integration enforces the same high standards of security in the cloud, ensuring that customers’ cloud environments are secure and protected against cyber threats. Additionally, the integration provides centralized visibility, providing valuable insights into the threats on their network enabling customers to manage their security policies through their existing Panorama console, streamlining management, allowing their cloud teams to focus on application migration and new application development.
Ease of use: Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW is designed to be incredibly easy to use. Similar to Virtual WAN product principles for simplicity and ease of use, this Palo Alto Networks integrated solution allows customers to procure and deploy the solution directly from the Azure portal in just a few minutes, providing instant protection against cyber threats. The solution is also painless to operate as Palo Alto Networks takes care of scaling, resilience, and software updates. This integration gives customers the agility and flexibility they need to manage their cloud security while focusing on their core business objectives.

We want your feedback

We look forward to continuing to build out Azure Virtual WAN and adding more capabilities in the future. We encourage you to try out Azure Virtual WAN and the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW SaaS and look forward to hearing more about your experiences to incorporate your feedback into the product.

Learn more

For additional information, please explore these resources:

Secure your cloud environment with Cloud Next-Generation Firewall by Palo Alto Networks, an Azure Native ISV Service—now in preview

Rohit Tatachar — Tue, 02 May 2023 08:00:16 Z

To support our customers in accelerating their digital transformation journey and protecting their cloud environment against threats, Microsoft is committed to giving customers the best possible options for securing their applications. To accelerate that commitment, we are excited to announce the preview of Cloud Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) for Azure.

Cloud NGFW for Azure is Palo Alto Networks NGFW delivered as a managed service on Microsoft Azure. It enables you to easily utilize Palo Alto Networks best-in-class network security capabilities on Azure, and you can manage it using either Palo Alto Networks Panorama policy management solution or directly from the Azure portal. Cloud NGFW for Azure combines the scalability and reliability of Microsoft Azure with Palo Alto Networks deep expertise in network security.

“At Microsoft, we are dedicated to ensuring that Microsoft Azure is the most trusted and secure cloud platform. With the preview release of the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure, we are pleased to expand our ecosystem of native ISV solutions and provide customers and developers with more options to meet their security needs. This collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft combines the scalability and reliability of Azure with Palo Alto Networks expertise to help safeguard our customers against the latest threats.”—Julia Liuson President, Microsoft Developer Division at Microsoft.

"More and more of our customers are running their business critical applications in Azure and are looking to us to help keep those workloads secure. With Cloud NGFW for Azure we are excited to combine Palo Alto Networks best-in-class security with the scalability and reliability of Azure to provide our mutual customers the ability to run their applications with confidence. As a managed Azure Native ISV service, we are proud to deliver the ease of use customers expect from a cloud native experience.”—Lee Klarich, Chief Product Officer, Palo Alto Networks.

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall is available on Azure

Palo Alto Networks is a leader in cloud security and provides next-generation cybersecurity to thousands of customers globally, across all sectors. With the integration of Cloud NGFW for Azure into the Azure ecosystem we are delivering an integrated experience and empowering a growing ecosystem of developers and customers to help protect their organizations on Azure.

Cloud NGFW for Azure is offered through Azure Marketplace and offers many of the same capabilities as Palo Alto Networks hardware firewalls and virtualized next-generation firewalls as a managed service, making it easily scalable for cloud environments.

We are excited to work with Palo Alto Networks to provide powerful capabilities to Azure customers, including:

Security: Palo Alto Networks provides a rich set of security features thanks to its unique machine learning (ML) powered NGFW. Cloud NGFW for Azure uses AI and ML behind the scenes to detect and stop known, unknown, and zero-day threats, enabling customers to stay ahead of sophisticated adversaries. This advanced technology has allowed Palo Alto Networks to block nearly 5 billion events each day, demonstrating the effectiveness of this solution in providing robust security to customers.
Ease of Use: Cloud NGFW for Azure is designed to be incredibly easy to use, thanks to its Azure-native ISV Service architecture. This enables customers to procure and deploy the solution directly from the Azure portal in just a few minutes, providing instant protection against cyber threats. The solution is also very easy to operate as Palo Alto Networks takes care of scaling, resilience, and software updates. Cloud NGFW for Azure integrates seamlessly with your network in Azure enabling you to protect traffic across their entire estate. This integration provides customers with the agility and flexibility they need to manage their cloud security while focusing on their core business objectives.
Consistent Management from On-Prem to Cloud: Cloud NGFW for Azure is integrated with their Panorama policy management solution. This combination offers a host of benefits to our mutual customers. Firstly, it enables seamless security policy extension from on-prem to Azure, simplifying operations and reducing administrative workload and total cost of ownership. More importantly, this integration enforces the same high standards of security in the cloud, ensuring that customers’ cloud environments are secure and protected against cyber threats. Additionally, integration provides centralized visibility, providing valuable insights into the threats on their network from on-prem environments to the cloud. This enables customers to manage their security policies through their existing Panorama console, streamlining management, allowing their cloud teams to focus on application migration and new application development.

Do more with less

We have invested in a deeply integrated experience with Palo Alto Networks on Azure including some of the key capabilities listed below to help you do more with less.

Seamless end user experience

We collaborated closely with Palo Alto Networks to develop Cloud NGFW for Azure, and tested it with our joint customers. Cloud NGFW for Azure provides a seamless and simplified end user experience for Cloud NGFW for Azure by integrating the deployment, management, billing, and support of the Palo Alto Networks solution on Azure, available via Azure Marketplace.

Cloud NGFW for Azure also provides integrated billing with Azure subscription invoicing, deep integrations with Azure services for role-based access control (RBAC) and identity management, and a unified support model. This service gives the user consistency in performance and security across their portfolio of on-prem and Azure cloud apps by using the same security solution and configurations everywhere.

Deploy in minutes

Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW is deeply integrated into the Azure ecosystem. Through this deep integration, users can provision a new Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall in a matter of minutes, so they can quickly secure their Azure applications.

Run where you want

Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure can be deployed into both Virtual Networks and Virtual WAN hubs, and integrated with Azure Key Vault so even encrypted communications can be inspected for security. Cloud NGFW for Azure can be deployed into your Virtual Network automatically using a custom solution via service injection, and user-defined routing can be applied to route traffic to-and-from Cloud NGFW for Azure for inspection.

Customers who want a fully managed network-as-a-service with routing can also choose to deploy the solution in a Virtual WA. Virtual WAN abstracts and simplifies the complexity of routing within a large hybrid network that spans on-premises and Azure at-scale. Configuring routing in Virtual WAN to send traffic to Cloud NGFW for Azure as a bump-in-the-wire solution requires just a single click with the Virtual WAN's routing engine handling the rest of the routing.

Getting started with Cloud NGFW for Azure

Discovery and procuring: Azure customers can find the Palo Alto Networks service listed on Azure Marketplace, review the different purchasing plans offered, and procure it directly with single billing enabled:

Provisioning the Palo Alto Networks resources: Within several clicks, you can deploy Palo Alto Networks service in your desired subscription and datacenter regions with your preferred plan.

ISC 2023: Experience the power of HPC in the cloud with Microsoft Azure

Rachel Pruitt — Mon, 01 May 2023 08:00:02 Z

The ISC High-Performance Event (ISC), formerly known as International Supercomputing Conference, is one of the most important events in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry, bringing together some of the world's most prominent researchers, developers, vendors, and users to discuss the latest advancements in HPC technology. Microsoft Azure has had a major presence at ISC for several years now, and this year's conference will be no exception.

Looking back at ISC 2022

At ISC 2022, we showcased the latest HPC solutions for Azure HPC, including the general availability of several new products. These solutions are designed to help organizations of all sizes take advantage of the power and flexibility of Azure for their HPC workloads.

Key themes for us in the past have been around showcasing our latest advancements in HPC and AI infrastructure, and how our solutions can help businesses accelerate their research, streamline their operations, and achieve their business goals. In addition, we demonstrated the value of our partnerships with various industry leaders and how we collectively enable customers to leverage the latest technologies in HPC and AI. We also highlighted our commitment to providing secure and scalable cloud solutions to meet the demands of the most complex workloads.

Key themes to help businesses at ISC 2023

As we look forward to the upcoming event, these key themes are even more important to discuss with customers and find ways for them to do more with less in this environment of macroeconomic uncertainty. Our experts combined with our key partners in this space are truly incredible at helping businesses optimize their cloud spend and leverage the best technology for the right ROI to get the fastest results possible.

AI is also a key theme in our current landscape, with big breakthroughs happening recently in this space, and will flow through into our presence at the event. Whether you’re working on image and speech recognition, natural language processing, or predictive modeling, a powerful infrastructure is needed to power and accelerate these workloads.

This year we’re a silver sponsor for the ISC 2023 event. We’ll have both a booth on-site (C318) and a virtual presence. We’ll have several presentations per day around key topics in the HPC and AI spaces, given by Microsoft experts and partners. We’ll also have some presentations from customers, where you can learn more about how other companies are accelerating their workloads on the cloud and ask questions.

Vendor Showdown

Antigoni Chrysostomou, Director Specialist Management, Microsoft.

Come hear about the following topics in this year’s Vendor Showdown:

Microsoft's strategy to continue investing in the newest CPUs and graphic processing units (GPUs) with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA—building genuine HPC and AI infrastructure at scale.
How we are running Linux on our HPC systems and we can run message passing interface (MPI) jobs on Azure.
How Azure is achieving world-class performance optimized often with special versions of CPUs not available on prem or with other cloud vendors on the market.
Microsoft’s strategy around AI infrastructure for training AI models.
Quantum Computing and the ability to run quantum use cases on today’s HPC infrastructure.
Examples of how we help customers achieve more.

HPC Solutions Forum

Hall H, Booth K1001—Ground Floor on Tuesday, May 23, 2023, from 1:40 PM to 2:00 PM CEST.

HPC infrastructure for AI outcomes: Learning at large scale—Monday, May 22, 2023. Time to be announced.

Gabrielle Davelaar

Senior AI Lead Global Black Belt, Microsoft.

Karl Podesta

Senior Specialist, Microsoft Azure HPC.

Microsoft Azure claims five entries in the top 50 supercomputers in the world (November 2022). These entries are each smaller parts of larger systems, at separate sites. As a part of public cloud infrastructure, they are used by customers all over the world for running both HPC and large AI models. They are also used by Microsoft itself. Our partnerships (such as with NVIDIA and OpenAI) help us to run some of the largest AI models in the world and bring this intelligence directly into the entire suite of Microsoft products, from Windows to Office to Bing (and Azure itself, too). Come and learn some of what we have learned from training, deploying, and running the world’s largest AI models, on some of the world’s largest HPC infrastructure—and our thoughts on how this relates to sustainability and powering the future.

Want to keep an eye on what’s happening? Check out our ISC 2023 website, which we’ll continue to update as plans are solidified.

Newest advancements since ISC 2022

Azure HBv4-series and HX-series virtual machines, now in preview

In November 2022, the latest advancements in purpose-built virtual machines targeted for HPC workloads brought the HBv4-series and HX-series, powered by long awaited, newest 4th Gen EPYCTM AMD processors, codenamed ‘Genoa.’ The HBv4-series is the next generation of our long running, flagship HB-series, and brings significant improvements to key workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis, frontend and backend electronic design automation (EDA), rendering, molecular dynamics, computational geoscience, weather simulation, AI inference, and financial risk analysis. The brand new HX-series is a significant step towards delivering the best platform for silicon design, with higher memory capacity and is designed to support ever growing models that are becoming more commonplace among chip designers.

Azure Managed Lustre, now in preview

In February 2023 we launched Azure Managed Lustre in preview, a new storage offering for Azure HPC. Lustre is an open-source parallel file system renowned for HPC and is adept at large-scale cluster computing. Azure Managed Lustre (preview) provides high-performance storage of Lustre with the control and consistency of Azure. As a result, customers can focus on their business goals, whether that’s building a fraud detection system based on statistical analysis system (SAS) analytics or decoding the human genome to create the next breakthrough in medicine.

Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines, now generally available

The new Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines became generally available in June 2022, featuring NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs and enhanced performance capabilities for graphics-intensive processing workloads. These virtual machines are ideal for graphics-intensive applications for CAD, architecture engineering and construction (AEC), gaming, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and provide customers with flexible, scalable solutions to meet their computing needs. With GPU partitioning (1/8 to 2 full GPUs available), these new virtual machines lower the barrier to entry for companies wanting to leverage GPUs, where a full GPU is not necessary. We encourage customers to explore the new capabilities of Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines and experience the benefits of advanced graphics processing for their business.

See what our customers have been up to

	Moody’s Analytics Moody's Analytics collaborated with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable cloud HPC solution to support its insurance financial intelligence platform. By leveraging Azure virtual machine scale sets and Azure HPC SKUs, Moody's was able to efficiently scale its infrastructure to support dynamic workloads, improve application performance, and reduce operational costs. As a result of this partnership, Moody's Analytics was able to enhance its customer experience and provide more accurate, reliable, and timely financial analysis to the insurance industry.
	Climavision Climavision partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable and reliable cloud solution to support its advanced weather forecasting technology. With Azure's AI and analytics capabilities, Climavision was able to improve its weather prediction accuracy and provide real-time, hyperlocal weather insights to its customers. By leveraging Azure's secure and flexible cloud platform, Climavision was able to enhance its operational efficiency and achieve significant business growth.
	UD Trucks UD Trucks collaborated with Microsoft to develop an advanced HPC and AI infrastructure to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its manufacturing processes. By leveraging Azure's HPC capabilities and machine learning algorithms, UD Trucks was able to streamline its supply chain operations and enhance its vehicle design process. With Azure's secure and scalable cloud platform, UD Trucks was able to achieve significant cost savings and position itself for future growth in the automotive industry.
	Encina Chemicals Encina Chemicals partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable, secure, and flexible cloud solution to optimize its manufacturing processes, reduce time to solution, and increase the possibility of running larger and more sophisticated domain models that incorporate more detailed physics and more complex chemical reactions. Azure's integrated AI and analytics capabilities enabled Encina Chemicals to automate quality control, optimize production, and reduce waste—leading to significant cost savings, increased efficiency, and better resource sustainability. Using Azure HPC allowed taking leaps in sustainability initiatives instead of slowly creeping forward with preexisting technology. The simulations generated precise, actionable data used in the design of a cutting-edge recycling facility allowing Encina Chemicals and other sustainability startups to use faster, less expensive modeling in Azure to help them deploy and scale modeling innovative ideas with confidence.

Learn more about Azure HPC and ISC 2023

Here are some key places for you to learn more about Azure HPC and our presence at the ISC High-Performance Event 2023:

Keep up on our presence at ISC 2023.
See what we have available for Azure high-performance computing.
View how Microsoft, AMD, and NetApp are supporting EDA workloads.
Learn how Azure is enabling AI workloads with AI infrastructure.
Visit our hub for all technical content for high-performance computing.

Managing IP with Microsoft Azure and Cliosoft

Rachel Pruitt — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 09:00:06 Z

This blog was co-authored by Fernando Aznar Cornejo, AMD Partner Development Manager; Nathaniel Lum, Senior Applications Engineer, Cliosoft; Amit Varde, Director – Solutions Engineering, Cliosoft.

Intellectual Property (IP) is a critical asset for technology companies, encompassing a company's patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. For technology companies, IP often refers to source code or design, which is the foundation of their products and services. Therefore, protecting IP is crucial to a company's success, and proper management of IP data and processes is equally essential.

As technology companies have grown and become more geographically diverse, managing IP data and processes have become more complex. Companies now need to be able to build geographically diverse teams and design centers, adding new complexity and challenges to IP data and process management. With the advent of cloud computing, companies are leveraging the power of the cloud for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. This move to the cloud has made effective and efficient IP data management a necessity.

Managing revisions of IPs is a fundamental requirement, but IP data governance, traceability, and security are equally important. These requirements have led to the development of IP management platforms, which are designed to meet the unique needs of technology companies. Ultimately, using an IP management system enables companies to collaborate efficiently with accuracy, secure their IP, track the expertise of their employees, and comply with regulatory requirements.

Companies that work on hardware, software, or both must manage IP data and processes holistically on a Unified IP Management Platform. This platform must provide revision and release control for geographically and functionally diverse teams of engineers and managers contributing to the company's intellectual property development process. This is where the power of using HPC platforms on the cloud is most apparent.

Knowing your key requirements for an IP management system

During the product design process, several features are needed to ensure companies are getting the most out of their IP management system. If you’re looking to implement an IP management system, look to ensure your system has the following elements.

Version control tools that provide three main features: reversibility, concurrency, and annotation, which help engineering teams manage their source code or design. Integrating version control with IP editor tools improves productivity for engineering teams by making data sharing more efficient and reducing errors. A centralized repository that helps engineers synchronize their work more frequently and improves collaborations by allowing engineers to see who is working on what and stay up-to-date on changes.
Technology design often has large files, so an IP management system needs to provide viable options to mitigate the problem and manage data management at scale powered with technology such as a network storage optimization.
IP traceability is a key feature of an IP management system, that helps with Bill of Materials (BOM) Management, IP Provenance tracking, and data analytics
IP Reuse: To maximize the company's return on invested time, money, and efforts, engineering teams need a central catalog of IPs to search and browse for all available IPs. Engineers need access to real-time, accurate information about the IP. The catalog of IPs must provide comprehensive dependency tracking. Engineers and managers must be able to report the Bill of Materials (BOM) for every project or IP in the catalog and provide an IP consumers' report, including detailed information on the products using the IP.
Long term return on investment (ROI) stemming from a system that can track IP over time. Companies spend a lot of time, money and effort to develop the IP, so having a system that can access real-time and historical knowledge about IP is paramount.

Using Cliosoft on Microsoft Azure

Cliosoft’s Data and IP Management platform ensures teams can create, manage, and store their documents, scripts, methodologies, and ideas seamlessly. In addition, Cliosoft HUB addresses the size and complexities of today’s IP management. Used in combination, users can accurately manage their intellectual property.

Microsoft Azure’s purpose-built HPC platform offers industry-leading security, scalability, and flexible use models to meet the demands of the most complex high-performance computing workloads. The availability of Azure’s virtual machines means having large amounts of compute available, which gives companies the flexibility to scale up and down depending on their IP management needs.

By implementing a well-designed Cliosoft IP Source Code Management Platform on Microsoft Azure, enterprise customers can leverage the power of both systems to achieve high scalability, collaboration, availability, and reliability in their product development cycles. This solution provides companies with the tools they need to manage their IP data and processes holistically, ensuring that they can develop high-quality intellectual property while reducing development times and costs.

Moving Forward

IP is a critical asset for technology companies, and proper management of IP data and processes is essential for a company's success. The move to cloud computing has made effective and efficient IP data management a necessity. Cliosoft and Microsoft Azure provide a solution for managing IP source code in technology development, offering a platform that addresses the complexity and challenges of IP governance, traceability, and security. Companies that leverage this solution can achieve high scalability, availability, and reliability in their product development cycles, giving them a competitive advantage in achieving success.

To learn more about the technical details in simplifying your IP management, read the whitepaper.

What’s new in Azure Data & AI: Helping organizations manage the data deluge

Jessica Hawk — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 08:30:10 Z

When I meet with customers and partners, one thing is clear: nearly every organization is looking to accelerate its use of data to drive strategic outcomes. Generating data isn’t the issue. By 2025, IDC estimates the world will surpass 181 zettabytes globally and a staggering 80 percent of that data will be unstructured (think streaming audio and video, social media, and the Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data).¹ This explosion of data presents both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is that we can use this data to uncover as-yet unknown insights, predictions, and automation opportunities to drive business outcomes in previously unthinkable ways. Data fuels AI innovation, which is something many of us are being asked to do given the recent advances in generative AI. However, we as practitioners understand that a key challenge lies in securely ingesting, storing, managing, analyzing, and sharing all that data effectively.

These challenges and opportunities that come as a result of today’s exponential data proliferation exist across industries. For example, the National Basketball Association (NBA) now ingests and analyzes around 10 million data points per game to influence strategies on the court. SEGES, a non-profit that advises farmers on running their businesses more efficiently and sustainably, uses big data to predict crop yields and spot early signs of livestock disease or injury with higher accuracy. AG Insurance relies on vast real-time data to build more personalized insurance solutions for customers. While each organization has distinct use cases, they all use the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform to modernize their data estate and enable advanced analytics and AI. We see this over and over with our customers—getting the data house in order is truly foundational to taking advantage of what generative AI can do for a business. To get expert help with designing and building a modern data foundation for AI, check out the Azure Migration and Modernization Program.

Yet we know getting to a modern, cloud-based data foundation doesn’t end with a shift to the cloud. Data governance, security, and privacy are fundamental to a modern data estate. In March 2023, Microsoft became the first cloud provider to successfully complete the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) 14 Key Controls and Automations certification. This certification demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to providing comprehensive cloud data management automation and controls for protecting sensitive data to accelerate cloud adoption. We are excited to continue to partner with leaders around the globe to make data governance in the cloud easier to implement and more approachable which will allow everyone to derive more value from data responsibly.

Hungry to hear from industry peers as they discuss their approach to data strategy? Check out Insights Tomorrow, a new podcast from Microsoft hosted by Patrick LeBlanc featuring in-depth conversations with data leaders and experts about the revolutionary journeys they are taking in the world of data, analytics, and governance.

New and upcoming technical resources:

Microsoft Build: Join the next wave of developer innovation. Registration is now open for in-person and virtual experiences May 22 to 25, 2023. Get the latest product news from Microsoft, advance your knowledge and skills with deep interactive sessions, and network with peers.
Can ChatGPT work with your enterprise data? In 15 minutes, learn how to integrate ChatGPT into your own enterprise-grade app experiences using Azure OpenAI Service with precise control over the knowledge base, for in-context and relevant responses. Interact with your organization’s private internal data, while respecting the information protection controls put in place. Watch “Can ChatGPT work with your enterprise data?” to learn more.
Learn Azure data fundamentals: Kickstart your learning journey with our new Cloud Skills Challenge. In 30 days, you’ll gain a foundation in core database concepts in cloud environments and data services including relational data, nonrelational data, big data, and analytics.

We’re innovating across the Microsoft Cloud to make data more accessible and actionable for every line of business. This month, we are introducing new capabilities to help you move beyond the cost and complexity of fragmented data to realize business value with AI. Let’s dive in.

Start small and scale relational apps globally with Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL

Azure is the first cloud provider to offer a single database service that supports both relational and non-relational workloads, helping you build cloud-native apps with all your data. Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL is a fully managed service, enabling highly scalable relational apps, such as multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, real-time operational analytics apps, and high-throughput transactional apps. This month, we announced the general availability of cluster compute start and stop to easily stop and start clusters as needed to control compute costs and REST APIs to help customers manage cluster and networking settings programmatically. We also announced the preview of Customer Managed Keys, enabling you to bring your own key for data protection at rest in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. Learn more about Customer Managed keys on the Azure Cosmos DB blog.

Do more with less using Centrally Managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server

Azure Hybrid Benefit is a cost-saving benefit that allows customers to apply their existing SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance to Azure virtual machines, saving up to 30 percent or more on Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance. To help alleviate the financial pressures organizations are facing amidst economic uncertainty, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Centrally Managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server, which helps customers optimize costs by applying blocks of eligible licenses across all Azure SQL virtual machines and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) resources within their overall account or subscriptions. With full visibility into a SQL Server estate, centralized management aims to make it easier for customers to monitor and sustain compliance and get the most out of their SQL investments.

Operationalize responsible AI for healthcare applications

When making real-world decisions that impact patients, practitioners, and facilities, it is critical that healthcare institutions leverage the power of AI and machine learning models responsibly. At the HIMMSS23 conference earlier this month, we announced the general availability of the Azure Machine Learning responsible AI dashboard accelerator kit for healthcare. The responsible AI dashboard is helpful across industries, but this accelerator kit aims to help machine learning practitioners train and debug models specifically for healthcare settings. For example, this accelerator can equip healthcare providers with directional and causal relationship analyses between historical patient data and health scores to help inform lifestyle recommendations and modifications for patients. By prioritizing model fairness and explainability, healthcare organizations can enable higher confidence in and adoption of AI outputs to support patient care, space planning, or dispatching and scheduling staff.

To tie it all together, I’ll also share an abbreviated demo from the showcase floor at HIMMS23. Below, we see how Contoso Healthcare, a nationwide healthcare provider, leverages the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform to maximize the value of their data estate to help them reduce costs, improve clinical operations, and manage their organization’s compliance requirements. We get a look at how vertical AI solutions, such as Custom Text Analytics for healthcare, can help physicians save time when reviewing their patient's medical history, and we see how Azure Cognitive Search and Azure OpenAI Service can help physicians find the answers they need across vast quantities of medical research documents more quickly. Next, Contoso combines the Azure Machine Learning responsible AI dashboard for healthcare and Power BI to help their physicians understand patterns in their data to improve clinical and operational insights. Lastly, Contoso uses Compliance Manager, part of Microsoft Purview, to help them manage their organization’s multi cloud compliance requirements.

Identify up to 10 spoken languages in real-time with Azure Speech

We are proud to introduce Continuous Language ID, our newest feature available with Azure Speech services. With this feature, speech recognition and speech translation customers can now seamlessly detect multiple languages in real-time scenarios—such as live presentations or broadcasts—as well as analyze existing audio content.

Continuous Language ID builds upon existing speech identification capabilities available in Azure Speech services that can detect a single language within the first five seconds of a piece of audio. Now, with Continuous Language identification, users can accurately detect up to 10 languages throughout an entire piece of audio content enabling them to transcribe or translate multi-lingual audio content in one go. If you anticipate multiple languages will be spoken in real-time scenarios or want to analyze existing audio where speakers use different languages, Continuous Language ID is the feature you need. You can try Azure Speech services for free today.

Train state of the art models with Azure AI Infrastructure

To close, I want to share new resources to learn about how Azure’s leading cloud AI supercomputing infrastructure and end-to-end machine learning capabilities give you the performance, scalability, and built-in security needed to build, train, and deploy the most demanding AI workloads with confidence. From the training of state-of-the-art complex AI models to deep learning, and inference, Azure delivers solutions backed by Microsoft’s responsible AI principles, and consistency for data scientists with a familiar toolchain. Learn about what makes our infrastructure differentiated and our proven track record of delivering the greatest supercomputing to partners like OpenAI and Hugging Face to build and host their own large AI solutions with this infographic and the new whitepaper from Harvard Business Review, “Rethinking Cloud Strategies for Advanced AI.”

Start your data modernization journey with Microsoft

Whether you have large, complex AI workloads or you simply want to make the most of intelligent capabilities in your existing applications, Microsoft and our partners are ready to help you accelerate your productivity with data and AI. If you missed it last month, I recommend checking out our webinar with Forrester, “Accelerate AI In Your Org—It's Easier Than You Think” to learn more about the impact of AI on the workforce, the challenges of AI adoption, and the potential of AI to drive innovation and growth. And of course, I truly hope you will join us at Microsoft Build on May 23 to 25, 2023 to learn about exciting innovations, get hands-on experience, and network with peers.

¹ IDC Corporate, “Worldwide IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 2021-2025”, March 2021.

Microsoft Azure Blog

New and upcoming capabilities with Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)—An Azure Native ISV Service

Better together with Azure and Elastic Cloud

Elastic 8.X version support

Cluster and user management

Private link

Observability resource types

Region expansion

Looking at the future

Elastic version selection

Billing visibility enhancements

Native experience for Elastic customers on standard Azure marketplace listing

Next steps

What’s new with Azure Files

NFS Azure file shares are now the default option for SAP Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) deployments

New SLA of 99.99 percent uptime for Azure Files Premium Tier is generally available

Snapshot support for NFS file shares (Preview)

Boosting per-client performance with NFS nconnect is generally available

Up to 1100 MiB/s single client write throughput

Up to 1700 MiB/s single client read throughput

Learn more

Insights from the 2023 Open Confidential Computing Conference

What is confidential computing?

Customer adoption patterns

Current challenges

The future of confidential computing

Microsoft at OC3

Microsoft Cost Management updates—April 2023

FinOps Foundation announced a new specification project to demystify cloud billing data

Centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is generally available

Scheduled alerts in Azure Government

Register for Securely Migrate and Optimize with Azure

Register for Optimize Your IT Costs with Azure Monitor

Cut costs with AI-powered productivity in Microsoft Teams

3 ways to reduce costs with Microsoft Teams Phone

What's new in Cost Management Labs

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud

New videos and learning opportunities

Documentation updates

What's next?

Preparing for future health emergencies with Azure HPC

High-performance computing making a difference

Powering pharmaceutical research and innovation

Next steps

Azure Virtual WAN introduces its first SaaS offering

The use case

User experience

How does this all work within Virtual WAN

Key highlights of the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure integration with Virtual WAN

We want your feedback

Learn more

Secure your cloud environment with Cloud Next-Generation Firewall by Palo Alto Networks, an Azure Native ISV Service—now in preview

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall is available on Azure

Do more with less

Seamless end user experience

Deploy in minutes

Run where you want

Getting started with Cloud NGFW for Azure

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Key themes to help businesses at ISC 2023

Vendor Showdown

HPC Solutions Forum

Newest advancements since ISC 2022

Azure HBv4-series and HX-series virtual machines, now in preview

Azure Managed Lustre, now in preview

Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines, now generally available

See what our customers have been up to

Learn more about Azure HPC and ISC 2023

Managing IP with Microsoft Azure and Cliosoft

Knowing your key requirements for an IP management system

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Moving Forward

What’s new in Azure Data & AI: Helping organizations manage the data deluge

New and upcoming technical resources:

Start small and scale relational apps globally with Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL

Do more with less using Centrally Managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server

Operationalize responsible AI for healthcare applications

Identify up to 10 spoken languages in real-time with Azure Speech