Latest Business and Technology News
Published
Tue, 24 May 2016 22:11:25 GMT
I’ll be in the UK next week presenting at the free AzureCraft event being held on June 3rd and 4th. This event was created by the UK Azure User Group and is a great way to learn about Azure as well as engage with the Azure community in the UK.
What’s new in Azure Talk
I’ll be speaking on June 3rd from 9:30-11:30am on “What’s new in Azure”. It is going to have a lot of new content and highlight some of the cool new services and capabilities in Azure that developers might not have had a chance yet to try out (while at the same time being understandable even to people who have never used Azure before). Some of the topics + demos I’m planning to cover include:
- Mobile apps with Xamarin – Build native iOS, Android and Windows mobile apps + mobile DevOps
- Azure Functions – Listen and react to events using server-less code
- Azure Container Service – Build Docker based container applications with distributed orchestration
- Azure DocumentDB – Planet-scale NoSQL service, now with MongoDB API/Protocol support as well
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse – Store and query huge amounts of data
- Azure IoT – Connect any device to the cloud
- Sneak Peak of new Azure Command Line Experience – First look at something cool coming out soon
After my talk there are a bunch of additional talks throughout the day that will then go into even more depth on different Azure topics.
Sign-up for Free
You can register for the event for free here. The event on June 3rd (where I’m speaking) is being held at the Mermaid Puddle Dock, Blackfriars London. On June 4th there is then a great set of additional talks + workshops being held at the Microsoft Reading campus.
You can learn more about the overall event on the Azurecraft.uk web-site.
Hope to see you there!
Scott
Published
Wed, 24 Feb 2016 18:56:58 GMT
As the role of mobile devices in people's lives expands even further, mobile app developers have become a driving force for software innovation. At Microsoft, we are working to enable even greater developer innovation by providing the best experiences to all developers, on any device, with powerful tools, an open platform and a global cloud.
As part of this commitment I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.
In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.
Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies - and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.
Microsoft has had a longstanding partnership with Xamarin, and have jointly built Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and our Enterprise Mobility Suite to provide developers with an end-to-end workflow for native, secure apps across platforms. We have also worked closely together to offer the training, tools, services and workflows developers need to succeed.
With today’s acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and enable seamless mobile app dev experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure delivers a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything a developer needs to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device. We are really excited to see what you build with it.
We are looking forward to providing more information about our plans in the near future – starting at the Microsoft //Build conference coming up in a few weeks, followed by Xamarin Evolve in late April. Be sure to watch my Build keynote and get a front row seat at Evolve to learn more!
Thanks,
Scott
Published
Thu, 01 Oct 2015 05:43:17 GMT
Yesterday we held our AzureCon event and were fortunate to have tens of thousands of developers around the world participate. During the event we announced several great new enhancements to Microsoft Azure including:
- General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
- Announcing new N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities
- Announcing Azure IoT Suite available to purchase
- Announcing Azure Container Service
- Announcing Azure Security Center
We were also fortunate to be joined on stage by several great Azure customers who talked about their experiences using Azure including: Jet.com, Nascar, Alaska Airlines, Walmart, and ThyssenKrupp.
Watching the Videos
All of the talks presented at AzureCon (including the 60 breakout talks) are now available to watch online. You can browse and watch all of the sessions here.
My keynote to kick off the event was an hour long and provided an end-to-end look at Azure and some of the big new announcements of the day. You can watch it here.
Below are some more details of some of the highlights:
Announcing General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
Yesterday we announced the general availability of our new India regions: Mumbai (West), Chennai (South) and Pune (Central). They are now available for you to deploy solutions into.
This brings our worldwide presence of Azure regions up to 24 regions, more than AWS and Google combined. Over 125 customers and partners have been participating in the private preview of our new India regions. We are seeing tremendous interest from industry sectors like Public Sector, Banking Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare whose cloud adoption has been restricted by data residency requirements. You can all now deploy your solutions too.
Announcing N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU Support
This week we announced our new N-series family of Azure Virtual Machines that enable GPU capabilities. Featuring NVidia’s best of breed Tesla GPUs, these Virtual Machines will help you run a variety of workloads ranging from remote visualization to machine learning to analytics.
The N-series VMs feature NVidia’s flagship GPU, the K80 which is well supported by NVidia’s CUDA development community. N-series will also have VM configurations featuring the latest M60 which was recently announced by NVidia. With support for M60, Azure becomes the first hyperscale cloud provider to bring the capabilities of NVidia’s Quadro High End Graphics Support to the cloud. In addition, N-series combines GPU capabilities with the superfast RDMA interconnect so you can run multi-machine, multi-GPU workloads such as Deep Learning and Skype Translator Training.
Announcing Azure Security Center
This week we announced the new Azure Security Center—a new Azure service that gives you visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources, and helps you stay ahead of threats and attacks. Azure is the first cloud platform to provide unified security management with capabilities that help you prevent, detect, and respond to threats.
The Azure Security Center provides a unified view of your security state, so your team and/or your organization’s security specialists can get the information they need to evaluate risk across the workloads they run in the cloud. Based on customizable policy, the service can provide recommendations. For example, the policy might be that all web applications should be protected by a web application firewall. If so, the Azure Security Center will automatically detect when web apps you host in Azure don’t have a web application firewall configured, and provide a quick and direct workflow to get a firewall from one of our partners deployed and configured:
Of course, even with the best possible protection in place, attackers will still try to compromise systems. To address this problem and adopt an “assume breach” mindset, the Azure Security Center uses advanced analytics, including machine learning, along with Microsoft’s global threat intelligence network to look for and alert on attacks. Signals are automatically collected from your Azure resources, the network, and integrated security partner solutions and analyzed to identify cyber-attacks that might otherwise go undetected. Should an incident occur, security alerts offer insights into the attack and suggest ways to remediate and recover quickly. Security data and alerts can also be piped to existing Security Information and Events Management (SIEM) systems your organization has already purchased and is using on-premises.
No other cloud vendor provides the depth and breadth of these capabilities, and they are going to enable you to build even more secure applications in the cloud.
Announcing Azure IoT Suite Available to Purchase
The Internet of Things (IoT) provides tremendous new opportunities for organizations to improve operations, become more efficient at what they do, and create new revenue streams. We have had a huge interest in our Azure IoT Suite which until this week has been in public preview. Our customers like Rockwell Automation and ThyssenKrupp Elevators are already connecting data and devices to solve business problems and improve their operations. Many more businesses are poised to benefit from IoT by connecting their devices to collect and analyze untapped data with remote monitoring or predictive maintenance solutions.
In working with customers, we have seen that getting started on IoT projects can be a daunting task starting with connecting existing devices, determining the right technology partner to work with and scaling an IoT project from proof of concept to broad deployment. Capturing and analyzing untapped data is complex, particularly when a business tries to integrate this new data with existing data and systems they already have.
The Microsoft Azure IoT Suite helps address many of these challenges. The Microsoft Azure IoT Suite helps you connect and integrate with devices more easily, and to capture and analyze untapped device data by using our preconfigured solutions, which are engineered to help you move quickly from proof of concept and testing to broader deployment. Today we support remote monitoring, and soon we will be delivering support for predictive maintenance and asset management solutions.
These solutions reliably capture data in the cloud and analyze the data both in real-time and in batch processing. Once your devices are connected, Azure IoT Suite provides real time information in an intuitive format that helps you take action from insights. Our advanced analytics then enables you to easily process data—even when it comes from a variety of sources, including devices, line of business assets, sensors and other systems and provide rich built-in dashboards and analytics tools for access to the data and insights you need. User permissions can be set to control reporting and share information with the right people in your organization.
Below is an example of the types of built-in dashboard views that you can leverage without having to write any code:
To support adoption of the Azure IoT Suite, we are also announcing the new Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT program, an ecosystem of partners whose offerings have been tested and certified to help businesses with their IoT device and platform needs. The first set of partners include Beaglebone, Freescale, Intel, Raspberry Pi, Resin.io, Seeed and Texas Instruments. These partners, along with experienced global solution providers are helping businesses harness the power of the Internet of Things today.
You can learn more about our approach and the Azure IoT Suite at www.InternetofYourThings.com and partners can learn more at www.azure.com/iotdev.
Announcing Azure IoT Hub
This week we also announced the public preview of our new Azure IoT Hub service which is a fully managed service that enables reliable and secure bi-directional communications between millions of IoT devices and an application back end. Azure IoT Hub offers reliable device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device hyper-scale messaging, enables secure communications using per-device security credentials and access control, and includes device libraries for the most popular languages and platforms.
Providing secure, scalable bi-directional communication from the heterogeneous devices to the cloud is a cornerstone of any IoT solution which Azure IoT hub addresses in the following way:
- Per-device authentication and secure connectivity: Each device uses its own security key to connect to IoT Hub. The application back end is then able to individually whitelist and blacklist each device, enabling complete control over device access.
- Extensive set of device libraries: Azure IoT device SDKs are available and supported for a variety of languages and platforms such as C, C#, Java, and JavaScript.
- IoT protocols and extensibility: Azure IoT Hub provides native support of the HTTP 1.1 and AMQP 1.0 protocols for device connectivity. Azure IoT Hub can also be extended via the Azure IoT protocol gateway open source framework to provide support for MQTT v3.1.1.
- Scale: Azure IoT Hub scales to millions of simultaneously connected devices, and millions of events per seconds.
Getting started with Azure IoT Hub is easy. Simply navigate to the Azure Preview portal, and use the Internet of Things->Azure IoT Hub. Choose the name, pricing tier, number of units and location and select Create to provision and deploy your IoT Hub:
Once the IoT hub is created, you can navigate to Settings and create new shared access policies and modify other messaging settings for granular control.
The bi-directional communication enabled with an IoT Hub provides powerful capabilities in a real world IoT solution such as the control of individual device security credentials and access through the use of a device identity registry. Once a device identity is in the registry, the device can connect, send device-to-cloud messages to the hub, and receive cloud-to-device messages from backend applications with just a few lines of code in a secure way.
Learn more about Azure IoT Hub and get started with your own real world IoT solutions.
Announcing the new Azure Container Service
’We’ve been working with Docker to integrate Docker containers with both Azure and Windows Server for some time. This week we announced the new Azure Container Service which leverages the popular Apache Mesos project to deliver a customer proven orchestration solution for applications delivered as Docker containers.
![image[24]](https://aspblogs.blob.core.windows.net/media/scottgu/Windows-Live-Writer/ed3a062477c8_135CC/image%5B24%5D_thumb.png "image[24]")
The Azure Container Service enables users to easily create and manage a Docker enabled Apache Mesos cluster. The container management software running on these clusters is open source, and in addition to the application portability offered by tooling such as Docker and Docker Compose, you will be able to leverage portable container orchestration and management tooling such as Marathon, Chronos and Docker Swarm.
When utilizing the Azure Container Service, you will be able to take advantage of the tight integration with Azure infrastructure management features such as tagging of resources, Role Based Access Control (RBAC), Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and the fully integrated user experience in the Azure portal. By coupling the enterprise class Azure cloud with key open source build, deploy and orchestration software, we maximize customer choice when it comes to containerize workloads.
The service will be available for preview by the end of the year.
Learn More
Watch the AzureCon sessions online to learn more about all of the above announcements – plus a lot more that was covered during the day. We are looking forward to seeing what you build with what you learn!
Hope this helps,
Scott
Published
Mon, 28 Sep 2015 20:54:24 GMT
Today, I’m happy to announce several key additions to our big data services in Azure, including the General Availability of HDInsight on Linux, as well as the introduction of our new Azure Data Lake and Language services.
General Availability of HDInsight on Linux
Today we are announcing general availability of our HDInsight service on Ubuntu Linux. HDInsight enables you to easily run managed Hadoop clusters in the cloud. With today’s release we now allow you to configure these clusters to run using both a Windows Server Operating System as well as an Ubuntu based Linux Operating System.
HDInsight on Linux enables even broader support for Hadoop ecosystem partners to run in HDInsight providing you even greater choice of preferred tools and applications for running Hadoop workloads. Both Linux and Windows clusters in HDInsight are built on the same standard Hadoop distribution and offer the same set of rich capabilities.
Today’s new release also enables additional capabilities, such as, cluster scaling, virtual network integration and script action support. Furthermore, in addition to Hadoop cluster type, you can now create HBase and Storm clusters on Linux for your NoSQL and real time processing needs such as building an IoT application.
Create a cluster
HDInsight clusters running using Linux can now be easily created from the Azure Management portal under the Data + Analytics section. Simply select Ubuntu from the cluster operating system drop-down, as well as optionally choose the cluster type you wish to create (we support base Hadoop as well as clusters pre-configured for workloads like Storm, Spark, HBase, etc).
All HDInsight Linux clusters can be managed by Apache Ambari. Ambari provides the ability to customize configuration settings of your Hadoop cluster while giving you a unified view of the performance and state of your cluster and providing monitoring and alerting within the HDInsight cluster.
Installing additional applications and Hadoop components
Similar to HDInsight Windows clusters, you can now customize your Linux cluster by installing additional applications or Hadoop components that are not part of default HDInsight deployment. This can be accomplished using Bash scripts with script action capability. As an example, you can now install Hue on an HDInsight Linux cluster and easily use it with your workloads:
Develop using Familiar Tools
All HDInsight Linux clusters come with SSH connectivity enabled by default. You can connect to the cluster via a SSH client of your choice. Moreover, SSH tunneling can be leveraged to remotely access all of the Hadoop web applications from the browser.
New Azure Data Lake Services and Language
We continue to see customers enabling amazing scenarios with big data in Azure including analyzing social graphs to increase charitable giving, analyzing radiation exposure and using the signals from thousands of devices to simulate ways for utility customers to optimize their monthly bills. These and other use cases are resulting in even more data being collected in Azure. In order to be able to dive deep into all of this data, and process it in different ways, you can now use our Azure Data Lake capabilities – which are 3 services that make big data easy.
The first service in the family is available today: Azure HDInsight, our managed Hadoop service that lets you focus on finding insights, and not spend your time having to manage clusters. HDInsight lets you deploy Hadoop, Spark, Storm and HBase clusters, running on Linux or Windows, managed, monitored and supported by Microsoft with a 99.9% SLA.
The other two services, Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Data Lake Analytics introduced below, are available in private preview today and will be available broadly for public usage shortly.
Azure Data Lake Store
Azure Data Lake Store is a hyper-scale HDFS repository designed specifically for big data analytics workloads in the cloud. Azure Data Lake Store solves the big data challenges of volume, variety, and velocity by enabling you to store data of any type, at any size, and process it at any scale. Azure Data Lake Store can support near real-time scenarios such as the Internet of Things (IoT) as well as throughput-intensive analytics on huge data volumes. The Azure Data Lake Store also supports a variety of computation workloads by removing many of the restrictions constraining traditional analytics infrastructure like the pre-definition of schema and the creation of multiple data silos. Once located in the Azure Data Lake Store, Hadoop-based engines such as Azure HDInsight can easily mine the data to discover new insights.
Some of the key capabilities of Azure Data Lake Store include:
- Any Data: A distributed file store that allows you to store data in its native format, Azure Data Lake Store eliminates the need to transform or pre-define schema in order to store data.
- Any Size: With no fixed limits to file or account sizes, Azure Data Lake Store enables you to store kilobytes to exabytes with immediate read/write access.
- At Any Scale: You can scale throughput to meet the demands of your analytic systems including the high throughput needed to analyze exabytes of data. In addition, it is built to handle high volumes of small writes at low latency making it optimal for near real-time scenarios like website analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT).
- HDFS Compatible: It works out-of-the-box with the Hadoop ecosystem including other Azure Data Lake services such as HDInsight.
- Fully Integrated with Azure Active Directory: Azure Data Lake Store is integrated with Azure Active Directory for identity and access management over all of your data.
Azure Data Lake Analytics with U-SQL
The new Azure Data Lake Analytics service makes it much easier to create and manage big data jobs. Built on YARN and years of experience running analytics pipelines for Office 365, XBox Live, Windows and Bing, the Azure Data Lake Analytics service is the most productive way to get insights from big data. You can get started in the Azure management portal, querying across data in blobs, Azure Data Lake Store, and Azure SQL DB. By simply moving a slider, you can scale up as much computing power as you’d like to run your data transformation jobs.
Today we are introducing a new U-SQL offering in the analytics service, an evolution of the familiar syntax of SQL. U-SQL allows you to write declarative big data jobs, as well as easily include your own user code as part of those jobs. Inside Microsoft, developers have been using this combination in order to be productive operating on massive data sets of many exabytes of scale, processing mission critical data pipelines. In addition to providing an easy to use experience in the Azure management portal, we are delivering a rich set of tools in Visual Studio for debugging and optimizing your U-SQL jobs. This lets you play back and analyze your big data jobs, understanding bottlenecks and opportunities to improve both performance and efficiency, so that you can pay only for the resources you need and continually tune your operations.
Learn More
For more information and to get started, check out the following links:
Hope this helps,
Scott