Category: Microsoft Azure

Azure reference architectures are arranged by scenario, with related architectures grouped together. Each architecture includes recommended practices, along with considerations for scalability, availability, manageability, and security. Most also include a deployable solution. Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/reference-architectures/

The preview for long-term backup retention in Azure SQL Database was announced in October 2016, providing you with a way to easily manage long-term retention for your databases – up to 10 years – with backups stored in your own Azure Backup Service Vault. Based upon feedback gathered during the preview, we are happy to announce a set of major enhancements to the long-term backup retention solution. With this update we have eliminated the need for you to deploy and manage a separate Backup Service Vault. Instead, SQL Database will utilize Azure Blob Storage under the covers to store and manage your long-term backups. This new design will enable flexibility for your backup strategy, and overall more control over costs. This update brings you the following additional benefits: More regional…

You will learn how to get started analyzing text! We'll show you how to sign up for a cognitive service, and the power of Text Analytics, Entity Linking and Bing Entity Search. Reference: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/AI-Show/Understanding-Text-using-Cognitive-Services

Today customers rely on Azure’s application, infrastructure, and network monitoring capabilities to ensure their critical workloads are always up and running. It’s exciting to see the growth of these services and that customers are using multiple monitoring services to get visibility into issues and resolve them faster. To make it even easier to adopt Azure monitoring services, today we are announcing a new consistent purchasing experience across the monitoring services. Three key attributes of this new pricing model are: 1. Consistent pay-as-you-go pricing We are adopting a simple “pay-as-you-go” model across the complete portfolio of monitoring services. You have full control and transparency, so you pay for only what you use. 2. Consistent per gigabyte (GB) metering for data ingestion We are changing the pricing model for data ingestion from…

Late 2017 Microsoft released some very cool technology in Azure called Azure AD Domain Services.  This service provides Azure Customers with Virtual Machines in Azure the ability to use Domain Services such as Kerberos, NTLM and Group Policy lock down without the need for deploying Domain Controllers in the cloud. It is important to note, Azure AD Domain Services a paid service, once enabled in your Azure Tenancy, you will be billed monthly.  Azure AD Domain Services unlike other cloud services in Azure cannot be stopped or paused, it must be deleted from the Azure Tenancy to avoid further billing.  To understand how this service is charged, please see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/details/active-directory-ds/ What Azure AD Domain Services offers customers is the ability to remove the need for building domain controllers in the…

Ever since I started working on the Virtual Machine (VM) platform in Azure, there has been one feature request that I consistently hear customers asking for us to build. I don’t think words can describe how excited I am to announce that today we are launching the public preview of Serial Console access for both Linux and Windows VMs. Managing and running virtual machines can be hard. We offer extensive tools to help you manage and secure your VMs, including patching management, configuration management, agent-based scripting, automation, SSH/RDP connectivity, and support for DevOps tooling like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. However, we have learned from many of you that sometimes this isn’t enough to diagnose and fix issues. Maybe a change you made resulted in an fstab error on Linux and…

Azure Automation For Azure IAAS enthusiasts, Microsoft has provided a platform to automate all the azure services using powershell. The language is tweaked and used as “powershell workflow”. Why to Use Reducing Manual Effort and help in consistent testing Managing resources (deployment/VM’s etc) How to Use Create a powershell workflow in azure web portal and execute it. Runbook Deployment and execution of tasks written in PowerShell. Provisioning/Deployment/Maintenance/Monitoring. Things to know! Automation Account – A dedicated account to perform runbook design/execution/management. Asset – Global resources used by runbooks to assist in common tasks and value specific operations Windows PowerShell Workflow – Implementation of azure automation using PowerShell Workflows. Workflow is a group of individual steps performing an action. Management Certificates – Authenticate azure resources for azure automation in an azure subscription.…

High-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and visualization GPUs have a wide variety of uses. That’s why Microsoft has partnered with NVIDIA to bring a wide variety of NVIDIA GPUs to Azure. Join us in San Jose next week at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference to learn how Azure customers combine the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud with the capability of NVIDIA’s GPUs. At Booth 603, Microsoft and partners will have demos of customer use cases and experts on hand to talk about how Azure is the cloud for any GPU workload. We will have demos from our partners at Altair, PipelineFX, and Workspot. In addition, you can learn about work we’ve done in oil & gas, automotive, and artificial intelligence. Partner and customer sessions in the conference program include: Transforming the…

As a Microsoft Partner Network member, are you looking to build your technical capabilities for Application Innovation? Learn first-hand from a Microsoft Partner Technical Consultant during a live, interactive technical webinar where you can ask questions as you learn! Best part? There is no cost to MPN members! There’s more… while technical webinars are the foundation to building your technical skillset, you have a few other options to engage with Microsoft technical experts: Dev Chat – chat live to get the technical tips you need to get started and successfully build Office 365 or Azure apps and get answers to quickly resolve programming questions regarding the capability and services (available in English and Mandarin only) – available at no cost to Network, Action Pack, Silver and Gold MPN partners Technical…