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:

• High availability for SAP NetWeaver (RHEL)
• High availability for SAP NetWeaver (SLES)
• High availability for HANA scale-out system with HSR (SLES)

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.

This post was co-authored by Dave Burkhardt and Sami Modak.

As part of your cloud journey, critical applications need to be deployed in multiple Azure regions to ensure high availability for your global customer base. When reviewing Azure’s various global traffic distribution solutions, ask yourself, “Which option is the best one for my application?”.

In this blog, you will learn about each global traffic distribution solution Azure offers, and which solution is the best one for your internet-facing cloud architecture. Currently, Azure offers different options for distributing global traffic. Microsoft Azure Front Door is a content delivery network (CDN) service with application layer load balancing capabilities. Azure cross-region Load Balancer is a global network layer load balancer. Finally, Azure Traffic Manager is a domain name service (DNS)-based traffic distribution solution. 

Choosing the right global traffic distribution solution

You will learn about three example companies—Contoso1, Contoso2, and Contoso3. For each company, we will dive into their application’s scenario and decide which global traffic distribution solution is the best one for them.

Customer scenario 1—wholesale distributor

Contoso1 is a large wholesale distributor that has locations all over the globe. Contoso1 has been going through a large technological transformation and has been migrating services to Azure. One of the applications being moved to Azure is their backend inventory management software. This application is responsible for providing users with information about inventory status and updating inventory records after a transaction has occurred. As part of their migration the team at Contoso1 has strict requirements that need to be met by a global distribution solution.

• First, all traffic type will be layer 4 and must be served with ultra-low latency. In addition, the application requires a regional redundancy with automatic traffic fail-over in the event a region is down, to ensure high availability.
• Second, the application requires a static IP address that the application’s frontend will consistently ping.
• Finally, any updates made to regional deployments shouldn’t have an impact on the overall backend inventory application.

Given all the requirements laid out by Contoso1’s, Azure cross-region Load Balancer is a perfect solution for their application. Azure cross-region Load Balancer is highly optimized at serving layer-4 traffic with ultra-low latency. Furthermore, cross-region load balancer provides geo-proximity routing, which means all Contoso1’s stores traffic will be forwarded to the closest regional deployment to them. Azure cross-region Load Balancer also provides automatic failover. In the event one of Contoso1’s regional deployment is unhealthy, all traffic will be serviced by the next healthy regional deployment. In addition, cross-region load balancers provide users with a static globally anycast IP address, in which Contoso1 doesn’t have to worry about their IP address changing. Finally, Azure cross-region Load Balancer will allow Contoso1 to update its regional deployments behind a single global endpoint without any impact on its end users.

Customer scenario 2—social media company

Contoso2 is a global social media platform. As a social media site, they need to serve both interactive and static content to their users around the globe as quickly and reliably as possible. Most recently, due to Contoso2’s prominent status as a social media platform, they have experienced an outage with their on-premises hosted website because of a DDoS attack. That said, Contoso2 has the following strict requirements as they migrate to Azure:

• A platform that can deliver both static and dynamic content to their consumers around the globe with the utmost performance and reliability.
• Ability to route content to both their mobile and desktop users as quickly as possible.
• Easily integrate with Azure’s DNS, Web Application, Storage, and Application Gateway products.
• DDoS protection.
• Reduce secure sockets layer (SSL) load on Contoso2’s application servers, and instead process SSL requests on the edge for faster user experience for Contoso2’s global clients.

Azure Front Door is an ideal solution to enable accelerated and highly resilient web application performance for optimal delivery of static and dynamic content around the globe:

• Static Content—Contoso2’s cached static content can be served from Azure Front Door’s 185 global edge points of presence (PoP) locations. To ensure the utmost performance and resiliency, Azure Front Door utilizes the Anycast protocol to make sure the Contoso2’s client’s requests are served from the nearest global edge locations.
• Dynamic Content—Azure Front Door has an arsenal of traffic acceleration features. Client to Azure Front Door PoP traffic is again optimized via the Anycast protocol. Although as it specifically pertains to dynamic workloads, edge PoP to customer’s origin connections are optimized via split TCP. This technique enables the traffic to terminate the TCP connection to the nearest edge PoP and uses long living connections over Microsoft’s global private wide area network (WAN) to reduce the round-trip-time (RTT). Additionally, in the event Cotoso2 deployed multiregional origin deployments, Azure Front Door utilizes health probes to fetch content from the least latent origin.

Moreover, Azure Front Door also has SSL offload capabilities which can improve performance further. In addition, Azure Front Door is highly optimized for HTTP and web-based applications. With Azure Front Door, customers are equipped with various layer 7 routing features. These features allow customers to apply business routing and advanced routing within Azure Front Door. For example, Azure Front Door can route requests to mobile or desktop versions of Contoso2’s web application based on the client device type. Additional examples include SSL offload, path-based routing, fast failover, caching, and more.

Today Azure provides end-to-end solutions for every aspect of application management. Azure Front Door provides seamless integration with other Azure services such as DNS, Web App, and Storage. These integrations allow customers to easily create powerful web applications built using the integration of multiple Azure services.

Finally, Azure Front Door provides built-in support for various security products to help protect customers’ web applications. For example, customers can secure their origins with layer 3, 4, and 7 DDOS mitigation, and seamlessly enable Azure Web Application Firewall protection.

Customer scenario 3—sustainable fashion retailor

Contoso3 is a large retail store focused on sustainable fashion items. Contoso3 has a large online presence and has historically been hosting all their applications on-premises. However, given the advantage of the cloud and Azure, Contoso3 has begun migrating their applications to Azure. One of these applications is their online store platform. As the team at Contoso3 is evaluating different Azure global traffic distribution solutions, they have outlined several requirements that must be addressed.

• First, the team at Contoso3 will be doing a rolling migration where part of their application will remain on-premises and the other part will be hosted on Azure. Any viable solution should be able to direct traffic to on-premises servers to support this rolling migration plan.
• Second, latency is critical for Contoso3 and client traffic needs to be routed to healthy endpoints in a timely manner. 
• Finally, the solution needs to be able to direct users to the correct backend type based on their geographical location. Contoso3 caters to a wide range of customers and often has clothing items specific to certain geographical areas.

With all the requirements stated prior, Azure Traffic Manager would be the optimal solution for Contoso3. With Azure Traffic Manager, users can add on-premises servers in the backend to support burst-to-cloud, failover-to-cloud, and migrate-to-cloud scenarios. In addition, Azure Traffic Manager provides automatic failover and multi-region support, which all result in traffic being served with low latency. DNS name resolution is fast, and results are cached. The speed of the initial DNS lookup depends on the DNS servers the client uses for name resolution. Typically, a client can complete a DNS lookup within approximately 50 ms. The results of the lookup are cached for the duration of the DNS time-to-live (TTL). The default TTL for Traffic Manager is 300 seconds (about five minutes). The Traffic Manager can also help Contoso3 with their geofencing needs, specifically with the geographic routing feature. This feature will allow Contoso3 to direct users to the correct backend instance based on their geographical location.

Summary

The following section discusses common use cases for each load balancing solution, and what each solution is optimized for.  

Learn More

To learn more about the products discussed in the blog please visit the following sites:

• Azure cross-region Load Balancer
• Azure Front Door
• Azure Traffic Manager

Business-to-Business (B2B) commerce is experiencing a revolution driven largely by the mass adoption of cloud computing and the movement towards a simpler, more digital buying experiences. At the same time, cloud budgets are strong and mostly growing—IDC is predicting that cloud services will surpass USD1.7 trillion by 2026 while sustaining compound annual growth of almost 17 percent. But, with economic uncertainty, companies and organizations are challenged to “do more with less” and make the most of every dollar invested.

Cloud marketplaces offer you the ability to gain flexibility and control over your spending and make the most out of your cloud budget. This is why cloud marketplaces are expected to see a massive growth, from USD8 billion last year to USD50 billion by 2026² as predicted by Bessemer Venture Partners. To accelerate IT modernization and maximize the value of investments, we are innovating and improving Microsoft commercial marketplace to support your entire cloud portfolio.

The marketplace: Customized to your needs

There is often a misconception with cloud marketplaces that you lose touch with your vendors and are limited to “the sticker price.” We understand the complexities of enterprise deal making and the marketplace is a tool to help you simplify this process so you can focus on the innovation you need to deliver. While there is always the option to buy “off the shelf” solutions, we’re continuing to improve our custom dealmaking and private offer capabilities so you can spend smart and move fast.

With private offers, you can engage directly with partners, negotiate custom terms, pricing, and payment options, and get customized solutions delivered straight to your inbox. And with recent improvements in our marketplace, partners can create and deliver these private offers in less than 15 minutes—and eligible purchases can count towards your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). We are the only cloud provider that by default applies the entire purchase* towards your commitment (and there are thousands). As more and more customers look to maximize the value of their investments, we’ve seen over 300 percent increase in customers with a MACC buying through marketplace.

Plus, the marketplace saves you the hassle of onboarding new vendors and streamlines the complexity of purchasing so it is all invoiced directly on your Azure bill. This enables you to simplify procurement and reduce legal complexity by purchasing applications under a standard contract. All solutions using the standard contract contain the same terms and conditions, so your legal team only needs to review once.  And, when you purchase solutions through marketplace, you are working with the most trusted cloud and our extensive set of best-in-breed capabilities across app innovation, data and AI, infrastructure, and security.

More and more of our customers—and sellers—are thinking marketplace first when getting their cloud solution. By being marketplace first, you can cut down on time to value and manage costs based on usage. Whether you are new to the Microsoft commercial marketplace or if you’ve already been using it to find solutions for your business, we are excited to help you along your journey. Taking advantage of the resources and tools will streamline the transaction process, maximize the value of your cloud spend, and you can buy with confidence knowing that these solutions are backed by Microsoft.

These enhancements are removing the frictions in B2B commerce, and simultaneously helping you to make the most of every cloud dollar spent. Here’s how you make the most of this opportunity:

Maximizing value with partner solutions that count towards consumption commitments

You can shop for Azure solutions that qualify towards your consumption commitment on the Azure portal. All you need to do is:

1. Log into Azure
2. Go to the marketplace tab
3. Select “Azure benefit eligible”

From there you can further refine search results based on your criteria. We have thousands of solutions available, so when you purchase these through marketplace—the amount you spend can count towards your cloud consumption commitment. Here are examples of a few providers with MACC-eligible solutions:

Fortinet offers a comprehensive security fabric platform to help industries accelerate security, maximize productivity, preserve user experience, and lower total cost of ownership.

Featured solution: Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (VM)

Empowering users to unlock the value of their data with Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) solution on Azure.

Featured solution: Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud

MongoDB Atlas, the industry’s first unified developer data platform, allows you to accelerate and simplify how you build with data on Azure modern applications.

Featured solution: MongoDB Atlas 

Break through your bad data and get the insight you need to consolidate, clean up, and maintain your data with Profisee’s solutions.

Featured solution: Profisee MDM—SaaS 

Conquer your analytics challenges, from experimental to mission critical, with faster decisions in the cloud.

Featured solution: SAS® Viya® portfolio on SAS® Cloud

Get agentless scanning with complete visibility and actionable context for your multi-cloud environment in minutes so your teams can proactively identify, prioritize, remediate, and prevent risks.

Featured solution: WIZ Cloud Infrastructure Security Platform

More and more of our customers—and sellers—are thinking “marketplace first” when getting their cloud solutions. By managing your cloud portfolio through marketplace, you can cut down on time to value and manage costs based on usage.

Whether you are new to the Microsoft commercial marketplace or if you’ve already been using it to find solutions for your business, we are excited to help you along your journey. Take advantage of the resources and tools within the marketplace to increase your efficiency, buy with confidence, and spend smarter.

Learn more about Microsoft commercial marketplace

• Shop marketplace
• Learn about Azure consumption commitments 
• Get a private Azure marketplace

¹IDC, Worldwide Whole Cloud Forecast, 2022–2026: The Next Stage of the Shift to a Cloud-Centric Technology Industry; US49857122, December 2022.

²Bessemer Venture Partners, 2022 State of the Cloud report.

The future of connectivity and the cloud

Over the past decade, we at Microsoft have seen a tremendous amount of change—digital transformation enabled by the cloud. But the cloud’s biggest impact is yet to come. McKinsey estimates that by 2030, we’ll see more than a trillion dollars impacted by the cloud across the Fortune 500.¹ In an industry currently experiencing large-scale transformation, this represents a huge opportunity.

The future cloud, however, will look very different from the cloud of today. It will expand to become a highly distributed fabric, spanning 5G to space. It will be powered by a modern network infrastructure and will enable a new application and connectivity paradigm—what we call modern connected apps—that puts compute even closer to the problems we need to solve.

This new generation of highly distributed, low latency, and network-aware applications uses 5G innovation to enable computing where it’s needed most and opens entirely new scenarios for operators, enterprises, and developers across a range of industries. 

Unlocking the opportunity for the telecommunications ecosystem

At Microsoft, our aim is to be the most trusted co-innovation partner through every stage of the digital evolution, committed to working with communications service providers (CSPs), enterprises, developers, and ISVs alike on the future of a ubiquitous cloud that unlocks the true potential of modern connected apps.

• We are empowering operators to accelerate their network transformation with our carrier-grade, trusted platform and helping them unlock new opportunities with automation and AI.
• We are enabling enterprises with ubiquitous computing that spans from cloud to edge.
• And we are helping developers and ISVs build more innovative, network-aware applications.

Microsoft is providing the key solutions that are shaping the future cloud, and we have some exciting news in each of these areas to help operators, enterprises, and developers get started.

Accelerate network transformation with carrier-grade trusted platform

One of our goals is to enable operators to optimize their existing investments and services and to accelerate network transformation on our carrier-grade, trusted hybrid platform. Central to this goal is our Azure for Operators portfolio.

Last year, we unveiled a new wave of Azure for Operators solutions and services, which continue to enable the secure development of high-performance, low-latency applications, and next-generation wireless solutions. 

Introducing Microsoft Azure Operator Nexus

Today we are announcing the public preview of Azure Operator Nexus—the next-generation hybrid cloud platform created for communications service providers (CSPs). Since we debuted the private preview at MWC 2022, we’ve expanded the capabilities of Operator Nexus to meet the needs of operators that are looking to modernize and transform their network. Operator Nexus enables operators to use cloud technology to modernize and monetize their network investments—lowering total cost of ownership (TCO), driving operational efficiency and resiliency with advanced AI and automation, improving the security of highly distributed, software-based networks.

Operator Nexus enables operators to run their workloads on-premises or on Azure, where they can seamlessly deploy, manage, secure, and monitor everything—from the bare metal to the network to the tenant. It is purpose-built for carrier-grade workloads, using the same Azure experience offered by the hyperscale public cloud, supporting our first-party solutions as well as a wide variety of our partner ecosystem offerings from industry-leading network equipment provider (NEP) partners. Proven to run network functions at a tier-one operator scale, Operator Nexus meets the security, resiliency, observability, manageability, and performance needs required by operators to achieve meaningful business results throughout the digital transformation of their mobile network.

“As a pioneer in network virtualization and SDN, AT&T is confident in our decision to run our multi-vendor 5G Standalone Mobile Core on Operator Nexus platform while we continue to deploy and operate the platform in AT&T data centers. AT&T made the decision to adopt Operator Nexus platform over time with expectation to lower total cost of ownership (TCO), leverage the power of AI to simplify operations, improve time to market, and focus on our core competency of building the world’s best 5G service. We appreciate the efforts of our Network Function ecosystem collaborators to support the evolution of our Mobility Core platform.”—Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President, Network CTO, AT&T

“Through the combination of Ericsson’s market-leading, cloud-native 5G Core applications and orchestration suite with Microsoft’s carrier-grade Operator Nexus platform, we envision many opportunities for CSPs to digitally transform their core networks while improving customer experiences and creating exciting, new mobile services. Building on our success at mutual customers such as AT&T, Ericsson, and Microsoft are investing together to ensure Ericsson 5G Core cloud-native applications run on the Operator Nexus platform efficiently, securely, and reliably."—Monica Zethzon, Vice President and Head of Solution Area Core Networks, Ericsson

“With the addition of Mavenir’s open cloud-native architecture end-to-end solutions including Converged Packet Core to Operator Nexus platform we look forward to working with Microsoft to help operators drive their core network transformations.”—Bejoy Pankajakshan, EVP, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Mavenir

"We’re excited to further strengthen our growing partnership with Microsoft to Nokia’s Cloud and Network Services portfolio that enables operators to run Nokia’s cloud-native 5G Core on Operator Nexus’ carrier-grade hybrid cloud platform as well as for Nokia to provide the network functions and platform to make operator network APIs available to developers through the Azure platform."—Fran Heeran, SVP, Core Networks, Nokia Cloud and Network Services, Nokia

Learn more about Operator Nexus in this Operator Nexus blog and this Operator Nexus video.

Azure Operator Nexus Ready and systems integrator programs

We are also introducing the Operator Nexus Ready and systems integrator (SI) programs to ensure that our platform has a broad and trusted ecosystem of support. To accelerate deployment and integration, the  Operator Nexus Ready program certifies that the ecosystem of cloud-native network functions (CNFs), virtual network functions (VNFs), and other software interoperate with the Operator Nexus platform. We are in the process of certifying VNFs and CNFs from a range of partners with two certification levels.

• Level one is a base level that assures interoperability with the Operator Nexus platform.
• Level two adds Azure deployment automation using the Azure Network Function Manager and offers entrance into the Azure Marketplace for ready availability to operators.

Additionally, our Operator Nexus SI program includes a select group of systems integrators known for both their telecommunications expertise, as well as their broad Azure skills. Each of these partners will work closely with the Operator Nexus engineering team to build their Operator Nexus platform skills, and to assure customer success in deployment and integration.

Voice Core reimagined 

Another crucial aim of ours is to help optimize operators’ existing communications investments and services. To this end, we are announcing the general availability of Azure Communications Gateway and the private preview of Azure Operator Voicemail. We developed these voice services to support fixed and mobile operators as they continue to migrate critical voice workloads to the cloud.

Azure Communications Gateway provides operators with the critical interworking functionality required to connect an operator’s established public switched telephone network (PSTN) directly to Microsoft Teams, enabling them to deliver Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile services. Communications Gateway is a globally available, managed service that offers an alternative to on-premises solutions for session initiation protocol (SIP) interworking and API automation, thereby simplifying network integration and expediting operators’ time to market. To learn more, read the Azure Communications Gateway Tech Community blog.

Azure Operator Voicemail enables operators to migrate their voicemail services to Azure and take advantage of a fully managed service, reducing the operational support burden and allowing for greater focus on revenue-producing projects. To learn more, read the Azure Operator Voicemail Tech Community blog.

With these announcements, we remain committed in our effort to accelerate network transformation and meet operators exactly where they are on their cloud journey.

Unlock opportunities with automation and AI

The world has been inspired by the transformative power of AI thanks to the recent success of ChatGPT and our ongoing partnership with OpenAI. Now, operators can take advantage of specialized, advanced AI solutions that help to unlock new business opportunities from data and insights in their operations, such as AIOps.

Next-gen AI operations for operators

The complexity of managing 5G services requires a new way of managing networks dependent on real-time analysis of massive quantities of data that applies predictive AI to inform the configuration of the product environments. AIOps employs the same operational techniques and capabilities that Microsoft uses to manage Azure, one of the world’s most complex services, packaged specifically for operators’ needs.

Today, we are announcing the public preview of two AIOps services Azure Operator Insights and Azure Operator Service Manager. These hybrid services simplify the management of existing networks as well as ensure new Microsoft services, such as Azure Operator Nexus, Voice Communications Gateway, and Operator 5G Core, are managed with consistent approaches for monitoring, diagnostics, and lifecycle management.

• Azure Operator Insights enables the collection and analysis of massive quantities of network data gathered from complex multi-part or multi-vendor network functions. It delivers insights for operator-specific workloads to help operators understand the health of their networks and the quality of their subscribers' experiences.
• Azure Operator Service Manager provides seamless management of complex services deployed across hybrid cloud sites. Combined with consolidated management across Azure cloud and edge platforms, Operator Service Manager helps to accelerate operator service deployment. Together, these new services generate insights from data to inform the configuration of the network—with changes tested thoroughly using Safe Deployment Processes. We are making them available to operators, NEPs, and SIs directly for managing workloads in operators’ networks, Azure, and hybrid environments. We look forward to the opportunities these new AIOps services bring operators in the future.

“3UK is laser-focused on delivering world-class gaming experience to mobile users and we are excited to be working with the Microsoft Azure for Operators organization whose new operator-specific analytics services are delivering near real-time insights with quality, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness not otherwise possible.”—Iain Milligan, Chief Network Officer, 3UK

“2degrees delivers world-class mobile services to our customers. We are excited to be working with Microsoft Azure for Operators and their new operator-specific analytics services. Together we are exploring innovative capabilities using the new Azure Operator Insights analytics service, focusing on ensuring we continue to provide our customers with the exceptional mobile services they expect.”—Saul Parkinson, Core Network Architect, 2degrees

Azure for Operators brings together a truly better-together portfolio that encompasses many aspects of the operator’s network. It’s rooted in Azure Operator 5G Core and deployed by Azure Operator Service Manager on Azure Operator Nexus. Using AI from Azure Operator Insights, it’s intelligently operated and monitored. And importantly, it includes opportunities for our ecosystem of partners. Watch the video to learn more about how we are empowering operators to modernize and monetize their 5G investments. 

Build innovative, network-aware applications with new Azure Programmable Connectivity 

Along with operators, we are also working hard to enable developers for the evolution of cloud and edge. Today, we are announcing the private preview of Azure Programmable Connectivity, a solution for developers to build network-aware modern connected applications. Azure Programmable Connectivity provides a unified, standard interface across operator networks, enabling developers to create cloud and edge-native applications that interact with the intelligence of networks. This solution will deliver a consistent, transparent experience across multiple connectivity environments such as public and private LTE/5G networks, as well as wired and satellite networks. By exposing aspects of the underlying network to applications, Azure Programmable Connectivity provides a large developers ecosystem enabling operators to monetize their infrastructure investments.

Azure Programmable Connectivity helps application developers deliver the best user experience for highly distributed, modern connected applications by offering a seamless and enriched connection between networks and diverse compute targets, such as cloud regions, private and public MEC, IoT edge, and satellite for example, ensuring that developers can access the underlying network capabilities with ease. We are also collaborating with a growing ecosystem of operators, network technology companies, and API platform providers to help unlock the potential of Azure Programmable Connectivity. These include a global operator ecosystem including AT&T, Rogers, and T-Mobile in North America; Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica in Europe; and Singtel in Asia. Microsoft is also working with network technology partners and API platform providers Ericsson including its Vonage/Ericsson Global Network Platform and Nokia including its Network as Code platform, with more partners coming soon.

Watch demo videos with some of our partners AT&T, DT/T-Mobile, and Telefonica.

Developers can apply and signup for access to the private preview program.

Enable ubiquitous computing from cloud to edge 

As the cloud continues to grow in capability, agility, and reach, so does our platform, which enables ubiquitous computing and connectivity extending from cloud to edge—including private MEC, public MEC, on-premises, cloud regions, and even space.

Azure Private 5G Core now generally available 

As part of this expansion, today we are excited to announce that Azure Private 5G Core is now generally available. Since introducing Azure private MEC in public preview in June 2021 and Azure Private 5G Core at MWC 2022, we continue our mission to empower enterprises and governments to achieve more with multi-access edge compute, networking, and applications.

Azure private MEC will be built and delivered by an increasing set of operators, SIs, and ISV partners, serving enterprises across a wide range of industries around the world, including manufacturing, transportation, logistics, energy, and defense sectors. To date, more than 25 partners have published their offers on Azure Marketplace, making it easy for enterprises to quickly deploy these solutions, and to take advantage of private 5G. Learn more about our partner solutions in this private MEC blog.

Azure Private 5G Core provides a simple, scalable, and secure deployment of a 5G standalone core network deployed on Azure Stack Edge. This release includes a range of enhanced features such as support for 4G LTE and 5G standalone radios, rapid deployment on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack Edge Pro, and multi-site deployment. It also includes a built-in metrics dashboard, enhanced availability, advanced SIM policy with QoS support, and support for select Azure Stack Edge and HCI hardware platforms. 

Hosted on Azure private MEC, we are also unveiling Azure Edge Network Fabric which provides secure policy-based routing between multi-access devices at a customer’s premises and local applications, cloud, and edge networks, simplifying private MEC deployments. We are also previewing Radio Access Network (RAN) Observability capability to integrate RAN key performance indicators (KPI) with online dashboards. This feature provides partners and enterprises with combined observability, network insights, and analytics capability for the complete private 4G or 5G network—all from a single Azure portal.

“Reliable network connections are key for many processes and applications throughout the airport, especially the bridging point between Wi-Fi networks and public networks, as this is becoming an increasing issue with large amounts of data and real-time applications. NTT’s solution, powered by Azure private MEC, is helping us deploy the infrastructure and applications that will increase our operational efficiencies. NTT’s knowledge of 5G networks, combined with their experience in the aviation industry, is the perfect combination.”—Sebastian Mueller, CIO Cologne Bonn Airport

Expanding Azure public MEC solutions across North America and Asia 

Finally, our public MEC capabilities continue to expand to enable enterprises and developers to deploy latency-sensitive applications in densely populated metros for use cases such as venues, airports, and connected cities. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced the general availability of Azure public MEC with AT&T in Atlanta and Dallas. Now, we are extending the general availability of new sites with AT&T in Detroit, with New York, Los Angeles, and Miami coming soon. We are also happy to announce the private preview of the Azure public MEC with Singtel in Singapore, the first public offering in Asia, which extends the capability of Azure to Singtel’s 5G network edge. 

“Combining AT&T 5G with the Azure public MEC solution is laying the foundation for low-latency use cases, especially across transportation. With vehicles becoming the ultimate connected device, these edge zones will allow for new and improved driving experiences. With each new site, we’re one step closer to seeing the true breadth and depth 5G will unleash for businesses and consumers alike.”—Mike Troiano, SVP, Products, AT&T Business

“Singtel is excited about the collaboration with Microsoft to be the first telco in Asia to launch an Azure public MEC offering powered by Azure and Singtel Paragon Platform. The Azure public MEC is now available for enterprises in Singapore to deploy latency-sensitive applications. Enterprises can also leverage the ecosystem of partner apps from Singtel’s Paragon Platform and Microsoft at the Azure public MEC.”—Bill Chang, CEO Group Enterprise and Regional Data Center, Singtel

Learn more in Azure public MEC with this Singtel video.

MEC ISV programs enable rapid enterprise solution deployments 

We invite technology partners to join our ISV programs for Azure public MEC and Azure private MEC to receive technical benefits and platform capabilities designed specifically for ISVs, including discounted demos, training, and go-to-market support. 

• Azure private MEC ISV program: Watch and read this blog to learn more about the Azure private MEC ISV program featuring Cognitiwe, Ipsotek, RedViking, and weavix. Register here to learn more.
• Azure public MEC ISV program: Watch the video to learn more about the Azure public MEC ISV program featuring Multicasting.io, Palo Alto Networks, and Veeam. Register here to learn more.

Get started today

Along with our ecosystem partners, we are truly building a "better together" architecture that holistically addresses the needs of CSPs as they look to transform their networks. Our aim is to be the most trusted co-innovation partner through every stage of the digital evolution, committed to working with operators and enterprises on the future of modern networks and the cloud.

Invitation to operators, system integrators, and network function partners

• For CSPs interested to modernize and monetize their network investments, signup today.
• Operators and System Integrators interested in collaborating with Microsoft to build solutions with private MEC can get started by registering now.

Invitation to enterprise, developers, and ISVs 

• Enterprises interested in any of the solutions listed above can contact our partners via the Azure Marketplace listings, or by contacting the Azure private MEC team.
• Developers who are interested to create network-aware applications with Azure Programmable Connectivity can sign up now.
• Discover transformative 5G use cases, training, solution accelerators, and 5G starter kits.
• Application ISVs interested in collaborating with Microsoft to build MEC solutions can get started by registering here for private MEC and here for public MEC.
• To learn more about how Microsoft is helping organizations embrace 5G with modern connected applications, sign up for news and updates delivered to your inbox.

¹Cloud’s trillion-dollar prize is up for grabs, McKinsey.

In terms of AI developments, 2022 proved to be a banner year. AI production and usage increased and both deep learning and machine learning models steadily conquered increasingly complex problems. But AI evolution goes beyond impressive production and adoption levels to include breakthroughs in new computing methods, applications, and mega-scale supercomputers. Two of the leaders in this space are Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA and here are some of their most noteworthy achievements this year.

Massive cloud AI supercomputer for mega-sized AI models

The two computing giants are collaborating to provide one of the most powerful AI supercomputing platforms in the world. Powered by Microsoft Azure’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure combined with NVIDIA GPUs, networking, and the full stack of AI software, this cloud supercomputer will help enterprises train, deploy, and scale AI, including large, state-of-the-art models.

Azure is the first public cloud to incorporate NVIDIA’s advanced AI stack, adding tens of thousands of NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs, NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking, and the NVIDIA AI enterprise software suite to its platform.

This effort isn’t limited to spinning up better outputs in lean times—there’s also the need to advance knowledge and discoveries to benefit all of mankind’s endeavors and needs. All told, it’s an impressive AI system that performs at scales rarely imagined to be possible.

A quantum leap for AI-fueled scientific discoveries

AI can do far more than traditional data mining and advanced analytics. AI is dramatically changing scientific methods, handling complexities that a human mind cannot comprehend.

At Supercomputing 2022 (SC22), NVIDIA announced broad adoption of its next-generation H100 Tensor Core GPUs and Quantum-2 InfiniBand, including new offerings on Microsoft Azure cloud and over 50 new partner systems for accelerating scientific discovery.

H100 and Quantum-2 are part of NVIDIA’s high-performance computing (HPC) platform—a full technology stack with CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, systems, networking, and a broad range of AI and HPC software—that provides researchers the ability to efficiently accelerate their work on powerful systems, on-premises or in the cloud.

Microsoft Azure will be the first to offer NVIDIA Quantum-2 for HPC Workloads, providing a world-class supercomputing cloud infrastructure that allows researchers and scientists using Azure to achieve their life’s work.

Innovation is the lifeblood of all industries and this Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA breakthrough puts it at the fingertips of all users.

AI brings medical imagery diagnostics into sharper focus

A powerful collaboration between Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA, and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network puts AI-based medical image diagnostic tools directly into the hands of radiologists and other clinicians. This enables the capture of economies at scale, meaning patient care improves while costs drop.

A powerful collaboration between Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA, and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network puts AI-based medical image diagnostic tools directly into the hands of radiologists and other clinicians. This enables the capture of economies at scale, meaning patient care improves while costs drop. 

Powered by Microsoft Azure, the Nuance Precision Imaging Network provides access to an entire ecosystem of AI-powered tools and insights within clinical workflows to more than 12,000 healthcare facilities and the 80 percent of U.S. radiologists who use Nuance's PowerScribe radiology reporting and PowerShare image sharing solutions¹. 

Mass General Brigham will be among the first to accelerate end-to-end AI model development and deployment in clinical workflows on the Nuance Precision Imaging Network.

Wrapping up the roundup

• Azure collaborates with Hazy Research and NVIDIA to achieve unmatched MLPerf results. Azure-Hazy Research is the only submitter that reached below the 2-minute mark with BERT on 16 virtual machines.
• Azure scales 530B Parameter GPT-3 Model with NVIDIA NeMo Megatron. Combining NVIDIA NeMo Megatron with Azure AI infrastructure offers a powerful platform that anyone can spin up in minutes without having to incur the costs and burden of managing their own on-premises infrastructure.
• Azure and NVIDIA scored Top500 and Green500 ranking for AI purpose-built infrastructure
• HPCwire bestowed Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA top awards in Best Use of HPC in Financial Services Editors’ Choice, Best AI Product or Technology—Readers’ Choice, and Best Use of High-Performance Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence.
• At Supercomputing 2022, Nidhi Chappell, General Manager, Microsoft Azure HPC + AI, and Ian Buck, VP/General Manager Hyperscale and HPC Computing, NVIDIA discussed game changers in AI and cloud infrastructure. And NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang shared the latest news, innovations, and technologies in NVIDIA’s SC22 Special Address.

Stay tuned for our 2023 advancements

Keep up to date with Microsoft and NVIDIA. Visit our HPCwire Solution Channel.

Sources: NVIDIA Teams With Microsoft to Build Massive Cloud AI Computer, NVIDIA news, November 16, 2022.
 

This blog has been coauthored by Ashish Shah, Partner Director of Engineering, Azure Developer Experience.

We are announcing the general availability of Azure Load Testing. Azure Load Testing is a fully managed load-testing service that enables you to generate high-scale load, gain-actionable insights, and ensure the resiliency of your applications and services regardless of where they're hosted. Developers, testers, and engineering teams can use it to optimize application performance, scalability, or capacity.

Get started with Azure Load Testing now, by quickly creating a load test for your web application by using a URL. If you already have load tests leveraging JMeter, you can easily get started by reusing existing Apache JMeter test scripts.

Building resiliency testing into developer workflows

Our goal at Microsoft is to help developers do more with less effort. When performance, scalability, or resiliency issues are identified in production or even close to production they can be extremely difficult and costly to resolve. With Azure Load Testing developers can catch issues closer to code authoring time as part of their developer workflows saving them valuable time and energy.

“As part of our quality shift left initiatives, the Cloud Ecosystem Security teams were able to prevent multiple unique load related bugs from reaching production by gating production builds using Azure Load Testing as part of our CI/CD pipeline. The service teams have also combined the load from Azure Load Testing with fault injection scenarios from Azure Chaos Studio to replicate, root cause and prevent non happy path scenarios that are hard to catch using regular testing frameworks. Along with service resiliency validation, Azure Load Testing has helped uncover the bounds of the distributed system and saved us costs by eliminating unused resources and frameworks.”—Microsoft Cloud Ecosystem Security engineering team

“The Azure Synapse team uses Azure Load Testing to generate different levels of workloads from high concurrency to large input data sequential execution targeting Synapse SQL Serverless endpoints. With the flexibility of JMeter we can start/stop other services within a cluster that can inject different failures, thus truly testing the resiliency of our service.”—Microsoft Azure Synapse engineering team

Pay only for what you need

Optimize your infrastructure while ensuring your application and services are resilient to severe spikes in customer traffic. Leverage Azure Load Testing to optimize your infrastructure before production, planning for the customer traffic you are expecting, paying only for what you need. Then leverage Azure Load Testing to test for unplanned increases in load.

Figure 1: Easily scale load in Azure Load Testing to check the resiliency of your applications and services.

Regression testing

For Azure-based applications, Azure Load Testing collects detailed resource metrics to help you identify performance bottlenecks across your Azure application components. You can automate regression testing by running load tests as part of your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow.

Figure 2: Build Load Testing into your developer workflow with pass/fail criteria.

Azure-specific insights can help you understand how different load scenarios impact all the parts of your application, and you can compare test results across different load tests to understand behavior changes over time.

Azure Load Testing creates monitoring data using Azure Monitor, including Application insights and Container insights, to capture details from the Azure services. Depending on the type of service, different metrics are available. For example, the number of database reads, the type of HTTP responses, or container resource consumption. Both client-side and server-side metrics are available in the Azure Load Testing dashboard.

Figure 3: Get performance insights across client and Azure service side metrics with Azure Load Testing.

Enable advanced load testing scenarios

For more advanced load testing scenarios, you can create a JMeter-based load test, a popular open-source load and performance tool. For example, your test plan might consist of multiple application requests, or input data and parameters to make the test more dynamic. And if you already have existing JMeter test scripts you can reuse them to create load tests with Azure Load Testing.

Figure 4: Azure Load Testing architecture overview.

What has changed since preview?

Since we debuted Azure Load Testing, we have enabled several new capabilities based on customer feedback.

Quick test creation

• Quick test creation of Azure Load Testing with URL. Quick test creation lets you create a load test without a JMeter script, enabling you to set up, run, and test your URL in less than five minutes.

Azure SDK Load Testing Libraries

• .NET Azure Load Testing Library
• Java Azure Load Testing Library
• JavaScript Azure Load Testing Library
• Python Azure Load Testing Library

JMeter capabilities

• Support for user specified JMeter properties. Support for user-specified JMeter properties, making load tests more configurable.
• Splitting input data across multiple test engines. If you're using CSV data in your JMeter script, you can process the input data in parallel across multiple test engines. Azure Load Testing enables you to configure a test to split the data evenly across all engine instances.

Authentication, user-managed identities, and customer-managed keys

• Authenticate with Client Certificates. Azure Load Testing now enables you to authenticate application endpoints which require a client certificate.
• Test Private Endpoints or applications hosted on-premises. Azure Load Testing enables you to test private application endpoints or applications that you host on-premises.
• System assigned and user-assigned managed identities. Azure Load Testing now supports both system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities.
• Customer managed keys. Azure Load Testing support for customer-managed keys.

Additional metrics

• Additional Client-side metrics for pass/fail criteria. Azure Load Testing enables you to leverage pass/fail criteria metrics including additional client-side metrics of requests per second and latency.
• View load engine metrics. Ability to view engine health metrics to understand the performance of the test engine during the run, enabling confidence in the test results and improve test configuration.

Compliance and regional availability

• Azure Load Testing is HITRUST certified.
• Azure Load Testing Regional availability. Azure Load Testing is now available in 11 regions; Australia East, East Asia, East US, East US2, North Europe, South Central US, Sweden Central, UK South, West Europe, West US2, and West US3.

Get started with Azure Load Testing

You can get started with Azure Load Testing by creating an Azure Load Testing resource in the Azure portal. Check out the Azure Load Testing documentation and create your first load test.

Learn more about pricing details on the Azure Load Testing pricing page.

Watch the new DevOps Lab episode, "What's new in Azure Load Testing?"

Azure Load Testing on DevOps Lab

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Figure 5: What’s new in Azure Load Testing with April Edwards and Nikita Nallamothu.

Share your feedback

We’d love to hear from you through our feedback forum.

We are excited that for the fifth consecutive time Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide. We believe this placement is a testament to our continued investments in customers' integration needs.

An integration solution for all developers

Enterprise business depends on all kinds of applications—packaged, software as a service (SaaS), and custom-built. Business value is realized when these applications integrate with each other. Microsoft’s enterprise integration offering, Azure Integration Services, brings these varied applications together—empowering organizations to create differentiated customer and partner experiences. What’s more, this integration extends beyond the traditional organization boundaries—encompassing applications from suppliers, customers, and business partners.

Every enterprise integration use case is different. Azure Integration Services provides a comprehensive set of services that can be used standalone or in combination to build an integration solution that meets our customers' unique needs.

Both professional and citizen developers can leverage the power and flexibility of Azure Integration Services to create business value. With support for Azure Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, App Insights, and Azure Monitor, we bring an intuitive user experience to professional developers on the platform of their choice. When used in conjunction with Microsoft Power Platform, citizen developers can also build a breadth of integration solutions for low-code application development.

As a part of the larger Azure platform, we provide seamless integration and access to all the additional Azure services. The flexibility to only pay for what you need makes Azure Integration Services a cost-effective and agile solution. Customers can get started without any license commitment or upfront purchasing and scale seamlessly with their integration needs and usage.

Powering our customers’ digital transformation initiatives

Enterprise integration is the cornerstone of digital transformation initiatives. Azure Integration Services is on a mission to bring your technology investments together, be it on-premises or in the cloud. It enables businesses to embrace new applications while still maintaining connectivity with their legacy systems via hybrid app integration and full lifecycle API management.

Cargolux, Europe’s biggest all-cargo airline, accelerated its digital transformation using Azure Integration Services. Our integration solution has enabled Cargolux to build a digital ecosystem and generate value for both their internal teams and their customers. Cargolux now exposes services supporting flight operations, airplane maintenance, and cargo management programmatically using Azure API Management offering secure customer access for fast, automated transactions.

“Through Azure API Management, we can provide direct API connection to our environment for customer systems so that they can do direct bookings on the spot. It’s opened up a new world in helping customers get their cargo onto our planes.”—Alfons Seesink, Chief Technology Officer, Cargolux

Modernize workflows with low or no code

Many enterprises customers like Manulife and DHL have chosen Azure Logic Apps to boost their developer productivity by automating their business-critical workflows. This was all made possible by over 600 out-of-the-box Azure Logic Apps connectors to Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SAP, Twitter, and more that help seamlessly connect data, events, and resources across applications and systems—without writing any code. Additionally, the solution also provides the extensibility to write custom connectors.

“With Logic Apps, everything communicates without errors. It took me just a few hours to get the first proof of concept out. Now we use it to automate so many of our business processes.” —Rohit Mistry, Infrastructure Analyst, Manulife

“With the integration capabilities we’ve gained through Azure, employees can now simplify or eliminate the most tedious parts of their jobs and contribute in more valuable ways.” —Fekko Roelofs, Program Manager Robotics Hub & Resource Orchestration at DHL Supply Chain, DHL

Coca-Cola used custom-built Azure Logic Apps connectors to automate their bottling operations, internal and external order processing, and connecting data across systems, accelerating its time-to-market.

“We also value the extensibility of the platform, enabling us to build and integrate custom connectors.” —Jared Simmons, Systems Analyst, Coca-Cola

Succeeding together

The exponential rise in the data, applications, and systems in use at enterprises can make enterprise integration a daunting undertaking. Azure Integration Services is here to help. Our battle-hardened solution coupled with our enterprise-wide expertise makes us a unique partner on your digital transformation journey. Learn how organizations like yours use Azure Integration Services to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.

Download a complimentary copy of the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide to learn why Microsoft is named a Leader.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, Keith Guttridge, Andrew Comes, Saikat Ray, 24 January 2023 . The report was earlier named as Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service.

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Gartner Reprint.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Enterprises and hobbyists alike have been using Azure Computer Vision’s Image Analysis API to garner various insights from their images. These insights help power scenarios such as digital asset management, search engine optimization (SEO), image content moderation, and alt text for accessibility among others. 

Newly improved features including read (OCR)

We are thrilled to announce the preview release of Computer Vision Image Analysis 4.0 which combines existing and new visual features such as read optical character recognition (OCR), captioning, image classification and tagging, object detection, people detection, and smart cropping into one API. One call is all it takes to run all these features on an image. 

The OCR feature integrates more deeply with the Computer Vision service and includes performance improvements that are optimized for image scenarios that make OCR easy to use for user interfaces and near real-time experiences. Read now supports 164 languages including Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hindi.

Tested at scale and ready for deployment 

Microsoft’s own products from PowerPoint, Designer, Word, Outlook, Edge, and LinkedIn are using Vision APIs to power design suggestions, alt text for accessibility, SEO, document processing, and content moderation. 

You can get started with the preview by trying out the visual features with your images on Vision Studio. Upgrading from a previous version of the Computer Vision Image Analysis API to V4.0 is simple with these instructions.

We will continue to release breakthrough vision AI through this new API over the coming months, including capabilities powered by the Florence foundation model featured in this year’s premiere computer vision conference keynote at CVPR. 

Additional Computer Vision services

Spatial Analysis is also in preview. You can use the spatial analysis feature to create apps that can count people in a room, understand dwell times in front of a retail display, and determine wait times in lines. Build solutions that enable occupancy management and social distancing, optimize in-store and office layouts, and accelerate the checkout process. By processing video streams from physical spaces, you're able to learn how people use them and maximize the space's value to your organization.

The Azure Face service provides AI algorithms that detect, recognize, and analyze human faces in images. Facial recognition software is important in many different scenarios, such as identity verification, touchless access control, and face blurring for privacy. Face service access is limited based on eligibility and usage criteria in order to support our Responsible AI principles. Face service is only available to Microsoft managed customers and partners. Use the Face Recognition intake form to apply for access. For more information, see the Face limited access page.

Computer Vision and Responsible AI

We are excited to see how our customers use Computer Vision’s Image Analysis API with these new and updated features. Our technology advancements are also guided by Microsoft’s Responsible AI process, and our principles of fairness, inclusiveness, reliability and safety, transparency, privacy and security, and accountability. We put these ethical standards into practice through the Office of Responsible AI (ORA)—which sets our rules and governance processes, the AI Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research (Aether) Committee—which advises our leadership on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI innovations, and Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE)—a team that enables the implementation of Microsoft Responsible AI rules across engineering groups.

Get started

Start improving how you analyze images with Image Analysis 4.0 with a unified API endpoint and a new OCR Model. 

• Computer Vision documentation.
• Image Analysis documentation. 
• Quick Start for Image Analysis. 
• Vision Studio for demoing product solutions.