Azure News - Microsoft Ignite 2022

We transitioned from “Digital Transformation” to “Digital Imperative” said Satya Nadella during the Microsoft Ignite’s Keynote.

In today’s uncertain economic environment, companies are looking to change the way they do work to get better results, with less friction and more choice.

During Microsoft Ignite 2022, Microsoft demonstrated how to accelerate innovation with the world's most complete cloud and how Microsoft Cloud is helping customers to do more with less based on the hereafter 5 pillars in which we summarized most of Azure Ignite’s announcements.

1. Be data-driven & optimized with Azure

Build agility, optimize your business, and create data-driven experiences with Microsoft Azure. Learn how Azure helps you innovate on your terms and modernize your infrastructure; how the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform provides an integrated data fabric to achieve agility; and realize faster time to value with Microsoft Industry Clouds.

1.1. Core Services: Do more with less (get the most value out of the cloud investment)

• A new Azure savings plan for compute (Generally Available) : save up to 65 percent on compute services, compared to pay-as-you-go prices when commit to spend a fixed hourly amount on compute services for one or three years. Customers choose whether to pay for the commitment all upfront or monthly at no extra cost. As customers use select services such as Virtual Machines and container instances across the world, their usage is covered by the plan at reduced prices, helping customers get more value from their cloud budget. During the times when usage is above the hourly commitment, customers will be billed at their regular pay-as-you-go prices.
• Azure Migration and Modernization program (AMMP ) now helps plan and deploy cloud security services while migrating, including support for Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel. Let’s also take advantage of Azure innovation across hybrid environments with Azure Arc deployment support for workloads that need to remain on premises.
• Azure Hybrid Benefit (Generally Available) : New Windows Server benefits and features Microsoft is expanding Azure Hybrid Benefit, a program that enables Software Assurance (SA) customers to reduce costs. With the new Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Stack HCI, customers can: Run AKS on Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI at no additional cost with Windows SA and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) subscriptions. With this, customers can deploy and manage containerized Linux and Windows apps from cloud to edge (Windows Server, Windows IOT, …) ?with a consistent, managed Kubernetes service (AKS Lite) or get Azure Stack HCI at no additional cost with Windows Server Datacenter SA. Customers can modernize their existing datacenter and edge infrastructure to run their virtual machine (VM) and container-based workloads on modern infrastructure with industry-leading price-performance and built-in connectivity to Azure.
• Spot priority mix for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (Preview) : A new feature for Virtual Machine Scale Sets will enable Azure customers to mix Standard and Spot Virtual Machines (VMs) in the same virtual machine scale set. This new capability is available with flexible orchestration mode and can help Azure customers achieve significant cost savings given the deep discount rates that Spot VMs usually provide.

1.2. Sustainability

• Azure Well Architecture Framework for Sustainability (link) In partnership with the Green Software Foundation, we've developed this set of recommendations for optimizing Azure workloads. This documentation helps you plan your path forward, improve your sustainability posture, and create new business value while reducing your operational footprint. To achieve an increase in carbon efficiency, consider how your workload, directly and indirectly, can reduce carbon emissions.

1.3. Core Services: The only extensible hybrid cloud

Microsoft provides extensive Hybrid-cloud services thanks to Azure. It relates to Network services, authentication & authorization services, 3rd party control plan extension towards Azure (VMWare, Nutanix), native Cloud connectors in Microsoft Products (SQL 2022) and Azure Arc services launched in 2019. We are pleased to announce:

• Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) lite (Generally Available ): brings the AKS platform to the light-weight edge devices. AKS is the managed, CNCF-conformant, Kubernetes platform by Microsoft that can run both Linux and Windows container applications. AKS lite builds on this stable platform to offer a light-weight Kubernetes distribution – both K8S and K3S, that can be easily deployed at the edge, on any Windows PC class device with Windows 10 and 11 IoT Enterprise, Enterprise and Pro. In addition to this, for scenarios where you use Windows Server at the lightweight operational technology edge, you can use AKS lite as well. AKS lite simplifies managing, deploying, and maintaining a Kubernetes cluster on-premises, making it easy to get started hosting Linux and Windows containers. Azure Kubernetes Service on-premises or at the edge with Azure Arc.
• Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere (preview ): extends Azure governance and management capabilities to VMware vSphere infrastructure. With Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere, you get a consistent management experience across Azure and VMware vSphere infrastructure. Arc-enabled VMware vSphere allows to perform various VMware virtual machine (VM) lifecycle operations directly from Azure, empower developers and application teams to self-serve VM operations on-demand using Azure role-based access control (RBAC), browse VMware vSphere resources (VMs, templates, networks, and storage) in Azure and provide a single pane view for your infrastructure across both environments and conduct governance and monitoring operations.
• VMware on Azure (Preview) : Updates to Azure VMware Solution (AVS): this native VMware environment is available in 24 regions around the globe with stretched clusters (Preview ) for Azure VMware Solution, providing 99.99 percent uptime for mission-critical applications requiring the highest availability and maximum control over access to encrypted data. In case of Availability Zone (AZ) failure, customers’ virtual machines (VMs) and applications automatically failover to an unaffected AZ with no application impact and Customer-managed keys for Azure VMware Solution (Public Preview) : provides you with control over your encrypted vSAN data on Azure VMware Solution. With this feature, you can use Azure Key Vault to generate customer-managed keys as well as centralize and streamline the key management process.
• Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Microsoft Azure (Generally Available) : simplifies and accelerates the customer journey to the cloud. Nutanix customers can migrate or extend their workloads to Azure, without modification or retooling. With Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure, customers can leverage their existing Nutanix skills and tools, add Azure services such as security, identity and analytics and gain cost efficiencies with license portability that enables them to use their existing licenses for Azure deployment. And, to further support a hybrid model, customers can also seamlessly extend Azure data services to their on-premises Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters using the Nutanix platform.
• Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure (link) Microsoft and Oracle have partnered to provide low latency, high throughput cross-cloud connectivity, allowing you to take advantage of the best of both clouds. Using this cross-cloud connectivity, you can partition a multi-tier application to run your database tier on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and the application and other tiers on Microsoft Azure. The experience is similar to running the entire solution stack in a single cloud. It simplifies using both clouds. Oracle Database Service for Azure reduces the complexity of connecting your clouds, networks, identities, and data.

1.4. Azure Services: ARM based toolchain & deployment

• Windows Dev Kit 2023 (code name “Project Volterra”) ( Generally Available ) : Starting now developers can build, run, and test Windows apps for Arm on a single compact device : See more details in Chapter 3 (Developer Platform).
• Developer tools: A fully Arm-native suite of developer tools is available for installing on Windows 11, including: Visual Studio 2022 17.4 Preview 2 for Arm64 T his is the first native Arm64 version of Visual Studio available with workloads enabled for desktop development with C++ (for MSBuild-based projects), .NET desktop development, and web development. Additionally, our latest preview includes support for Windows SDK and Win App SDK components (Win UI). NET 7 Preview Arm64 SDK: Native support for Arm64 is available in .NET 6, along with the .NET Framework 4.8.1 runtime and SDK, but that support has been extended in .NET 7. Visual Studio Code for ARM: VS Code has supported an ARM64 architecture since the September 2020 version 1.50 release, including extensions for Remote Development.
• Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere Altra Arm–based processors (Generally available) : Excellent price-performance, greater power efficiencies, lower price points of entry for Linux scale-out workloads.
• ARM based Kubernetes: Containers can be deployed on ARM-based infrastructure.

1.5. Core Services: Confidential Computing (Link)

• New foundational Azure confidential computing services, helps protect data in use with additional capabilities to services like Confidential VM node pools: Confidential VMs and guest attestation, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) on confidential VMs, Confidential VM option for SQL Server on Azure VMs ?
• Confidential VM node pools on AKS (Public Preview ) Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides enterprise security capabilities for organizations to deploy containers at scale. AKS is the first to market in enabling confidential VM with AMD SEV-SNP node pools in Kubernetes, adding defense-in-depth to Azure's hardened security profile.
• Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework (Preview ): a new Azure service that offers execution of the Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) open-source software development kit (SDK) as a managed service. This will eliminate the need for developers to stand up, maintain and manage their own infrastructure to support CCF-based services. CCF is an open-source framework for building highly available, stateful services that require decentralized trust with centralized compute for ease of use and performance.

1.6. Azure Core Services: Storage

• Premium SSD v2 (General ly Available) : The expansion of the Azure Disk Storage portfolio with the general availability of Premium SSD v2 for greater flexibility when managing performance and costs. With Premium SSD v2 Azure customers can now provision up to 64 tebibytes (TiBs) of storage capacity, 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 1,200 megabits per second throughput on a single disk. You can provision separately disk size, IOPS, and throughput to match your workload requirements, resulting in greater flexibility when managing performance and costs. Furthermore, you can dynamically scale up or down the performance as needed without downtime, giving you the flexibility to manage disk performance cost-effectively.
• Azure Elastic SAN (Preview) : a unique cloud-native and fully managed storage area network (SAN) service. Combining SAN-like capabilities with the benefits of being a cloud-native service, Azure Elastic SAN will offer a scalable, cost-effective, high-performance, and reliable storage solutions. It can connect to a variety of Azure compute services, enabling customers to seamlessly lift and shift their SAN workloads to the cloud without having to change their provisioning and management model. Support standard industry protocol (iSCSI) for data access
• Zone-redundant storage support by Azure Backup (Generally Available ): The option to store the backup of the workloads protected by Azure Backup in zone redundant vaults is generally available. When you configure the protection of a resource with the zone-redundant storage (ZRS) vault, the backups replicate synchronously across three availability zones in a region. It enables you to perform successful restores and recover your data even if a zone goes down. For organizations governed by the compliance requirement of data not crossing the regional boundary, zone redundant storage is the right and preferred choice for backups. Azure Backup currently supports ZRS in these r egions.
• Enhanced soft delete for Azure Backup (Public Preview) : Enhanced soft delete improves upon Azure Backup's existing soft delete capability to provide the ability to recover your backup data in scenarios of accidental or malicious deletion. With enhanced soft delete, you get the ability to make soft delete irreversible, which protects soft delete from being disabled by any malicious actors. Hence, enhanced soft delete provides better protection for your backups against various threats. Enhanced soft delete also allows you to provide a customizable soft delete retention period for which soft deleted data must be retained.
• Store business-critical blob data with immutable storage (link) : Immutable storage for Azure Blob Storage enables users to store business-critical data in a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) state. While in a WORM state, data can't be modified or deleted for a user-specified interval. By configuring immutability policies for blob data, you can protect your data from overwrites and deletes.
• Shared managed disk (Generally Available) : Azure shared disks is a feature for Azure managed disks that allows you to attach a managed disk to multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. Attaching a managed disk to multiple VMs allows you to either deploy new or migrate existing clustered applications to Azure.

1.7. Other Azure Core Services

• Azure Monitor new capabilities called “Predictive Autoscale” (Preview) : for Virtual Machine Scale Sets: Users can leverage machine learning to manage and scale Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets resources by forecasting the overall CPU load and ensuring that scale-out occurs in time to meet the demand.
• Azure Automanage (Generally Available for Azure VMs and Arc-enabled servers) : Azure Automanage is a service that automates configuration of virtual machines (VMs) to best-practice Azure services, as well as continuous security and management operations across the entire lifecycle of VMs in Azure or hybrid environments enabled through Azure Arc. This allows you to save time, reduce risk, and improve workload uptime by automating day-to-day configuration and management tasks– all with point-and-click simplicity and at scale.
• Azure Advisor Score (Generally Available) : provides best practice recommendations for your workloads. These recommendations are personalized and accountable to help you: Improve the posture of your workloads and optimize your Azure deployments, proactively prevent top issues by following best practices and assess your Azure workloads against the five pillars of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. As a core feature of Advisor, Advisor Score can help you achieve these goals effectively and efficiently. Advisor Score now supports the ability to report on specific workloads using resource tag filters in addition to subscriptions. For example, you can now omit non-production resources from the score calculation. You can also track your progress over time to understand whether you are consistently maintaining healthy Azure deployments.
• Azure Center for SAP solutions (Preview ): an end-to-end deployment and management experience running SAP on Azure, now supports registering Windows-based systems and installing SAP S/4HANA 2020/2021, while providing cost transparency though integration with the Cost analysis feature and even more Quality checks.
• Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus (Preview) : Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus allows you to collect and analyze metrics at scale using a Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, based on the Prometheus project from the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. This fully managed service allows you to use the Prometheus query language (PromQL) to analyze and alert on the performance of monitored infrastructure and workloads without having to operate the underlying infrastructure.

1.8. Data & Analytics

• Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform (generally available ): The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, which unifies databases, analytics, and governance, has added the Partner Ecosystem, a selection of complementary and integrated partner solutions to help customers accelerate their data integrations and value creation. The Partner Ecosystem meets customers where they are with select cloud-based partner solutions that complement native Azure platform capabilities with better together solutions, all within the integrated Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. This first wave of partner solutions spans each layer of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform including:

o Databases: MongoDB and YugabyteDB bring leading cloud native NoSQL and NewSQL databases together with analytics and data governance within the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform.

o Analytics: Informatica, Confluent, dbt Labs, Fivetran, Qlik and Striim bring low-code/no-code data integration and transformation solutions for analytics to simplify the process of building and operating complex enterprise- grade pipelines to integrate data from a variety of sources and transform pipelines with a single-pane experience in Microsoft Purview.

o Data governance: Profisee, CluedIn, Delphix and OneTrust represent Master Data Management, compliance, and security solutions for hybrid and multicloud data estates.

• Microsoft and Databricks deepen partnership for modern, cloud-native analytics (link) : Databricks has been a key partner for us in delivering a cloud native platform for Analytics in the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. We have further strengthened our partnership with Databricks to evolve our Analytics platform to an Open and Governed Data Lakehouse foundation. This foundation will enable our customers to unify their most demanding Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence investments on a single data foundation for analytics and data visualization. and an open and governed data lake house. The foundation will also enable customers to responsibly democratize their analytics data products to accelerate digital transformation applications across their organizations.?

o?Microsoft and Databricks have partnered to build this foundation in the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform by integrating their hallmark capabilities to deliver an integrated solution for our customers.??

o?Core to the foundation is the Open and Governed Data Lakehouse, a unified and cloud native data fabric capable of serving business intelligence, machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads at enterprise and cloud scales, without requiring organizations to invest in building, integrating, and operating point data fabrics for each.??

• CosmosDB (Generally Available) : we’re adding distributed database support for PostgreSQL, a popular open-source database engine. Azure Cosmos DB now brings fast, flexible, and scalable service to open-source relational data with the introduction of distributed PostgreSQL support. Built upon the Hyperscale (Citus) engine, the new Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL brings everything developers love about PostgreSQL and the powerful Citus extension to Microsoft’s fast and scalable database for cloud-native app development. Developers can now build apps with both relational and non-relational (NoSQL) data using the same familiar database service. This complements the existing NoSQL APIs in Azure Cosmos DB to provide a common data foundation for a variety of applications including multi-tenant SaaS, IoT, and OLTP apps.
• SQL Server 2022 (Preview ): SQL Server brings a lot of new features such as: Link feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance for DR, Azure Synapse Link for SQL , Microsoft Purview integration , Ledger and a lot more…
• SAP CDC capabilities for Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics (Generally Available ) enables customers to bring in SAP data for advanced analytics. Azure Data Factory’s new Microsoft Graph Data Connector for Microsoft 365 datasets transports your office data into Azure, so you can unlock collaboration and productivity insights. We’re also continuing to remove friction from end-user experiences, allowing you to share your Power BI datasets across tenants through Power BI B2B data sharing.
• Microsoft Purview (link ) combines unified data governance with risk and compliance solutions. Business workflows Generally Available), and business metamodel (Preview), make it easier to maximize the business value of your data and drive cross-functional data governance.
• Azure Data Studio MySQL extension (Public Preview) : you can now connect to and modify MySQL databases along with your other databases, taking advantage of the modern editor experience and capabilities in Azure Data Studio, such as IntelliSense, code snippets, source control integration, native Jupyter Notebooks, an integrated terminal, and more. Use this new tooling with any MySQL server hosted on-premises, on virtual machines, on managed MySQL in other clouds, and on Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server.
• Oracle to Azure migration with Database Migration Assessment for Oracle (Public Preview) : Expanded capabilities within the Database Migration Assessment for Oracle extension in Azure Data Studio now include Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The extension allows you to perform code assessment (identify complexity of workload), estimate the manual effort required to migrate the workload to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and provides a detailed report with actions needed to facilitate the migration. This extension provides a way to plan your migration from Oracle to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, removing the tedious work of assessing the migration manually. Through the same tooling, customers can get target sizing recommendations for Oracle Database migration to Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which is ideal for large workloads up to 100 TB.

2.???Deliver efficiency with automation and AI

Deliver efficiency with AI and automation across your business. Learn how organizations across industries are applying AI, automation, and mixed reality to streamline business processes, enhance collaboration, and improve customer and employee experiences.

2.1. Azure OpenAI Services

• Azure OpenAI Service - Dall-E 2 (limited access in preview ): Aer Language processing (Language or Codex via Cognitive services Azure or API), Azure will be able to generate content, images, and code to bring visual ideas to life – all from inputting simple text. It provides customers such as Matel cloud AI infrastructure that blends the cutting-edge innovation of text-to-image generation with the compliance, responsible AI guardrails and certifications that Azure offers. Microsoft is also integrating DALL-E 2 into its consumer apps and services starting with the newly announced Microsoft Designer app, and soon be integrated into Image Creator in Microsoft Bing.

DALL-E 2 was trained on a supercomputer hosted in Azure that Microsoft built exclusively for OpenAI. The same Azure supercomputer was also used to train OpenAI’s GPT3 natural language models and Codex , the model that powers GitHub Copilot and certain features in Microsoft Power Apps that run on Azure OpenAI Service: Azure also makes it possible for these AI tools to rapidly generate images, text, or code suggestions for a person to review and consider using. Along similar lines, a person who is listening to an audiobook on their phone would typically look at the same book cover art for each chapter. DALL-E version 2 could be used to generate a unique image to accompany each scene in each chapter.

2.2. Other AI Azure News

• Machine Learning:

o?Use AzureML registries to share ML pipelines and models across teams and workspaces: This feature enables you to access cross-workspace collaboration across MLOps. Data science teams within an organization can now work together to create registries, publish pipelines and models, and promote models across development, test, and production environments.?

o?Optimize training with the Azure Container for PyTorch: This feature is the latest PyTorch environment, and it is optimized for large, deep-learning workloads. This lightweight, standalone environment offers you accelerated training at reduced costs.

o?Azure Container for PyTorch and Azure Data Science Virtual Machines for PyTorch (Preview ): are curated environments and custom images that will bundle innovative technologies used by Microsoft to set up, develop, accelerate and support optimized training for PyTorch models.

• Responsible Al dashboard in Azure Machine Learning (generally Available soon ): making it possible for customers to easily implement Responsible Al by debugging machine learning models and making informed data-driven decisions. The Responsible Al scorecard introduces an on-demand UI experience for generating PDF scorecards, making it possible for no-code/low-code customers to create reports for their models.
• Computer Vision Image Analysis 4.0 Image Analysis 4.0 and Spatial Analysis on the Edge (public preview) : A new version of the Computer Vision Image Analysis API is now in preview. Image Analysis 4.0 makes all image visual features available through a single endpoint. You can now perform image caponing, tagging, read(OCR), people detection, smart crops, and object detection in one API call all at once. Read(OCR) now supports 164 languages including Cyrillic and Arabic.
• Azure Form Recognizer offer new capabilities (Preview ): including content extraction from contracts and support for 275 languages.

2.3. Automation

• Power Automate:

o?Power Automate description to cloud flow (Preview ): Building on the success of GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Power Platform is bringing the same copilot principles to Power Automate with description to cloud flow. Now users can describe what they want to automate in a sentence, and AI will build your flow in seconds. No endless searching or guesswork, just describe it and let Power Automate generate the requisite cloud flow. This feature streamlines automation for all users.

o?Power Automate format data by examples: Writing expressions to utilize data when automating workflows can be daunting. Power Automate now simplifies this process by leveraging AI to reshape data for more straightforward expression authoring by use of examples. To access this feature in Power Automate cloud flow designer, users can select any action and use the new option “format data by examples.” By feeding the designer examples of the desired output format to produce, Power Automate will automatically generate the expression formula to use.

3. Innovate with cloud & Developer platform

Accelerate innovation with the world's most complete cloud developer platform. Learn how every developer can achieve more with less using their favorite low and pro code tools. Modernize and scale application development with cloud-native architectures and fully managed databases. See how fusion teams rapidly build, deploy, and manage secure apps at scale.

3.1. Application Innovation

• Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager (public preview) : Distributed Kubernetes cluster management is complex and challenging. Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager simplifies multi-cluster management by enabling centralized management of all clusters at scale. Customers can group any combination of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters to simplify multi-cluster workflows like workload propagation and multi-cluster networking. Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager allows you to easily manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters, run multi-cluster workloads and services, and ensure consistent configuration, access, and governance across your Kubernetes environment.
• Azure Container Apps Premium plan: for apps and microservices that require specialized rather than ephemeral compute. The Premium plan hosting option is a fully managed, isolated environment with customized compute options and flexible cost control options.
• Azure App Service:

o??Go language Support (in development) : For the first time ever, Go language (v1.18 and v1.19) is natively supported on Azure App Service, helping developers innovate faster using the best fully managed app platform for cloud-centric web apps. The language support is expected to be available as an experimental language release on Linux App Service in November 2022.

o??Larger SKUs for App Service Environment v3 (In development) : Enterprises will soon be able to operate more securely with large SKUs to support more demanding workloads with App Service Environment v3. New Isolated v2 SKUs of 64GB/ 128GB/ 256GB provide compelling value to organizations that need a dedicated tenant to run their most sensitive and demanding applications. This is expected to be available in production in Q4 CY2022

• Managed Environments (preview) : offers a set of enhanced out-of-the-box governance capabilities that will simplify, automate, and streamline IT administration of Microsoft Power Platform at scale. Admins can select environments in the Microsoft Power Platform admin center and enable them as Managed Environments with a single click.
• Power Pages (Generally Available) : Power Pages is an enterprise grade connectivity platform for organizations to build and launch external self-service websites. The Power Pages platform allows them to connect with their customers, partners and communities and share business data, collaborate, and automate business processes with them at scale and securely. Learn more about building secure business websites.
• Power Apps Coauthoring (preview ): With coauthoring, Makers can now work together on the same app and page in the modern app designer at the same time. This enables teams to divide and conquer work to achieve a completed app faster than ever before.
• Teams platform for developers (link) :

o??Teams Live Share SDK (preview): Teams Live Share SDK, which will allow developers to turn any app, when shared in a Teams meeting, into a real-time, multi-user collaborative experience.

o??Extension of Teams apps to Outlook and Office: Using the Teams 2.0 JS SDK, announced at Microsoft Build 2022, developers can now build production apps that extend Teams Pages and Message Extensions across Teams, Outlook and Office.

o??Teams Toolkit in Visual Studio: Microsoft Teams Toolkit is now a part of Visual Studio, Microsoft’s flagship Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Developers can now use Visual Studio to build rich, collaborative apps that work in Teams and can also extend Teams app experiences into Outlook and Office.com.

3.2. Developer platform

• Windows Dev Kit 2023 (code name “Project Volterra”) ( Generally Available ) : Starting now developers can build, run, and test Windows apps for Arm on a single compact device : the latest Arm device built for Windows developers with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that provides best-in class AI computing capacity, multiple ports, and a stackable design for desktops and rack deployment. Purpose-built with everything you need to develop, debug, and test native Windows apps for Arm.?Support for building arm-native and porting exiting x64 apps is available including : Arm64EC (“Emulation Compatible”) and Arm64x (new type of binary that can contain the classic code and Arm64EC code together). The Windows Dev Kit 2023 is powered by the Snapdragon? 8cx Gen 3 compute platform, and sports 32 GB RAM and 512 GB fast storage, along with multiple ports: built-in Wi-Fi 6, physical ethernet, 3x USB-A and 2x USB-C, and mini-display port for easy and flexible connectivity to your devices, displays and networks. You can also drive up to 3 external monitors simultaneously including 2 at 4k 60Hz which provides all the screen real-estate that most developers need. Windows Dev Kit 2023 enables developers to build apps that unlock the power of the NPU hardware to accelerate AI/ML workloads delivering AI-enhanced features & experiences without compromising app performance. You can get started now and access the power of the NPU through the open source and cross-platform ONNX Runtime inference engine making it easy to run AI/ML models from popular machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• DevBox (preview) : a new service introduced at Microsoft Build 2022, provides developers with self-service access to high-performance, cloud-based (windows 365) workstations preconfigured and ready-to-code for specific projects. Visual Studio images for Dev Box are now generally available on Azure Marketplace. These ready-to-use images ensure developers can be productive as soon as they create a Dev Box by lever aging commonly used Visual Studio functionalities as well as complimentary tools.
• Azure Deployment Environments (Preview) : Azure Deployment Environments, will enable developer teams to quickly spin up app infrastructure with project-based templates that establish consistency and best practices while maximizing security, compliance, and cost efficiency. Azure Deployment Environments help dev teams create and manage all types of environments throughout the application lifecycle.
• Azure Developer CLI (Preview) : The Azure Developer CLI (azd) is an open-source tool that accelerates the me it takes for you to get started on Azure. azd provides a set of developer-friendly commands that map to key stages in your workflow (code, build, deploy, monitor). The CLI allows you to work consistently in a repeatable way across the terminal, your editor/integrated development environment, GitHub Actions pipeline, and more
• Azure Load Testing (Preview ): Azure Load Testing Preview is a fully managed load-testing service that enables you to generate high-scale load. The service simulates traffic for your applications, regardless of where they're hosted. Developers, testers, and quality assurance (QA) engineers can use it to optimize application performance, scalability, or capacity.
• Azure Chaos Studio (Preview ): Azure Chaos Studio is a managed service that uses chaos engineering to help you measure, understand, and improve your cloud application and service resilience. Chaos engineering is a methodology by which you inject real-world faults into your application to run controlled fault injection experiments. Resilience is the capability of a system to handle and recover from disruptions. Application disruptions can cause errors and failures that can adversely affect your business or mission. Whether you're developing, migrating, or operating Azure applications, it's important to validate and improve your application's resilience. Chaos Studio helps you avoid negative consequences by validating that your application responds effectively to disruptions and failures. You can use Chaos Studio to test resilience against real-world incidents, like outages or high CPU utilization on virtual machines (VMs).
• GitHub Copilot (Generally Available ): GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that helps you write code faster and with less work. It draws context from comments and code to suggest individual lines and whole functions instantly. GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pretrained language model created by OpenAI. It is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs). GitHub Copilot now available for teachers .

4. Reenergizing your workforce with Microsoft 365

• Microsoft Syntex (generally available) integrates offerings from across the Microsoft Cloud, from M365 and Azure to Power Platform and Purview. Syntex automatically reads, tags and indexes high volumes of content and connects it where it’s needed in context – in search, in applications and as reusable knowledge. It puts people at the center, with content integrated into collaboration and workflows like eSignature. It reads, tags and indexes content – whether digital or paper – making it searchable and available within specific applications or as reusable knowledge. It can also manage the content lifecycle with security and retention settings.

5. Protect Everything, everyone, everywhere?

• Defender for Cloud for DevSecOps (Preview) : enables comprehensive visibility, posture management and threat protection across multi-cloud environments including Azure, AWS, Google, and on-premises resources. Defender for DevOps integrates with GitHub Advanced Security that is embedded into both GitHub and Azure DevOps, to empower security teams with the ability to protect resources from code to cloud.
• GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps (Private Preview) : it brings GitHub’s industry-leading, developer-focused security tooling to Azure DevOps. GitHub Advanced Security provides a native application security solution within our development workflow, enabling management of open-source dependencies, custom code, and secrets across the software lifecycle. Advanced Security for Azure DevOps will include a powerful and accurate CodeQL code scanner to identify any code vulnerabilities or errors in code.
• Microsoft Entra Identity Governance (Preview) : Automatically ensure that the right people have the right access to the right apps and services at the right me. Strengthen security and reduce costs with Microsoft Entra by improving productivity, strengthening security, and automating routine tasks.

6. Resources

Microsoft Learn (link )

Build skills that open doors. See all you can do with documentation, hands-on training, and certifications to help you get the most from Microsoft products.

Build in the cloud with an Azure free account (link )

Microsoft Ignite (Assets & Replay )

Recommended Ignite sessions in French

1. Keynote de décryptage des annonces MSIgnite par les équipes Microsoft France (Replay )
2. Keynote Le Cloud au service de l’innovation (Replay )
3. Breakout Azure : hybridité, sécurité, résilience et durabilité pour de solides fondations de services applicatifs et de données (Replay )
4. Breakout Bonnes pratiques de déploiement applicatifs dans Azure Kubernetes Services (Replay )
5. Breakout Quand un dev et citizen dev créent ensemble une app et une API (Replay )
6. On Demand Comment sécuriser proactivement et réactivement une infrastructure dans le cloud (On Demand )
7. On Demand Intégrez de l'IA avec efficacité dans votre entreprise (On-Demand )
8. Learn Live Sécurisez et isolez l'accès aux ressources Azure en utilisant des groupes de sécurité réseau et des points de terminaison de service (Replay )
9. Learn Live Planifier la protection des charges de travail dans le cloud à l'aide de Microsoft Defender for Cloud (Replay )
10. Learn Live Démarrez le cycle de vie de l'apprentissage automatique avec MLOps (Replay )

Recommended Ignite sessions in English

1. Keynote Microsoft Ignite Opening (Replay )
2. Fireside Chat with Scott Guthrie and Alysa Taylor: How Customers Build Agility and Drive Innovation with the Microsoft Cloud (Replay )
3. Breakout Microsoft and Databricks Partnership (Replay )
4. Breakout Accelerate innovation with the world's most complete cloud developer platform (Replay )
5. Breakout Build agility, optimize your business, and create data-driven experiences with Microsoft Azure (Replay )
6. Breakout Deliver efficiency with automation and AI across your business (Replay )
7. Breakout Protect everything, everyone, everywhere with comprehensive security (Replay )

Other Azure resources

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