Ignite 2024 recap: Here’s what you might’ve missed from Microsoft Azure

We know it’s easy for things to get lost in the shuffle. Here’s a recap of Azure’s new innovations in cloud infrastructure, data, and AI announced during this year’s Microsoft Ignite.

Azure AI Foundry: the next wave of Azure innovation?

Web, mobile, and cloud technologies have driven the rise of new application platforms, and now, AI is changing how we build, run, govern, and optimize them. Business leaders are keen to reduce the time and cost of implementing AI solutions while making sure those solutions are increasing business value. ??

That’s why we’re introducing Azure AI Foundry—a new all-in-one platform for designing, customizing, and managing AI applications and agents. It’s a cutting-edge AI technology that keeps your real-world business needs in mind and helps organizations effectively use AI to its fullest potential.??

AI is getting better each day at understanding different types of content and inputs—like text, audio, images, and video. We're launching Azure AI Content Understanding to help make building apps from unstructured data faster, easier, and more cost-effective. By using generative AI, information is pulled from data like documents, images, videos, and audio and used to create customizable, structured outputs.

AI agents are capable of autonomously doing routine tasks, making work faster and easier while keeping you in control. We’re introducing Azure AI Agent Service to help developers build, deploy, and scale enterprise AI-powered applications. These intelligent agents handle tasks independently, but ask humans for final checks, so your team can prioritize important projects.??

AI models are capable of incredible things, but to get the most out of their capabilities, you need customized solutions. Our expanded AI model catalog gives you choice and flexibility, ensuring your organization has what it needs to explore how AI models can bring value to your business.??

We're also introducing new partnerships by teaming up with Weights & Biases, Gretel, Scale AI, and Statsig to make customizing AI models easier and faster.?By working with Weights & Biases, Azure will include tools to track and improve AI models like GPT-4. With Gretel, you can upload data to Azure to fine-tune models for better results, while Scale AI provides expert help and support for training models. Finally, Statsig will let you set up AI applications and run experiments to make them better.?

As intelligent applications handle increasingly high volumes of data requests, fast and reliable access to data is essential for success. In-memory caching helps meet this demand by reducing slowdowns and database traffic. Azure Managed Redis is now available in public preview, delivering the latest Redis features, better reliability, and strong support, all at a lower cost than the current Azure Cache for Redis.?

Learn more about new Azure?innovations in AI in Jessica Hawk’s blog here. ?

Powerful, secure, and adaptive cloud infrastructure?

We’re announcing significant updates across our cloud and AI infrastructure, including better chips and liquid cooling, new data integrations, and more flexible cloud deployments.??

The NVIDIA Blackwell platform is coming to the cloud. We're starting to make these systems available for testing, working closely with NVIDIA and other AI experts. The new Azure ND GB200 v6 will be a series of virtual machines designed for AI, using the NVIDIA GB200 NVL rack and advanced InfiniBand networking. This setup will connect thousands of Blackwell GPUs to provide powerful AI computing. Azure AMD HBv5 virtual machines are made for high-performance computing tasks, performing up to eight times better than other cloud options and up to 35 times faster than older systems. They are designed to handle very demanding tasks by moving data quickly.??

Azure Boost DPU is our first in-house chip designed for data-heavy tasks. It uses less power and is very efficient, combining many parts of a regular server into one chip. Servers with this chip can run cloud storage tasks using three times less power and perform four times better than current servers. Azure Integrated Hardware Security Module is our new in-house security chip designed to keep encryption and signing keys safe without compromising performance. Starting next year, this chip will be in every new server in our datacenters to boost protection for all types of workloads.?

At Microsoft, we’re continuing to improve our cloud infrastructure and services to help you handle critical workloads and operations smoothly across teams using Azure. That’s why we’re announcing the preview of SQL Server 2025, a new AI-ready database platform that uses Azure Arc to deliver cloud agility anywhere. This version maintains its top-notch security and performance and has built-in AI to make developing AI applications easier. With Azure Arc, SQL Server 2025 helps customers manage, secure, and control their SQL databases at scale both on-premises and in the cloud.?

Azure Local is a new platform that uses the cloud to control and manage services at local sites. It works with Azure Arc to bring Azure services to your local hardware, giving you the ability to safely and securely run both new and old applications on different types of hardware, including servers with GPUs for AI tasks.??

We also recently announced that Windows Server 2025 is now available, featuring easier upgrades, advanced security, and new capabilities that enable AI and machine learning. Additionally, Windows Server 2025 is previewing a hotpatching subscription option, enabled by Azure Arc, that will allow organizations to save time by installing updates with fewer restarts.?

Customers can now get better security, data, and AI features in Oracle Database@Azure. Microsoft Purview is integrating with Oracle Database@Azure to enhance data visibility and help ensure compliance with industry regulations, improving data security and governance at scale.??

Learn more about new upgrades to AI infrastructure here.??

Microsoft Fabric: Accelerate innovation with an AI-powered data platform?

A year ago, we launched Microsoft Fabric—an all-in-one SaaS platform that gives your organization the power to accomplish any data project. Now, we’re introducing new AI-powered features that help your teams work and process data more effectively and securely.?

We’re introducing Fabric Databases, a new class of cloud databases that combine transactional and analytical workloads into a single platform, allowing developers to streamline app development with simple, autonomous databases.???

The new OneLake catalog can help all Fabric users discover and manage trusted data, as well as provide governance for data owners with valuable insights, recommended actions, and tooling.

AI Functions in Fabric let users accomplish text-related tasks easily with very little coding. Notebook users can quickly handle tasks like summarizing and classifying text, analyzing sentiment, correcting grammar, and more.

Learn more about the new Fabric announcements from Ignite here.

Want more from Ignite? Watch Satya Nadella’s keynote to get the latest updates on innovations in AI and cloud technologies from Microsoft.