AI is reshaping industries, driving transformation in how businesses operate, communicate, and serve customers. In today’s fast-evolving Generative AI landscape, businesses feel the urgency to transform their customer experiences and business processes with AI applications. In a recent study, IDC found that Generative AI usage has jumped significantly, up from 55% in 2023 to 75% in 2024. The return on investment for Generative AI is also significant. IDC found that companies on average experience a 3.7x return on their investment. To deliver business impact with AI applications, businesses are equally looking to modernizing existing applications. However, building and modernizing applications to deliver scalable, reliable, and highly performant AI applications can be complex, time consuming and resource intensive. Microsoft, a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platform and Container Management, provides a comprehensive application platform designed to address these challenges. Azure’s application platform and services provide developers and IT operators with a comprehensive suite of services to build, deploy, and scale modern intelligent applications in a quick, secure and efficient manner.
Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 from Nov 18–22, in Chicago and online, to discover the latest Azure Application Platform updates, enhancements, and tools to accelerate your AI app development and app modernization journey.
- Accelerate business growth with AI Apps
From container-based services with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Container Apps (ACA), to Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering like Azure App Service, and powerful integration capabilities with Azure Integration Services and serverless capabilities with Azure Functions – Azure’s Application Platform provides a complete, end-to-end solution for building, deploying, and managing AI applications - all in one place. The unified platform enables businesses to go from ideas to production faster by leveraging an extensive array of 1600+ AI models in Azure AI Studio Model Catalog, integrated with popular developer tools like GitHub, GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio, and real-time transactional data in Azure databases.
At Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing several new enhancements to our Application Platform to help you build transformational AI applications:
- Real-time AI inferencing with Serverless GPUs: Azure Container Apps now support serverless GPUs in public preview. Serverless GPU enables you to seamlessly run AI workloads on-demand with automatic scaling, optimized cold start, per-second billing with scale down to zero when not in use, and reduced operational overhead to support easy real-time custom model inferencing and other machine learning tasks. Learn more.
- Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions: Dynamic sessions in Azure Container Apps, now generally available, is a fast, sandboxed, ephemeral compute, suitable for running AI-generated, untrusted code at scale in multi-tenancy scenarios. Each session has full compute isolation using Hyper-V. You now have easy access to fast, ephemeral, sandboxed compute on Azure without managing infrastructure. Learn more.
- AI capabilities in Azure Logic Apps: AI capabilities are now available in the Azure Logic Apps Consumption SKU in public preview, offering advanced features like the Azure AI Search Connector, Azure OpenAI Connector, and Forms Recognizer. These enhancements enable intelligent document processing, enhanced search, and language capabilities for more intelligent workflows. Additionally, Azure Logic Apps Standard now supports Templates, providing pre-built workflow solutions to streamline integration workflow development. Learn more.
- AI Template Gallery: To help developers quickly get started with building AI apps, we’ve created an AI App Template Gallery that features templates for common AI use cases. With these templates, you can start building AI apps on Azure in as little as 5 minutes.
- Free services for AI apps: Start building AI apps with free Azure application, data, and AI services to minimize upfront costs. Explore which services offer free monthly amounts to estimate the cost for your project. Discover specialized programs for startups and students to develop AI-powered apps on Azure. Learn more.
Learn how customers like H&R Block , Pimco, Novo Nordisk, Harvey, Jato Dynamics, Medigold Health and C.H.Robinson are delivering transformational business impact with AI applications on Azure.
- Modernize your Apps for AI and continuous innovation
To remain competitive, organizations must keep up with modern app development trends and meet evolving customer expectations. This means accelerating application development speed, enhancing scalability and agility, and overcoming the limitations of legacy applications, which can be costly to maintain and challenging to innovate on.
At Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing several new features and enhancements to help you accelerate your app modernization and become AI ready faster.
- Azure App Service: We are excited to announce the general availability of sidecars in Azure App Service, a versatile pathway for organizations to modernize existing apps and add powerful new capabilities without significant rewrites necessary in the main application code. They enable you to add new capabilities by adding SDKs—like AI, logging, monitoring, and security features—to your primary application without the need to significantly modify and redeploy the app. Learn more.
- GitHub Copilot upgrade assistant for Java: Keeping Java apps up to date with the latest versions can be a time-consuming task. GitHub Copilot upgrade assistant for Java, currently in private preview, enables you to use AI to simplify upgrading Java applications with autonomous AI agents, ensuring trust and transparency throughout the upgrade experience. Learn more.
- Bring Your Own License for JBoss EAP on Azure App Service: We are excited to announce General Availability of Bring Your Own License for JBoss EAP on Azure App Service is coming in December 2024. You can use existing JBoss EAP subscriptions to deploy applications to Azure App Service, making it far easier to move existing applications to the cloud while retaining support from both Red Hat and Microsoft across the application lifecycle. Learn more.
- Logic Apps Hybrid Deployment Model: Azure Logic Apps has introduced a new Hybrid Deployment Model, enabling businesses to run integration workflows on their own infrastructure—on-premises, private clouds, or other public clouds. This model allows greater flexibility for meeting specific regulatory, privacy, and network requirements while still benefiting from the rich 1400+ Logic Apps connector library for seamless integration with enterprise systems. Learn more.
- Azure Migrate application assessments: The newly released Application aware assessment capability in Azure Migrate helps with application-level migrations, rather than individual servers or application components. The Azure Migrate app and code assessment tool and GitHub Copilot Chat integration offer more granular code assessment and AI-assisted suggestions for changes required to successfully run .NET and Java applications on Azure Learn more.
Learn how customers like Commercial Bank of Dubai, Scandinavian Airlines, Nexi, Ossur, Sapiens, MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company and Finastra leverage Azure’s application platform to modernize their business-critical applications and deliver enhanced customer experience.
- Scale and secure enterprise-grade production apps
When working with customers on modernizing their applications, we consistently hear about challenges in securing and scaling legacy systems. Outdated infrastructure often leads to operational bottlenecks, slows development, and impacts competitiveness. With rising cyber threats, older systems can lack the robust security measures necessary to protect data and applications. Microsoft Azure addresses these needs with a globally available, enterprise-grade platform that integrates security at every level.
Check out Azure application platform announcements at Microsoft Ignite to help you scale and secure your enterprise applications:
- Scale, secure, and optimize Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): AKS is designed to simplify Kubernetes adoption for developers and operators of all skill levels. With the latest updates, AKS is now more user-friendly, secure, and cost-efficient, allowing you to focus on building and scaling your applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Read the summaries below and this blog for more details.
- Cluster upgrades are now more reliable and efficient, and multiple clusters can be upgraded automatically. Additionally, AKS Automatic (preview) will now dynamically select an appropriate virtual machine (VM) based on the capacity in your Azure subscription.
- With AKS, you now have full visibility over runtime and host vulnerabilities in your AKS cluster. The AKS security dashboard (now available in preview as a blade in Azure portal) offers a simplified and streamlined view of security vulnerabilities and remediation insights for resource owners or cluster administrators. Trusted launch (generally available) enhances the security of certain virtual machines (VMs) by protecting against advanced and persistent attack techniques.
- Intelligent workload scheduling in Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager is now generally available, providing operators more control when deploying workloads to optimize resource utilization and simplify multi-cluster scenarios. Auto-instrumentation through Application Insights (coming soon) makes it easier to access telemetry like metrics, requests, and dependencies, as well as visualizations like the application dashboard and application map.
- Expanded GenAI gateway capabilities in Azure API Management: Azure API Management has expanded support for GPT-4o models, including both text and image-based capabilities. Additionally, the new Generative AI Gateway Token Quota allows flexible token quotas (daily, weekly, or monthly), helping organizations control costs and track usage patterns for effective resource management. Learn more.
- Achieve instant fast scaling with Azure Functions: Flex Consumption plan is a new Azure Functions hosting plan that builds on the consumption pay-per-second serverless billing model with automatic scale down to zero when not in use for cost efficiency. With Flex Consumption plan now in General Availability, you can integrate with your virtual network at no extra cost, ensuring secure and private communication, with no considerable impact to your app’s scale out performance. Learn more.
Learn how customers like BMW, ABN-AMRO, SPAR, ClearBank are scaling and operating mission critical enterprise-grade production apps on Azure application platform.
With the Azure Application Platform, you can build new AI applications and modernize your existing applications faster, while ensuring end-to-end security and scalability across the entire app development journey, from development to production.
Join us at Ignite this week and learn more about updates for Azure Digital and App Innovation: Here.
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