Azure Stack Hub developer announcements - September 2020

Azure Stack Hub developer improvements September 2020

We are pleased to share with you the following upcoming changes to Azure Stack Hub for Developers. We encourage you to review the new functionality and take advantage of the updates and, as always,  please provide feedback.

Run Azure Stream Analytics on Azure Stack Hub as an IoT Edge module

We are pleased to announce the public preview of Azure Stream Analytics on Azure Stack Hub. Configurations have been added to the IoT Edge module which allows it to interact with blob storage, Event Hubs, and IoT Hub running in an Azure Stack Hub subscription by allowing unique URLs found in each Azure Stack Hub deployment. Learn more about the Azure Stream Analytics support for Azure Stack Hub here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/stream-analytics/on-azure-stack.

Azure Stack Hub is now supporting various GitHub Actions in Beta Preview

GitHub Actions enable developers to create custom software development life cycle (SDLC) workflows. We are proud to announce that GitHub Actions for Azure now can target Azure Stack Hub deployments, that allows users to create workflows to build, test, package, release and deploy to an Azure Stack Hub Environment directly from their GitHub repository. Learn more about GitHub Actions on Azure Stack Hub here.

Notebooks for Connected AI/ML on Azure Stack Edge

In these Machine Learning Notebooks, we show you how to package, deploy, and run inferencing on an Azure Stack Edge device, taking advantage of its GPU for image processing. We download a model from the internet and package it into a container using the Azure ML SDK. We then deploy the container to the Azure Stack Edge device for running inferencing workloads.

API Profiles for Hybrid Compatibility

Coming in October, a new API Profile will be released called 2020-09-01-hybrid, which will have all the latest functionality found on Azure Stack Hub. This will include IoT Hub, Event Hub, Databox Edge RP, as well as the newest API versions for Key Vault, Compute, Storage, and Networking. This will help further the Hybrid consistency story as we move closer to the versions supported on Azure and will be reflected in our supported SDKs, PowerShell, CLI, and ARM templates.

AZ Modules to Azure Stack Hub to bring cross-platform compatibility

AZ modules will be GA for Ignite, featuring the new API Profile, as well as be cross-platform compatible. The cross-platform compatibility enables PowerShell core on Mac OS and Linux. AZ modules on Azure Stack Hub also allow us to continue to be an extension of Azure. For more information, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/operator/powershell-install-az-module?view=azs-2005.

New Extensions to Visual Studio Code

We are happy to announce that the following Visual Studio Code extensions now can target Azure Stack Hub: Azure Storage, Azure Functions and Azure IoT Hub. This allows you to manage and deploy those resources in your Azure Stack Hub environment providing a great experience with Visual Studio Code.  For more information, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/user/azure-stack-dev-start-vscode-azure?view=azs-2005

Updates to end-of-end Solutions

We continue to invest in building end to end solutions that make it easy for you to kick start the prototyping and development of hybrid solutions. Our GitHub repo continues to be updated with new solutions targeting different verticals.

We are releasing updates to the Factory.AI solution, a turn-key application that makes it easy to train and deploy vision models without the need for data science knowledge. You can try Factory.AI yourself by downloading the artifacts here.

Besides Manufacturing, we are also investing in other verticals. For Healthcare  we have released updates to the FHIR implementation for the Edge, which ensures secure transfer of patient data. In the Retail space, we continue to envision new use cases to address touchless experiences and other retail needs.

Integration with Azure Live Video Analytics (LVA)

All of our end-to-end solutions rely heavily on the ability to ingest and process large amounts of video for inferencing. To accommodate the wide array of available CPU architectures and hardware acceleration options, we have integrated Live Video Analytics – a platform for  capturing, recording, and analyzing live video and publishing the results (which could be video and/or video analytics) to Azure Services in the cloud and/or the edge – to build our hybrid solutions and applications. The Factory.AI solution, is the first one to use LVA as it's video ingestion pipeline, and it features six useful out of the box scenarios including object counting, employee safety, defect detection, machine misalignment, tool detection and part confirmation.

Integrating with LVA made it easier for us to support widely used chip architectures and hardware optimized AI frameworks like Nvidia Deepstream and Intel OpenVINO. It also facilitated closer integration with complementary technologies across Microsoft’s AI ecosystem, including Computer Vision for spatial analysis and Cognitive Services Custom Vision.

Intelligent Industry Solution Series

Together, Intel and Microsoft are enabling intelligent solutions that are changing the landscape across industries. This year at Microsoft Ignite, we’re excited to showcase a portfolio of solutions through industry blueprints including Healthcare, Manufacturing and Retail, and. Our goal is to provide turnkey and modern solutions from edge to cloud, securely and reliably. Learn more here.

Cognitive Services

Our partnership with the Cognitive Services continues, and together we are seeing great demand from ISV’s and enterprise customers taking advantage of running AI models in containers to address their business needs and help them drive success. 

We are excited to see the announcement for Speech (STT, TTS) and Anomaly Detector containers going in GA as well as the introduction to new containers in Public Preview, including Computer Vision and Speech Service. Please refer to the following announcements from the Cognitive Services team for more details: Cognitive Services GA announcements and Public preview announcement.

We encourage you to review the resources listed in this blog post and take advantage of all the new platform improvements. Also if you haven’t done so, make sure you checkout this Ignite session with Natalia Mackevicius about what’s new with the Azure Stack portfolio and this learning video regarding our announcements at Ignite 2020.

Because Ignite is virtual this year, we created a mobile app that allows you to look at Azure Stack hardware and new form factors through augmented reality in the comfort of your environment. You can download it for your iOS or Android device or learn more about it here. We hope you enjoy it!