Simplify IT management with Microsoft Copilot for Azure – save time and get answers fast
Today, we’re announcing Microsoft Copilot for Azure, an AI companion, that helps you design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot your cloud infrastructure and services. Combining the power of cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) with the Azure Resource Model, Copilot for Azure enables rich understanding and management of everything that’s happening in Azure, from the cloud to the edge. The cloud management landscape is evolving rapidly, there are more end users, more applications, and more requirements demanding more capabilities from the infrastructure. The number of distinct resources to manage is rapidly increasing, and the nature of each of those resources is becoming more sophisticated. As a result, IT professionals take more time looking for information and are less productive. That’s where Copilot for Azure can help. Microsoft Copilot for Azure helps you to complete complex tasks faster, quickly discover and use new capabilities, and instantly generate deep insights to scale improvements broadly across the team and organization. In the same way GitHub Copilot, an AI companion for development, is helping developers do more in less time, Copilot for Azure will help IT professionals. Recent GitHub data shows that among developers who have used GitHub Copilot, 88 percent say they’re more productive, 77 percent say the tool helps them spend less time searching for information, and 74 percent say they can focus their efforts on more satisfying work. 1 Copilot for Azure helps you: Design: create and configure the services needed while aligning with organizational policies Operate: answer questions, author complex commands, and manage resources Troubleshoot: orchestrate across Azure services for insights to summarize issues, identify causes, and suggest solutions Optimize: improve costs, scalability, and reliability through recommendations for your environment Copilot is available in the Azure portal and will be available from the Azure mobile app and CLI in the future. Copilot for Azure is built to reason over, analyze, and interpret Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Azure Resource Graph (ARG), cost and usage data, documentation, support, best practice guidance, and more. Copilot accesses the same data and interfaces as Azure's management tools, conforming to the policy, governance, and role-based access control configured in your environment; all of this carried out within the framework of Azure’s steadfast commitment to safeguarding customer data security and privacy. Azure teams are continuously enhancing Copilot’s understanding of each service and capability, and every day, that understanding will help Copilot become even more helpful. Read on to explore some of the additional scenarios being used in Microsoft Copilot for Azure today. Learning Azure and providing recommendations Modern clouds offer a breadth of services and capabilities—and Copilot helps you learn about every service. It can also provide tailored recommendations for the services your workloads need. Insights are delivered directly to you in the management console, accompanied by links for further reading. Copilot is up to date with the latest Azure documentation, ensuring you’re getting the most current and relevant answers to your questions. Copilot navigates to the precise location in the portal needed to perform tasks. This feature speeds up the process from question to action. Copilot can also answer questions in context of the resources you’re managing, enabling you to ask about sizing, resiliency, or the tradeoffs between possible solutions. Understanding cloud environments The number and types of resources deployed in cloud environments are increasing. Copilot helps answer questions about a cloud environment faster and more easily. In addition to answering questions about your environment, Copilot also facilitates the construction of Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries for use within Azure Resource Graph. Whatever your experience level, Copilot accelerates the generation of insights about your Azure resources and their deployment environments. While baseline familiarity with the Kusto Query Language can be beneficial, Copilot is designed to assist users ranging from novices to experts in achieving their Azure Resource Graph objectives, anywhere in Azure portal. You can easily open generated queries with the Azure Resource Graph Explorer, enabling you to review generated queries to ensure they accurately reflect the intended questions. Optimizing cost and performance It’s critical for teams to get insights into spending, recommendations on how to optimize and predictive scenarios or “what-if” analyses. Copilot aids in understanding invoices, spending patterns, changes, and outliers, and it recommends cost optimizations. Copilot can help you better analyze, estimate, and optimize your cloud costs. For example, if you prompt Copilot with questions like, "Why did my cost spike on July 8?" or "Show me the subscriptions that costs the most," you’ll get an immediate response based on your usage, billing, and cost data. Copilot is integrated with the advanced AI algorithms in Application Insights Code Optimizations to detect CPU and memory usage performance issues at a code level and provides recommendations on how to fix them. In addition, Copilot helps you discover and triage available code recommendations for your .NET applications. Metrics-based insights Each resource in Azure offers a rich set of metrics available with Azure Monitor. Copilot can help you discover the available metrics for a resource, visualize and summarize the results, enable deeper exploration, and even perform anomaly detection to analyze unexpected changes and provide recommendations to address the issue. Copilot can also access data in Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus, enabling the creation of PromQL queries. CLI scripting Azure CLI can manage all Azure resources from the command line and in scripts. With more than 9,000 commands and associated parameters. Copilot helps you easily and quickly identify the command and its parameters to carry out your specified operation. If a task requires multiple commands, Copilot generates a script aligned with Azure and scripting best practices. These scripts can be directly executed in the portal using Cloud Shell or copied for use in repeatable operations or automation. Support and troubleshooting When issues arise, quickly accessing the necessary information and assistance for resolution is critical. Copilot provides troubleshooting insight generated from Azure documentation and built-in, service-specific troubleshooting tools. Copilot will quickly provide step-by-step guidance for troubleshooting, while providing links to the right documentation. If more help is needed, Copilot will direct you to assisted support if requested. Copilot is also aware of service-specific diagnostics and troubleshooting tools to help you choose the perfect tool to assist you, whether it's related to high CPU usage, networking issues, getting a memory dump, scaling resources to support increased demand or more. Hybrid management IT estates are complex with many workloads run across datacenters, operational edge environments, like factories, and multicloud. Azure Arc creates a bridge between the Azure controls and tools, and those workloads. Copilot can also be used to design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot Azure Arc-enabled workloads. Azure Arc facilitates the transfer of valuable telemetry and observability data flows back to Azure. This lets you swiftly address outages, reinstate services, and resolve root causes to prevent recurrences. Building responsibly Copilot for Azure is designed for the needs of the enterprise. Our efforts are guided by our AI principles and Responsible AI Standard and build on decades of research on grounding and privacy-preserving machine learning. Microsoft’s work on AI is reviewed for potential harms and mitigations by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and policy experts. All of the features in Copilot are carried out within the Azure framework of safeguarding our customers’ data security and privacy. Copilot automatically inherits your organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies for Azure. Data is managed in line with our current commitments. Copilot large language models are not trained on your tenant data. Copilot can only access data from Azure and perform actions against Azure when the current user has permission via role-based access control. All requests to Azure Resource Manager and other APIs are made on behalf of the user. Copilot does not have its own identity from a security perspective. When a user asks, ‘How many VMs do I have?’ the answer will be the same as if they went to Resource Graph Explorer and wrote / executed that query on their own. What’s next Microsoft Copilot for Azure is already being used internally by Microsoft employees and with a small group of customers. Today, we’re excited about the next step as we announce and launch the preview to you! Please click here to sign up. We’ll onboard customers into the preview on a weekly basis. In the coming weeks, we'll continuously add new capabilities and make improvements based on your feedback. Learn more Azure Ignite 2023 Infrastructure Blog Adaptive Cloud Microsoft Copilot for Azure Documentation 1 Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness, Eirini Kalliamvakou, GitHub. Sept. 7, 2022.Announcing Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs in Preview
Today, we are excited to announce the gated preview of Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor core GPUs. These VMs are ideal for training, fine-tuning and serving popular open-source models, such as Stable Diffusion and its larger variants (SDXL, SSD…) and language models (Zephyr, Falcon, GPT2, MPT, Llama2. Wizard, Xwin).New capabilities help simplify and streamline the experience with Microsoft Dev Box
It’s hard to believe that Microsoft Dev Box has already been generally available for almost four months. In this time, we have been blown away by the excitement from administrators and developers about a VDI service purpose-built for developer productivity. With all the real-world usage has also come feedback and suggestions, and we’ve been busy working on new features and capabilities to further improve the Dev Box experience—for devs, admins, and platform engineers alike. From new prebuilt images to streamlined setup, networking, and management features, we’re excited to share the latest Dev Box updates available today and in preview. Read on to learn more. Giving dev teams self-service customization with guardrails While we've put a lot of work into making the dev experience great with Dev Box, we’ve heard from IT and platform engineers that there’s still room to improve the admin experience. Dev Box cuts down on the time admins spend setting up physical workstations, but creating a variety of images to support different teams still takes too much time. Dev teams may know what tools they need for their projects, but they often lack the expertise to build images themselves. That means creating custom images requires an inefficient back-and-forth between dev leads and admins to align on project needs—which becomes even less sustainable when scaling across teams. To address these challenges, Dev Box now offers configuration-as-code customization in private preview. Config-as-code significantly reduces the burden on IT admins and platform engineers by giving developers more granular control of their Dev Box configurations—while still maintaining centralized governance. Enterprise admins can establish guardrails that specify what software and tools are approved for use, then delegate config-as-code file creation to dev teams. Dev Box automatically enforces guardrails defined by the admins while applying config-as-code files. To scale image creation even further, dev teams can store approved config-as-code files in their own source code repositories for ease of access and reuse. Platform engineers and admins can also use repos to store guardrails for customization—Dev Box already integrates with Azure DevOps repositories, and we’re actively working towards integrations with GitHub repositories as well. For other scenarios, such as private package manager support, admins can configure KeyVault with Dev Box to store secrets, and leverage KeyVault to pre-configure private assets during the Dev Box customization process. With config as code-based customization, dev teams can now tailor their dev boxes to the exact requirements of their project, while platform engineers can focus on enforcing governance and security at scale. Dev Box customization empowers dev teams to truly own their workstations, making onboarding even faster while unlocking advanced use cases like splitting different tasks across multiple, purpose-built Dev Box instances. Config-as-code customization give devs tons of freedom to personalize dev boxes—from choosing OS settings and installing additional tools to updating tools in the base VM image with additional extensions. By creating devbox.yaml files with their existing scripts and package managers, devs can even roll out settings across their Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code environments. Dev teams can use these customizations to combine tasks and get the right configuration for their unique needs. For example, some options include: Personalizing your environment with a custom theme and other Windows settings Setting up a Dev Drive for faster performance Installing additional software with WinGet and other package managers Adding the GitHub Copilot extension and others to Visual Studio 2022 Configuration-as-code is currently available in private preview. Sign up for the private preview today. Dev Box Compatible Docker Desktop images Even as config-as-code customization lessens the burden on admins, there are other ways we can help platform engineers and IT admins streamline image creation. One way of doing this is to provide prebuilt images that can be used to create general templates to suit a variety of projects. Already, we offer specialized Visual Studio images built for Dev Box. Now, we’re excited to expand our image offerings with new prebuilt images that include Docker Desktop. These images are the result of a new collaboration between Microsoft and Docker and make it that much easier to use Dev Box to build cloud native applications. The images come with everything you need to build containerized applications with Visual Studio and Docker Desktop. Start using Docker Desktop for Dev Box today. Streamlining Dev Box setup with simplified networking and the quick create template We want to continue to streamline the configuration and setup process to ensure the Dev Box experience is satisfying for devs and admins alike. With its advanced networking capabilities, Dev Box gives IT teams comprehensive control in their ability to secure Dev Box instances. But creating new Virtual Networks (VNets) from scratch requires specialized networking knowledge and can be time-consuming when teams are split across multiple geographies that each need their own separate VNet. Microsoft-hosted network is a new feature in Microsoft Dev Box that provides admins with the option to use a prebuilt Microsoft-hosted network, rather than having to build a new VNet from scratch. Microsoft-hosted networks enable admins to significantly streamline Dev Box deployment process when they don’t need advanced network settings and rely on Microsoft for routing network traffic. Microsoft-hosted networks give admins more options and flexibility when setting up dev boxes, helping streamline the process when needed. Using Microsoft-hosted networks can be especially useful for organizations that want to operate in a Zero Trust model, as it makes it easier to quickly set up multiple networks and keep workloads isolated on separate dev boxes with their own unique permissions. We’re also excited to announce new quick-create templates that provide new users and admins with a single step Dev Box deployment that creates everything you need to get started with Dev Box. This template supports a variety of common Dev Box use cases, making it easy for anyone to configure and deploy Dev Box. This is especially useful for new admins who are unfamiliar with the Dev Box configuration process and can even make it easier for dev leads to create their own project dev boxes. After running the deployment template, you’ll have everything you need up and running to visit devportal.microsoft.com and create your first dev box. Continued learnings from deploying Dev Box across Microsoft If you’ve been following our blogs, you know we at Microsoft are committed to going all-in with Dev Box. We’ve been using Dev Box at Microsoft since January 2022 when we piloted the service with our Office 365 organization. At Build, we had already increased our rollout to 10,000 developers, and today, we’ve ramped up further to 15,000 active developers. So far, we’re hearing great things about the transition to Dev Box. Through initial feedback, we’ve seen overall satisfaction numbers top 80%, with 65% of developers using Dev Box as their primary development environment. Over the past four months, we’ve been gathering data on our internal Dev Box usage. Initial results show that several development tasks are significantly faster on Dev Box than on physical machines. Across teams, build times are significantly faster: 43% faster CloudBuild repo build times 16% faster PowerBI repo build times 2% faster OneDrive SyncClient 13% faster AzureCompute-Move This data is encouraging, and we hope to see more like it as we continue to scale Dev Box internally at Microsoft. Get started with Microsoft Dev Box today We look forward to hearing how these new features will help devs, admins, and platform engineers enjoy even more simplified, streamlined experiences on Dev Box. For those interested, you try Dev Box today. To find out how to get started with Dev Box, check our docs pages. Finally, learn about Microsoft Dev Box through our recent Ignite session, or get access to our new features like configuration-as-code customization and the quick create template.Accelerate edge deployments with cloud-managed infrastructure and Azure Stack HCI version 23H2
Today we’re announcing Azure Stack HCI version 23H2, cloud-managed hyperconverged infrastructure that applies adaptive cloud principles to the full stack. Deploy and operate everything from hardware to applications using Azure Resource Manager and core Azure management services.
Azure Deployment Environments optimizes developer experience and adds new enterprise capabilities
Earlier this year, at Build, we announced the general availability of Azure Deployment Environments, an Azure service that enables developers to self-serve their own environments from curated, project-based infrastructure-as-code templates. Since then, we’ve heard great community feedback and are excited by the buzz around the service. Today, we’re excited to announce several new features that optimize the developer experience and make it even easier to fit Deployment Environments into your existing workflows, along with new cost management features to help keep costs under control.Announcing Azure Functions Flex Consumption: sign up for the early access preview
<p><span><li-image width="264" height="264" alt="azurefunctions.png" align="center" id="470087iE427FC18F65FAE94" size="large" sourceType="new"></li-image></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span>Announcing Azure Functions Flex Consumption: sign up for the early access preview</span></p>Announcing: Microsoft moves $25 Billion in credit card transactions to Azure confidential computing
Microsoft is proud to showcase that customers in the financial sector can rely on public Azure to add confidentiality to provide secure and compliant payment solutions that meet or exceed industry standards. Microsoft is committed to hosting 100% of our payment services on Azure, just as we would expect our customers to do. Microsoft’s Commerce Financial Services (CFS) has completed a critical milestone by deploying a level 1 Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliant credit card processing and vaulting solution, moving $25 Billion in annual credit card transactions to the public Azure cloud.
