Tag: Azure

Every year, Red Hat Summit features inspirational and actionable content, industry-shaping news, and innovative practices from customers and partners. From hybrid cloud, containers, and cloud-native app platforms to management, automation, and more, speakers from around the world, across industries, and sectors join to share how they’re using open tools to build better solutions for themselves and their customers. Microsoft is proud to sponsor and participate in Red Hat Summit 2022 which brings together communities who are passionate about open source in the enterprise.

Business is changing, and keeping up with fluctuations in markets and customer demands is not easy. Modernization is essential. Technologies like containers, Kubernetes, and hybrid cloud architectures are key components that provide the scalability, innovation, and flexibility you need to maintain a competitive edge, grow market share, and increase margins. Microsoft and Red Hat offer you the tools to reduce complexity and simplify your environment, innovate faster, deliver high-quality customer experiences, and expand and scale your infrastructure in any direction so you can be a disruptor in your industry.

Today, we’re announcing multiple enhancements to our Red Hat on Azure offerings that help customers accelerate their digital transformation with the power of the cloud. This includes the broad availability of our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure and Red Hat Open Shift Support for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

Detailed updates include:

• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure is now available to customers in North America with global availability coming soon. The Ansible Automation Platform 2.2 features are available for customers in the tech preview. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure enables IT organizations to quickly automate and scale in the cloud, with the flexibility to deliver any application, anywhere, without additional overhead or complexity. Achieve zero to automation in minutes by deploying the managed application directly from the Azure Marketplace.
  
• Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance is now supported on Red Hat OpenShift. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers who need to run their data workloads outside Azure in their own datacenters or multicloud environments, we bring trusted Azure SQL and open-source software database services to meet them where they are. This database service unifies management and delivers mission-critical performance, high availability/disaster recovery at scale. With an evergreen SQL that has no end-of-support, customers can realize the best of Azure SQL on OpenShift, in any environment. Customers can enjoy fully automated updates and patches to innovate faster and be more secure. 

“Red Hat has been a strategic partner in our Azure Arc partner ecosystem in lighting up the next-gen Azure data services to run anywhere. With this support, organizations can run Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance across any environment without worrying about the infrastructure underneath. The combination of RedHat OpenShift and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance allows customers to use the platform they know and trust to accelerate innovation with faster time to market with enterprise-grade support.”—Peter Carlin, CVP Azure Database Platform

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 will be available on Azure from May 24. With demand for edge computing continuing to grow, RHEL 9 incorporates key enhancements specifically designed to address evolving IT needs at the edge. Edge management helps teams more securely manage and scale Red Hat Enterprise Linux on distributed devices from a single interface. RHEL 9 will include support for Red Hat Update Infrastructure 4 allowing for automatic updates.
• Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux 3.0 will be broadly available from May 24. Through Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux 3.0, customers can migrate their on-premises RHEL servers to Azure by bi-directionally converting existing RHEL pay-as-you-go (PAYG) VMs on Azure to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, resulting in cost savings. In its latest iteration, support for custom images has been included. Read more about how Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux for additional information.

Learn more

Visit the Microsoft Red Hat on Azure page to learn more about our offerings and join us at Red Hat Summit.

“Every company will need to demonstrate their sustainability impact in the next few years,” adds Vowels. “Not only will they be looking at the way they’re working, but they’ll also be looking at the actions their suppliers are taking and whether those align with their own. The opportunity is big, our platform is ready, and we’re excited to scale.”

Working with a sibling isn’t for everyone, but Vowels and Atkins have made it work for them. They realized early on that the “unfiltered” candidness between siblings allowed them to bypass a lot of the “niceties” that other co-founders might have to grapple with.

As sisters, they already had a handle on each other’s personalities and temperaments, as well as their triggers and limits. As they got to know each other professionally, they developed a newfound respect for what the other brings to the table.

Based in Sydney, Atkins oversees product development as well as marketing and business development in Australia. Vowels, based in Singapore, takes care of operations, finance, data and business development in Asia.

“When it comes to strengths, we’re polar opposites – that makes us complementary,” Vowels explains. Atkins adds, “we naturally gravitated toward our roles based on our strengths – and it’s working out well.”

To make their idea come to life they searched for dependable tools and systems. From the get-go, Microsoft Azure has been their cloud of choice. Similarly, Microsoft AI and machine learning  software have been instrumental to structuring data and establishing the data relationships to accommodate increasingly complex requirements as their company grows.

Reports are sent to clients via Microsoft Power BI to provide familiarity and peace of mind. “Using a product like Power BI means that the foundations are set. Our customers are confident about using these products, especially when it comes to security,” says Vowels. “Since our customers are already Power BI users, they can set up quickly and navigate their reports without needing to upskill or figure out a new software. This seamlessness has been instrumental.”

Two years into their givvable journey there is much to be proud of. As Atkins says, “We’ve stayed on course because we’re passionate about the problem we’re trying to solve. It’s why we’ve been able to overcome the challenges that have come our way.”

Vowels, smiling, adds, “And we’ve surrounded ourselves with some incredible people.”

TOP IMAGE: Solar panels on a distribution warehouse roof. Photo: Getty.

Over the last few years, financial institutions have been through seismic changes in the global economy. Among them has been the rapid increase and adoption of digital payment methods and the emergence of new cloud-native payment providers. To keep pace and unlock new value, these institutions are prioritizing the need to modernize their payment infrastructures to enhance the customer experience and support industry initiatives like open banking, real-time payments, and ISO20022 migration without compromising security and compliance.

In the payments and financial messaging area, SWIFT is a fundamental player, responsible for a daily average of 42 million messages. At Sibos 2019, Microsoft announced the first-ever successful public cloud-based, end-to-end payment transaction using SWIFT connectivity on Microsoft Azure, as part of our broader investment in payments.

This proof of concept by Microsoft Treasury included hosting their entire payment infrastructure on Azure—including their back-office payment infrastructure, Logic Apps connectivity solution, and SWIFT messaging infrastructure.

Since then, Microsoft has been working closely with SWIFT at a strategic level to architect its virtual connectivity solutions on Azure. With the completion of successful pilots with a range of financial institutions, the results of these investments are now coming to market.

This new solution, called Alliance Connect Virtual, will be available for customers to deploy in Azure in 2022, as a phased launch together with SWIFT. The first release is available now and the next release will follow later this year. Alliance Connect Virtual will enable financial institutions to accelerate their payments modernization strategy to reduce their on-premises footprint, rationalize the total cost of ownership, and rapidly deploy cloud-based payments architecture with the added operational, security and intelligence benefits the Microsoft Cloud offers. We have created a set of reference architectures for our customers to use as guidance in their deployments as well as Azure Policies to simplify meeting security requirements for SWIFT. Sophie Racquet, Head of Alliance Connect and Digital Connectivity Product Management at SWIFT states:

“Launching Alliance Connect Virtual marks a major milestone in supporting our customers’ journey to the cloud. Whether in the cloud or on-premises, our community will be able to experience the same level of security, reliability and availability, and attest their CSP compliance too. We’ve received overwhelming positive feedback from our pilot customers so far and I’m looking forward to our phased launch throughout 2022.”  

Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) was instrumental in the first public cloud connectivity pilot and is already using Azure-based SWIFT solutions for wire payments with Microsoft’s Treasury division. The company’s Treasury Services group, which delivers global payments, trade services, and cash management, provides payments services for Microsoft Treasury. Saket Sharma, Chief Strategy and Digital Officer for BNY Mellon Treasury Services gave his perspective on the reason for pioneering SWIFT connectivity in the cloud with Microsoft:

“As we continue to concentrate on enhancing the resiliency and capacity of our payments and broader financial market infrastructure through digitization, Microsoft Treasury and Azure have been critical collaborators with BNY Mellon in advancing this agenda. We continue to work together closely, remaining focused on providing always-on payment services and accelerating delivery of new capabilities to clients around the world.” 

Anita Mehra, Corporate Vice President of Global Treasury and Financial Services at Microsoft also shared her view on the collaboration:

“We are thrilled to partner with SWIFT in bringing their Alliance Connect Virtual offering to the Azure public cloud. This allows Microsoft Treasury, an early adopter of SWIFT, to continue our focus on security, compliance & resiliency of customer data.”

SWIFT connectivity on Azure goes further than simply translating an on-premises service to one that runs in the cloud. Microsoft will be offering additional value-add services to support our customers which will include unique seamless integration capabilities with back-end systems and support to the ISO20022 migration initiative (using Azure Logic Apps), and an automated and seamless approach to ensure compliance with SWIFT’s Customer Security Programme “CSP” (using Azure Policy solution for SWIFT CSCFv2022).

Microsoft partners with a range of leading global systems integrators in the financial services industry. To help customers take advantage of the new SWIFT connectivity solution on Azure, we’ve worked with Capgemini, Microsoft’s 2021 Partner of the Year for Financial Services, to build services to help financial institutions with the migration of their current SWIFT infrastructure, including Alliance Access, Alliance Messaging Hub (AMH) or AutoClient, to enable rapid deployment of the SWIFT connectivity solutions on Azure. Jeroen Holscher, Head of Global Payments at Capgemini Financial Services shares his perspective:

‘’Our long-standing strategic partnership with Microsoft and SWIFT’s payments technology is the perfect union to help our customers rapidly transition from on-premise to cloud. Together, we have built a strong framework for enterprises to mitigate risk, reduce TCO, drive innovation at scale, and achieve operational efficiencies. We are very excited to collaborate with Microsoft and support our client portfolio across the banking, financial and other industries to help them build a future-ready business for tomorrow.’’ 

At Microsoft, we want to ensure that every organization has the digital capability required to succeed going forward and are committed to helping our financial services customers improve time to value, reduce costs, increase agility, and accelerate innovation for sustainable growth. This latest initiative with SWIFT highlights that commitment, and we look forward to the value it will bring to drive innovation for our mutual customers and the financial services industry.

Additional Microsoft resources

Learn more information about architectural guidance for the deployment of Alliance Connect Virtual on Azure today. And to access additional resources and learn how financial services organizations are transforming digitally using technologies and solutions from Microsoft and our partners, visit our banking, capital markets, insurance, and Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services home pages.

This blog post is co-authored by David Stein, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Jinghui Mo, Staff Software Engineer, and Hangfei Lin, Staff Software Engineer, all from Feathr team.

Feature store motivation

With the advance of AI and machine learning, companies start to use complex machine learning pipelines in various applications, such as recommendation systems, fraud detection, and more. These complex systems usually require hundreds to thousands of features to support time-sensitive business applications, and the feature pipelines are maintained by different team members across various business groups.

In these machine learning systems, we see many problems that consume lots of energy of machine learning engineers and data scientists, in particular duplicated feature engineering, online-offline skew, and feature serving with low latency.

Figure 1: Illustration on problems that feature store solves.

Duplicated feature engineering

• In an organization, thousands of features are buried in different scripts and in different formats; they are not captured, organized, or preserved, and thus cannot be reused and leveraged by teams other than those who generated them.
• Because feature engineering is so important for machine learning models and features cannot be shared, data scientists must duplicate their feature engineering efforts across teams.

Online-offline skew

• For features, offline training and online inference usually require different data serving pipelines—ensuring consistent features across different environments is expensive.
• Teams are deterred from using real-time data for inference due to the difficulty of serving the right data.
• Providing a convenient way to ensure data point-in-time correctness is key to avoid label leakage.

Serving features with low latency

• For real-time applications, getting feature lookups from database for real-time inference without compromising response latency and with high throughput can be challenging.
• Easily accessing features with very low latency is key in many machine learning scenarios, and optimizations needs to be done to combine different REST API calls to features.

To solve those problems, a concept called feature store was developed, so that:

• Features are centralized in an organization and can be reused
• Features can be served in a synchronous way between offline and online environment
• Features can be served in real-time with low latency

Introducing Feathr, a battle-tested feature store

Developing a feature store from scratch takes time, and it takes much more time to make it stable, scalable, and user-friendly. Feathr is the feature store that has been used in production and battle-tested in LinkedIn for over 6 years, serving all the LinkedIn machine learning feature platform with thousands of features in production.

At Microsoft, the LinkedIn team and the Azure team have worked very closely to open source Feathr, make it extensible, and build native integration with Azure. It’s available in this GitHub repository and you can read more about Feathr on the LinkedIn Engineering Blog.

Some of the highlights for Feathr include:

• Scalable with built-in optimizations. For example, based on some internal use case, Feathr can process billions of rows and PB scale data with built-in optimizations such as bloom filters and salted joins.
• Rich support for point-in-time joins and aggregations: Feathr has high performant built-in operators designed for Feature Store, including time-based aggregation, sliding window joins, look-up features, all with point-in-time correctness.
• Highly customizable user-defined functions (UDFs) with native PySpark and Spark SQL support to lower the learning curve for data scientists.
• Pythonic APIs to access everything with low learning curve; Integrated with model building so data scientists can be productive from day one.
• Rich type system including support for embeddings for advanced machine learning/deep learning scenarios. One of the common use cases is to build embeddings for customer profiles, and those embeddings can be reused across an organization in all the machine learning applications.
• Native cloud integration with simplified and scalable architecture, which is illustrated in the next section.
• Feature sharing and reuse made easy: Feathr has built-in feature registry so that features can be easily shared across different teams and boost team productivity.

Feathr on Azure architecture

The high-level architecture diagram below articulates how would a user interacts with Feathr on Azure:

Figure 2: Feathr on Azure architecture.

1. A data or machine learning engineer creates features using their preferred tools (like pandas, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks, and more). These features are ingested into offline stores, which can be either:
   • Azure SQL Database (including serverless), Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool (formerly SQL DW).
   • Object storage, such as Azure BLOB storage, Azure Data Lake Store, and more. The format can be Parquet, Avro, or Delta Lake.
2. The data or machine learning engineer can persist the feature definitions into a central registry, which is built with Azure Purview.
3. The data or machine learning engineer can join on all the feature dataset in a point-in-time correct way, with Feathr Python SDK and with Spark engines such as Azure Synapse or Databricks.
4. The data or machine learning engineer can materialize features into an online store such as Azure Cache for Redis with Active-Active, enabling multi-primary, multi-write architecture that ensures eventual consistency between clusters.
5. Data scientists or machine learning engineers consume offline features with their favorite machine learning libraries, for example scikit-learn, PyTorch, or TensorFlow to train a model in their favorite machine learning platform such as Azure Machine Learning, then deploy the models in their favorite environment with services such as Azure Machine Learning endpoint.
6. The backend system makes a request to the deployed model, which makes a request to the Azure Cache for Redis to get the online features with Feathr Python SDK.

A sample notebook containing all the above flow is located in the Feathr repository for more reference.

Feathr has native integration with Azure and other cloud services. The table below shows these integrations:

Feathr component	Cloud Integrations
Offline store – Object Store	Azure Blob Storage Azure ADLS Gen2 AWS S3
Offline store – SQL	Azure SQL DB Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools (formerly SQL DW) Azure SQL in VM Snowflake
Online store	Azure Cache for Redis
Feature Registry	Azure Purview
Compute Engine	Azure Synapse Spark Pools Databricks
Machine Learning Platform	Azure Machine Learning Jupyter Notebook
File Format	Parquet ORC Avro Delta Lake

Table 1: Feathr on Azure Integration with Azure Services.

Installation and getting started

Feathr has a pythonic interface to access all Feathr components, including feature definition and cloud interactions, and is open sourced here. The Feathr python client can be easily installed with pip:

pip install -U feathr

For more details on getting started, please refer to the Feathr Quickstart Guide. The Feathr team can also be reached in the Feathr community.

Going forward

In this blog, we’ve introduced a battle-tested feature store, called Feathr, which is scalable and enterprise ready, with native Azure integrations. We are dedicated to bringing more functionalities into Feathr and Feathr on Azure integrations, and feel free to give any feedback by raising issues in Feathr GitHub repository.

Semiconductor and silicon technology are the basis of digital transformation happening everywhere, across industries and our daily lives, impacting the way we work, learn, and play. The continuous improvement in the performance and power of silicon has been key to enabling this innovation. Here at Microsoft, we’ve empowered our long-standing partners in the semiconductor industry to embrace Azure’s cloud infrastructure and scale out electronic design automation (EDA). With a new EDA-optimized cloud environment running on Azure, the launch of Synopsys Cloud marks a significant milestone for the industry by offering silicon design teams the ability to scale and accelerate their development cycles—transforming chip design the way that the cloud transformed computing.

Increasing flexibility and efficiency in silicon development on Azure

The collective rise in time-to-market pressure caused by the global chip shortage and increasing computational demands have caused chipmakers to seek more flexibility and efficiency in the silicon design process. Migrating chip design to Azure’s optimized infrastructure helps address part of this equation by enabling critical design and verification workloads on the cloud—resulting in faster time-to-results and better quality at a lower cost. With Synopsys Cloud built on Azure, chip designers will now also have access to a new pay-per-use model offering automated provisioning of infrastructure and EDA tools to address the growing demands of silicon design.

This “pay-as-you-go” model is a software as a service (SaaS)-based approach that will reduce barriers for companies of all sizes while enabling greater innovation and value for customers and EDA vendors alike. Using the power of Azure’s workload scaling and virtual machine (VM) selection capabilities, Synopsys Cloud customers will be able to optimize critical EDA workloads—from reducing processing time on verification tasks to saving runtime and enabling faster design convergence on library characterization.

Expanding access to chip design on the cloud

Microsoft has long been committed to helping companies of all sizes unlock more potential on the cloud. With its powerful chip design and verification tools running on Azure’s trusted and comprehensive cloud platform, Synopsys is Microsoft’s preferred partner for EDA on the cloud. Using Synopsys’ solution, customers ranging from startups to large design enterprises benefit from simplified access to custom infrastructure for all their chip design needs—helping them build silicon and tackle designs they previously could not

Innovation for wide-ranging impact

From intelligent scaling of EDA resources to using AI and machine learning models to transform design and resource management, silicon manufacturing has already seen vast improvements with the introduction of the cloud. The shift towards cloud-centric silicon design has enabled newfound access to compute, storage, and tooling resources. Ultimately, improved time-to-results, quality-of-results, and cost-of-results are just the beginning of what cloud-enabled EDA enhancements can offer. As design on the cloud becomes increasingly widespread, I look forward to seeing the silicon industry continuing to innovate towards new levels of ingenuity—powered by the Microsoft Cloud.

Tune in to Synopsys’ SNUG 2022 conference to watch a keynote by Dr. Aart de Geus, Chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys, including a fireside chat with Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

Learn more

This blog has been co-authored by Jessie Jia, Senior Program Manager, Azure Networking and Gunjan Jain, Principal Program Manager, Azure Networking.

In 2019, we launched Azure Front Door to bring enterprise-grade content delivery network (CDN) capabilities to our customers. This was a result of our own cloud journey over the past 13 years, which led us to develop unique infrastructure and services hardened by support for Microsoft’s largest applications like Bing, Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, Skype, and Azure. Read about LinkedIn’s experience¹ migrating their own infrastructure to Azure Front Door.

Since then, a lot has changed for you and your customers. The acceleration of digital transformation to adapt to new ways of doing business, hybrid working models, and increasing security costs has driven the demand for a new type of cloud CDN that can address these modern challenges and simplify internet-first architectures in the cloud.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the new Azure Front Door, our native, modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) catering to both dynamic and static content acceleration with built-in turnkey security, and a simple and predictable pricing model. There are two Azure Front Door tiers—Azure Front Door Standard and Premium—that provide a unified, secure solution for delivering your applications, APIs, and content on Azure or anywhere.

Azure Front Door: The modern enterprise CDN

Every company is now a technology company challenged with managing a rapidly growing digital footprint, dispersed workforce, and evolving security threats. As a result, enterprises are looking for solutions that help meet the rising demands for better scalability, more security, higher performance, greater automation, and easier manageability—with reduced costs.

Whether you’re delivering content and files or building global apps and APIs, Azure Front Door can help you deliver higher availability, lower latency, better scale, and more secure experiences to your users wherever they are. Azure Front Door also enables you to define, manage, and monitor the global routing for your app.

Dynamic and static content acceleration with intelligent security

With the addition of Azure Front Door Standard and Premium, two new tiers that combine the capabilities of Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) and attach with Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF), Azure Front Door is now a unified, modern cloud CDN platform with intelligent threat protection and simple to understand pricing model, built on Microsoft’s massive-scale private global network.

Azure Front Door now also provides a rich set of advanced capabilities that enhance the DevOps experience, security posture, and cost-effectiveness for enterprise customers migrating and/or deploying high-performance, scalable, and secure applications on Azure or anywhere.

The key benefits you can get from Azure Front Door include:

Modern architecture

Build and operate dynamic, high-quality digital experiences with highly automated, secure, and reliable platforms.

• Deeply integrated experiences with other Azure applications and services such as domain name system (DNS) and Web Apps to improve manageability and speed up deployment. We now offer DNS TXT record-based validation to simplify and reduce delays around custom domain validation.
• Improved automation and simplified provisioning with cloud-native and DevOps friendly command line tools. For example, you can now provision custom domains along with other resources in one deployment and validate the domain ownership afterward or use the new Quick Create option in the portal to dramatically reduce deployment and configuration steps.
• Enhanced analytics capabilities such as access logs, health probe logs, additional metrics, and pre-built traffic and security reports for more effective monitoring, troubleshooting, and debugging.
• Expanded rules at the edge with enhanced rules engine capabilities adding regular expressions and server variables that let you move more of your business logic to the edge and create more complex and dynamic routing between your users and backends.

Fast global delivery

Deploy your apps and content at scale to your users wherever they are—creating opportunities for you to compete, weather change, and quickly adapt to new demand and markets. 

• A truly global network built by Microsoft with hundreds of edge locations connected to Azure via a private WAN that can improve latency for apps by up to three times and provides enterprise-grade reliability and massive scalability to deliver low latency and high throughput for consistent application experiences.
• Unified static and dynamic delivery is offered in a single service to accelerate and scale your application and with real-time routing to develop high-availability experiences for applications hosted in Azure or anywhere.
• A simplified cost model that reduces billing complexity by having fewer meters customers need to plan for and integrated egress (data transfer outbound) pricing that removes the separate egress charge from Azure regions to Azure Front Door. Please refer to the Azure Front Door pricing page for more details.

Intelligent security

Protect your digital estate against known and new threats with intelligent security that embrace a Zero Trust framework.

• Best-of-breed security services seamlessly attached such as built-in layer 3-4 DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall, Azure DNS to protect your domains, and Azure Private Link.
• WAF enhancements offer a powerful, yet cost-effective protection from common attacks and bots and are customizable to application-specific detections. Azure Front Door Premium includes Azure Web Application Firewall at no additional cost and provides enhanced capabilities. Azure WAF is also releasing a new DRS 2.0 RuleSet, offering reduced false positives and anomaly scoring-based detection. Bot manager—now generally available, provides an additional layer of Bot detection based on Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
• Azure Private Link support on Azure Front Door Premium with availability in all Azure regions with availability zones, enabling your application to extend all the way out to the edge with private access from Azure Front Door to your backends in Azure.

Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic)

The existing Azure Front Door and Azure CDN from Microsoft will now be known as Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) moving forward. Azure Front Door (classic), as well as Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic), will continue to be fully supported and you can continue to use them. However, we encourage you to take advantage of Azure Front Door Standard and Premium as the latest capabilities and future enhancements will not be available on Azure Front Door (classic).

Over the coming months, we will be launching zero downtime migrations from Azure Front Door (classic) and Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) to Azure Front Door Standard and Premium. Please stay tuned for more updates. If you are new to Azure Front Door, you can easily launch Azure Front Door Standard and Premium in the Azure portal or using our API.

Get started

Get started with the new Azure Front Door today! To learn more about the service and various features, refer to the Azure Front Door documentation. If you are interested in exploring capabilities beyond the standard offering, simply file a feature request on our Networking Community Page or feel free to contact us at [email protected].

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¹Accelerating the LinkedIn Experience with Azure Front Door.

Santa Claus is coming to town.*

*Due to COVID-19, Mr. Kringle is unable to greet children at the Macy’s flagship store in New York City. At some malls, Mr. Kringle must sit behind plexiglass to hear Christmas wishes. Mr. Kringle’s elves are carrying disinfectant wipes. Mr. Kringle’s elves are now called “Santa’s Sanitation Squad.” Mr. Kringle is still consulting virologists as to whether he can consume cookies and milk while in your home.

Like almost every other 2020 holiday, Christmas won’t be quite the same. But there’s one custom we can still count on: Santa and his sleigh will navigate from the North Pole to your rooftop to drop off your gifts (while he wears a face mask).

We know this thanks to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Spring, Colorado, NORAD keeps constant watch over U.S. and Canadian aerospace via global satellite and radar systems. And the same good people have monitored Santa’s journey every Christmas Eve since 1955.

On Dec. 24, NORAD will again offer its beloved Santa Tracker, revealing up-to-the-second whereabouts of Saint Nick and his sky-high reindeer team as they circle the planet. Anyone can follow the route via a special NORAD website that’s maintained by Microsoft engineers and hosted on Microsoft Azure.

The website also features games, holiday music, movies and more. It’s available in eight languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Chinese. In addition, NORAD will use its new, Santa-tracking app and its social media channels to post updates throughout the evening.

And for curious kids who need to know more than the ETA of Father Christmas, NORAD on Thursday launched a new chatbot to respond to timely questions, like: “Is there a big drum of hand sanitizer on board the sleigh?” Answer: “Santa is taking all of the necessary precautions to keep everyone safe as he delivers presents.” NORAD deployed the chatbot by using Azure Bot Service.

“It’s been a tough year and everyone’s looking for a bit of good news,” says NORAD spokesman Preston Schlachter. “We realize that. We want to offer a fun experience for everybody and maybe take their minds off what 2020 has been like.”

The soul of NORAD’s Santa Tracker has long been its Christmas Eve call center, a festive hub usually staffed by some 1,500 headset-wearing volunteers – a mix of civilians in holiday sweaters and service members in full camo.

Every Dec. 24 for years, the group has packed into several conference rooms at Peterson Air Force Base, filling two-hour shifts across a 20-hour day. The work is fast. Each volunteer typically fields about one call per minute from a child somewhere in the world anxious for Santa’s approach. Some volunteers know that excitement personally – as kids, they once called NORAD’s tracker hotline.

To maintain safe distances this year, NORAD will host fewer call-center volunteers and wearing a mask will be mandatory, Schlachter says. Callers who can’t reach a live operator via 877-HI-NORAD (877-446-6723) will hear a recorded update on Santa’s location.

But for one long-time volunteer, Christmas won’t be the same unless he’s on the base, answering those urgent calls.

“I absolutely can’t miss it,” says Jim Jenista, a NORAD employee and former Navy pilot and bombardier who has spent nearly 20 Christmas Eves in the call center.

In fact, it has become a Jenista family tradition – and an occasion to dress for the moment.

Since the early 2000s, Jenista, his wife, Karen, and their six children have volunteered for the NORAD phone bank. They arrive in Santa hats and handmade T-shirts, each emblazoned with a specific reindeer. The kids are now grown and live far away. This year, it will just be Jenista and Karen bedecked in their “Cupid” and “Vixen” shirts.

“It is so rewarding. That night embodies the innocence, the expectation and the excitement of the holiday and the giving season,” Jenista says. “It’s also the fastest two hours of your life.”

In many ways, Jenista represents NORAD’s unique duality: sober security meets joyful wonder.

The organization was built during the Cold War to help defend North America against missile strikes. Today, however, many kids know NORAD for its softer side: following and safeguarding Santa’s long ride.

Jenista once flew A-6 Intruders and F-14 Tomcats, was on duty at NORAD on 9/11, and he currently helps coordinate U.S. military training exercises. In his free time, however, he hosts a YouTube channel as “Grandpa Silly,” reading from children’s books in his animated style.

“Our motto at NORAD is, ‘We have the watch,’” Jenista says. “That means while you go about your life, just know that we’re here, ready to deter those who might want to do us harm.

“NORAD Tracks Santa is a unique opportunity to share additional mission information with the people who depend on us,” he adds. “We get to talk about radars and intercepts and infrared and satellites – all the equipment and procedures we have to protect the population.”

In both worlds, Jenista says, NORAD seeks to help people sleep better at night.

And there’s one more similarity between the two endeavors: Operating the Santa Tracker is also a year-round mission.

“It’s not something that just gets started and implemented in December,” says Schlachter, who leads NORAD’s preparation. “As soon as the program is over on Christmas, we are talking about lessons learned and how we can make changes for the following year.”

To sustain and continually reinvent its Santa Tracker, NORAD relies on a large roster of volunteers, from tech companies like Microsoft to local businesses in Colorado Springs that provide call center operators with coffee, water, sandwiches and snacks.

“All of our partners have approached NORAD wanting to be a part of the program, and they all provide those services gratis,” Schlachter says. “We could not have this program without their generosity.”

At Microsoft, more than 25 employees worked on the Santa Tracker website and chatbot throughout the year. That includes Azure and Bing engineers, plus engineers from the FastTrack for Azure team, a technical enablement program that helps with rapid design and deployment of cloud solutions.

In 2019, the Santa Tracker website racked up about 15 million pageviews.

Earlier this year, many of those same employees were busy helping Microsoft customers and partners shift their companies to remote work. Against that pandemic backdrop, Microsoft engineers continued to collaborate with NORAD to update the website and build the chatbot, says Susan Sullivan, a Microsoft senior program manager in Azure engineering.

“The worry might have been: How does a program like this, not on people’s minds in March, April and May, get the traction it needs when everybody is totally distracted?” Sullivan says.

“But individuals saw the Santa Tracker program and enjoyed taking a deep breath of something fresh. It was a nice respite from all of the craziness going on,” she adds.

Sullivan leads Microsoft’s Santa Tracker efforts. That includes holding weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams with Schlachter and others at NORAD. Amid those months of planning and designing, news of the pandemic infused the team with extra urgency to deliver a website that was both memorable and fully reliable, Sullivan says.

It was as if they were protecting a precious piece of Christmas for kids around the world.

“There is an even bigger spirit behind the work this year,” Sullivan says. “I do imagine kids being more engaged online, more interested in the uplifting aspect of Christmas, and families taking the time to really make it special.

“Everything does feel like it’s more important this year,” she adds. “It feels like there’s a bigger opportunity to bring joy.”

As a new normal has been defined by a worldwide pandemic and economic changes this year, businesses have sought new ways to optimize the delivery of their goods and services and better IT cost efficiency in an increasingly remote work environment.

The technology that lays the foundation for remote work, hyperconverged infrastructure, has long been an ideal way for organizations to deliver key workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), IT for remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) and for companies to drive datacenter modernization. Azure Stack HCI delivers on these customer needs with the innovation of Azure integration. With our cloud-native approach, our goal is to help customers realize higher value HCI through quick deployment and integration that leverages familiar management and tools with flexible Azure subscription pricing.

Customers and partners benefit from Azure Stack HCI innovations today

With the general availability of Azure Stack HCI today, we’ve taken the great feedback customers provided in preview to deliver a full-featured offering that includes centralized management, stretch clustering, built in hybrid capabilities, and Azure Arc integration. Our approach is resonating with customers and partners alike, including integrated system partners DataON, Dell Technologies, and Lenovo. Customers across many verticals, including Benenden Schools, Bradley Legal, the Cherokee County School District, Florida State Medical College of Medicine, and Hendrick Motorsports have already seen success with Azure Stack HCI through participation in preview and have achieved business value from Azure Stack HCI in driving early production deployment for multiple use cases including ROBO, database workloads, and datacenter modernization in general. Read the customer experience blog.

Do more with the new Azure Stack HCI and integrated systems

The innovations delivered by Azure Stack HCI open a wide range of customer scenarios. For example, simplifying hybrid with native Azure integration provides visibility of the clusters in the Azure Portal for hybrid management. Another key innovation is the newly built-in stretched clustering capabilities to easily enhance a customer disaster recovery strategy. See this technical video to learn more.

As customers are looking to minimize their time to value when deploying new infrastructure, Microsoft has worked with its partners to deliver a new integrated system experience for Azure Stack HCI as one of the form factors available. These integrated systems are shipping as pre-racked, with software, hardware, and firmware pre-installed and a simple deployment GUI. The new Azure Stack HCI full stack updates feature is integrated with each of the partner systems, bringing one click orchestration when new features or security updates need to be applied to the cluster. The system administrator is always in control, and always gets the latest features and validated full-stack updates.

Partner ecosystem

Today’s general availability also marks multiple integrated systems from our trusted partners such as DataON, Dell Technologies, and Lenovo. These Azure Stack HCI integrated systems have been co-engineered for enterprise-ready reliability and simplicity.

“As a partner that made the “Microsoft choice” we are bullish about the new simplicity and ease of use that Azure Stack HCI integrated systems bring to our customers. We have worked hand in hand with Microsoft to deliver a seamless experience on our new DataON AZS product line with DataON MUST Pro for Windows Admin Center. MUST Pro simplifies deployment and updating on Azure Stack HCI with minimal disruption to your hybrid cloud infrastructure. We believe that all industry verticals can benefit from the innovation delivered by such a system.”  —Howard Lo, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, DataON

“With a long-standing history of bringing products to market with Microsoft, we are introducing the Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI built on trusted Dell EMC PowerEdge server technology. As part of our industry leading hyperconverged portfolio, this all-in-one, jointly engineered system delivers an Azure hybrid cloud consumption experience for customers with integrated deployment and full-stack automated lifecycle management.” —Jon Siegal, Vice President of Product Marketing, Dell Technologies

“Lenovo is looking forward to bringing Microsoft Azure Stack HCI integrated form factor to Lenovo’s most popular servers and Edge server lineup. Our joint partnership with Microsoft delivers a new hyperconverged infrastructure solution that helps our mutual customers accelerate their cloud journey. The hybrid capabilities and seamless integration with Azure is a perfect complement to the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX product line.” —Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager, Server, Storage, and Software Defined Infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group

Another great way to deploy Azure Stack HCI is using the Intel Select Solution offerings that deliver lots of flexibility.

“Azure Stack HCI reimagines hybrid cloud for enterprises with newfound simplicity in how IT can access Azure services based on what makes sense for their business, whether that is onpremises or in the cloud. The Intel Select Solutions for Azure Stack HCI are market-ready solutions delivered by a breadth of partners, extensively tested and performance verified to further simplify deployment while giving customers the scale and efficiency needed for a modern infrastructure to advance their business.” —Jason Grebe, Corporate Vice President, General Manager, Cloud Enterprise Solutions Group at Intel.

In addition, today’s general availability also brings new Independent Software Vendor support for Azure Stack HCI with Commvault, DataDog, Veeam and Veritas—now all fully operable with Azure Stack HCI to give our customers an even broader choice of tools.

Next steps