We're at ignite, well, we're virtually here or there,
but we're at Ignite.
And Gwyn and I have found the best bits of Azure news to come out of Microsoft's
premier industry event. The event in general,
announced a load of upgrades and improvements to existing services.
And this update, we will look at five areas.
That's five of cloud computing that stood out Azure percept for
edge AI solutions,
Microsoft mesh to make your team's meetings 3d, kind of,
identity on Azure gets a very interesting additions.
New hybrid Azure features such as express route IPV,
six support and more industry specific Azure clouds.
If you want all the news in marketing speak,
we have linked to the official ignite book of news in the description as well.
Yes, we have something for everyone. One more thing.
My colleague fellow Azure, MVP and expert hatwearer,
Gwyn did a live stream this week for the Azure AZ-104 exam,
tons of tips, advice, sample exam questions,
all delivered with cohost Chase. So check it out in the link below. All right,
let's get into it. Gwyn, go.
Let's kick things off with Microsoft percept Microsoft's new platform for
creating edge AI solutions,
edge computing is all about allowing standalone mobile devices to perform tasks
such as image recognition, response to voice commands and textual translation.
Without access to the cloud. Percept brings a selection of hardware, software,
and services to help customers using Azure AI and Azure IOT
services. The main components of Azure, percept are, AI hardware,
reference design and certification programs,
which provide patterns and best practices for developing edge AI hardware that
can be integrated easily without her AI and IOT services.
Another component is the Azure percept DK,
which is a development kit that is flexible enough to support a wide variety of
prototyping scenarios.
And the final component is the services and workflows to accelerate edge AI
model and solution development.
This includes development workflows and pre-built models accessible from Azure
percept studio model development services,
device management services for scale and, and end-to-end security.
They've also provided a ton of documentation on how to get started with the
platform and you can purchase the dev kit right from the Microsoft store.
In my opinion, the dev kit looks pretty neat,
sort of like it belongs in some kind of cyber punk movie anyways,
onto some Azure mesh news. Take it away, sir. Lars.
You watched the keynote at Microsoft ignite. You are aware of Microsoft mesh.
Yeah.
This mixed reality collaboration platform as Microsoft calls It allows anyone
to meet a kind of virtual reality space and interact.
The technology is relying on a mix of using HoloLens. Microsoft's mixed reality,
headset, holograms, Azure compute power and AI.
If the dream becomes reality to channel a bit of Alex Kipman creator of
Hololens, mesh will let people work together remotely,
but feel they are in same room.
Sort of think of it as Microsoft teams with a 3d element.
The vision is to use it for engineering, universities, remote offices,
ocean exploring, and a whole lot more. And if Microsoft can pull this off,
it could be another way to make those relentless video calls,
just a little bit more interesting, interactive and efficient. Also,
we get to really show off our dance moves. If the keynote is anything to go by.
We've got some Azure identity updates to actually including an AWS
feature. This first one is passwordless authentication.
Password managers, such as onepassword,
and lastpass helped dramatically to reduce the main vulnerabilities of password,
which are reuse and weak passwords, but it is still using passwords.
Microsoft has announced the general availability of passwordless authentication,
which offers a combination of temporary access pass or tap for short and
authenticator verification. No more passwords.
The second identity announcement is AWS single sign-on it's.
Now pre-integrated with Azure active directory and available in the app gallery.
This integration lets you connect Azure ID with AWS SSO,
a cloud-based service that simplifies single sign on access across multiple AWS
accounts and resources.
You can centralize management of user access to AWS while your team can gain
access using their Azure ID credentials. This is of course,
to target those existing Microsoft customers that also have AWS resources,
a pretty neat feature in my opinion, Lars,
what have you got to tell our lovely audience?
Thanks Gwyn. Wow.
No more passwords ending in one then two and then three.
And don't look at me like that. You've done it too. I know. Yeah.
Now I want to talk about hybrid.
Microsoft has decades worth of companies and users that have their own on-prem
installations. They aren't going to switch to cloud computing overnight,
but they might just move some bits or use cloud for new projects.
Microsoft is wanting to help those customers with a hybrid cloud solution to
solve a lot of cloud computing challenges at ignite.
They started that path with a bunch of new hybrid cloud products and features
Azure arc now works with machine learning.
This means you can train ML models directly where the data lives using the
existing infrastructure that you have Azure arc enabled Kubernetes is
now generally available.
Azure backup center enables centralized Backup management for Azure virtual
machines sql in Azure,
virtual HANA in Azure VMs and Azure file,
no matter location or description.
And this is now also generally available express route IPV six support,
which has becoming crucial for IOT scenarios.
Virtual WAN remote user VPN features,
Azure route server now available for preview facilitates dynamic routing between
network virtual appliances NVAs and virtual networks and a
bunch more. I need to breathe. Gwyn!
Well let's look at the new and not so new dedicated industry cloud platforms.
We got healthcare cloud back in October 2020, a few weeks back,
we got the Ricoh cloud.
Now we have three more Microsoft cloud for financial services, nonprofit cloud,
and cheese making cloud... See,
this is what happens when I let Lars write the script. Not cheese, but yes,
manufacturing the Microsoft cloud for manufacturing as Microsoft puts it. Quote,
Microsoft industry clouds are tailored to address unique industry needs and
decrease time to value from years to months.
This means that data is assigned context from the start and services and Azure
can work faster and more efficient. Unquote.
These clouds also include specific features and dynamics three 65 and Microsoft
three 65 as well as make sure compliance is taken care of.
Be sure to check out the details on every service that we've talked to you about
in this episode provided to you in the show notes of this episode.
You know what else happened this week?
100 thousand subscribers on YouTube is what! Well, yeah,
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As we say on the, a cloud guru team,
when the main annual Azure conference has more sessions and you can possibly
attend, seek and hope Gwyn covers those.
So see you next week and keep giving us thumbs up Cloud Gurus.