AzureCon Keynote Announcements: India Regions, GPU Support, IoT Suite, Container Service, and Security Center

Yesterday we held our AzureCon event and were fortunate to have tens of thousands of developers around the world participate.  During the event we announced several great new enhancements to Microsoft Azure including:

• General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
• Announcing new N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities
• Announcing Azure IoT Suite available to purchase
• Announcing Azure Container Service
• Announcing Azure Security Center

We were also fortunate to be joined on stage by several great Azure customers who talked about their experiences using Azure including: Jet.com, Nascar, Alaska Airlines, Walmart, and ThyssenKrupp.

Watching the Videos

All of the talks presented at AzureCon (including the 60 breakout talks) are now available to watch online.  You can browse and watch all of the sessions here.

My keynote to kick off the event was an hour long and provided an end-to-end look at Azure and some of the big new announcements of the day.  You can watch it here.

Below are some more details of some of the highlights:

Announcing General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India

Yesterday we announced the general availability of our new India regions: Mumbai (West), Chennai (South) and Pune (Central).  They are now available for you to deploy solutions into.

This brings our worldwide presence of Azure regions up to 24 regions, more than AWS and Google combined. Over 125 customers and partners have been participating in the private preview of our new India regions.   We are seeing tremendous interest from industry sectors like Public Sector, Banking Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare whose cloud adoption has been restricted by data residency requirements.  You can all now deploy your solutions too.

Announcing N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU Support

This week we announced our new N-series family of Azure Virtual Machines that enable GPU capabilities.  Featuring NVidia’s best of breed Tesla GPUs, these Virtual Machines will help you run a variety of workloads ranging from remote visualization to machine learning to analytics.

The N-series VMs feature NVidia’s flagship GPU, the K80 which is well supported by NVidia’s CUDA development community. N-series will also have VM configurations featuring the latest M60 which was recently announced by NVidia. With support for M60, Azure becomes the first hyperscale cloud provider to bring the capabilities of NVidia’s Quadro High End Graphics Support to the cloud. In addition, N-series combines GPU capabilities with the superfast RDMA interconnect so you can run multi-machine, multi-GPU workloads such as Deep Learning and Skype Translator Training.

Announcing Azure Security Center

This week we announced the new Azure Security Center—a new Azure service that gives you visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources, and helps you stay ahead of threats and attacks.  Azure is the first cloud platform to provide unified security management with capabilities that help you prevent, detect, and respond to threats.

The Azure Security Center provides a unified view of your security state, so your team and/or your organization’s security specialists can get the information they need to evaluate risk across the workloads they run in the cloud.  Based on customizable policy, the service can provide recommendations. For example, the policy might be that all web applications should be protected by a web application firewall. If so, the Azure Security Center will automatically detect when web apps you host in Azure don’t have a web application firewall configured, and provide a quick and direct workflow to get a firewall from one of our partners deployed and configured:

Of course, even with the best possible protection in place, attackers will still try to compromise systems. To address this problem and adopt an “assume breach” mindset, the Azure Security Center uses advanced analytics, including machine learning, along with Microsoft’s global threat intelligence network to look for and alert on attacks. Signals are automatically collected from your Azure resources, the network, and integrated security partner solutions and analyzed to identify cyber-attacks that might otherwise go undetected. Should an incident occur, security alerts offer insights into the attack and suggest ways to remediate and recover quickly. Security data and alerts can also be piped to existing Security Information and Events Management (SIEM) systems your organization has already purchased and is using on-premises.

No other cloud vendor provides the depth and breadth of these capabilities, and they are going to enable you to build even more secure applications in the cloud.

Announcing Azure IoT Suite Available to Purchase

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides tremendous new opportunities for organizations to improve operations, become more efficient at what they do, and create new revenue streams.  We have had a huge interest in our Azure IoT Suite which until this week has been in public preview.  Our customers like Rockwell Automation and ThyssenKrupp Elevators are already connecting data and devices to solve business problems and improve their operations. Many more businesses are poised to benefit from IoT by connecting their devices to collect and analyze untapped data with remote monitoring or predictive maintenance solutions.

In working with customers, we have seen that getting started on IoT projects can be a daunting task starting with connecting existing devices, determining the right technology partner to work with and scaling an IoT project from proof of concept to broad deployment. Capturing and analyzing untapped data is complex, particularly when a business tries to integrate this new data with existing data and systems they already have. 

The Microsoft Azure IoT Suite helps address many of these challenges.  The Microsoft Azure IoT Suite helps you connect and integrate with devices more easily, and to capture and analyze untapped device data by using our preconfigured solutions, which are engineered to help you move quickly from proof of concept and testing to broader deployment. Today we support remote monitoring, and soon we will be delivering support for predictive maintenance and asset management solutions.

These solutions reliably capture data in the cloud and analyze the data both in real-time and in batch processing. Once your devices are connected, Azure IoT Suite provides real time information in an intuitive format that helps you take action from insights. Our advanced analytics then enables you to easily process data—even when it comes from a variety of sources, including devices, line of business assets, sensors and other systems and provide rich built-in dashboards and analytics tools for access to the data and insights you need. User permissions can be set to control reporting and share information with the right people in your organization.

Below is an example of the types of built-in dashboard views that you can leverage without having to write any code:

To support adoption of the Azure IoT Suite, we are also announcing the new Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT program, an ecosystem of partners whose offerings have been tested and certified to help businesses with their IoT device and platform needs. The first set of partners include Beaglebone, Freescale, Intel, Raspberry Pi, Resin.io, Seeed and Texas Instruments. These partners, along with experienced global solution providers are helping businesses harness the power of the Internet of Things today.  

You can learn more about our approach and the Azure IoT Suite at www.InternetofYourThings.com and partners can learn more at www.azure.com/iotdev.

Announcing Azure IoT Hub

This week we also announced the public preview of our new Azure IoT Hub service which is a fully managed service that enables reliable and secure bi-directional communications between millions of IoT devices and an application back end. Azure IoT Hub offers reliable device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device hyper-scale messaging, enables secure communications using per-device security credentials and access control, and includes device libraries for the most popular languages and platforms.

Providing secure, scalable bi-directional communication from the heterogeneous devices to the cloud is a cornerstone of any IoT solution which Azure IoT hub addresses in the following way:

• Per-device authentication and secure connectivity: Each device uses its own security key to connect to IoT Hub. The application back end is then able to individually whitelist and blacklist each device, enabling complete control over device access.
• Extensive set of device libraries: Azure IoT device SDKs are available and supported for a variety of languages and platforms such as C, C#, Java, and JavaScript.
• IoT protocols and extensibility: Azure IoT Hub provides native support of the HTTP 1.1 and AMQP 1.0 protocols for device connectivity. Azure IoT Hub can also be extended via the Azure IoT protocol gateway open source framework to provide support for MQTT v3.1.1.
• Scale: Azure IoT Hub scales to millions of simultaneously connected devices, and millions of events per seconds.

Getting started with Azure IoT Hub is easy. Simply navigate to the Azure Preview portal, and use the Internet of Things->Azure IoT Hub. Choose the name, pricing tier, number of units and location and select Create to provision and deploy your IoT Hub:

Once the IoT hub is created, you can navigate to Settings and create new shared access policies and modify other messaging settings for granular control.

The bi-directional communication enabled with an IoT Hub provides powerful capabilities in a real world IoT solution such as the control of individual device security credentials and access through the use of a device identity registry.  Once a device identity is in the registry, the device can connect, send device-to-cloud messages to the hub, and receive cloud-to-device messages from backend applications with just a few lines of code in a secure way.

Learn more about Azure IoT Hub and get started with your own real world IoT solutions.

Announcing the new Azure Container Service

’We’ve been working with Docker to integrate Docker containers with both Azure and Windows Server for some time. This week we announced the new Azure Container Service which leverages the popular Apache Mesos project to deliver a customer proven orchestration solution for applications delivered as Docker containers.

The Azure Container Service enables users to easily create and manage a Docker enabled Apache Mesos cluster. The container management software running on these clusters is open source, and in addition to the application portability offered by tooling such as Docker and Docker Compose, you will be able to leverage portable container orchestration and management tooling such as Marathon, Chronos and Docker Swarm.

When utilizing the Azure Container Service, you will be able to take advantage of the tight integration with Azure infrastructure management features such as tagging of resources, Role Based Access Control (RBAC), Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and the fully integrated user experience in the Azure portal. By coupling the enterprise class Azure cloud with key open source build, deploy and orchestration software, we maximize customer choice when it comes to containerize workloads.

The service will be available for preview by the end of the year.

Learn More

Watch the AzureCon sessions online to learn more about all of the above announcements – plus a lot more that was covered during the day.  We are looking forward to seeing what you build with what you learn!

Hope this helps,

Scott