Microsoft has announced a slew of new capabilities for its Azure cloud as well as at each one of its development-focused Ignite conferences. In the 2022 edition, the company will include three additional capabilities.
DALLE 2 is now available for select customers through a preview in Azure OpenAI. For those unfamiliar, the model allows for the generation of images via a text or image input. Also, Azure Cognitive Service now supports over 90 languages.
Both Image Analysis 4.0 and Spatial Analysis on the Edge are available for preview in the computer vision space. They will provide enhanced feature extraction and analysis with a focus on safety and security. Furthermore, Azure Cognitive Service for Speech is adding new customization capabilities as well as more languages and emotions. Read more about all the updates to Azure Cognitive Services here.
A couple of preview capabilities are included in Azure Form Recognizer, as well as content extraction from contracts and support for 275 languages.
As a preview, we have registries, Azure Container for PyTorch, Azure Data Science Virtual Machines for PyTorch, and Apache Spark pools integration. The most commonly available features include automated machine learning capabilities, and Python SDK v2. The Responsible AI dashboard is expected to become generally available soon.
Microsoft''s low-code industrial AI development platform "Project Bonsai" is being developed. There are a number of new capabilities in the preview, including action masking, model-based training acceleration, Assessment 2.0, and Bonsai Samples in Azure Marketplace. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is also a contributor to this initiative.
Microsoft has announced a variety of new partner solutions for its Intelligent Data Platform: MongoDB and YugabyteDB, for analytics, and Onetrust, Delphix, and others.
Azure CosmosDB receives better performance via the Citus engine and supports documents larger than 16MB in Azure CosmosDB for MongoDB. Moreover, Azure Database for MySQL now receives a preview for Autoscale IO. As the name implies, it manages the IO dynamically and only pay for the IO you use.
As usual, Azure Synapse Analytics will have additional capabilities in the coming months. This includes a pipeline template for connectivity to Microsoft 365 data and an improvement to the Copy Activity functionality through a tool called Mapping Data Flows. Despite this, the R language is now supported in preview form in Azure Synapse, while a new version of SynapseML is generally available.
Azure Data Explorer is bringing in support for new data ingestion types, including Amazon S3, Azure Event Grid, Azure Synapse Link, and OpenTelemetry Metrics. It can also read and write in the open standard Parquet and Delta formats. Finally, Microsoft Purview Data Governance has new features such as SQL Dynamic lineage, Metamodels, and machine learning-based classifications in a preview.
With a single sign-on experience (SSO) implementation options for Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Azure Self-Service, Azure Marketplace for VM self-service, and Graphics Processing Unit partitioning (GPU-P) with live migration in advance, as well as intent-based network automation.
Azure Automanage is available for Azure Arc-enabled servers and Azure virtual machines, with virtual machine scaling options for virtual machine scaling and spot virtual machines for less cost-saving. Similarly, Azure Premium SSD v2 is usually available, while Azure Elastic SAN (storage area network) is in preview.
Azure Monitor is now supported by Windows 10 and Windows 11, thanks to the Windows client installer, and has an agent migration tool, which is now in beta. In the same vein, alert rule recommendations will be offered.
Azure''s Domain Name System (DNS) private resolver and Azure''s public multi-access edge compute are all available in the networking space. Microsoft is also expanding Azure Hybrid Benefit and is also offering the Windows admin center via the Azure portal. Additionally, Microsoft will soon offer a savings plan for compute that will allow customers to pay a fixed hourly rate for all compute as long as they sign up. Finally, Nutanix Cloud Clusters are all available.
Customers of Azure VMware Solution will likely find out that stretched clusters now provide 99.99% private cloud uptime in advance. Additionally, customer managed key (CMK) are supported, allowing easier management, rotation, and integration with Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics.
Finally, when it comes to Azure''s DevOps and other development tools, we have a whole set of updates. If you want to see them here, please refer to the hyperlink.
Microsoft is developing a self-paced exercise on Microsoft Learn, which will allow employees to demonstrate these skills on LinkedIn. They will also be invited to a private LinkedIn group where employers will be able to directly engage with them.