Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.23

November 15, 2023

Welcome to the twenty-third edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2023. This will also be the final newsletter of 2023 as we take a holiday break and pick it up again in the new year.

Hello again, my friends from around the world. I’m so happy you continue to subscribe and read this bi-weekly newsletter on Azure. I enjoy sitting down each week to research and write this, and hopefully, you will continue to find value in it. Feel free to invite your co-workers or others to subscribe if you think they would find it helpful.

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ONE.

Microsoft Ignite 2023 has officially kicked off in Seattle and online. As I write this, I am watching Satya Nadella’s keynote and combing through the 100 announcements made in connection with the conference.

For events such as this, Microsoft publishes a Book of News that lists all of the announcements that they make in advance:

https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2023-book-of-news/

In this newsletter, I’ll talk about some of my favorite announcements that I can find. And we’ll start with the keynote.

First, I will start by saying that it feels like a lot. There are so many announcements.

Satya Nadella said during the keynote that “this is clearly the age of copilots”. Copilots is the term that Microsoft is using for generative AI assistants everywhere. You will have Copilots in Windows, copilots in Azure, copilots in Office, copilots in SQL Database, and in Teams. Microsoft is going HARD on AI assistants everywhere.

Somebody in the Ignite Chat made a joke that you had to have a drink everytime Microsoft mentions the word copilot or AI. Well, you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning by noon if you did that, so I don’t suggest that game.

A couple of quotes stand out to me from the keynote:

Satya Nadella: “Copilot will be the new UI that helps us access the world’s knowledge and your organization’s knowledge. But most importantly, it’s your agent that helps you act on that knowledge.”

There were some interesting infrastructure/hardware announcements in the keynote:

Microsoft has invented a new type of fiber optic cable that goes 47% faster than traditional cable. That’s crazy!
Microsoft is now competing with Intel and ARM as a chip manufacturer. They announced their own silicon chip, Azure Cobalt, the fastest ARM chip of any cloud provider – 128 CPU cores on a chip
Nvidia’s H200 AI Accelerator chip will be available in Azure
A new Azure VM family specifically for generative AI workloads using AMD accelerator chips
Competing with Nvidia and AMD – Microsoft has another custom chip called Azure Maia, which is an AI Accelerator chip that runs cloud-based training and inferencing for AI workloads, such as OpenAI models, Bing, GitHub Copilot, and ChatGPT.

And there were an infinite number of AI announcements. I can’t even keep up with all of them. We all know that Azure has an Open AI service so that you can access the GPT services from Open AI. But it seems they are opening the tent to all the other providers too. They are hosting Meta’s Llama 2 model as a service. And will soon provide other models hosted as a service including Mistral (code generation) and Jais (Arabic LLM).

Large Language Models (LLMs) have a new little brother! Here comes Small Langauge Models (SMLs)! Microsoft will host some SMLs starting with Phi 2 model. These models are designed to be so small, that they can be hosted on a local server with no need to access the cloud to run them.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, made the following statement about Generative AI. Let me know if you think it’s a bit over the top: “Generative AI is the single most significant platform transition in computing history. Bigger than PC, bigger than mobile, it’s going to be bigger than Internet.”

I’m getting a bit of a headache thinking about all of these announcements. Watch the videos here, as Ignite is still going on today.

There were a lot of announcements, and I simply can’t cover them all today in this little newsletter. As I see things that are interesting, I’ll cover them in future newsletters.

See more:https://ignite.microsoft.com/

TWO.

Of all the AI (sorry, Copilot) announcements, the first one that caught my attention had to do with Azure.

Microsoft Copilot for Azure.

Microsoft describes it as a companion that will simplify how users design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot applications and infrastructure in the cloud.

This reminds me a bit about Azure Advisor to start. Right now, Advisor applies a set of predefined rules to your specific usage of Azure and makes recommendations on how you can improve your usage. It can make suggestions about cost-saving, security or performance.

So Copilot for Azure runs in the top menu bar and is available to help. If you need to learn about some service, you can ask Copilot some questions about what the service does. And if perhaps you’re wondering what option to set or what size of resource to choose in real-time while you’re creating the resource, Copilot can provide helpful answers.

Or, if you’re trying to construct a Kusto query to get information about your resource usage, you can ask Copilot, and it will construct the query for you. That can be useful as very few people are experts in KQL. It can also work with CLI coding help as well as navigating Prometheus for Azure Monitor queries.

But besides being helpful with documentation and query writing, Copilot apparently can look at your usage of Azure and answer questions. “Why did my cost spike on April 8?” and it can look at your cost report and apparently answer that question. That could be very helpful. Or “What’s the easiest way I can reduce my spending?” Those will be helpful to a lot of people.

It will be interesting to see this in action.

See more:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-infrastructure-blog/simplify-it-management-with-microsoft-copilot-for-azure-save/ba-p/3981106

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

The following updates to the Azure platform were announced in the last two weeks:

Azure Monitor Logs archive provides up to 12 years of retention
Azure support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will end by 31 October 2024
Azure Monitor Alerts integration with Event Grid for Azure Key Vault system events, in preview
Azure Monitor Agent JSON log collection, in preview
Ubuntu Server to Ubuntu Pro in-place upgrade now available, in GA
Experiment templates now available in Azure Chaos Studio
Azure Boost, in GA
Azure VMSS Zonal Expansion, in preview
VM Hibernation, in preview
Microsoft Copilot for Azure, in preview
ExpressRoute as a Trusted Service
ExpressRoute Direct and Circuit in different subscriptions
ExpressRoute Scalable Gateway, in preview
ExpressRoute Seamless Gateway Migration, in preview
Microsoft Copilot for Azure capability now available in Azure Cosmos DB, in preview
Cosmos DB Dynamic scaling per partition and per region, in preview
Priority-based execution in Azure Cosmos DB, in preview
Cross-account container copy for Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL API, in preview
Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore
Vector search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore
Free tier on Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore
Azure AI Advantage for Azure Cosmos DB
Trusted launch as default for VMs deployed through PowerShell and CLI
Confidential containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), in preview
Confidential temp disk encryption for confidential VMs, in preview
Azure Chaos Studio is now generally available
Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager
Kubernetes AI toolchain operator
Cost analysis add-on for AKS, in preview
Azure Container Storage is now available with Azure Linux container host
Azure Logic Apps workflow assistant in public preview, in preview
Announcing Azure Integration Environment in public preview
Attach and VMs to and from Existing Virtual Machine Scale Sets, in preview

Be sure to check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/

COMING UP FOR ME.

I’ll just be watching some of the Ignite videos to be up to speed on the latest announcements. Udemy’s Black Friday sale is starting tomorrow, so if you’re looking for a good deal on Azure courses (or ChatGPT), come check my profile out starting tomorrow:

https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/