Category: Microsoft news

Microsoft news, features, events, and press materials

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Microsoft announces the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, a new design approach for supply chain agility, automation and sustainability

Microsoft Supply Chain Platform harmonizes the data estate, introduces “command center” for enterprise supply chain

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 14, 2022 — On Monday, Microsoft Corp. announced the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, which helps organizations maximize their supply chain data estate investment with an open approach, bringing the best of Microsoft AI, collaboration, low-code, security and SaaS applications in a composable platform.

The company also announced the preview of Microsoft Supply Chain Center, a ready-made command center for supply chain visibility and transformation and part of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform. Supply Chain Center is designed to work natively with an organization’s supply chain data and applications, with built-in collaboration, supply and demand insights, and order management.

“Businesses are dealing with petabytes of data spread across legacy systems, ERP, supply chain management and point solutions, resulting in a fragmented view of the supply chain,” said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president, Microsoft Business Applications and Platform. “Supply chain agility and resilience are directly tied to how well organizations connect and orchestrate their data across all relevant systems. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and Supply Chain Center enable organizations to make the most of their existing investments to gain insights and act quickly.”

“Supply chain solutions are more critical than ever. Our early assessment of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and Supply Chain Center is that the company has put its technology, applications and resources together in a way that will serve its customer base well in a wide swath of IT and operations environments, offering flexibility for diverse IT environments and continuous agility for transformation into the future,” said Daniel Newman, founding partner and principal analyst of Futurum Research.

The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform: An open, collaborative and composable foundation for data and supply chain orchestration

With today’s announcement, we are making it easier for customers to realize the value of the Microsoft Cloud for their supply chain. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform provides the building blocks across Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams and Power Platform for customers to develop or independently adopt capabilities for their supply chain needs. With Dataverse, customers can create thousands of connectors to gain visibility across supply chain, develop custom workflows with low-code solutions in Power Platform, and securely collaborate internally and externally through the power of Teams. With tools and processes that drive positive impact, the platform can enable organizations to gain deeper insights and minimize the carbon impact of their organization and supply chain.

The Microsoft partner ecosystem will continue to play a critical role in enabling customer supply chain resiliency and agility. With the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, partners can bring their industry and domain expertise to create integrated solutions leveraging Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Teams and Power Platform. We will continue to support our customers with a rich partner ecosystem including advisors and implementers like Accenture, Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC and TCS. In addition, to help customers find the best solution for their supply chain needs, we’ll continue working with solution providers such as Blue Yonder, Cosmo Tech, Experlogix, Flintfox, inVia Robotics, K3, O9 Solutions, SAS, Sonata, To-Increase Software and many more.

Accelerating business agility with the Microsoft Supply Chain Center

At the core of the Supply Chain Platform is the Microsoft Supply Chain Center, now available in preview, which provides a command center experience for practitioners to harmonize data from across existing infrastructure supply chain systems, such as data from Dynamics 365, and other ERP providers, including SAP and Oracle, along with standalone supply chain systems. Data Manager in Supply Chain Center enables data ingestion and orchestration to provide visibility across the supply chain and drive action back into systems of execution. During preview, our launch partners C.H. Robinson, FedEx, FourKites and Overhaul will offer native experiences within Supply Chain Center.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customers automatically gain access to Supply Chain Center. Supply Chain Center also includes prebuilt modules to address supply chain disruptions across supply and order fulfillment:

  • The supply and demand insights module leverages advanced Azure AI models to predict upstream supply constraints and shortages through supply intelligence. Organizations can perform simulations using data from their supply chain network to predict stock-outs, over-stocking or missed-order lines. Combined with smart news insights, which provide relevant news alerts in the Supply Chain Center on external events, supply chain practitioners can make decisions and plan with real-world event information and historical insights for product demands.
  • The order management module in Supply Chain Center enables organizations to intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate it with a rules-based system using real-time omnichannel inventory data, AI and machine learning. Organizations can adapt quickly to meet future order volumes and fulfillment complexities by extending their capabilities with prebuilt connectors to the best-of-breed of specialized technology partners for order intake, delivery and third-party logistics services. Existing Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management customers will automatically get access to Supply Chain Center and the order management module at launch.
  • With secure, built-in Teams integration, customers can mitigate supply constraints by collaborating with external suppliers in real time, to secure new supply sources, troubleshoot transportation issues, and communicate upstream and downstream impacts based on changes.
  • With partner modules built into the Supply Chain Center, customers can unlock specific solutions, such as freight visibility from Overhaul, directly in the experience. Since everything runs off a Dataverse environment, the data is consistent no matter what module is being using. This eliminates pasting information back and forth and reconciling which reports have the most up-to-date information.

With today’s announcements, Microsoft is taking a significant step toward its commitment to reimagine the supply chain, helping drive efficiency and agility for our customers.

To learn more, visit the Official Microsoft Blog.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

This Veterans Day we honor the sacrifice and contributions of those who answer the call to military service – and the positive impact they have at Microsoft, as well as in their local communities.

From Copilot for business to Codespaces for all, at GitHub Universe we’re bringing our breakthrough offerings to even more organizations and developers around the world. 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Honoring military service on Veteran’s Day

“Many in Microsoft’s military community are veterans and others still serve today, in reserve corps for their countries. They commit weekends to training. They accept the responsibility of periodic deployments, some weeks and even months in duration. They, along with active-duty peers, are at the ready to be called to serve by their country. They are also outstanding colleagues who have made a choice to apply their well-earned skills and capabilities at Microsoft. We are better as a result.”

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Surface Special Edition merges Windows 11 Bloom and Liberty

To celebrate a decade of Surface, a special edition of Microsoft’s signature 2-in-1 device draws its inspiration from Windows 11’s desktop wallpaper and nearly 150 years of history at a world-renowned global design house.

The Surface Pro Liberty Keyboard with Slim Pen 2*, which shows off the collaboration between Microsoft Surface and the London-based Liberty, is now available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Japan (though supplies are limited).

“It’s such a contrast of things and you would never expect this to happen in some ways,” says Elliott Hsu, a principal hardware designer at Microsoft who headed a team that worked with Liberty to also create the laser engraved Surface Pro 9 Liberty Special Edition* and printed keyboard, which embodies the elaborate florals Liberty is known for and serves as a natural branch of the Windows 11 Bloom that debuted last year.

Windows 11 introduced Bloom to the world in 2021 as the very first image you saw on the screen: a desktop wallpaper that served as a symbolic image of starting anew with this operating system. Inspired by flowers, it was created entirely in the digital world.

That was something that fascinated Adam Herbert and his design team at Liberty, a company he’d long admired and loved before he started working there four years ago.

While Microsoft’s designers use technology in almost every step of their creative process, Liberty’s designers use pens, pencils and paper. They go outside to sketch. They draw from the real world.

“I’ve always loved Liberty,” Herbert says. “I think it is a key figure in the DNA of British design. We create things that feel traditional and also unexpected at the same time. All of our designs start out as a drawing, painting, collage or sketch. It’s a really interesting melting pot of ideas and design approaches.”

Herbert admits it was “mind-blowing” for him to see how Microsoft created the Bloom flower that’s come to symbolize Windows 11.

Surface on a table next to a book of patterns

Established in 1875, Liberty has seen many trends come and go. But fashion and design being cyclical, the company has been able to ride many waves and stay relevant.

“What’s magical about their brand is a 90-year-old and a 19-year-old can wear the same scarf in a different way with the same print, and it works,” Hsu says. “From the design standpoint, we had always been inspired by Liberty and what they do, from their craftsmanship to brand ethos.”

It’s a proud tradition that Herbert grew to appreciate even more after discovering the vastness of Liberty’s archives, which reveals different eras of the company’s design history.

“Whatever we create now goes back into that archive,” Herbert says. “We look at designs from 100 years ago and we redraw them and bring them back to life. I love to think that in 100 years, Liberty Designers will look at what we did now and they might revisit our work and use it in a totally different way.”

Woman sitting with a Surface on a table, surrounded by a blue couch

Liberty and Microsoft’s relationship began in 2019, when Hsu visited Liberty’s headquarters in London to find design inspiration in the brand’s well-known floral patterns. At that time, he and Herbert – who hit it off almost immediately – focused on the Washington state flower, the rhododendron, in trying to make an initial connection between the brands.

The pandemic put a pause on their progress on the project, but it reiterated something that became integral to developing this special edition: the prominence of PCs in daily life.

“PCs and devices have become even more personal to people,” Hsu says. “During the pandemic, your PC never went away. It was always on your desk, always on your table. Everything in your personal and professional life came through that portal, which keeps us connected in trying times.”

For Herbert, his interaction with technology during the pandemic pushed him out of his comfort zone. Suddenly he had to work and communicate with his team while they were scattered all over London, when previously they put together design presentations with boards that had physical fabric swatches attached to them.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Digital Now: Why a global company’s tech can’t just work, it has to wow

In this episode of “Digital Now,” Penelope Prett, the chief information, data and analytics officer at global professional services company Accenture, explains why her tech-savvy workforce, one of the largest in the world, expects tech to be not just ready to go at the point of service and accessible from everywhere, but also to be a delightful experience that supports engagement.

“The thing that’s great about it is when you have a technology-literate population … they are willing to play with you,” she says. “So you can try new things, you can push the edge of the envelope. There’s a much higher tolerance for new things, for failure and for learning.”

“Digital Now” is a video series hosted by Andrew Wilson, chief digital officer at Microsoft, who invites friends and industry leaders inside and outside of Microsoft to share how they are tackling digital and business transformation, and explores themes like the future of work, security, artificial intelligence, and the democratization of code and data.

Prett and Wilson also discuss how the democratization of technology presents new opportunities for business growth, but still needs guardrails in place to address security and usability. At Accenture, says Prett, democratization is celebrated, but user experience, data and security will always remain under the protection of the IT organization.

Visit Digital Now on YouTube to view more episodes.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Microsoft Flight Simulator celebrates milestone and release of 40th Anniversary Edition

Microsoft’s longest-running franchise has inspired and captivated aviation enthusiasts and professionals throughout the world for 40 years.

Today we celebrate the exciting history of aviation with the release of the Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition, the most advanced version of this beloved franchise yet. Among the many features included in this update is a true-to-life airliner, the Airbus A310-300, rendered with stunning accuracy. The 40th Anniversary Edition also features, for the first time since the platform’s 2006 release, helicopters and gliders that perform with amazing life-like realism.

We’re also introducing seven renowned historical aircraft: the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1915 Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, the 1927 Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, the 1935 Douglas DC-3, the beautiful 1937 Grumman G-21 Goose, the 1947 Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, and the famous 1947 Hughes H-4 Hercules “Spruce Goose,” the largest seaplane and wooden aircraft ever built.

We have also added four classic airports, including the Meigs Field in Chicago, a traditional home airport for the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise.

It is an incredibly exciting update celebrating aviation history, introducing significant technical advancements in flight dynamics and simulation, and featuring two new types of aircraft (gliders and helicopters) — all to delight our community and showcase the beauty and the thrill of flight!

In summary, the Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition delivers the following brand-new content:

  • 1 true-to-life Airbus A310 airliner
  • 2 helicopters and 14 heliports
  • 2 gliders and 15 glider airports
  • 7 famous historical aircraft including the Hughes H-4 Hercules (also known as the Spruce Goose)
  • 4 classic commercial airports
  • 24 classic missions from the franchise’s past

Test your piloting skills against the challenges of riding thermals in an unpowered glider, controlling rotor-wing aircraft over dense urban cityscapes, improved real-time atmospheric simulation and live weather in a dynamic and vibrant world. Create your flight plan to anywhere on the planet. Join us in celebrating the award-winning franchise with the Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition, loaded with all-new features, aircraft, and content that span the history of aviation. The sky is calling!

Check out the Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition today, available as a free update for existing players. For new simmers, the 40th Anniversary Edition is the perfect entry point to the franchise.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition is available for Xbox Series X|S and PC with Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Windows, and Steam, and on Xbox One and supported mobile phones, tablets, and lower-spec PCs via Xbox Cloud Gaming.

For the latest information on Microsoft Flight Simulator, stay tuned to @MSFSOfficial on Twitter.

Microsoft Flight Simulator
Xbox Live
Xbox Play Anywhere

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Xbox Game Studios

☆☆☆☆☆ 357
★★★★★

Xbox One X Enhanced
PC Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass

Microsoft Flight Simulator is the next generation of one of the most beloved simulation franchises. From light planes to wide-body jets, fly highly detailed and stunning aircraft in an incredibly realistic world. Create your flight plan and fly anywhere on the planet. Enjoy flying day or night and face realistic, challenging weather conditions.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Microsoft threat intelligence presented at CyberWarCon 2022

At CyberWarCon 2022, Microsoft and LinkedIn analysts presented several sessions detailing analysis across multiple sets of actors and related activity. This blog is intended to summarize the content of the research covered in these presentations and demonstrates Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center’s (MSTIC) ongoing efforts to track threat actors, protect customers from the associated threats, and share intelligence with the security community.

The CyberWarCon sessions summarized below include:

  • “They are still berserk: Recent activities of BROMINE” – a lightning talk covering MSTIC’s analysis of BROMINE (aka Berserk Bear), recent observed activities, and potential changes in targeting and tactics.
  • “The phantom menace: A tale of Chinese nation-state hackers” – a deep dive into several of the Chinese nation-state actor sets, their operational security patterns, and case studies on related tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
  • “ZINC weaponizing open-source software” – a lighting talk on MSTIC and LinkedIn’s analysis of ZINC, a North Korea-based actor. This will be their first public joint presentation, demonstrating collaboration between MSTIC and LinkedIn’s threat intelligence teams.

MSTIC consistently tracks threat actor activity, including the groups discussed in this blog, and works across Microsoft Security products and services to build detections and improve customer protections. As with any observed nation-state actor activity, Microsoft has directly notified customers that have been targeted or compromised, providing them with the information they need to help secure their accounts. Microsoft uses DEV-#### designations as a temporary name given to an unknown, emerging, or a developing cluster of threat activity, allowing MSTIC to track it as a unique set of information until we reach a high confidence about the origin or identity of the actor behind the activity. Once it meets the criteria, a DEV is converted to a named actor.

They are still berserk: Recent activities of BROMINE

BROMINE overlaps with the threat group publicly tracked as Berserk Bear. In our talk, MSTIC provided insights into the actor’s recent activities observed by Microsoft. Some of the recent activities presented include:

  • Targeting and compromise of dissidents, political opponents, Russian citizens, and foreign diplomats. These activities have spanned multiple methods and techniques, ranging from the use of a custom malicious capability to credential phishing leveraging consumer mail platforms. In some cases, MSTIC has identified the abuse of Azure free trial subscriptions and worked with the Azure team to quickly take action against the abuse.
  • Continued targeting of organizations in the manufacturing and industrial technology space. These sectors have been continuous targets of the group for years and represent one of the most durable interests.
  • An opportunistic campaign focused on exploiting datacenter infrastructure management interfaces, likely for the purpose of access to technical information of value.
  • Targeting and compromise of diplomatic sector organizations focused on personnel assigned to Eastern Europe.
  • Compromise of a Ukrainian nuclear safety organization previously referenced in our June 2022 Special Report on Defending Ukraine (https://aka.ms/ukrainespecialreport).

Overall, our findings continue to demonstrate that BROMINE is an elusive threat actor with a variety of potential objectives, yet sporadic insights from various organizations, including Microsoft, demonstrate there is almost certainly more to find. Additionally, our observations show that as a technology platform provider, threat intelligence enables Microsoft’s ability to protect both enterprises and consumers and disrupt threat activity affecting our customers.

The phantom menace: A tale of China-based nation state hackers

Over the past few years, MSTIC has observed a gradual evolution of the TTPs employed by China-based threat actors. At CyberWarCon 2022, Microsoft analysts presented their analysis of these trends in Chinese nation-state actor activity, covering:

  • Information about new tactics that these threat actors have adopted to improve their operational security, as well as a deeper look into their techniques, such as leveraging vulnerable SOHO devices for obfuscating their operations.
  • Three different case studies, including China-based DEV-0401 and nation-state threat actors GALLIUM and DEV-0062, walking through (a) the initial vector (compromise of public-facing application servers, with the actors showing rapid adoption of proofs of concept for vulnerabilities in an array of products), (b) how these threat actors maintained persistence on the victims (some groups dropping web shells, backdoors, or custom malware), and (c) the objectives of their operations: intelligence collection for espionage.
  • A threat landscape overview of the top five industries that these actors have targeted—governments worldwide, non-government organizations (NGO)s and think tanks, communication infrastructure, information technology (IT), and financial services – displaying the global nature of China’s cyber operations in the span of one year.

As demonstrated in the presentation, China-based threat actors have targeted entities nearly globally, employing techniques and using different methodologies to make attribution increasingly harder. Microsoft analysts assess that China’s cyber operations will continue to move along their geopolitical agenda, likely continuing to use some of the techniques mentioned in the presentation to conduct their intelligence collection. The graphic below illustrates how quickly we observe China-based threat actors and others exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities and then those exploits becoming broadly available in the wild.

Chart showing that after a vulnerability is publicly disclosed, it takes only 14 days on average for an exploit to be available in wild, 60 days for POC code to be released on GitHub, and 120 days for the exploit to be available in scanning tools.
Figure 1. The speed and scale of vulnerability exploitation. Image source: Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022

ZINC weaponizing open-source software

In this talk, Microsoft and LinkedIn analysts detail recent activity of a North-Korea based nation-state threat actor we track as ZINC. Analysts detailed the findings of their investigation (previously covered in this blog) and walked through the series of observed ZINC attacks that targeted 125 different victims spanning 34 countries, noting the attacks appear to be motivated by traditional cyber-espionage and theft of personal and corporate data. A few highlights include:

  • In September 2022, Microsoft disclosed detection of a wide range of social engineering campaigns using weaponized legitimate open-source software. MSTIC observed activity targeting employees in organizations across multiple industries including media, defense and aerospace, and IT services in the US, UK, India, and Russia.
  • Based on the observed tradecraft, infrastructure, tooling, and account affiliations, MSTIC attributes this campaign with high confidence to ZINC, a state-sponsored group based out of North Korea with objectives focused on espionage, data theft, financial gain, and network destruction.
  • When analyzing the data from an industry sector perspective, we observed that ZINC chose to deliver malware most likely to succeed in a specific environment, for example, targeting IT service providers with terminal tools and targeting media and defense companies with fake job offers to be loaded into weaponized PDF readers.
  • ZINC has successfully compromised numerous organizations since June 2022, when the actor began employing traditional social engineering tactics by initially connecting with individuals on LinkedIn to establish a level of trust with their targets.
  • Upon successful connection, ZINC encouraged continued communication over WhatsApp, which acted as the means of delivery for their malicious payloads. MSTIC observed ZINC weaponizing a wide range of open-source software including PuTTY, KiTTY, TightVNC, Sumatra PDF Reader, and muPDF/Subliminal Recording software installer for these attacks. ZINC was observed attempting to move laterally across victim networks and exfiltrate collected information from.
Diagram showing end-to-end attack chain of a ZINC attack, from initial compromise and execution, to persistence, command and control, discovery, and collection
Figure 2. ZINC attack chain.  Read more in our detailed blog: ZINC weaponizing open-source software.

As the threat landscape continues to evolve, Microsoft strives to continuously improve security for all, through collaboration with customers and partners and by sharing our research with the larger security community. We would like to extend our thanks to CyberWarCon and LinkedIn for their community partnership.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How Cloud Intelligence/AIOps is making cloud systems more autonomous, proactive and manageable

The image has two circles side-by-side, each divided into three equal segments. An arrow between the two circles points from left to right to show the evolution from Microsoft’s previous Software Analytics research to today’s Cloud Intelligence/AIOps.

When legendary computer scientist Jim Gray accepted the Turing Award in 1999, he laid out a dozen long-range information technology research goals. One of those goals called for the creation of trouble-free server systems or, in Gray’s words, to “build a system used by millions of people each day and yet administered and managed by a single part-time person.”  

Gray envisioned a self-organizing “server in the sky” that would store massive amounts of data, and refresh or download data as needed. Today, with the emergence and rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and cloud computing, and Microsoft’s development of Cloud Intelligence/AIOps, we are closer than we have ever been to realizing that vision—and moving beyond it.  

Over the past fifteen years, the most significant paradigm shift in the computing industry has been the migration to cloud computing, which has created unprecedented digital transformation opportunities and benefits for business, society, and human life.  

The implication is profound: cloud computing platforms have become part of the world’s basic infrastructure. As a result, the non-functional properties of cloud computing platforms, including availability, reliability, performance, efficiency, security, and sustainability, have become immensely important. Yet the distributed nature, massive scale, and high complexity of cloud computing platforms—ranging from storage to networking, computing and beyond—present huge challenges to building and operating such systems.  

What is Cloud Intelligence/AIOps?

Cloud Intelligence/AIOps (“AIOps” for brevity) aims to innovate AI/ML technologies to help design, build, and operate complex cloud platforms and services at scale—effectively and efficiently.  

AIOps has three pillars, each with its own goal:  

  • AI for Systems to make intelligence a built-in capability to achieve high quality, high efficiency, self-control, and self-adaptation with less human intervention.  
  • AI for Customers to leverage AI/ML to create unparalleled user experiences and achieve exceptional user satisfaction using cloud services.  
  • AI for DevOps to infuse AI/ML into the entire software development lifecycle to achieve high productivity.  

Where did the research on AIOps begin?  

Gartner, a leading industry analyst firm, first coined the term AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) in 2017. According to Gartner, AIOps is the application of machine learning and data science to IT operation problems. While Gartner’s AIOps concept focuses only on DevOps, Microsoft’s Cloud Intelligence/AIOps research has a much broader scope, including AI for Systems and AI for Customers.  

The broader scope of Microsoft’s Cloud Intelligence/AIOps stems from the Software Analytics research we proposed in 2009, which seeks to enable software practitioners to explore and analyze data to obtain insightful and actionable information for data-driven tasks related to software and services. We started to focus our Software Analytics research on cloud computing in 2014 and named this new topic Cloud Intelligence (Figure 1). In retrospect, Software Analytics is about the digital transformation of the software industry itself, such as empowering practitioners to use data-driven approaches and technologies to develop software, operate software systems, and engage with customers.  

The image has two circles side-by-side, each divided into three equal segments. An arrow between the two circles points from left to right to show the evolution from Microsoft’s previous Software Analytics research to today’s Cloud Intelligence/AIOps.
Figure 1: From Software Analytics to Cloud Intelligence/AIOps

What is the AIOps problem space? 

There are many scenarios around each of the three pillars of AIOps. Some example scenarios include predictive capacity forecasting for efficient and sustainable services, monitoring service health status, and detecting health issues in a timely manner in AI for Systems; ensuring code quality and preventing defective build deployed into production in AI for DevOps; and providing effective customer support in AI for Customers. Across all these scenarios, there are four major problem categories that, taken together, constitute the AIOps problem space: detection, diagnosis, prediction, and optimization (Figure 2). Specifically, detection aims to identify unexpected system behaviors (or anomalies) in a timely manner. Given the symptom and associated artifacts, the goal of diagnosis is to localize the cause of service issues and find the root cause. Prediction attempts to forecast system behaviors, customer workload patterns, or DevOps activities, and so on. Lastly, optimization tries to identify the optimal strategies or decisions required to achieve certain performance targets related to system quality, customer experience and DevOps productivity. 

The image has three columns, each with a stack of four items, which show the problems and challenges of AIOps and the techniques used to address them.
Figure 2: Problems and challenges of AIOps

Each problem has its own challenges. Take detection as an example. To ensure service health at runtime, it is important for engineers to continuously monitor various metrics and detect anomalies in a timely manner. In the development process, to ensure the quality of the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practice, engineers need to create mechanisms to catch defective builds and prevent them from being deployed to other production sites.  

Both scenarios require timely detection, and in both there are common challenges for conducting effective detection. For example, time series data and log data are the most common data forms. Yet they are often multi-dimensional, there may be noise in the data, and they often have different detection requirements—all of which can pose significant challenges to reliable detection.  

Microsoft Research: Our AIOps vision

Microsoft is conducting continuous research in each of the AIOps problem categories. Our goal for this research is to empower cloud systems to be more autonomous, more proactive, more manageable, and more comprehensive across the entire cloud stack.  

Making cloud systems more autonomous

AIOps strives to make cloud systems more autonomous, to minimize human operations and rule-based decisions, which significantly helps reduce user impact caused by system issues, make better operation decisions, and reduce maintenance cost. This is achieved by automating DevOps as much as possible, including build, deployment, monitoring, and diagnosis. For example, the purpose of safe deployment is to catch a defective build early to prevent it from rolling out to production and resulting in significant customer impact. It can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming for engineers, because anomalous behaviors have a variety of patterns that may change over time, and not all anomalous behaviors are caused by a new build, which may introduce false positives.  

At Microsoft Research, we used transfer learning and active learning techniques to develop a safe deployment solution that overcomes these challenges. We’ve been running the solution in Microsoft Azure, and it has been highly effective at helping to catch defective builds – achieving more than 90% precision and near 100% recall in production over a period of 18 months.  

Root cause analysis is another way that AIOps is reducing human operations in cloud systems. To shorten the mitigation time, engineers in cloud systems must quickly identify the root causes of emerging incidents. Owing to the complex structure of cloud systems, however, incidents often contain only partial information and can be triggered by many services and components simultaneously, which forces engineers to spend extra time diagnosing the root causes before any effective actions can be taken.  By leveraging advanced contrast-mining algorithms, we have implemented autonomous incident-diagnosis systems, including HALO and Outage Scope, to reduce response time and increase accuracy in incident diagnosis tasks. These systems have been integrated in both Azure and Microsoft 365 (M365), which has considerably improved engineers’ ability to handle incidents in cloud systems. 

Making cloud systems more proactive 

AIOps makes cloud systems more proactive by introducing the concept of proactive design. In the design of a proactive system, an ML-based prediction component is added to the traditional system. The prediction system takes the input signals, does the necessary processing, and outputs the future status of the system. For example, what the capacity status of cluster A looks like next week, whether a disk will fail in a few days, or how many virtual machines (VMs) of a particular type will be needed in the next hour.​  

Knowing the future status makes it possible for the system to proactively avoid negative system impacts. For example, engineers can live migrate the services on an unhealthy computing node to a healthy one to reduce VM downtime, or pre-provision a certain number of VMs of a particular type for the next hour to reduce the latency of VM provisioning. In addition, AI/ML techniques can enable systems to learn over time which decision to make.  

As an example of proactive design, we built a system called Narya, which proactively mitigated potential hardware failures to reduce service interruption and minimize customer impact. Narya, which is in production in Microsoft Azure, performs prediction on hardware failures and uses a bandit algorithm to decide which mitigation action to take. 

Making cloud systems more manageable 

AIOps makes cloud systems more manageable by introducing the notion of tiered autonomy. Each tier represents a set of operations that require a certain level of human expertise and intervention. These tiers range from the top tier of autonomous routine operations to the bottom tier, which requires deep human expertise to respond to rare and complex problems.  

AI-driven automation often cannot handle such problems. By building AIOps solutions targeted at each tier, we can make cloud platforms easier to manage across the long tail of rare problems that inevitably arise in complex systems. Furthermore, the tiered design ensures that autonomous systems are developed from the start to evaluate certainty and risk, and that they have safe fallbacks when automation fails or the platform faces a previously unseen set of circumstances, such as the unforeseen increase in demand in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As an example of tiered autonomy, we built Safe On-Node Learning (SOL), a framework for safe learning and actuation on server nodes for the top tier. As another example, we are exploring how to predict the commands that operators should perform to mitigate incidents, while considering the associated certainty and risks of those commands when the top-tier automation fails to prevent the incidents. 

Making AIOps more comprehensive across the cloud stack

AIOps can also be made more comprehensive by spanning the cloud stack—from the lowest infrastructure layers (such as network and storage) through the service layer (such as the scheduler and database) and on to the application layer. The benefit of applying AIOps more broadly would be a significant increase in the capability for holistic diagnosis, optimization, and management. 

Microsoft services built on top of Azure are called first-party (1P) services. A 1P setting, which is often used to optimize system resources, is particularly suited to a more comprehensive approach to AIOps. This is because with the 1P setting a single entity has visibility into, and control over, the layers of the cloud stack, which enables engineers to amplify the AIOps impact. Examples of 1P services at Microsoft include large and established services such as Office 365, relatively new but sizeable services such as Teams, and up and coming services such as Windows 365 Cloud PC. These 1P services typically account for a significant share of resource usage, such as wide-area network (WAN) traffic and compute cores. 

As an example of applying a more comprehensive AIOps approach to the 1P setting, the OneCOGS project, which is a joint effort of Azure, M365, and MSR, considers three broad opportunities for optimization:  

  1. Modeling users and their workload using signals cutting across the layers—such as using the user’s messaging activity versus fixed working hours to predict when a Cloud PC user will be active—thereby increasing accuracy to enable enabling appropriate allocation of system resources. 
  2. Jointly optimizing the application and the infrastructure to achieve cost savings and more.  
  3. Tame the complexity of data and configuration, thereby democratizing AIOps.  

The AIOps methodologies, technologies and practices used for cloud computing platforms and 1P services are also applicable to third-party (3P) services on the cloud stack. To achieve this, further research and development are needed to make AIOps methods and techniques more general and/or easily adaptable. For example, when operating cloud services, detecting anomalies in multi-dimensional space and the subsequent fault localization are common monitoring and diagnosis problems.  

Motivated by the real-world needs of Azure and M365, we proposed the technique AiDice, which automatically detects anomalies in multi-dimensional space, and HALO, a hierarchy-aware approach to locating fault-indicating combinations that uses telemetry data collected from cloud systems. In addition to deploying AiDice and HALO in Azure and M365, we’re also collaborating with product team partners to make AiDice and HALO AIOps services that can be leveraged by third-party services. 

Conclusion 

AIOps is a rapidly emerging technology trend and an interdisciplinary research direction across system, software engineering, and AI/ML communities. With years of research on Cloud Intelligence, Microsoft Research has built up rich technology assets in detection, diagnosis, prediction, and optimization. And through close collaboration with Azure and M365, we have deployed some of our technologies in production, which has created significant improvements in the reliability, performance, and efficiency of Azure and M365 while increasing the productivity of developers working on these products. In addition, we are collaborating with colleagues in academia and industry to promote the AIOps research and practices. For example, with the joint efforts we have organized 3 editions of AIOps Workshop at premium academic conferences AAAI 2020, ICSE 2021, and MLSys2022. 

Moving forward, we believe that as a new dimension of innovation, Cloud Intelligence/AIOps will play an increasingly important role in making cloud systems more autonomous, more proactive, more manageable, and more comprehensive across the entire cloud stack. Ultimately, Cloud Intelligence/AIOps will help us make our vision for the future of the cloud a reality. 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Do more with less using new Azure HX and HBv4 virtual machines for HPC

This post was co-authored by Jyothi Venkatesh, Senior Product Manager, Azure HPC and Fanny Ou, Technical Program Manager, Azure HPC.

The next generation of purpose-built Azure HPC virtual machines

Today, we are excited to announce two new virtual machines (VMs) that deliver more performance, value-adding innovation, and cost-effectiveness to every Azure HPC customer. The all-new HX-series and HBv4-series VMs are coming soon to the East US region, and thereafter to the South Central US, West US3, and West Europe regions. These new VMs are optimized for a variety of HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis, frontend and backend electronic design automation (EDA), rendering, molecular dynamics, computational geoscience, weather simulation, AI inference, and financial risk analysis.

Innovative technologies to help HPC customers where it matters most

HX and HBv4 VMs are packed with new and innovative technologies that maximize performance and minimize total HPC spend, including:

  • 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ processors (Preview, Q4 2022).
  • Upcoming AMD EPYC processors, codenamed “Genoa-X,” (with general availability in 1H 2023).
  • 800 GB/s of DDR5 memory bandwidth (STREAM TRIAD).
  • 400 Gb/s NVIDIA Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand, the first on the public cloud.
  • 80 Gb/s Azure Accelerated Networking.
  • PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs delivering 12 GB/s (read) and 7 GB/s (write) of storage bandwidth.

Below are preliminary benchmarks from the preview of HBv4 and HX series VMs using 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors across several common HPC applications and domains. For comparison, performance information is also included from Azure’s most recent H-series (HBv3-series with Milan-X processors), as well as a 4-year-old HPC-optimized server commonly found in many on-premises datacenters (represented here by Azure HC-series with Skylake processors).

Graph showing performance across benchmarks, relative to a 4-year-old server, HBv3 VMs, and HBv4/HX VMs.

Figure 1: Performance comparison of HBv4/HX-series in Preview to HBv3-series and four-year-old server technology in an HPC-optimized configuration across diverse workloads and scientific domains.

Learn more about the performance of HBv4 and HX-series VMs with 4th Gen EPYC CPUs.

HBv4-series brings performance leaps across a diverse set of HPC workloads

Azure HBv3 VMs with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors with AMD 3D V-cache™ Technology already deliver impressive levels of HPC performance, scaling MPI workloads up to 27x higher than other clouds, surpassing many of the leading supercomputers in the world, and offering the disruptive value proposition of faster time to solution with lower total cost. Unsurprisingly, the response from customers and partners has been phenomenal. With the introduction of HBv4 series VMs, Azure is raising the bar yet again—this time across an even greater diversity of memory performance-bound, compute-bound, and massively parallel workloads.

VM Size

Physical CPU Cores

RAM (GB)

Memory Bandwidth (STREAM TRIAD) (GB/s)

L3 Cache/VM (MB)

FP64 Compute (TFLOPS)

InfiniBand RDMA Network (Gbps)

Standard_HB176rs_v4

176

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-144rs_v4

144

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-96rs_v4

96

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-48rs_v4

48

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-24rs_v4

24

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Notes: 1) “r” denotes support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) and “s” denotes support for Premium SSD disks. 2) At General Availability, Azure HBv4 VMs will be upgraded to Genao-X processors featuring 3D V-cache. Updated technical specifications for HBv4 will be posted at that time.

HX-series powers next generation silicon design

In Azure, we strive to deliver the best platform for silicon design, both now and far into the future. Azure HBv3 VMs, featuring 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-cache Technology, are a significant step toward this objective, offering the highest performance and total cost effectiveness in the public cloud for small and medium memory EDA workloads. With the introduction of HX-series VMs, Azure is enhancing its differentiation with a VM purpose-built for even larger models becoming commonplace among chip designers targeting 3, 4, and 5 nanometer processes.

HX VMs will feature 3x more RAM than any prior H-series VM, up to nearly 60 GB of RAM per core, and constrained cores VM sizes to help silicon design customers maximize ROI of their per-core commercial licensing investments.

VM Size

Physical CPU Cores

RAM (GB)

Memory/Core(GB)

L3 Cache/VM (MB)

Local SSD NVMe (TB)

InfiniBand RDMA Network (Gbps)

Standard_HX176rs

176

1,408

8

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-144rs

144

1,408

10

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-96rs

96

1,408

15

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-48rs

48

1,408

29

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-24rs

24

1,408

59

768

3.6 TB

400

Notes: 1) “r” denotes support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) and “s” denotes support for Premium SSD disks. 2) At General Availability, Azure HBv4 VMs will be upgraded to Genoa-X processors featuring 3D V-cache. Updated technical specifications for HBv4 will be posted at that time.

400 Gigabit InfiniBand for supercomputing customers

HBv4 and HX VMs are Azure’s first to leverage 400 Gigabit NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand. This newest generation of InfiniBand brings greater support for the offload of MPI collectives, enhanced congestion control, and enhanced adaptive routing capabilities. Using the new HBv4 or HX-series VMs and only a standard Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS), customers can scale CPU-based MPI workloads beyond 50,000 cores per job.

Continuous improvement for Azure HPC customers

Microsoft and AMD share a vision for a new era of high-performance computing in the cloud: one defined by constant improvements to the critical research and business workloads that matter most to our customers. Azure continues to collaborate with AMD to make this vision a reality by raising the bar on the performance, scalability, and value we deliver with every release of Azure H-series VMs.

Graph showing consistent performance increases across generations of virtual machines: HC series (Skylake), HBv2 series (Rome), HBv3 series (Milan X), HX/HBv4 series (Genoa).

Figure 2: Azure HPC Performance 2019 through 2022.

Learn more about the performance of HBv4 and HX-series VMs with 4th Gen EPYC CPUs.

Customer and partner momentum

Altair orange triangular logomark and business name.

“We’re pleased to see Altair® AcuSolve®’s impressive linear scale-up on the HBv3 instances, showing up to 2.5 times speedup. Performance increases 12.83 times with an 8-node (512-core) configuration on 3rd AMD EPYC™ processors, an excellent scale-up value for AcuSolve compared to the previous generation delivering superior price performance. We welcome the addition of the new Azure HBv4 and HX-series virtual machines and look forward to pairing them with Altair software to the benefit of our joint customers.”

—Dr. David Curry, Senior Vice President, CFD and EDEM
AMD business name and abstarct logomark.

“Customers in the HPC industry continue to demand higher performance and optimizations to run their most mission-critical and data-intensive applications. 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors provide breakthrough performance for HPC in the cloud, delivering impressive time to results for customers adopting Azure HX-series and HBv4-series VMs.”

—Lynn Comp, Corporate Vice President, Cloud Business, AMD
ANSYS text logo.

“Ansys electronics, semiconductor, fluids, and structures customers demand more throughput out of their simulation tools to overcome challenges posed by product complexity and project timelines. Microsoft’s HBv3 virtual machines, featuring AMD’s 3rd Gen EPYC processors with 3D V-Cache, have been giving companies a great price/performance crossover point to support these multiphysics simulations on-demand and with very little IT overhead. We look forward to leveraging Azure’s next generation of HPC VMs featuring 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors, the HX and HBv4 series, to enable even greater simulation complexity and speed to help engineers reduce risk and meet time-to-market deadlines.”

—John Lee, Vice President and General Manager, Electronics and Semiconductor, Ansys
Cadece text logo.

“We’ve helped thousands of customers combine the performance and scalability of the cloud, providing ease-of-use and instance access to our powerful computational software, which speeds the delivery of innovative designs. The two new high-performance computing virtual machines powered by the AMD Genoa processor on Microsoft Azure can provide our mutual customers with optimal performance as they tackle the ever-increasing demands of compute and memory capacity for gigascale, advanced-node designs.”

—Mahesh Turaga, Vice President, Cloud Business Development, Cadence
Hexagon Logo and business name with Technology partner underneath.

“Hexagon simulation software powers some of the most advanced engineering in the world. We’re proud to partner with Microsoft, and excited to pair our software with Azure’s new HBv4 virtual machines. During early testing in collaboration with the Azure HPC team, we have seen a generational performance speedups of 400 percent when comparing structural simulations running on HBv3 and HX-series VMs. We look forward to seeing what our joint customers will do with this remarkable combination of software and hardware to advance their research and productivity, now and tomorrow. In the first quarter of 2023, we will be benchmarking heavy industrial CFD computations, leveraging multiple HBv4 virtual machines connected through InfiniBand.”

—Bruce Engelmann, CTO, Hexagon
Rescale cloud logo.

“Microsoft Azure has once again raised the bar for HPC infrastructure platform in the cloud this time with the launch of Azure HBv4 and HX virtual machines based on AMD’s 4th gen EPYC Genoa CPUs. We are expecting a strong customer demand for HBv4 and are excited to offer it to our customers that would like to run CFD, EDA, or other types of HPC workloads in the cloud.

—Mulyanto Poort, Vice President of HPC Engineering at Rescale
Siemens logo.

“Early testing by AMD with Siemens EDA workloads showed 15 percent to 22 percent improvements in runtimes with Microsoft Azure’s new AMD-based virtual machines compared to the previous generation. Semiconductor chip designers face a range of technical challenges that make hitting release dates extremely difficult. The combined innovation of AMD, Microsoft Azure, and Siemens provides a simplified path to schedule predictability through the increased performance possible with the latest offerings.”

—Craig Johnson, Vice President, Siemens, EDA Cloud Solutions
Synopsys text logo.

“Customer adoption of the cloud for chip development is accelerating, driven by complexity and time-to-market advantages. The close collaboration between Synopsys and Microsoft brings together EDA and optimized compute to enable customers to scale under the Synopsys FlexEDA pay-per-use model. Verification represents a significant EDA workload in today’s complex SoCs and with the release of AMD’s next-generation EPYC processor available on Microsoft Azure, customers can take advantage of the optimized cache utilization and NUMA-aware memory layout techniques to achieve up to 2x verification throughput over previous generations.”

—Sandeep Mehndiratta, Vice President of Cloud at Synopsys

Learn more

#AzureHPCAI

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Developing interest in computer science with Microsoft MakeCode

As part of Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, our work in computer science education is critical to ensuring that all students have the opportunity to learn foundational computing skills. The mission of Microsoft MakeCode is to empower the next generation of technology creators through fun projects, immediate results, and both block and text editors for learners at different experience and grade levels.

What is MakeCode Arcade?

MakeCode Arcade is a free, online platform for building retro-style video games using block or text-based programming. Using blocks that snap together as a developmentally appropriate alternative to text-based programming languages, students at any skill level can create projects and share a multi-player interactive product in minutes.  

While Arcade was designed for elementary and middle school students to develop hands-on fundamental coding skills, MakeCode Arcade offers an AP Computer Science Principles curriculum. This College Board endorsed and approved curriculum aligned for high school students features game-based learning to increase student engagement and experimentation.

Leveling Up in Your Classroom

With less than 30% of teachers in elementary and middle school having a degree in a computer or technical services, we recognize that there are multiple pathways to teaching computer science1. In addition to supporting student learning, MakeCode promotes teacher learning pathways with free professional development opportunities, customizable lessons, and access to tailor-made resources that do not require pre-existing coding knowledge or expertise.

Whether you are new to computer science, interested in bridging CS across the curriculum, or exploring the art of the possible with block-based programming, we encourage educators to familiarize themselves with MakeCode resources:

  1. Connect with our free MakeCode professional learning and self-guided resources on Microsoft Learn. Pro Tip: We recommend starting with “Engaging learners through games with MakeCode Arcade” as a great starting place.
  2. Explore the skillmaps, tutorials, and live coding sections of MakeCode Arcade.
  3. Check out our standards-aligned Introduction to Computer Science curriculum.
  4. Visit and bookmark our dedicated teacher resource page on the MakeCode homepage.
  5. Share your insights and partner with a teacher in another school subject.

Connecting Arcade to Your Classroom

After reviewing some of MakeCode’s educator resources and tools, consider how you will use Arcade and block-based coding with your students:

  • What are the natural connections to your classroom with MakeCode Arcade? Coding naturally aligns with math concepts like coordinate grids, rotation, and variables as well as problem solving and the arts. Further, computer science is a cross-discipline subject; consider how you might partner with Language Arts, Social Studies and other content areas to embed computer science instruction across the curriculum. As a reminder, each skillmap includes a learning outcomes document outlining the specific objectives of the activity.
  • What can you demonstrate with MakeCode Arcade? Show a project that you created to spark the students’ interest and demonstrate how to get started with MakeCode Arcade.
  • What activity can students successfully complete on the first day? Whether you do this as a class or assign it as an individual activity, the Beginner Skillmap or any of our Hour of Code activities make great introductions for first-time coders.
  • How can you elevate student work at the end of the first day? Students feel a sense of purpose when they’re able to share their final creations with a classroom or even an elbow-partner. Create a space to ensure that students can explain their projects to a friend. Also, when completing skillmaps, students are rewarded with a downloadable certificate and a digital badge upon reaching the trophy level.

Wakanda Forever and Hour of Code

We have two new engaging and entertaining experiences for Computer Science Education Week© 2022, which are already available for use in your classroom.

Hour of Code: “Code a Carnival”

Celebrate this year’s CS Education Week with Code a Carnival by MakeCode Arcade. Students will be introduced to game design as they create traditional carnival activities like “Whack-the-Mole” and “Burstin’ Balloons.” Along with guided tutorials, Code a Carnival provides a free easy-to-use teacher resource guide. 

To really bring your carnival to life, students can create multiplayer versions of their games to play with their friends, while putting their skills to the test. Whatever their coding experience, every student (and teacher) can increase their programming knowledge and have fun, while coding their own carnival game!

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever  

Have any Black Panther fans in your classroom? Your school can learn coding fundamentals as they develop their own action-packed activity inspired by Marvel Studios’© Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (in theaters beginning November 11).

Ready to take the first step? Kickstart your lesson along with an introduction by Letitia Wright, the actress who plays Wakanda’s lead technologist Shuri.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygSHKnmC_IU?&wmode=opaque&rel=0&w=640&h=360]After your students learn about their challenge, introduce your students to the MakeCode Arcade Wakanda Forever tutorial. This activity has step-by-step instructions and a corresponding teacher lesson plan, making it perfect for any classroom regardless of their coding background.

For more Wakanda Forever inspired content and the opportunity for your class to win an Xbox, go to xbox.com/wakanda-forever.

Powering Up with MakeCode

Ready to take your lessons to the next level? You can also integrate MakeCode with popular tools like the Micro:bit and Minecraft Education Edition. MakeCode works with the affordable, pocket-sized computer called a micro:bit, students can create things like a soil moisture sensor or a DIY pedometer.

Does your school have a subscription to Minecraft Education Edition? If so, did you know that you can use MakeCode to automate events and mod Minecraft’s virtual world? Visit Microsoft Learn to get started with block coding in Minecraft Education Edition. 

Stay Connected

We encourage you to subscribe to our MakeCode Blog to learn more, engage with other teachers on our MakeCode forum, or visit the Microsoft Learn Educator Center to bolster your knowledge about STEM, coding, and computer science. Don’t forget to follow @MSMakeCode wherever you scroll for the most up-to-date MakeCode news.

1 The Computer Science Teacher Landscape: Results of a Nationwide Teacher Survey | CSTA