Tag: Azure

Tokyo/Redmond, Wash. – June 10, 2020 – NTT DATA Corporation (NTT DATA), a leading global IT services provider, and Microsoft Corp. today announced they are jointly pursuing strategic opportunities as part of the multi-year strategic alliance announced in December with parent company NTT Corporation. The companies today announced an expansion of the alliance with a focus on accelerating enterprise customer’s digital transformation with Microsoft Azure as a preferred cloud solution to help accelerate business and increase workplace productivity.

The alliance brings together NTT DATA’s best-in-class global IT services with Microsoft’s trusted cloud platform, AI technologies, and a suite of productivity tools aimed at helping businesses digitally transform, increasing efficiencies of business operations and productivity.

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, there are growing demands for clients to achieve digital transformation through agile system integration utilizing cloud computing and other technologies. NTT DATA provides comprehensive business and IT services to clients across industries, including consulting-led IT strategy and managed services, as well as system design, integration, operations, and maintenance. Microsoft technologies that will enable digital transformation on the cloud include Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics 365.

“NTT DATA is committed to helping enterprises realize their digital transformation. Through this strategic collaboration with Microsoft combining Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and digital technologies with NTT DATA’s experience and knowledge in delivering IT services, we will provide solutions and services that contribute to accelerating our enterprise customers digital transformation,” said Yo Honma, President and CEO of NTT DATA.

“Through this collaboration, we look forward to combining NTT DATA’s global infrastructure and services expertise across industries with the power of Microsoft Azure and our productivity tools to create new opportunities and value for our clients by helping them to quickly digitally transform their business. Together, we will continue exploring new solutions opportunities and added value for our clients,” said Alex Simons,  Corporate Vice President, ID Program Management, Microsoft.

Key initiatives of the alliance include:

Client’s Digital Transformation　　

The companies will work together to help companies digitally transform their business, jointly enhancing and deploying solutions and services built on Microsoft Azure, and leveraging Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams. The companies will enhance NTT DATA’s knowledge management solution everis knowler, and robotics process automation tool WinActor focusing on streamlining business operations and increasing productivity and efficiency.  NTT DATA and Microsoft will leverage the solution area that includes Azure migration service and managed services for mission-critical systems such as SAP and support the acceleration of digital transformation across industries.

Workstyle Innovation

NTT DATA and Microsoft will promote workstyle innovation using digital technology to maximize organizational power by enhancing the capabilities of employees globally. In this initiative, NTT DATA will accelerate the transformation of workstyles within NTT DATA through the security offerings in Microsoft 365 and collaboration tools through Microsoft Teams. By promoting the development of internal IT environments with the aim of improving productivity, NTT DATA will transform workstyles throughout the organization and improve performance by sharing best practices for increased results. Based on the results from these activities and the knowledge sharing of system implementation, both companies will propose workstyle changes to clients in all industries.

Capability Development

The companies will work together to transform and establish NTT DATA’s organizational culture to promote the development and utilization of the digital capabilities at NTT DATA by utilizing various digital transformation cases that Microsoft has created around the world. Additionally, NTT DATA plans to cultivate approximately 10,000 employees worldwide qualified with digital technologies and Microsoft cloud-related certifications, supporting customer digital transformation.

Technology For Good

NTT DATA will explore Microsoft’s AI for Health philanthropic program empowering the company to work on tackling some of the toughest challenges in global health.  Microsoft’s AI for Health empowers researchers and organizations with AI to help improve the health of people and communities around the world. NTT DATA will focus on supporting the United Nations’ sustainable development goals in the areas of AI imaging.

“WinActor” is a registered trademark of NTT Advanced Technology Corporation.

About NTT DATA

NTT DATA is a leading IT services provider and global innovation partner headquartered in Tokyo, with business operations in over 50 countries. Our emphasis is on long-term commitment, combining global reach with local intimacy to provide premier professional services varying from consulting and systems development to outsourcing. For more information, visit www.nttdata.com.

About Microsoft

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.

 

Media contact

NTT DATA Corporation
Public Relations Department
pr-team@kits.nttdata.co.jp

Microsoft Japan, Ltd.,
Corporate Communication Division,
Phone: 03-4535-8055 (departmental representative) E-mail:mskkpr@microsoft.com

Now more than ever, enterprises must deliver their applications with speed and robustness that matches the high expectations of their customers. The ability to provide sub-millisecond response times, reliably support the demands of enterprises from small to large, and scale seamlessly to handle millions of requests per second are critical to modern application development. At the same time, technology solutions need to be more open and flexible to handle cloud native architectures while maintaining mission-critical uptime and reliability.

Microsoft and Redis Labs partnering to bring new features to Azure Cache for Redis

With this in mind, I am announcing a new partnership between Microsoft and Redis Labs to bring their industry-leading technology and expertise to Azure Cache for Redis. This partnership represents the first native integration between Redis Labs technology and a major cloud platform, underscoring our commitment to customer choice and flexibility.

For years, developers have utilized the speed and throughput of Redis to produce unbeatable responsiveness and scale in their applications. We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Azure Cache for Redis, our managed solution built on open source Redis, as Azure customers have leveraged Redis performance as a distributed cache, session store, and message broker. The incorporation of the Redis Labs Redis Enterprise technology extends the range of use cases in which developers can utilize Redis, while providing enhanced operational resiliency and security.

Redis integration designed for enterprise customers

With this partnership, we worked together with Redis to build a new expanded offering powered by Redis Labs technologies aimed specifically at the needs of enterprise customers. With the integration of Redis Labs technology with Azure Cache for Redis, customers can now access Redis Labs-developed modules including, RediSearch, RedisBloom, and RedisTimeSeries, which provide new data structures that will further enable use cases like data analytics and machine learning.

These modules will be paired with existing features of Azure Cache for Redis including data persistence, clustering, geo-replication, and network isolation. Customers will also now have the option to deploy on SSD flash storage, offering up to ten times larger cache sizes and similar performance levels at a lower price per GB. Reliability will be an even greater priority with an enhanced SLA and the capability to utilize active geo-replication to configure a globally available cache that can fail over to another region without any data loss. In the future, this capability will make it possible to connect on-premise caches with caches in Azure for availability and failover.

Native Azure management creates streamlined experience for developers

While the new service is managed natively in Azure as two new Enterprise tiers, customers will subscribe to the Redis Labs software through Azure Marketplace as an integral part of the configuration process. This unique integration provides all the benefits of using a service embedded in Azure, including management through the Azure portal and command-lines, security and standards compliance, and a unified billing experience.

Microsoft will handle first-line support and collaborate with Redis Labs on specific support issues to utilize their deep knowledge of the technology. As a native offering, developer teams will now find it significantly easier to integrate Redis Enterprise functionality into their Azure development efforts by taking advantage of the security, configuration, and support tools they are already familiar with. Plus, developers can enable these new features with no downtime or change in billing management.

We are thrilled to be expanding our relationship with Redis Labs and continuing our collaboration with the Redis open source community. Together, we will unlock the potential of Redis and enable enterprises to build applications that are more responsive and scalable than ever before with tools that developers love.

Learn more

For more information on the Redis Labs partnership, you can read the blog post from Redis Labs CEO, Ofer Bengal. Additional product information is also available on the Redis Labs blog. The initial announcement was made at RedisConf 2020 Takeaway. Preview for this new offering will be available later this year. Sign up to be notified when the preview is available.

This post is part 1 of a two-part series about how organizations use Azure Cosmos DB to meet real world needs and the difference it’s making to them. In part 1, we explore the challenges that led service developers for Minecraft Earth to choose Azure Cosmos DB and how they’re using it to capture almost every action taken by every player around the globe—with ultra-low latency. In part 2, we examine the solution’s workload and how Minecraft Earth service developers have benefited from building it on Azure Cosmos DB.

Extending the world of Minecraft into our real world

You’ve probably heard of the game Minecraft, even if you haven’t played it yourself. It’s the best-selling video game of all time, having sold more than 176 million copies since 2011. Today, Minecraft has more than 112 million monthly players, who can discover and collect raw materials, craft tools, and build structures or earthworks in the game’s immersive, procedurally generated 3D world. Depending on game mode, players can also fight computer-controlled foes and cooperate with—or compete against—other players.

In May 2019, Microsoft announced the upcoming release of Minecraft Earth, which began its worldwide rollout in December 2019. Unlike preceding games in the Minecraft franchise, Minecraft Earth takes things to an entirely new level by enabling players to experience the world of Minecraft within our real world through the power of augmented reality (AR).

For Minecraft Earth players, the experience is immediately familiar—albeit deeply integrated with the world around them. For developers on the Minecraft team at Microsoft, however, the delivery of Minecraft Earth—especially the authoritative backend services required to support the game—would require building something entirely new.

Nathan Sosnovske, a Senior Software Engineer on the Minecraft Earth services development team explains:

“With vanilla Minecraft, while you could host your own server, there was no centralized service authority. Minecraft Earth is based on a centralized, authoritative service—the first ‘heavy’ service we’ve ever had to build for the Minecraft franchise.”

In this case study, we’ll look at some of the challenges that Minecraft Earth service developers faced in delivering what was required of them—and how they used Azure Cosmos DB to meet those needs.

The technical challenge: Avoiding in-game lag

Within the Minecraft Earth client, which runs on iOS-based and Android-based AR-capable devices, almost every action a player takes results in a write to the core Minecraft Earth service. Each write is a REST POST that must be immediately accepted and acknowledged to avoid any noticeable in-game lag.

“From a services perspective, Minecraft Earth requires low-latency writes and medium-latency reads,” explains Sosnovske. “Writes need to be fast because the client requires confirmation on each one, such as might be needed for the client to render—for example, when a player taps on a resource to see what’s in it, we don’t want the visuals to hang while the corresponding REST request is processed. Medium-latency reads are acceptable because we can use client-side simulation until the backing model behind the service can be updated for reading.”

To complicate the challenge, Minecraft Earth service developers needed to ensure low-latency writes regardless of a player’s location. This required running copies of the service in multiple locations within each geography where Minecraft Earth would be offered, along with built-in intelligence to route the Minecraft Earth client to the nearest location where the service is deployed.

“Typical network latency between the east and west coasts of the US is 70 to 80 milliseconds,” says Sosnovske. “If a player in New York had to rely on a service running in San Francisco, or vice versa, the in-game lag would be unacceptable. At the same time, the game is called Minecraft Earth—meaning we need to enable players in San Francisco and New York to share the same in-game experience. To deliver all this, we need to replicate the service—and its data—in multiple, geographically distributed datacenters within each geography.”

The solution: An event sourcing pattern based on Azure Cosmos DB

To satisfy their technical requirements, Minecraft Earth service developers implemented an event sourcing pattern based on Azure Cosmos DB.

“We originally considered using Azure Table storage to store our append-only event log, but its lack of any SLAs for read and write latencies made that unfeasible,” says Sosnovske. “Ultimately, we chose Azure Cosmos DB because it provides 10 millisecond SLAs for both reads and writes, along with the global distribution and multi-master capabilities needed to replicate the service in multiple locations within each geography.”

With an event sourcing pattern, instead of just storing the current state of the data, the Minecraft Earth service uses an append-only data store that’s based on Azure Cosmos DB to record the full series of actions taken on the data—in this case, mapping to each in-game action taken by the player. After immediate acknowledgement of a successful write is returned to the client, queues that subscribe to the append-only event store handle postprocessing and asynchronously apply the collected events to a domain state maintained in Azure Blob storage. To optimize things further, Minecraft Earth developers combined the event sourcing pattern with domain-driven design, in which each app domain—such as inventory items, character profiles, or achievements—has its own event stream.

“We modeled our data as streams of events that are stored in an append-only log and mutate an in-memory model state, which is used to drive various client views,” says Sosnovske. “That cached state is maintained in Azure Blob storage, which is fast enough for reads and helps to keep our request unit costs for Azure Cosmos DB to a minimum. In many ways, what we’ve done with Azure Cosmos DB is like building a write cache that’s really, really resilient.”

The following diagram shows how the event sourcing pattern based on Azure Cosmos DB works:

Putting Azure Cosmos DB in place

In putting Azure Cosmos DB to use, developers had to make a few design decisions:

Azure Cosmos DB API. Developers chose to use the Azure Cosmos DB Core (SQL) API because it offered the best performance and the greatest ease of use, along with other needed capabilities.

“We were building a system from scratch, so there was no need for a compatibility layer to help us migrate existing code,” Sosnovske explains. “In addition, some Azure Cosmos DB features that we depend on—such as TransactionalBatch—are only supported with the Core (SQL) API. As an added advantage, the Core (SQL) API was really intuitive, as our team was already familiar with SQL in general.”

Read Introducing TransactionalBatch in the .NET SDK to learn more.

Partition key. Developers ultimately decided to logically partition the data within Azure Cosmos DB based on users.

“We originally partitioned data on users and domains—again, examples being inventory items or achievements—but found that this breakdown was too granular and prevented us from using database transactions within Azure Cosmos DB to their full potential,” says Sosnovske.”

Consistency level. Of the five consistency levels supported by Azure Cosmos DB, developers chose session consistency, which they combined with heavy etag checking to ensure that data is properly written.

“This works for us because of how we store data, which is modeled as an append-only log with a head document that serves as a pointer to the tail of the log,” explains Sosnovske. “Writing to the database involves reading the head document and its etag, deriving the N+1 log ID, and then constructing a transactional batch operation that overwrites the head pointer using the previously read etag and creates a new document for the log entry. In the unlikely case that the log has already been written, the etag check and the attempt to create a document that already existed will result in a failed transaction. This happened regardless of whether another request ‘beats’ us to writing or if our request reads slightly out-of-date data.”

In part 2 of this series, we examine the solution’s current workload and how Minecraft Earth service developers have benefited from building it on Azure Cosmos DB.

Get started with Azure Cosmos DB

Today, I’m excited to announce the preview of the next generation of Azure VMware Solution, designed, built, and supported by Microsoft and endorsed by VMware.

With the current economic environment, many organizations face new challenges to find rapid and cost-effective solutions that enable business stability, continuity, and resiliency. The new Azure VMware Solution empowers customers to seamlessly extend or completely migrate their existing on-premises VMware applications to Azure without the cost, effort, or risk of re-architecting applications or retooling operations. This helps our customers gain cloud efficiency and enables them to innovate at their own pace with Azure services across security, data, and artificial intelligence, as well as unified management capabilities. Customers can also save money with Windows Server and SQL Server workloads running on Azure VMware by taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits.

Microsoft first party service

The new Azure VMware Solution is a first party service from Microsoft. By launching a new service that is directly owned, operated, and supported by Microsoft, we can ensure greater quality, reliability, and direct access to Azure innovation for our customers while providing you with a single point of contact for all your needs. With today’s announcement and our continued collaboration with VMware, the new Azure VMware Solution lays the foundation for our customers’ success in the future.

Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer at VMware commented, “VMware and Microsoft have a long-standing partnership and a shared heritage in supporting our customers. Now more than ever it is important we come together and help them create stability and efficiency for their businesses. The new Azure VMware Solution gives customers the ability to use the same VMware foundation in Azure as they use in their private data centers. It provides a consistent operating model that can increase business agility and resiliency, reduces costs, and enable a native developer experience for all types of applications.”

These comments were echoed by Jason Zander, Executive Vice President at Microsoft, who said, “This is an amazing milestone for Microsoft and VMware to meet our customers where they are today on their cloud journey. Azure VMware Solution is a great example of how we design Azure services to support a broad range of customer workloads. Through close collaboration with the VMware team, I’m excited that customers running VMware on-premises will be able to benefit from Azure’s highly reliable infrastructure sooner.”

The new solution is built on Azure, delivering the speed, scale, and high availability of our global infrastructure. You can provision a full VMware Cloud Foundation environment on Azure and gain compute and storage elasticity as your business needs change. Azure VMware Solution is VMware Cloud Verified, giving customers confidence they’re using the complete set of VMware capabilities, with consistency, performance, and interoperability for their VMware workloads.

Access to VMware technology and experiences

Azure VMware Solution allows you to leverage your existing investments, in VMWare skills and tools. Customers can maintain operational consistency as they accelerate a move to the cloud with the use of familiar VMware technology including VMWare vSphere, HCX, NSX-T, and vSAN. Additionally, the new Azure VMware Solution has an option to add VMware HCX Enterprise, which will enable customers to further simplify their migration efforts to Azure including support for bulk live migrations. HCX also enables customers running older versions of vSphere on-premises to move to newer versions of vSphere seamlessly running on Azure VMware Solution.

Seamless Azure integration

Through integration with Azure management, security, and services, Azure VMware Solution provides the opportunity for customers to continue to build cloud competencies and modernize overtime. Customers maintain the choice to use the native VMware tools and management experiences they are familiar with, and incrementally leverage Azure capabilities as required.

As we look to meet customers where they are today, we are deeply investing in support for hybrid management scenarios, and automation that can streamline the journey. We are excited to announce more about future hybrid capabilities as they relate to Azure VMware Solution, soon.

Leverage Azure Hybrid Benefit pricing for Microsoft workloads

Take advantage of Azure as the best cloud for your Microsoft workloads running in Azure VMware Solution with unmatched pricing benefits for Windows Server and SQL Server. Azure Hybrid Benefit extends to Azure VMware Solution allowing customers with software assurance to maximize the value of existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server license investments when migrating or extending to Azure. In addition, Azure VMware Solution customers are also eligible for three years of free Extended Security Updates on 2008 versions of Windows Server and SQL Server. The combination of these unmatched pricing benefits on Azure ensures customers can simplify cloud adoption with cost efficiencies across their VMware environments.

In addition, at general availability Reserved Instances will also be available for Azure VMware Solution customers, with one-year and three-year options on dedicated hosts.

Global availability and expansion

The Azure VMware Solution preview is initially available in US East and West Europe Azure regions. We expect the new Azure VMware Solution to be generally available in the second half of 2020 and at that time, availability will be extended across more regions. Plans on regional availability for Azure VMware Solution will be made available here as they are disclosed.

To register your interest in taking part in the Azure VMware Solution preview, please contact your Microsoft Account Representative or contact our sales team.

Learn more about Azure VMware Solution on the Azure website.

For the past few years, Microsoft and Red Hat have co-developed hybrid solutions enabling customers to innovate both on-premises and in the cloud. In May 2019, we announced the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, allowing enterprises to run critical container-based production workloads via an OpenShift managed service on Azure, jointly operated by Microsoft and Red Hat.

Microsoft and Red Hat are now working together to further extend Azure services to hybrid environments across on-premises and multi-cloud with upcoming support of Azure Arc for OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so our customers will be able to more effectively develop, deploy, and manage cloud-native applications anywhere. With Azure Arc, customers will have a more consistent management and operational experience across their Microsoft hybrid cloud including Red Hat OpenShift and RHEL.

What’s new for Red Hat Customers with Azure Arc

As part of the Azure Arc preview, we’re expanding Azure Arc’s Linux and Kubernetes management capabilities to add support specifically for Red Hat customers, enabling you to:

Organize, secure, and govern your Red Hat ecosystem across environments

Many of our customers have workloads sprawling across clouds, datacenters, and edge locations. Azure Arc enables customers to centrally manage, secure, and control RHEL servers and OpenShift clusters from Azure at scale. Wherever the workloads are running, customers can view inventory and search from the Azure Portal. They can apply policies and manage compliance for connected servers and clusters from Azure Policy; either one or many clusters at a time. Customers can enhance their security posture through built-in Azure security policies and RBAC for the managed infrastructure that works the same way wherever they run. As Azure Arc progresses towards general availability, more policies will be enabled, such as reporting on expiring certificates, password complexity, managing SSH keys, and enforcing disk encryption.

In addition, with SQL Server 2019 for RHEL 8 is now quicker to deploy via new images now available in the Azure Marketplace, we’re expanding Azure Arc to manage SQL Server on RHEL, providing integrated database and server governance via unified Azure Policies.

Finally, Azure Arc makes it easy to use Azure Management services such as Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center when dealing with workloads and infrastructure running outside of Azure.

Manage OpenShift clusters and applications at scale

Manage container-based applications running in Azure Red Hat OpenShift service on Azure, as well as OpenShift clusters running on IaaS, virtual machines (VMs), or on-premises bare metal. Applications defined in Github repositories can be automatically deployed via Azure Policy and Azure Arc to any repo-linked OpenShift cluster, and policies can be used to keep them up to date. New application versions can be distributed globally to all Azure Arc-managed OpenShift clusters using Github pull requests, with full DevOps CI/CD pipeline integrations for logging and quality testing. Additionally, if an application is modified in an unauthorized way, the change is reverted, so your OpenShift environment remains stable and compliant.

Run Azure Data Services on OpenShift and anywhere else

Azure Arc enables you to run Azure data services on OpenShift on-premises, at the edge, and in multi-cloud environments, whether a self-deployed cluster or a managed container service like Azure Red Hat OpenShift. With Azure Arc support for Azure SQL Managed Instance on OpenShift, you’ll know your container-based data infrastructure is always current and up to date; Microsoft SQL Big Data Cluster (BDC) support for OpenShift provides a new container-based deployment pattern for big data storage and analytics, allowing you to elastically scale your data with your dynamic OpenShift based application anywhere it runs.

Managing multiple configurations for an on-premises OpenShift deployment from Azure Arc.

Azure SQL Managed Instances within Azure Arc.

If you’d like to learn more about how Azure is working with Red Hat to make innovation easier for customers in hybrid cloud environments, join us for a fireside chat between Scott Guthrie, EVP of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, and Paul Cormier, president and CEO of Red Hat, including a demo of Azure Arc for Red Hat today at the Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience.

Private hybrid clusters and OpenShift 4 added to Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Rounding out our hybrid offerings for Red Hat customers, today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift on OpenShift 4.

This release brings key innovations from Red Hat OpenShift 4 to Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Additionally we‘re enabling features to support hybrid and enterprise customer scenarios, such as:

• Private API and ingress endpoints: Customers can now choose between public and private cluster management (API) and ingress endpoints. With private endpoints and Azure Express Route support we’re enabling private hybrid clusters, allowing our mutual customers to extend their on-premises solutions to Azure.
   
• Industry compliance certifications: To help customers meet their compliance obligations across regulated industries and markets worldwide, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is now PCI DSS, HITRUST, and FedRAMP certified. Azure maintains the largest compliance portfolio in the industry both in terms of total number of offerings, as well as number of customer-facing services in assessment scope.
   
• Multi-Availability Zones clusters: To ensure the highest resiliency, cluster components are now deployed across 3 Azure Availability Zones in supported Azure regions to maintain high availability for the most demanding mission-critical applications and data. Azure Red Hat OpenShift has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9 percent.

• Cluster-admin support: We’ve enabled the cluster-admin role on Azure Red Hat OpenShift clusters, enabling full cluster customization capabilities, such as running privileged containers and installing Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs).

Getting started with Azure Arc

To learn more about Azure Arc for RHEL environments, get started with the preview today. For anyone interested in Azure Arc enabled OpenShift, we will be going into public preview soon. Contact us here for more info.