ROADMAP Azure Roadmap April 2017 O A D M A P P O S T E R I N S I D E INDEPENDENT IT PLANNING INFORMATION SERVICE www.directionsonmicrosoft.com
ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT Directions on Microsoft (DOM) Roadmaps provide all-in-one-planning references that summarize versions of Microsoft enterprise products and online services. For each product or service, the Roadmap provides: a brief description; key use scenarios; important dependencies; and details about future updates and retirements where known. IT decision makers can use Roadmaps to answer questions about products or services such as: What does Microsoft offer for a particular task? Which will likely get further Microsoft investment? What are the main improvements planned? What major changes or retirements are coming that might affect existing systems? DOM Roadmaps, along with DOM Product Evaluation Guides, Licensing Reference Set, and Webinars, help organizations proactively prepare for new and potentially disruptive changes in Microsoft enterprise technologies. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rob Sanfilippo, Research Vice President, Developer Tools and Strategies Expertise: Visual Studio and other developer tools, C# and other programming languages, the.net Framework, Azure, Exchange Server, Windows Phone, and Xbox. Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob Sanfilippo worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and services, including Exchange Server, BizTalk Server, and Xbox Live. Rob received a B.S. in electrical, computer, and systems engineering from Harvard University. 1410 Market Street, Suite 200 Kirkland, WA 98033 USA Tel. +1 425.739.4669 Fax +1 425.739.0339 Email info@directionsonmicrosoft.com www.directionsonmicrosoft.com CEO & Research Chair President Managing Vice President Lead Analysts Copy Editor Design Operations Robert Horwitz Jeff Parker Rob Helm Michael Cherry, Wes Miller, Don Retallack, Rob Sanfilippo, Andrew Snodgrass, Joshua Trupin Paula Thurman K. Brian Neel Mona Wolf Copyright 2017, Redmond Communications Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. ISSN 1077-4394. Redmond Communications, Inc. is an independent publisher and is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft Corporation. DIRECTIONS ON MICROSOFT reviews and analyzes industry news based on information obtained from sources generally available to the public and from industry contacts. While we consider these sources to be reliable, we cannot guarantee their accuracy. Readers assume full responsibility for any use made of the information contained herein. Throughout this newsletter, trademark names are used. Rather than place a trademark symbol at every occurrence, we hereby state that we are using the names only in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement of the trademark.
ROADMAP Azure Roadmap By Rob Sanfilippo Contributing Analysts: Michael Cherry, Rob Helm, Wes Miller, Don Retallack, Andrew Snodgrass, Joshua Trupin EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Azure, Microsoft s hosted application and storage services offering, has evolved substantially since it became commercially available in Feb. 2010. It consists of dozens of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) components. Customers can leverage Azure s massive scale and geographic reach for solutions in diverse areas, including virtual machine and Web site hosting, mobile application services, relational and nonrelational storage, and disaster recovery. Azure supports many non-microsoft technologies, including Linux, Android, ios, and Java. Recent Azure additions and enhancements show trends in areas where organizations could find opportunities to build new solutions or improve existing ones. Microsoft has largely driven the evolution by building on lower-level services that were available earlier on Azure and by expanding and advancing Azure s PaaS portfolio. It also has substantially updated the management technology and options for onpremises deployment of Azure infrastructure and solutions. The improvements could give customers better capabilities and deployment experiences, but use of high-level Azure services could foster a dependence on Microsoft-specific implementations, and customers should continue to be prepared for changes that could disrupt processes. This Roadmap provides an overview of Azure services for applications, storage, and systems. It summarizes each service, explains its benefits, risks, and pricing metrics, and projects its near-term technical roadmap where possible. Organizations considering Azure can use the report to evaluate where its services might fit into their own environments, while organizations already on Azure can use it as a guide to the future evolution of its services. All of the information in this Roadmap is our interpretation of the most credible public sources. Microsoft does not endorse this Roadmap, and its product plans are subject to change at any time.
Azure Roadmap IN THIS ISSUE ROADMAP Introduction...5 Compute and Networking...12 Virtual Machines...12 Container Service...16 Cloud Services...16 Virtual Networking...17 Batch...19 Scheduler...20 Service Fabric...20 DevTest Labs...21 Blockchain Services...21 Resources...22 Web and Mobile...23 Web Apps (Formerly Websites)...23 Mobile Apps (Replacement for Mobile Services)... 24 Functions...25 Mobile Engagement...26 API Management...27 Search...28 Media Services...28 Content Delivery Network (CDN)...29 Resources...29 Data Storage and Access...30 SQL Server Offerings in Azure...30 Storage...34 DocumentDB...35 HDInsight...36 Data Lake...36 Data Factory...37 Data Catalog...38 Power BI Embedded...41 Resources...42 Analytics...42 Azure Analysis Services...42 Data Lake Analytics...42 Machine Learning...43 Event Hubs...45 Stream Analytics...45 Cortana Intelligence Suite...46 Cognitive Services...47 Bot Service...47 HockeyApp and Application Insights...48 Resources...49 Web Services and Application Integration...50 API Apps for Web Services...50 Application Integration with Logic Apps and API Apps. 50 Service Bus...50 BizTalk Server and Services...51 IoT Suite and IoT Hub...52 Resources...53 Management and Backup...54 Site Recovery...54 Log Analytics...55 Automation...56 Backup...57 StorSimple...57 Security Center...58 Key Vault...59 Import Export...60 Resource Manager...60 Management Portal...61 Resources...63 On-Premises Azure...64 Azure Pack...64 Azure Stack...65 Resources...67 Index to Services...67
ROADMAP Introduction The Directions on Microsoft Azure Roadmap describes the components and services of Azure, Microsoft s hosted application and storage services offering. It summarizes each service, explains its benefits, risks, and pricing metrics, and projects its near-term technical roadmap where possible. Organizations considering Azure can use the report to evaluate where its services might fit into their own environments, while organizations already on Azure can use it as a guide to the future evolution of its services. Azure has evolved substantially since it became commercially available in Feb. 2010. It consists of dozens of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) components. Customers can leverage Azure s massive scale and geographic reach for solutions in diverse areas, including virtual machine (VM) and Web site hosting, mobile application services, relational and nonrelational storage, and disaster recovery. Azure supports many non-microsoft technologies, including Linux, Android, ios, and Java. Services are added and updated frequently, so current and potential customers may find new opportunities by conducting regular Azure evaluations. IaaS, PaaS, Microsoft, and Non- Microsoft Tech Supported Azure services can be grouped into two broad categories: IaaS. These services, which primarily consist of hosted VMs that can run Windows Server or Linux variants, are similar to those offered by Amazon Web Services, Azure s highly successful competitor. An IaaS system burdens customers with managing the OS and application platform, but customers can migrate existing applications that are deployed on-premises with little or no code rewriting. IaaS thus offers the most straightforward route to the cloud. PaaS. In a PaaS offering, a cloud vendor rents out the use of computer resources and takes responsibility for managing not only the hardware but also the OS and platform software running on the computers. PaaS services are attractive for their relatively low costs, scalability, reduced maintenance requirements, and opportunities to improve on the development and execution of business logic by leveraging componentized services. However, customers generally cannot run existing on-premises applications using exclusively PaaS services without some code rewriting to make applications compatible and to take full advantage of PaaS components. Developers work with Azure using specialized SDKs, which are available for several environments, such as.net, Java, PHP, and Node.js. The SDKs are regularly updated to support the latest Azure services, and Visual Studio receives ongoing updates to integrate Azure functionality with its tools. Administrators manage Azure through a Web-based management portal, which has undergone several major revisions, bringing better usability and consistency across service administrative interfaces. PowerShell scripting can also be used to work with Azure services, and cmdlet support is updated frequently. Azure regularly receives new support for non-microsoft technologies. For example, it can be used with Linux, Android, ios, Oracle, Docker, Puppet, Chef, Java, PHP, and Node.js. Microsoft has adopted a strategy of supporting popular services and tools on Azure even when they may compete with the company s on-premises offerings. Azure s full name was changed from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure in Apr. 2014, reflecting its reach beyond the Windows OS and related technologies. Azure has grown in scope dramatically since it debuted. Consequently, organizations that have not evaluated it recently or at all may find opportunities to leverage Azure by exploring it now. (See the sidebar Azure s Evolution on page 6.) Services Enable Broad Range of Scenarios Azure consists of dozens of services, and new service previews arrive several times a year. The services can be used individually or in combinations to address many categories of IT scenarios. Virtual Machine Hosting Workloads deployed on-premises or with non-microsoft hosting providers can be moved to Azure Virtual Machines ([Azure VMs], an IaaS offering) with little or no code rewriting. Hybrid deployments can be created with on-premises counterparts, especially when on-premises Microsoft products are used. For example, SQL Server allows AlwaysOn Availability Group replicas of on-premises databases to be hosted in Azure for disaster recovery. Using Azure in this way can reduce hardware costs, simplify scaling, provide elasticity to grow and shrink resources, and reduce latency for users by locating deployments in optimal geographical regions. Azure can also be used for development and test efforts to reduce costs of provisioning local lab resources, and most Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscriptions include monthly credits for Azure services. Azure VMs, which can run Windows Server or Linux and be provisioned from a gallery that offers licensable images containing products such as SQL Server, Biz- Talk, and Oracle database management software Azure network services, which allow Azure VMs to connect to each other or to on-premises servers with dedicated subnets, and provide Domain Name System (DNS) and load balancing capabilities
6 Introduction Directions on Microsoft ROADMAP April 2017 Container Service, which enables rapidly deploying a group of identical Azure VMs as container hosts for Linux container-based applications ExpressRoute, which lets customers work with Microsoft partners to use dedicated high-speed private network connections to Azure data centers DevTest Labs, which can help teams organize and optimize the use of Azure VMs for development and test purposes. Web Site Hosting External- and internal-facing Web sites can be deployed to Azure. Site resources can be scaled up and down quickly and automatically to address traffic loads. Deployment on regional data centers can reduce latency for clients, and when sites rely on other resources deployed in Azure (such as storage or authentication), latency connecting to those services is reduced. Web Apps (part of App Service), which provides a Web server with an associated database and preinstalled application frameworks and third-party open source applications, such as applications for content management and blogging Azure VMs, which can host IIS or another Web server, such as Apache Cloud Services Web and worker roles, a PaaS offering that provides user interfaces for Web sites and performs background computing tasks Media Services, a service for uploading, processing, managing, and delivering digital media such as video and audio Content Delivery Network (CDN), which caches data around the world for faster local access Search, which provides a hosted, tunable, full-text search service. Azure s Evolution Azure has grown in scope dramatically since it debuted in Feb. 2010. It currently consists of dozens of services that span Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and new service previews arrive several times a year. Azure consisted of four PaaS services when it launched. In a PaaS offering, a cloud vendor rents out the use of computer resources and takes responsibility for managing not only the hardware but also the OS and platform software running on the computers. Microsoft added IaaS services to Azure in Apr. 2013. These services, which primarily consist of hosted VMs that can run Windows Server or Linux variants, are similar to those offered by Amazon Web Services, Azure s highly successful competitor. The capacity and scalability of many of Azure s components has grown. Network communications bandwidth and security has been addressed with ExpressRoute, which lets customers work with Microsoft partners that offer dedicated private network connections to Azure data centers. Tools for working with Azure resources have gone through multiple iterations of improvements and enhancements since launch. The Web-based Azure management portal has undergone several major revisions, bringing better usability and consistency across service user interfaces. (The latest portal is built on Resource Manager, and it is not entirely compatible with the previous portal, which must still be used to work with certain Azure resources.) Azure SDKs, which are available for several environments such as.net, Java, PHP, and Node.js, are regularly updated to support the latest Azure services, and Visual Studio receives ongoing updates to integrate Azure functionality with its tools. PowerShell can also be used to work with Azure services, and cmdlet support is updated regularly. Azure has also steadily expanded its geographic reach: Microsoft has invested heavily in Azure data centers, of which there were originally six and are now more than 30 around the world. The ability for customers in regulated industries to secure workloads on Azure to comply with local regulations and standards is improving. For example, a specialized offering of Azure called Azure Government that has received (or is in the process of receiving) certifications to be used by U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies became available in Dec. 2014. Azure IP Advantage, a program introduced in Feb. 2017, extends patent infringement indemnification to customers running workloads on Azure hosted services. Patent indemnification lowers the legal risk of using Azure services, and therefore, it may differentiate Azure from the competition. DOMIS WATERMARK Databases and Storage Azure offers several types of storage options for databases and unstructured data. Using Azure storage can reduce hardware, deployment, and maintenance overhead and supplement on-premises data storage. Azure SQL Database, which hosts relational databases in a PaaS offering using SQL Server technology Azure VMs, which can host SQL Server or other database systems that run on Windows Server or Linux. Also, SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups replicas of on-premises databases can be hosted in an Azure Virtual Machine Storage, a nonrelational data service that stores application data in blobs, tables, queues, and files; SQL Server databases can be backed up to Azure Storage DocumentDB, a service that enables deployment of Not Only SQL (NoSQL) databases, which are used in applications (such as Web and mobile) that need a flexible data schema and the ability to cross OSs and devices StorSimple, a service that uses a hardware appliance to provide on-premises storage that integrates with Azure storage Data Factory, a service that provides data access and transformation capabilities, simplifying access to disparate data formats Azure SQL Data Warehouse, a scalable, high-performance business intelligence data repository as a service based on SQL Server Data Lake Store, a scalable managed Hadoop storage service that can ingest and process large amounts of unstructured data in their native formats at high rates Data Catalog, a centralized, hosted registry of enterprise data sources designed to simplify the sharing of approved data sources for business intelligence and application purposes Power BI Embedded, which allows users to embed refreshable reports in Web sites and applications for access by users outside of their organization. Systems Management Azure services can be used to handle or augment systems management tasks, reducing requirements for on-premises tools and, in some cases, automating procedures. Azure Active Directory, which includes a directory service (used by Office 365 and Windows Intune) derived from Windows Server Active Directory and that can enable single sign-on authentication for users of Office 365 and third-party applications that support the service COPYRIGHT 2017 REDMOND COMMUNICATIONS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FOR REPRINTS AND MEMBERSHIP CALL +1 425.739.4669 WWW.DIRECTIONSONMICROSOFT.COM
Azure Roadmap Introduction 7 Log Analytics, a service that uses local agents to watch for errors or configuration problems with Internet-connected server installations and sends alerts to administrators Automation, which automates IT-centric Azure processes using runbooks based on PowerShell workflows Security Center, which helps prevent, detect, and respond to security threats to Azure resources, such as VMs or Azure SQL instances HockeyApp and Application Insights, which are services that monitor, analyze, and track deployed applications for development and maintenance purposes (HockeyApp can also be used to deploy applications to user groups for prerelease testing). Disaster Recovery Azure can be used to back up data located on-premises or with other hosting providers. Data can be stored in multiple Azure data centers around the world, providing a solution for fault tolerance and catastrophic failures and helping customers meet internal or regulatory global disaster recovery requirements. Backup, which stores backups of data from Windows, Windows Server, and System Center Data Protection Manager Site Recovery, which maintains backups of physical and virtual machines and can work with on-premises Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and SQL Server installations Azure VMs, which can host SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups replicas of on-premises databases, and host thirdparty or custom backup solutions Storage, which can be used to back up SQL Server databases and for custom backup solutions StorSimple, a service that uses a hardware appliance to provide on-premises storage that integrates with Azure Storage. Application Infrastructure Azure services can be used as application building blocks, reducing development, deployment, and maintenance effort by providing base functionality that is independent of business logic. Use of these services is usually most appropriate for new development projects that can be architected to take the most advantage of their design. Existing applications typically require code rewriting to integrate these services. Cloud Services Web and worker roles, a PaaS offering that provides user interfaces for Web sites and performs background computing tasks Mobile Apps (part of App Service), which help developers build Android, ios, and Windows applications that leverage Azure and other cloud services Functions, which runs code on a schedule or in response to triggers but only incurs costs when the code is run Notification Hubs, which can send notifications to clients on multiple mobile device platforms at high scale (for example, millions of notifications can be sent in a span of minutes) Redis Cache, which provides a highspeed data cache for applications, based on the open source Redis Cache technology Azure Active Directory Access Control service, which allows applications to rely on multiple security identity providers for user authentication and authorization with minimal developer overhead Search, which provides a hosted, tunable, full-text search service API Management, which allows customers to publish information about their Web service APIs, control API usage, and capture usage statistics Service Fabric, which is a platform that enables highly scalable, distributed, DOMIS WATERMARK reliable microservice deployment onpremises and on Azure Cognitive Services, which allow developers to add intelligence to bots and other applications by leveraging Microsoft s data stores and machine learning models. Application Messaging Azure can be used to connect applications and services across the Internet. Firewall configuration can be simplified for communication between external users and on-premises applications. Interapplication messages can be queued and converted for processing, leveraging Azure as a broker. Service Bus, which enables disconnected application components to exchange messages across organizational boundaries BizTalk Services, which offers application-to-application message routing and conversion similar to BizTalk Server Logic Apps (part of App Service), which executes long-running business processes API Apps (part of App Service), which runs Web services, including a library of API App services built by Microsoft and third parties. Compute-Intensive Applications Azure s massive scale of compute and storage power enables the processing of large amounts of data, whether archived or arriving in real time. Organizations can avoid costs for high-performance hardware and advanced software, allowing some to deploy solutions that are otherwise cost-prohibitive. Business insights and predictions can be extracted from Big Data using Azure services. HDInsight, an implementation of Hadoop, which subdivides large amounts of data into smaller sections to be analyzed by individual computers in parallel Data Lake Analytics, which allows customers to build and process compute jobs, such as running a correlation analysis to look for trends Machine Learning, which allows customers to perform statistical algorithms on data to draw conclusions based on known results in similar data Event Hubs and Stream Analytics, which work together to ingest and process large volumes of streaming event data with low latency to help customers derive insights, draw conclusions, and trigger actions in real time IoT Hub, which handles device event data ingestion and cloud-to-device command transmission capabilities on a large scale, in particular for Internet of Things (IoT) solutions Blockchain services, which are composed of partner-supplied components to allow organizations to build distributed applications. On-Premises Cloud Infrastructure Microsoft offers software packages that enable organizations and third-party hosting providers to deploy Azure infrastructure in their own data centers to build multitenant private clouds. The following offerings support this scenario: Azure Pack, which is free to Windows Server and System Center customers, provides similar functionality and compatibility with some Microsoft-hosted Azure services, such as VMs and Web site hosting Azure Stack, which will deliver a significant portion of the software that drives Microsoft-hosted Azure using the same compute, network, and storage fabric code. Trends Emerging Recent Azure additions and enhancements show trends in areas where organizations could find opportunities to build new solu- COPYRIGHT 2017 REDMOND COMMUNICATIONS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FOR REPRINTS AND MEMBERSHIP CALL +1 425.739.4669 WWW.DIRECTIONSONMICROSOFT.COM
8 Introduction Directions on Microsoft ROADMAP April 2017 tions or improve existing ones. Microsoft has largely driven the evolution by building on lower-level services that were available earlier on Azure and by expanding and advancing Azure s PaaS portfolio. It also has substantially updated the management technology and options for on-premises deployment of Azure infrastructure and solutions. The improvements could give customers better capabilities and deployment experiences, but use of high-level Azure services could foster a dependence on Microsoft-specific implementations, and customers should continue to be prepared for changes that could disrupt processes. Database Landscape and Big Data Microsoft s database landscape has broadened over the past few years and now includes on-premises products and Microsoft-hosted services that enable ingestion, management, integration, and analysis of relational and nonrelational data sources. The products and services can also process Big Data sources such as Web logs, sensor readings, account transaction activity, and social media feeds, which contain unprocessed data that could provide insights to solve business problems. Architects interested in these capabilities should evaluate Azure services such as SQL Data Warehouse, Data Lake, DocumentDB, and HDInsight for potential database system design and integration benefits, and Machine Learning, Cortana Intelligence Suite, and IoT Suite for Big Data analytics capabilities. Microsoft still promotes SQL Server, but it is compatible with and complemented by these Azure services, which enable processing of all data source types using popular technologies such as NoSQL and Hadoop. The ability of Azure services to scale on demand, while customers pay, in most cases, only for the capacity that is used, makes Big Data solutions more feasible by reducing investment requirements. Artificial Intelligence Azure services can use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) that work Azure Technical Support Options for Enterprises DOMIS WATERMARK As Azure usage has increased and more enterprises have deployed production systems, Microsoft has introduced four tiers of paid Azure technical support that can provide customers with unlimited 24x7 technical assistance and initial response times of as little as 15 minutes for high-priority Azure issues. However, purchasing paths and support policies differ from traditional Premier Support, and organizations should be careful to avoid misplaced or duplicate spending. Paid Azure Support Tiers Azure customers get free support for billing issues and access to peer forums (discussed later in this sidebar), but break-fix support from Microsoft personnel requires a paid support plan. Consequently, most organizations will want one of these plans for production environments and important development projects. The support provided by these plans uses the same support engineers and case-handling policies as Microsoft Premier Support. Paid Azure plans provide unlimited 24x7 technical support, unlike classic Premier agreements, which define how many hours of 24x7 support a customer can access. However, non-premier levels of Azure support may carry longer initial case response times and may be limited to e-mail-based support. Azure support tiers are designed around varying customer needs: Developer, which is not meant for production environments, offers an initial response time target of no more than eight business hours and only permits customers to submit new cases online, not by phone. The Developer plan also limits case severity to the lowest priority, so cases can be delayed by Microsoft support in favor of higher-priority cases, and assistance may be delayed for multiple days. It does not include any support management from a Microsoft Technical Account Manager (TAM). with customer data and Microsoft s Bing data and engine to discover and expose insights for tasks such as predictive maintenance, fraud detection, and customer sentiment analysis. Azure services that address these tasks include the following: Azure Machine Learning allows customers to use statistical algorithms on data to draw conclusions based on known results in similar data or to recognize clusters of similar characteristic values in data. This predictive analytics capability can be used by applications for purposes such as determining product recommendations, equipment maintenance requirements, and financial credit scores. The Azure service offers simplified user interfaces relative to traditional tools used for machine learning (a field that has existed for decades), which could make the technique feasible for more organizations and scenarios. Cognitive Services allow developers to add intelligence to applications by leveraging Microsoft s data stores and machine learning models. These services offer vi- Standard offers initial response time targets of no more than two hours, up to three phone support incidents per month, and the ability to escalate cases to critical severity levels. This tier does not include support management from a TAM. It is designed for customers who have deployed some production environments in Azure, but with limited impact on the customer s business. Professional Direct offers an initial response time target of less than one hour for critical cases, unlimited phone support, and support from a pooled TAM, who may be different for each case. (This is similar to the support level offered to customers of the Premier Foundation support offering.) Customers on this plan are also eligible for limited Azure planning services, not just break-fix support. Premier entitles customers to managed Azure support, where an assigned (not pooled) TAM monitors and escalates cases for better service. Response time targets are four hours for low-severity cases and one hour for critical issues, and customers can purchase Azure Rapid Response, which is an add-on package that guarantees an initial response in no more than 15 minutes for critical issues. (For pricing information for each tier, see the chart Comparison of Azure Paid Support Plans on page 10.) Premier customers also have an assigned TAM who can help plan training, consulting, and support, as well as create a complete view of Azure services used by the customer, also called a Cloud Service Dependency Map (CSDM). The CSDM is intended to help visualize the interactions of an organization s services and Azure, but it can also be used by Microsoft as a tool to drive consumption. All levels of paid Azure support also cover technical issues related to the use of non-microsoft technologies, such as Py- COPYRIGHT 2017 REDMOND COMMUNICATIONS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FOR REPRINTS AND MEMBERSHIP CALL +1 425.739.4669 WWW.DIRECTIONSONMICROSOFT.COM
Azure Roadmap Introduction 9 sion, speech, language, knowledge, and search capabilities. The Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service enable developers to build and host bots, which are automated text chat agents that can serve as front ends to application and service functionality, and in some cases can replace human agents that are currently required for such purposes. Bot Service automates the creation of the necessary Azure resources to host a bot and provides tools to configure, manage, test, and modify the code of bots in the Azure portal. Cortana Intelligence Suite is a collection of Azure services that aim to help customers build Big Data solutions. The suite does not introduce significant new technology, but it provides code samples and templates that pull other Azure services together into logical pipelines for each step of a Big Data analysis solution. Azure AI services, like the Big Data services, can scale on demand, so customers pay only for the capacity that is used, reducing investment. Furthermore, because of their scale, Azure services can benefit from specialized hardware that customers would be unlikely to deploy. For example, Azure incorporates Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which are hardware components that can be programmatically rearchitected (currently by Microsoft, but possibly by customers in the future) to make them most applicable to machine learning workloads. Azure also offers virtual machines with GPU capabilities, which can drive solutions requiring compute power to process large data sets, such as when machine learning is used. Suites and Preassembled Offerings Solutions built on Azure have typically required the deployment and orchestration of several Azure service resources in addition to customer-supplied infrastructure and business logic code. Azure has provided the base capabilities to build solutions for a large range of areas since its debut, but the overhead of implementing complex solutions from scratch has likely slowed Azure adoption. DOMIS WATERMARK thon or Hadoop, when these technologies are deployed as part of an Azure product feature. Microsoft defines maximum initial response times for each level of service, but these are considered goals, not formal service level agreements. Therefore, Microsoft is not contractually penalized if it misses a response time window. Premier customers can ask their TAM to make sure that paid support hours have been used efficiently on specific cases and make adjustments in time charged when necessary. However, this option has limited value when applied to a pool of unlimited support. Customers can request adjustments or refunds through the Azure management portal, but these requests must be the result of known Azure downtime incidents. Purchasing Azure Support The Developer, Standard, and Professional Direct plans can be purchased online. Premier plans for Azure are available through Microsoft account managers; Standard, Professional Direct, and Premier plans (but not Developer plans) can be purchased as part of an Enterprise Agreement (EA). Azure support subscription terms are six months, billed monthly, except for Premier Support, which normally requires a 12-month agreement. Each Azure support plan covers one Azure account and all subscriptions associated with the account. The differentiation between an Azure account and an Azure subscription is important, because Azure support plans each cover one account, not one subscription. A subscription in Azure is a billing container for deployed Azure services. A single user account (Microsoft account or organizational ID) can own multiple subscriptions, and each subscription supports one service administrator and up to 200 co-administrators. Within one subscription, customers can host Microsoft has aimed to accelerate customer efforts to build and deploy solutions on Azure with offerings that jump-start development with preconfigured Azure resource groups, templates, infrastructure code, and specialized user interfaces. These offerings have targeted particular solution categories, but the model is likely to be used for future offerings (for example, to drive Azure solutions for industry verticals, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and banking). Offerings of this type include the following: Azure IoT Suite provides end-to-end sample solutions that use Azure services and open source software from Microsoft. The samples can be used as a starting point for building custom Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for remote monitoring and predictive maintenance scenarios. The suite could speed IoT-related projects that use Azure. Cortana Intelligence Suite, described above, speeds development and deployment of Big Data solutions. many storage accounts, virtual machines, and other services. All tiers of Azure support provide support during regional business hours for English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. After-hours support is limited to English and Japanese for high-priority cases. Since a single Azure support plan can cover multiple Azure subscriptions, a company can share a single plan across multiple groups and name multiple co-administrators on each subscription. Organizations that have invested in Azure support plans should regularly ensure that groups and individuals are aware of this policy and do not purchase separate Azure support plans. Free Azure Support Microsoft provides several forms of free nontechnical support for Azure. All Azure customers have access to the Azure management Web portal, even if they have not opted for a paid support plan. This portal lets the owner of an Azure account perform unlimited subscription management (for viewing billing, adjusting quotas, and transferring accounts on a subscription). Azure customers can also access free self-serve online forums through MSDN and Stack Overflow. These forums can assist in answering some Azure questions, but responses can be slow or nonexistent, there are no response time goals, and answers originate from the Azure user community, so they are not certified by Microsoft. Microsoft also maintains a Twitter account, which can provide free support for some questions, but it also lacks a response time goal. Microsoft reports on infrastructure issues on the Azure service dashboard, which can be freely accessed by all Azure users. However, this service only provides current service uptime status for Azure infrastructure. 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10 Introduction Directions on Microsoft ROADMAP April 2017 Azure Bot Service, described above, simplifies bot deployment on Azure, assists with publishing and managing bots, and could reduce costs associated with running bots. The Connected Vehicle Platform is a set of reference solutions built on Azure (and other Microsoft services) that automotive OEMs can use as a basis for implementing custom applications that run in the vehicles they manufacture. Blockchain services are composed of partner-supplied components that allow organizations to build distributed applications. Blockchains are a form of distributed ledger that enable transactions over peer-to-peer networks without a centralized clearinghouse. Microsoft is working with partners that offer tools and services to promote Azure as a hosting environment for applications that use a blockchain and leverage Azure services such as Machine Learning. Microsoft also provides prescriptive guidance for Azure solution architectures in categories such as mobile, e-commerce, and digital media. However, this guidance is documentation only and requires customers to create solutions based on the architectures from scratch. Deployment Model and Portal The original model for deploying and managing resources on Azure has been replaced by Azure Resource Manager. The new model helps customers organize, govern, and secure resources deployed on Azure better than the original model (now called classic ). It also supports templatizing deployments so they can be reused (for example, for staging, redundancy, or between Microsoft-hosted Azure and Azure Stack). An ambitious redesign of the Webbased Azure portal, which presents user interfaces for customers to provision, manage, and monitor resources they deploy in Azure, became generally available in Dec. 2015. The new portal is based on Azure Resource Manager (although it supports some elements of the classic model). It brings a revised visual design that presents a navigation menu, dashboards, and sets of configuration panes to guide administrators through management tasks. The classic model and portal will probably be discontinued in 2017, so organizations relying on them should plan for transition to Azure Resource Manager and the new portal, which may require specialized migration procedures. Deploying Azure On-Premises with Stack Azure Stack is on-premises software that will be offered as an integrated hardware and software package from certain vendors, probably in the second half of 2017. Stack aims to address customer de- DOMIS WATERMARK mand for an offering that provides infrastructure equivalent to Azure for onpremises use, allowing organizations and third-party hosting providers to deploy Comparison of Azure Paid Support Plans and manage their own multitenant private clouds, while keeping them compatible with Microsoft-hosted Azure. Stack could speed private cloud deployments, enable hybrid scenarios, and allow customers who have not used Azure due to compliance, regulatory, security, or regional availability reasons to deploy the technology. Stack s infrastructure code, deployment model, and management portal are equivalent to the implementation used by Azure. Sharing the same model and code base with Azure should make Stack highly compatible with the Microsoft-hosted version. Stack is Microsoft s most ambitious, but not its first, attempt at offering onpremises software that supports Azure functionality. Azure Pack, a free offering available to Windows Server and System Center customers since 2013, provides some Azure functionality for customer on-premises and hosting provider deployments. (Pack also ships on appliances from Dell, HPE, and Nutanix in an offering called Cloud Platform System.) However, Pack offers a smaller subset of Azure services than Stack, and its architecture has substantial differences from Azure s. Pack relies on System Center to mimic the fabric layer. Thus, Stack should be more compatible with Azure than Pack is, and Stack will probably perform better than Pack. A Windows Azure Appliance program offered several years ago allowed a small Microsoft offers four levels of paid Azure support in addition to the free account management services offered to all Azure customers. The chart shows a comparison of free plans with the four levels of paid Azure support, based on the features and cost of each plan. Billing and subscription management Community forums Service dashboard Unlimited 24x7 technical support Free Developer Standard Professional Direct Premier Case management by a Technical Account Manager (TAM) (pooled) Initial response goal <8 hours <2 hours <1 hour <15 minutes (with add-on) Web incident submission Phone support Limited Maximum case severity C A A A Monthly cost US$0 US$29 US$300 US$1,000 By contract COPYRIGHT 2017 REDMOND COMMUNICATIONS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FOR REPRINTS AND MEMBERSHIP CALL +1 425.739.4669 WWW.DIRECTIONSONMICROSOFT.COM