Build, innovate, and HackTogether! It’s time to get started building solutions with AI in the Power Platform! HackTogether is your playground for experimenting with the new Copilot and AI features in the Power Platform. With mentorship from Microsoft experts and access to the latest tech, you will learn how to build solutions in Power Platform by leveraging AI. The possibilities are endless for what you can create… plus you can submit your hack for a chance to win exciting prizes! ?
Power Apps Copilots for building and editing desktop and mobile applications
Power Automate Copilot for creating and editing automations
Power Virtual Agents Copilot and conversation booster for creating intelligent chatbots
Power Pages Copilot for creating business websites
You’ll get a high level overview of what you can do with these Copilots and get live demos of them in action! Please visit here for more details: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai
WHO IS IT AIMED AT?
This session is for anyone who likes to get into the weeds building apps and automations and are interesting in learning a skill that can accelerate their career. If you’re interested in how AI can help you build solutions faster and with more intelligence in the Power Platform then this session is for you!
WHY SHOULD MEMBERS ATTEND?
Build, innovate, and HackTogether! It’s time to get started building solutions with AI in the Power Platform! HackTogether is your playground for experimenting with the new Copilot and AI features in the Power Platform. With mentorship from Microsoft experts and access to the latest tech, you will learn how to build solutions in Power Platform by leveraging AI. The possibilities are endless for what you can create… plus you can submit your hack for a chance to win exciting prizes!
To view all the required environment setup, click here: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai and setup a Microsoft Developer Account and Power Platform Developer Account. This will give you access to all the services and Licenses you will need to follow along and build your own solution.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This is a continuation of an earlier blog post on unified environment management options in Power Platform admin center.
Customers of finance and operations apps have historically had two choices for deploying their development workloads: self-hosted as a virtual machine on-premises or hosted on a customer-provided Azure subscription. Both of these models have been available through the Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) admin center and have been heavily used by more than 99% of customers. This speaks to the extensibility requirements that enterprise customers have to enrich the products, creating competitive advantage and tackling unique circumstances.
Over the last couple of years, customers have been increasingly seeking faster and low-code extensibility options to complement their core Dynamics 365 business software. To that end, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of unified, developer environments that IT administrators can deploy directly from Power Platform admin center.
New environment templates in Power Platform
Customers who have purchased Dynamics 365 customer engagement have been able to enjoy a concept in Power Platform known as environment templates, which allow for faster creation of new sandbox environments that include Microsoft Dataverse, their Dynamics 365 application of choice, and several other related apps in a single deployment workflow. Now, finance and operations apps customers will find new templates available to them in Power Platform admin center for Finance (Preview), Supply Chain Management (Preview), and Project Operations for ERP (Preview). This will include Dataverse, the finance and operations core enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, and related apps for dual-write, virtual tables, and business events pre-installed and configured so that they are ready for immediate use.
How to deploy these new templates
If you want to simply try the deployment process for free, you can read about signing up for a no-cost, subscription-based, trial offer. After which, you will see templates such as these when you deploy a new trial environment via Power Platform:
Trial subscriptions are limited to 30 days, and you can only deploy up to 3 trial environments at the same time. During preview, we will not support converting the trial to a sandbox environment. However, this restriction will eventually be removed.
For the unified developer environments, during the preview these are limited to deployment via Power Platform for administrators PowerShell. For more information, see the step-by-step tutorial.
Storage-based provisioning model
As part of this preview, the new unified, developer environments will utilize the storage-based provisioning model that other Dynamics 365 applications rely upon today. For finance and operations apps customers, they will have two main categories of storage to manage: Dataverse database and Finance and operations database:
Every new environment requires at least 1 gigabyte (GB) of available storage for both Dataverse and Operations database capacity to deploy. Capacity is granted from finance and operations apps user licenses, sandbox add-on purchases, as well as add-on capacity packs. For more information on storage, as it relates to finance and operations apps, see the documentation.
Customers, partners, and ISVs can leverage this storage-based capacity model, and it will not bill to your Azure subscription.
More capabilities for admins and developers
Historically administrators for finance and operations apps have needed to manage time-consuming and complex tasks on behalf of the development teams they support. Such examples include backing up and restoring copies of production data over to the developer VMs hosted on-premises or in Azure, manually deploying new environments and assigning remote desktop credentials to a developer, and managing virtual machine uptime schedules to reduce cost.
Now administrators can:
Deploy environments at scale using admin tools like PowerShell or the Power Platform API.
Copy Lifecycle Services-based production or sandbox environments directly to the new, unified, developer environments both via the new admin center or via admin tools.
Add developers in Dataverse to give them permissions to deploy X++ to the new environment.
Add microservice add-ins to the developer environments such as Planning Optimization, and Export to Data Lake.
Enable customer-managed keys (CMK) for Dataverse and finance and operations apps together.
And more capabilities are coming! For developers, they can enjoy a simpler way of writing and deploying X++ alongside Dataverse solutions. For more information, see the related Unified Developer blog post.
Call to action
Ready to get started? Check out the Unified admin experience for finance and operations apps article to learn about this new way of provisioning developer and trial workloads. If you have any questions or feedback, please join our community in Viva Engage. We look forward to hearing from you!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are very happy to announce the private preview of Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database. Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database enables working with CSV, Parquet, and Delta files stored on Azure Storage Account v2 (Azure Blob Storage) and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Azure SQL Database will now support: CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE (CET), CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE AS SELECT (CETAS) as well as enhanced OPENROWSET capabilities to work with the new file formats.
The list of capabilities available in private preview are:
Major benefits of Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database are:
No data movement: Access real-time data where it is.
T-SQL language: Ability to leverage all the benefits of the T-SQL language, its commands, enhancements, and familiarity.
One source for all your data: Users and applications can use Azure SQL Database as a data hub, accessing all the required data in a single environment.
Security: Leverage SQL security capabilities to simplify permissions, credential management, and control
Export: Easily export data as CSV or Parquet to any Azure Storage location, either to empower other applications or reduce cost.
-- Create data source for NYC public dataset:
CREATE EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE NYCTaxiExternalDataSource
WITH (LOCATION = 'abs://nyctlc@azureopendatastorage.blob.core.windows.net');
-- Query all files with .parquet extension in folders matching name pattern:
SELECT TOP 1000 *
FROM OPENROWSET(
BULK 'yellow/puYear=*/puMonth=*/*.parquet',
DATA_SOURCE = 'NYCTaxiExternalDataSource',
FORMAT = 'parquet'
) AS filerows;
-- Schema discovery:
EXEC sp_describe_first_result_set N'
SELECT
vendorID, tpepPickupDateTime, passengerCount
FROM
OPENROWSET(
BULK ''yellow/*/*/*.parquet'',
DATA_SOURCE = ''NYCTaxiExternalDataSource'',
FORMAT=''parquet''
) AS nyc';
-- Query top 100 files and project file path and file name information for each row:
SELECT TOP 100 filerows.filepath(1) as [Year_Folder],
filerows.filepath(2) as [Month_Folder],
filerows.filename() as [File_name],
filerows.filepath() as [Full_Path]
FROM OPENROWSET(
BULK 'yellow/puYear=*/puMonth=*/*.parquet',
DATA_SOURCE = 'NYCTaxiExternalDataSource',
FORMAT = 'parquet') AS filerows;
-- Create external file format for Parquet:
CREATE EXTERNAL FILE FORMAT DemoFileFormat
WITH ( FORMAT_TYPE=PARQUET );
-- Create external table:
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE tbl_TaxiRides(
vendorID VARCHAR(100) COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN2,
tpepPickupDateTime DATETIME2,
tpepDropoffDateTime DATETIME2,
passengerCount INT,
tripDistance FLOAT,
puLocationId VARCHAR(8000),
doLocationId VARCHAR(8000),
startLon FLOAT,
startLat FLOAT,
endLon FLOAT,
endLat FLOAT,
rateCodeId SMALLINT,
storeAndFwdFlag VARCHAR(8000),
paymentType VARCHAR(8000),
fareAmount FLOAT,
extra FLOAT,
mtaTax FLOAT,
improvementSurcharge VARCHAR(8000),
tipAmount FLOAT,
tollsAmount FLOAT,
totalAmount FLOAT
)
WITH (
LOCATION = 'yellow/puYear=*/puMonth=*/*.parquet',
DATA_SOURCE = NYCTaxiExternalDataSource,
FILE_FORMAT = DemoFileFormat
);
-- Query the external table:
SELECT TOP 1000 * FROM tbl_TaxiRides;
Private Preview Sign-up form:
Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database is in active development, Private Preview users will help shape the future of the feature, with regular interactions with Data Virtualization product team. If you want to be part of the private preview a sign-up form is required and can be found here.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
In the fast-paced realm of modern business, companies often find themselves in need of agile warehousing solutions that can quickly adapt to changing customer demands. This evolution frequently involves a departure from their central ERP(enterprise resource planning) system, enabling the rapid establishment of a new warehousing entity. This shift requires the separation of warehouse management functionality from the broader ERP functions. In certain cases, the inexorable shift towards cloud-based operations drives the adoption of cloud-based warehouse systems.
The swift adoption of advanced warehouse management systems in a two-tier environment, working in harmony with any ERP system, represents a significant leap forward in operational efficiency. This dynamic solution provides robust core Warehouse Management System (WMS) capabilities, supports shared warehousing, seamlessly facilitates extended warehousing scenarios beyond advanced core WMS capabilities through pre-configured integrations with Microsoft’s suite of cloud solutions, including Sustainability Cloud, Intelligent Order Management, PowerBi, and a wide array of others. At the same time, it offers the flexibility to effortlessly integrate with numerous third-party Material Handling Equipment (MHE) systems, cloud-based printing solutions, and carrier hub cloud platforms.
Depending on specific operational requirements, businesses may choose to implement a Warehouse Management Only solution to address temporary or growing warehousing needs. These solutions offer customizable deployment options finely tuned to align with the enterprise’s unique demands. Operating in Warehouse management only mode enhances warehouse capabilities, ensuring a trifecta of flexibility, efficiency, and scalability—all achieved without necessitating a comprehensive overhaul of the existing system.
The embrace of Warehouse Management Only mode optimizes warehouse operations in an exceptionally effective manner, unlocking transformative potential that should not be underestimated. Take the plunge into these possibilities today by exploring the preview release and immersing yourself in the profound impact it can have on your business.
You can use lightweight source documents that are dedicated to inbound and outbound shipment orders to communicate between the systems. These documents focus exclusively on warehouse management, so they can replace multiple types of general-purpose documents (such as sales orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders) from a pure warehouse management perspective.
Warehouse management only mode also provides several deployment options to support your business needs. You can use Supply Chain Management to handle only warehouse operations, or you can use it to handle warehousing plus a wider range of processes (such as sales, purchase, and production orders). You can also set up a dedicated legal entity in Supply Chain Management that handles only the warehouse management processes for external systems.
Warehouse management only mode is a great way to enhance your warehouse management capabilities without having to overhaul your existing systems. It offers flexibility, efficiency, and scalability for your warehouse operations. Don’t miss this opportunity to try out this feature and see how it can transform your business. Try out the preview release today and get ready to experience the power of Warehouse management only mode.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Business Central 2023 release wave 2 introduces regional formats for reports, which adds a new dimension of customization for reports. This feature gives you more flexibility to tailor how reports print, according to your unique needs. Addressing inherent limitations, such as the inability to customize region formats for specific reports, the absence of support for designating a specific format for Customers and Vendors, and the reliance on report format settings from My Settings, this enhancement simplifies the reporting experience in Business Central. In this article, we’ll dive into the mechanics of these changes and explore how they enhance the overall reporting process in Business Central.
Behavior and Priority Order
To understand how the new regional format feature works, let’s explore its behavior and order of priority. This insight will help you grasp how Business Central determines the language and format to use for reports in different situations, so you can adjust these settings to suit your business requirements.
1. Request Page: Advanced Settings Take Center Stage
The highest priority in the report generation process resides with the advanced settings on the report request page. When you generate a report, you can specify the language and format you want to use for the report.
Advanced settings in the report request page
2. Report Object in AL: Precise Configuration
The heart of the matter lies in the AL triggers associated with the report object. Reports now include two important properties: Report.Language and Report.FormatRegion. These properties, defined within the AL triggers, play a key role in configuring reports. For many standard document reports in the Base App, these properties are set based on the Language Code and Format Region fields from the document itself. These fields get their values from the corresponding entity settings. For example, the Sales Header report gets its settings from the customer entity.
3. Language and Format in Customer/Vendor Card
If a report should be printed in the language of the recipient rather than in the working language, the developer can add code in the report to handle this. This functionality is already enabled for most reports in the standard Business Central database. The document is printed in the language that is specified in the Language Code field on the Customer or Vendor Card page.
Example of Language and Format Region Codes on the Customer page
4. Language and Format in My Settings
If the report properties mentioned earlier aren’t configured within the AL triggers, Business Central then refers to the settings in My Settings. For example, consider a scenario where a regional format isn’t defined for a customer. In this case, when you print documents associated with the customer, the Report.FormatRegion property won’t have a specific regional format set. Consequently, Business Central will turn to the regional format setting in My Settings as a fallback. While My Settings had a more prominent role in earlier versions, its current function is to step in when no alternative settings are available.
By using this order of priority, Business Central ensures that the report output language and format are based on the most relevant and specific configurations. This approach gives you greater control over language and format customization for individual reports. Ultimately, this feature streamlines the reporting process, making it more efficient and user-centric.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Our Microsoft Learn community, along with the rest of the world, has experienced a time of great change over the last few years—the pandemic, a sudden shift to remote work, economic volatility, and huge leaps in the capabilities and implementation of AI, to name just a few. Times of change like these cause us all to reevaluate our priorities, how we operate, and what’s most important across all areas of our lives. Careers are no small part of that equation. We must continuously adapt to these new realities, whether we’re employees, employers, job seekers, educators, or leaders of organizations. Because of that impact, Microsoft Learn remains committed to leading the way with resources to help equip our learners and customers with technical skills to not only meet but thrive through the challenges of that ever-changing landscape.
What does ‘skills-first’ mean and why are we talking about it?
We’re always on the lookout for emerging trends so that we can bring you insights to help you succeed. The latest and most significant of these trends is a direct response to the massive global shifts we alluded to above, what the World Economic Forum refers to as “an accelerated shift towards a skills-based operating model for talent.” Simply put: whether you’re focused on your own career or on finding the right talent, a skills-centric mentality is becoming more essential.
How does this impact you? There are all sorts of reasons to engage with skilling content—you might have one or more of the following goals (featuring some great Microsoft Learn blogs on the subject!):
Whatever your objective, knowing how to find and feature the right skills is a game-changer, and we want to be part of your journey.
What to expect from Microsoft Learn through the end of October
Our ‘Skill-it-forward’ content throughout September and October will be focused on understanding the skills-first trend and why it’s important. We’ll also be highlighting the tools and resources you need to build your technical skills and expertise. You can expect the inside scoop about what’s new with Microsoft Learn (hint: we might have a few announcements to make…). We’ll offer resources across Microsoft Learn and beyond to help you not only navigate this skills-centric shift but use it to achieve your goals. And of course, we can’t leave out Tips & Tricks – we always have a few up our sleeve!
Make sure you’re following us on Twitter and LinkedIn, and are subscribed to “The Spark,” our recently enhanced LinkedIn newsletter so you don’t miss any of the exciting stuff we have planned!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In a previous blog, we introduced Continuous Access Evaluation(CAE) – a product that brings Zero Trust principles to session management. Today we would like to discuss securing cross-tenant access with a focus on preventing data exfiltration.
It’s impossible to imagine a successful modern organization that doesn’t collaborate with partners across organizational boundaries. While cross-company collaboration empowers employees and enables partnerships, it also lowers barriers for both accidental and malicious data exfiltration. Microsoft Cross-Tenant Access Settings is designed to address security of cross-company exchange.
Outbound and Inbound Cross-Tenant Access Settings offer fine grain security controls for cross-company collaboration using user’s home identity, while Tenant Restriction v2 (TRv2) can be used to prevent data exfiltration using foreign identity.
Some of the hardest-to-prevent data leaks happen when users inside your organization use foreign identities to connect to external tenants. Let’s consider one such attack. A malicious insider creates a Microsoft Entra tenant. Then they authenticate to their malicious tenant from your organization’s device. Now the attacker can leak your files via email using the Exchange Online account of the malicious tenant. These types of attacks can be described as creating a “USB dongle in a cloud.” Regular security methods do not work against such attacks. Your tenant’s policies do not apply to external identities that attackers use. Blocking Microsoft Entra ID or Exchange Online URIs in the firewall would block your legitimate users along with the attacker. These types of attack need special defenses that TRv2 provides.
TRv2 works by sending special signals to Entra ID, Microsoft Account and other Microsoft resources. These signals point to Cross-Tenant Access Settings’ TRv2 policy that you created. Microsoft resources evaluate the policy and block unsanctioned access. We have two major flavors of TRv2.
Auth Plane TRv2 can block logins with external identities based on policy. To configure it you need to deploy a network proxy in your organization and configure that proxy to set TRv2 signals on all traffic to Entra ID and Microsoft Account. In the above example of a malicious insider leaking data over external email, the attacker will not be able to login to their malicious tenant and therefore will not be able to send email. Auth Plane TRv2 is now generally available.
Universal TRv2 as part of Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access goes one step further to protect against more sophisticated attacks where an attacker bypasses authentication by allowing anonymous access to the malicious tenant’s apps, such as anonymous meeting join in Teams. Or the attacker can import to your organizational device an access token lifted from a device in the malicious tenant. All these attack vectors bypass login to Entra ID. Since Universal TRv2 sends TRv2 signals on authentication plane (Entra ID and Microsoft Account) and data plane (Microsoft cloud applications), these attacks will be prevented. Universal TRv2 is currently in public preview.
We have another flavor of TRv2 in public preview – TRv2 on Windows. It’s a partial solution that protects the authentication and data planes but only for some scenarios. It only works on managed Windows devices and does not protect .NET stack, Chrome, or Firefox. We have heard from customers that it is difficult to deploy and does not provide adequate security. The Windows solution was meant to provide temporary protection until Universal TRv2 is released and we’re planning to retire it after Universal TRv2 is generally available.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft recognized as a Leader in the Gartner DaaS Magic Quadrant with a global presence, the largest partner ecosystem, and unparalleled integration.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Sellers are fundamental to any organization’s success—and despite economic headwinds, business leaders are concerned about keeping the talent they have happy and productive at their jobs. Many sellers have long relied on highly manual and disjointed processes that involve a mix of email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But following manual processes and switching between sales tools and spreadsheets can waste valuable time that sellers need to build relationships with customers and close deals. According to the latest Microsoft WorkLab research, 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make their everyday tasks—like sending follow-up emails or tracking sales—easier. That is why we’ve been busy building a vision for sales-specific AI to help increase seller productivity and success.
Today, we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms* for the thirteenth consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.
Figure 1: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms**
Our strong vision and approach with Microsoft Sales Copilot by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities allows sellers to spend more time focused on engaging with their customers.
Empowering sellers through automation and intelligence
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables sellers to close more deals and meet customer needs with the help of next-generation AI and real-time insights. Sellers have everything they need in their app of choice to engage with customers, including historical data and access to subject matter experts. Using data, sellers can achieve more consistent sales interactions from creating a lead to closing a sale, predict how much revenue they will generate in a given timeframe, automate repeatable processes and define sales best practices, and promote products and services with targeted marketing campaigns. Additional sales enablement features include adaptive guidance for next best steps based on actionable insights, AI-guided selling features like the sales assistant and conversation intelligence to help build stronger customer relationships, and predictive scoring models to prioritize leads and opportunities for increased conversion and win rates. Sales managers can also get intelligent insights into how their sales team members are performing, so they can provide proactive coaching to improve their teams’ overall performance.
With Microsoft Sales Copilot, which is included with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses, we have established a vision of CRM platform by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities to help sellers reduce mundane tasks and personalize customer relationships even further. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Sales Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security. Sellers can access Copilot in the tools where they’re working, whether that’s Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot also connects to Salesforce for instant data syncing. Sellers can use Copilot to automate tasks or view email or meeting summaries, helping them save time on daily tasks and spend more time with customers. AI-powered, real-time insights including customer summaries, recent notes and customer news, and highlights of any issues or concerns help sellers enter customer meetings fully prepared to focus on key items. And to help sellers follow up after those meetings, Copilot can generate AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as customer-specific emails using data from their CRM platforms and Microsoft Graph.
Providing sellers with access to customer data in one place is key to helping ensure their success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizes Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM platform data, which enables customers to securely store and manage data used by business applications. By using a platform solution to simplify and unify sales processes, sellers benefit from products built to talk to each other. Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with technologies including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend capabilities for sellers. This means that sellers can continue to use familiar tools, which helps to simplify user adoption and lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs—a priority for many organizations in today’s economy.
Organizations can leverage the power of the full Microsoft Cloud to help sellers succeed. Dynamics 365 Sales natively integrates with Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. With automatic data syncing between Microsoft 365 apps and Dynamics 365 Sales or other CRM platforms, sellers can also surface customer and opportunity information directly in Teams and Outlook, which minimizes context switching and data loss. In addition, sales operation leads and managers can use Power BI to further analyze trends and build reports. And Microsoft Power Platform enables sellers to automate workflows, create apps, and analyze data to increase agility and innovation.
Helping to ensure our customers’ success
Investec, a global financial services company, set out to help its client-facing teams listen directly to customers and build more valuable relationships. This made conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales appealing because it automatically transcribes sales calls and analyzes the content, sentiment, and participants’ behavior. Conversation intelligence takes advantage of Microsoft advancements in AI and natural language processing to automatically extract meaningful insights from sales calls. With these insights, Investec can review salespeople’s conversation styles, help coach individuals on best practices, keep track of sales conversations, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately keep track of sales conversations, and build stronger client relationships. With Dynamics 365 Sales, Investec automatically incorporates conversation intelligence data across its customer engagement platform, saving time on manual entry, reducing overhead, and building a comprehensive customer view.
MAPEI, a global leader in adhesive, sealant, and chemical product manufacturing, was using 90 different customized CRM systems across 57 countries when it decided to consolidate into a single, centralized system. Migrating to Dynamics 365 Sales helped MAPEI simplify internal processes for its employees and provide more proactive service to customers. Today, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities.
Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner
Microsoft is recognized again as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms for the thirteenth consecutive year.
We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.
Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, Guy Wood, 5 September 2023.
*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, we are announcing the general availability of the latest generations of Azure Burstable virtual machine (VM) series – the new Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 VMs based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C, AMD EPYC™ 7763v, and Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processors respectively.
The new generation of Azure burstable B-series v2 VMs are the lowest priced amongst general purpose VMs in Azure and now include native support for Arm-based workloads with the Bpsv2 series. B-series v2 VMs offer up to 15% better price-performance, up to 5x higher network bandwidth, and 10x higher remote storage throughput compared to the previous generation B-series VMs.
Azure customers today can select from a diverse range of Azure virtual machines that are tailored to meet the high CPU performance and utilization needs of their workloads. However, certain categories of workload do not require high levels of CPU utilization and performance on a continuous basis and can be run more cost-effectively on VMs optimized for burstable performance. With B-series v2 VMs, you can balance high CPU utilization and cost savings that automatically meets your workload’s real-time requirements. Burstable virtual machines provide high CPU utilization when applications need it and run at a baseline CPU utilization to save cost when high CPU utilization and performance are not required.
B-series v2 VMs are ideal for workloads that experience unpredictable spikes in demand and require occasional bursts of high CPU utilization. This capability makes burstable VMs ideal candidates for a variety of workloads such as web applications, small and medium databases, micro services, code repositories, CI/CD pipelines for development and test environments, and servers for proof-of-concept development that don’t require full CPU performance all the time, but occasionally need to burst to complete tasks quickly.
With the new Arm-based Bpsv2 VMs now available alongside x86-based Bsv2 and new AMD-based Basv2 burstable VMs, customers can now tailor their infrastructure for specific performance and price-performance requirements across CPU architectures. Arm-Based Bpsv2 VMs, with one physical core per vCPU, are ideal for many workloads like microservices, web apps, containers, and small to medium databases. While Bsv2 and Bav2 VMs can run these workloads, they also offer capabilities and infrastructure for monolithic, vectorized workloads, and others that don’t have affinity to Arm-based VMs.
You can choose from multiple memory ratios for a given vCPU size, giving you the flexibility to select the configuration and architecture that is ideal for your workload. Bsv2-series and Basv2-series offer up to 32 vCPUs and 128 GiB of RAM, and the Bpsv2-series offers up to 16 vCPUs with 64 GiB of RAM. All sizes support accelerated networking and network bandwidth up to 6.25 Gbps.To learn more about the pricing of Arm64-based and x86-based VMs, please visit the Azure Virtual Machines pricing pages.
The new Azure B-series v2 VMs support various Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian, SUSE Enterprise Linux and more. Windows Server and Windows Client are supported on x86-based B-series VMs. Client application developers can take advantage of Azure’s highly available, scalable, and secure platform to run cloud-based software, build and test workflows. To help developers increase their agility and support their work, we’ve made Insider Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise available on Arm-based Azure B-series VMs. Access the full list of images in the Azure Marketplace.
The new virtual machines support all remote disk types such as Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD and Ultra Disk storage. To learn more about various disk types and their regional availability, please refer to Azure managed disk type. Disk storage is billed separately from virtual machines and to learn more ondisk pricing please see pricing for disks.
You can also take advantage of Spot Virtual Machines, Reserved Instances and Saving Plan that are available for all new B-series VM families to potentially save even more. You can significantly reduce costs and improve your budget forecasting with Reserved VM Instances through upfront one-year or three-year commitments. With the Azure Savings Plan, you have the flexibility to save across multiple Azure Services, including this one. For workloads that can tolerate interruptions and have flexible execution time, using Spot Virtual Machines can significantly reduce the cost of running in Azure and further optimize your cloud spend. Eligible new Azure customers can sign up for an Azure free account and receive $200 Azure credit.
Start running your applications on Azure B-series v2 VMs today. We can’t wait to hear about the amazing workloads you will build with these new VMs.
Learn what our partners have to say about Azure’s latest burstable VMs:
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