Chris Walden, Author at Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom

An introduction to cloud analytics

Chris Walden — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Microsoft Azure is a platform that can cater to your analytical workloads – picking the right tool for the right job is the key. Fortunately, the core offerings can be broken down into three platform as a service (PaaS) offerings for storing and managing your high scale data workloads, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks and HDInsight, and a well-integrated tool for visualising it, Microsoft Power BI.

Storing and managing your data

Analytics in the cloud is ultimately about storing your data in the cloud where it can be conveniently processed using powerful services. There are three Azure services for processing your data. One is built by Microsoft and the other two are popular non-Microsoft platforms hosted as first-party services on Azure.

Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) is a massively parallel job service that can ingest file data and dynamically process it into more manageable data. ADLA uses U-SQL, a query language that is a mix of C# and SQL. It is deeply integrated with Visual Studio for development and debugging. It is also integrated with Active Directory, so if you are already using Microsoft for your identity management, it is a convenient way to extend your prior technology investments.

Azure Data Lake Analytics works hand-in-hand with another Azure service called Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS). ADLS Gen2, which was made available to the public earlier this year, takes many of the features of the original ADLS and builds them on top of Azure Blob Storage. Since Azure Data Lake Storage is built around Apache YARN, it will also play well with any platform that uses the open Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) standard, such as Databricks or HDInsight.

Azure Databricks is based on the popular Apache Spark analytics platform and makes it easier to work with and scale data processing and machine learning. The team that developed Databricks is in large part of the same team that originally created Spark as a cluster-computing framework at University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, the Databricks team worked with Microsoft to develop Azure Databricks as a first-party Microsoft service that integrates natively with Active Directory and other Azure tools.

If you prefer to process and analyse data using open source frameworks, HDInsight is a platform that combines several of them, including Apache Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Hive, and Storm. This is the most cost-effective option for Azure-based analytics in the cloud. Using open source frameworks also allows you to enjoy community support and community apps while having access to Azure security and service level agreements (SLAs).

Viewing your data

Housing and analysing your data is only part of the story. To visualise your data, Microsoft provides Power BI, a powerful data visualisation tool that integrates with Data Lake Storage, Databricks, and HDInsight.

Produce dashboards and reports with rich visualisations in Power BI. There are 3 components to note when using Power BI:

Power BI Desktop is a Windows desktop application for your data analysts to build and create dashboards and reports to share with your wider organisation and business users .
Data Analysts will publish their content to the Power BI service, this is a cloud service where you you store and share the reports you create with others members of your organization.
For those roles within your business that are away from their main devices there are also IOS, Android and Windows apps to access from your mobile devices to get access to your content wherever and whenever you need it.

Power BI offers a variety of visualisation types out-of-the-box such as bar charts, pie charts, gauges, KPIs, scatter charts, and maps. Besides these standard charts, Power BI also enables you to create your own custom visualisations. You can share your visualisations with others on a community site or become inspired by other people’s charts. In addition, you have the ability to create even more impact with Report Themes. As with custom visualisations, you can share your custom designs in the community themes gallery.

Summary

Azure analytics in the cloud provides multiple ways to process and analyse your high scale data, whether you want to use Microsoft solutions or prefer to use open source solutions hosted on Azure. Either way, Azure provides the security, data storage and compute resources, data storage and compute resources to allow you to work with big data in a manner of your choosing through Data Lake Storage, Databricks, and HDInsight. Once your data is processed and analysed, you can use Microsoft Power BI to visualise and present your results on both desktop and mobile platforms and paint a picture of your cloud data.

Learn more

The post An introduction to cloud analytics appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

New Azure features and functionality for May 2023

Chris Walden — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:00:00 +0000

It’s been a busy month as far as new Azure features and functionality go! Just in case you’ve missed something, we’ve collected all of the announcements from April 2023 in one place. Be sure to give this list a read through, as there’s a wealth of exciting new functions and updates to check out!

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

The post New Azure features and functionality for May 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Getting started with Azure Machine Learning

Chris Walden — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Azure Machine Learning provides an environment to create and manage the end-to-end life cycle of Machine Learning models. Azure Machine Learning’s compatibility with open-source frameworks and platforms like PyTorch and TensorFlow makes it an effective all-in-one platform for integrating and handling data and models. Azure Machine Learning is designed for all skill levels, with advanced MLOps features and simple no-code model creation and deployment.

Getting started with Azure Machine Learning

Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) is a cloud-based environment where you can build and manage machine learning models. It’s designed to govern the entire ML life cycle, so you can train and deploy models without focusing on setup. The platform is suitable for any kind of machine learning, from classical to deep learning, to supervised and unsupervised learning.

Azure ML is structured to help teams of data scientists and ML engineers make the most of their existing data processing and model development skills. Whether you prefer Python or R – or have previous experience with other open-source platforms such as PyTorch and TensorFlow – Azure ML is flexible enough to support these platforms and accelerate your work.

With built-in services like Azure ML studio that provide a user-friendly interface, and Automated Machine Learning capabilities that assist you in model selection and training, Azure ML has tools and features to suit every level of experience.

Kickstart your Azure Machine Learning journey

Whether you’re a developer or simply someone who wants to get a feel for what Azure Machine Learning is all about, there are plenty of learning resources out there.

You can also find further learning resources on the Azure ML learning resources page.

Try out Azure Machine Learning

One of the best ways to get grips with new tools and software is simply to give it a go. There’s no better way to do this than getting stuck into Azure Machine Learning itself.

Trying out Azure Machine Learning is free, so give it a whirl today.

Try Azure Machine Learning for free

Learn more

The post Getting started with Azure Machine Learning appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Getting started with Azure Quantum

Chris Walden — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Quantum computing presents unprecedented possibilities to solve society’s most complex challenges. Microsoft is committed to responsibly turning these possibilities into reality – for the betterment of humanity and the planet.

Over decades of research and development, Microsoft has achieved advancements across every layer of the quantum stack – including software, applications, devices, and controls – and is delivering true impact today through quantum-inspired classical computing.

Getting started with Q#

Bring quantum apps to life with the quantum development kit for the Q# quantum programming language and Azure Quantum. In this open-source kit, you’ll find tools to formulate and run optimization problems on large-scale or hardware-accelerated Azure compute resources, as well as for developing durable quantum applications for quantum hardware.

Try out the Azure Quantum Preview

When developing on Azure Quantum, you accelerate your development lifecycle by building your quantum solution once and running it on multiple systems with little to no change. Azure Quantum is your best path to leverage the latest optimisation technologies from Microsoft and our Partners, as you seek long term cost-saving solutions.

With Azure Quantum and its quantum development kit, what could be a heterogenous hardware and software set of solutions is unified. Your development investments are protected in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, and these hardware and software innovations are brought to you with minimal to no change to your code base.

Trying out the Azure Quantum preview is free, so give it a whirl today.

Kickstart your Azure Quantum learning

Whether you’re a developer or simply someone who wants to get a feel for what quantum computing is all about, there are plenty of learning resources out there.

You can also find further learning resources on the Quantum learning resources page.

Learn more

The post Getting started with Azure Quantum appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Getting started with Azure AI

Chris Walden — Tue, 30 May 2023 14:00:00 +0000

With AI, we can build solutions that seemed like science fiction a short time ago; enabling incredible advances in health care, financial management, environmental protection, and other areas to make a better world for everyone.

Discover Azure AI – a portfolio of AI services designed for developers and data scientists. Take advantage of the decades of breakthrough research, responsible AI practices and flexibility that Azure AI offers to build and deploy your own AI solutions. Access high-quality vision, speech, language and decision-making AI models through simple API calls, and create your own machine learning models with tools such as Jupyter Notebooks, Visual Studio Code and open-source frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Getting started with Azure AI

AI is a broad classification of computing that allows a software system to perceive its environment and take action that maximizes its chance of successfully achieving its goals. A goal of AI is to create a software system that’s able to adapt, or learn something on its own without being explicitly programmed to do it.

There are two basic approaches to AI. The first is to employ a deep learning system that’s modelled on the neural network of the human mind, enabling it to discover, learn, and grow through experience.

The second approach is machine learning, a data science technique that uses existing data to train a model, test it, and then apply the model to new data to forecast future behaviours, outcomes, and trends.

Kickstart your Azure AI learning journey

Whether you’re a developer or simply someone who wants to get a feel for what Azure AI is all about, there are plenty of learning resources out there.

You can also find further learning resources on the Azure AI learning resources page.

Try out Azure AI

One of the best ways to get grips with new tools and software is simply to give it a go. There’s no better way to do this than getting stuck into Azure AI itself.

Trying out Azure AI is free, so give it a whirl today.

Try Azure AI for free

Learn more

The post Getting started with Azure AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

A look at the announcements from Microsoft Build 2023

Chris Walden — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:16:40 +0000

This year’s edition of Microsoft Build has now wrapped up, but don’t worry if you missed it! The high-quality sessions and keynotes from across the two days are available to watch on-demand via the Microsoft Build Session Catalogue.

The event brought us many surprises, so just in case you couldn’t tune in live, let’s walk through some of the key announcements.

Azure AI

With the continual advancements being made in AI, solutions are rapidly changing to meet the needs of users. Microsoft Azure AI Service has several new capabilities to help customers increase productivity, efficiency and content safety for customers.

Updates to Azure OpenAI Service, now in preview, will include enhancements like Azure AI Studio, which will better enable organisations to combine Azure OpenAI Service with their data; a Provisioned Throughput Model, which will offer dedicated/reserved capacity; and plugins that will simplify integrating external data sources and streamline the process of building and consuming APIs.

Azure AI Content Safety, a new Azure AI service, will empower businesses to create safer online environments and communities. Models are designed to detect hate, violent, sexual and self-harm content across languages in both images and text. The models assign a severity score to flagged content, indicating to human moderators what content requires urgent attention.

Vector search for Azure Cognitive Search, the retrieval system for new large language models (LLM) apps, is coming soon in preview. Vector search allows developers to easily store, index and search by concept in addition to keywords, using organisational data including text, images, audio, video and graphs.

New capabilities, now in preview for Azure Cognitive Service for Language, will include the ability for developers to customise summarisation, in addition to the entity recognition, text classification and conversational language understanding (CLU) features already announced, and are all powered by Azure OpenAI Service.

Azure Machine Learning drastically improves machine learning professionals’ ability to operationalise responsible generative AI solutions by enabling evaluation at all phases of the model lifecycle. Updates to Azure Machine Learning include:

Prompt flow, in preview soon, will provide a streamlined experience for prompting, evaluating and tuning large language models. Users can quickly create prompt workflows that connect to various language models and data sources and assess the quality of their workflows with measurements, such as “groundedness,” to choose the best prompt for their use case.
Support for foundation models, in preview, will provide native capabilities to fine-tune and deploy foundation models from multiple open-source repositories using Azure Machine Learning components and pipelines.
Responsible AI dashboard support for text and image data, now in preview, will enable users to evaluate large models built with unstructured data during the model building, training and/or evaluation stage. This helps users identify model errors, fairness issues and model explanations before models are deployed, for more performant and fair computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) models.
Model monitoring, in preview, will enable users to track model performance in production, receive timely alerts and analyse issues for continuous learning and model improvement.

Azure Data

Microsoft Fabric, now in preview, delivers an integrated and simplified experience for all analytics workloads and users on an enterprise-grade data foundation. It brings together Power BI, Data Factory and the next generation of Synapse in a unified software as a service (SaaS) offering to give customers a price-effective and easy-to-manage modern analytics solution for the era of AI.

Power BI has several new updates that will empower organisations to turn data into insights immediately with an industry-leading BI platform and include:

Copilot in Power BI, in preview, will infuse the power of large language models with an organisation’s data to help uncover and share insights faster.
Power BI Direct Lake, in preview, is a new storage mode within Power BI datasets that will allow organisations to unlock massive data without having to replicate it, by seeing straight through to the data in the lake.
Power BI Desktop Developer Mode, in preview, will enable developer-centric workflows through Git integration for Power BI datasets and reports.

Azure Cosmos DB is introducing a range of new enhancements to optimise costs, performance and developer productivity. These enhancements demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to improving the user experience for app developers.

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale elastic pools is introducing a shared resource model for Hyperscale databases, now in preview. This update will help developers build and manage new apps in the cloud and scale multiple databases that have varying and unpredictable usage demands.

Developer Community

Microsoft is launching a variety of training and documentation on Microsoft Learn to help people leverage the power of AI.

The newly released content helps technology professionals build expertise and gain new skills in the latest AI innovations, including how to:

Use Azure OpenAI Service to summarise text, get code suggestions and generate images for a website.
Add intelligence to apps – and find insights – by creating tailored AI models within Power Apps.
Use Power Virtual Agents to build adaptable chatbots that use AI.
Code suggestions with GitHub Copilot to take projects to the next level.

Power Platform

Next-generation AI in Power Pages is revolutionising how customers build and launch data-centric websites for their businesses. With Copilot in Power Pages, now in preview, users can increase productivity and speed up the website building process by generating text, creating complex forms, contextual chatbots and web page layouts and creating and editing image and site design themes for rapid visual setup and customisation. This is possible in minutes using natural language input and intelligent suggestions.

Power Virtual Agents continues to help developers create more intelligent chatbots using the latest AI capabilities. New features include the ability for Power Virtual Agents to generate dialogue and complete actions, Azure conversational language understanding (CLU) integration, and the expansion of previously announced features, including conversation boosters in Power Virtual Agents.

Catalog in Power Apps, a new feature within Power Platform now in preview, will give developers and makers a place to publish and share the building blocks that underlie their apps. With every new app that developers create, their organisation will enjoy the benefits of a robust catalog that reduces the time and cost of each new app.

With Power Virtual Agents (PVA), users can easily author an intelligent Microsoft Teams bot using natural language to build and point to any website available within the tenant and Teams users. This update, now in preview, will democratise building company-wide help desk bots, such as human resources bots, and department/team-wide bots, such as onboarding bots.

And more!

This is just a small selection of announcements from Build 2023! Be sure to check out the Book of News to see everything, which includes announcements on AI, Security, Windows and more.

Missed the show? Check out the sessions you might have missed in the Session Catalogue, and follow the conversation on the UK Twitter channel, @MSDevUK, as well as on the #MSBuild hashtag!

The post A look at the announcements from Microsoft Build 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

New Azure features and functionality for April 2023

Chris Walden — Wed, 17 May 2023 13:35:28 +0000

It’s been a busy month as far as new Azure features and functionality go! Just in case you’ve missed something, we’ve collected all of the announcements from March 2023 in one place. Be sure to give this list a read through, as there’s a wealth of exciting new functions and updates to check out!

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

The post New Azure features and functionality for April 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Microsoft Build returns May 23-25!

Chris Walden — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 13:20:41 +0000

Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Microsoft Build, is back once again! Kicking off next month on May 24-26, it’ll be delivering high-quality sessions and keynotes from familiar faces at Microsoft, all at no cost. You just need to register!

You will hear cutting-edge perspectives from across the developer industry, discussing the developer landscape and opportunities for the coming year and beyond. By registering, you’ll be automatically signed up for all global content.

Every developer is welcome

At Microsoft Build, you’ll leave a better developer than when you arrived. It’s where you can solve challenges, meet the engineers behind the Microsoft platforms you use every day, and connect with a diverse group of developers who want to hone their skills.

On the day, you can expect all of this and more:

Keynotes: Headlines and announcements delivered by executives.
Technical/Breakout Sessions: More in-depth coverage of keynote content.
Ask the Experts: Sessions with experts in cloud, desktop, mobile, and web development for guidance specific to your project or interests.
Table Topics: Gather the community for live discussion on camera, and in chat! Get inspired by community experts, learn best practices, and discover helpful resources with other attendees.
Learn Live: Guided online with a subject matter expert to walk and talk through Microsoft Learn modules.
Partner Sessions: Connect with Microsoft Partners in either an Ask the Expert or Table Topics session.

On top of that, there are a variety of theme sessions for you to tune into, with topics from all over the developer ecosystem. Whether you want to learn about app development, AI or DevOps, there’s a session for you.

Register now!

In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to use the Microsoft Build session planner to sign up for these talks and more. It’s a great way to view all of the technical content on offer, while tailoring the event specifically to your interests.

Microsoft Build will provide the key developer content for which the event is known, while tailoring the event experience towards topics that developers the world over are looking for.

This digital event starts on May 23 at 8AM BST, at no cost, so register today to avoid disappointment!

Useful links

Register for Build 2023 today!
Follow the conversation on @MSDevUK, as well as on the #MSBuild hashtag!
Check out Microsoft Learn TV

The post Microsoft Build returns May 23-25! appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

New Azure features and functionality for March 2023

Chris Walden — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 22:25:00 +0000

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

The post New Azure features and functionality for March 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

New Azure features and functionality for February 2023

Chris Walden — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 14:37:39 +0000

It’s been a busy month as far as new Azure features and functionality go! Just in case you’ve missed something, we’ve collected all of the announcements from February 2023 in one place. Be sure to give this list a read through, as there’s a wealth of exciting new functions and updates to check out!

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

The post New Azure features and functionality for February 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Chris Walden, Author at Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom

An introduction to cloud analytics

Storing and managing your data

Viewing your data

Summary

Learn more

New Azure features and functionality for May​ 2023

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

Getting started with Azure Machine Learning

Getting started with Azure Machine Learning

Kickstart your Azure Machine Learning journey

Try out Azure Machine Learning

Learn more

Getting started with Azure Quantum

Getting started with Q#

Try out the Azure Quantum Preview

Kickstart your Azure Quantum learning

Learn more

Getting started with Azure AI

Getting started with Azure AI

Kickstart your Azure AI learning journey

Try out Azure AI

Learn more

A look at the announcements from Microsoft Build 2023

Azure AI

Azure Data

Developer Community

Power Platform

And more!

New Azure features and functionality for April​ 2023

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

Microsoft Build returns May 23-25!

Every developer is welcome

Register now!

Useful links

New Azure features and functionality for March​ 2023

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

New Azure features and functionality for February​ 2023

General Availability

Updates

Misc

Useful Links

New Azure features and functionality for May 2023

New Azure features and functionality for April 2023

New Azure features and functionality for March 2023

New Azure features and functionality for February 2023