Category: AI

What is the Book of News? The Microsoft Build 2023 Book of News is your guide to the key news items that are announced at Build 2023.

As expected there is a lot of focus on Azure and AI, followed by Microsoft 365, Security, Windows, and Edge & Bing. This year the book of news is interactive instead of being a PDF.

Some of my favourite announcements

Azure Cloud Native and Application Platform

Azure API Management

• Azure API Center: A new service that will enable organizations to centralize and manage their portfolio of APIs, regardless of type, life cycle or deployment location. This update is in preview. Learn more about updates to Azure API Center.
• WebSocket API passthrough: Allows users to manage, protect, observe and expose WebSocket APIs running in container environments with the API Management self-hosted gateway container. This is now generally available. Learn more about WebSocket API passthrough.
• Self-hosted gateway support for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tokens: Users will be able to secure communication between the self-hosted gateway to Azure to download configuration using Azure AD tokens. This allows customers to avoid manually refreshing a gateway token that expires every 30 days. This update is generally available.

Azure Event Grid

• Leverage HTTP to enable “pull” delivery of discrete events to provide more flexible consumption patterns at high scale.
• Enable publish-subscribe via the MQTT protocol, enabling bidirectional communication at scale between Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud-based services.
• Enables routing MQTT data to other Azure services and third-party services for further data analytics and storage.

These updates are now in preview. Learn more about public preview of MQTT protocol and pull message delivery in Azure Event Grid.

Azure Functions

• Deploy containerized Azure Functions in an Azure Container Apps environment to quickly build event-driven, cloud-native apps leveraging built-in Dapr integrations for distributed, microservice-based serverless apps.
• Maximize developer velocity using Azure Functions integrated programming model, write code using preferred programming language or framework that Azure Functions supports and get the built-in service integrations with triggers and bindings for a first-class, event-driven, cloud-native experience.
• Run Azure Functions alongside other microservices, APIs, websites, workflows or any containerized app using an Azure Container Apps environment built for robust serverless scale, microservices and fully managed infrastructure.

Azure Kubernetes Service

• Long-term support is now generally available, starting with Kubernetes 1.27. Once enabled, this provides a two-year support window for a specific version of Kubernetes. Kubernetes delivers new releases every three to four months to keep up with the pace of innovation in the cloud-native world. To give enterprises more control over their environment, long-term support for Kubernetes enables customers to stay on the same release for two years – twice as long as what’s possible today. This is a long-awaited development in the cloud-native, open-source community for customers who need the additional option for a longer upgrade runway with continued support and security updates.
• Transactable Kubernetes apps, now generally available, allow AKS customers to explore a vibrant ecosystem of first- and third-party Kubernetes-ready solutions from Azure Marketplace, and purchase and securely deploy them on AKS with easy click-through deployments. Conveniently integrated with Azure billing, these solutions are ready to use, taking advantage of all the benefits of running on a cloud-native platform like AKS.
• Confidential containers in AKS, now in preview, is a first-party offering that will allow teams to run standard unmodified containers, aligned with the Kata Confidential Containers open-source project, to achieve zero trust operator deployments with AKS. These containers can be integrated with the typical services used by apps running on AKS for monitoring, logging, etc. in a trusted execution environment (TEE), with each pod assigned its own memory encryption key, providing hardware-based confidentiality and integrity protections, underscoring Microsoft’s focus on enterprise-readiness for these workloads. Learn more about confidential containers in AKS.
• The multi-cluster update in Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager (Fleet), in preview, will enable multi-cluster and at-scale scenarios for AKS clusters. The new multi-cluster update feature gives teams the ability to orchestrate planned updates across multiple clusters for a consistent environment.

Azure Communication Services

• A new set of application programming interfaces (APIs), generally available next month, will help developers build server-based, intelligent calling workflows into their apps and simplify the delivery of personalized customer engagement with additional AI capabilities from Azure Cognitive Services.
• Call automation interoperability into Microsoft Teams will be in preview next month for businesses that want to connect experts who use Teams into existing customer service calls. From daily appointment bookings and order updates to complex customer outreach for marketing and customer service, call automation with Azure Communication Services is changing the landscape of customer engagement.

Azure Data Platform

Microsoft Fabric

• 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. Fabric has experiences for all workloads and data professionals in one place – including data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, applied observability and business intelligence – to increase productivity like never before.
• To further enable organizations to accelerate value creation with their data, Microsoft is integrating Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, in preview soon, to enable the use of natural language and a chat experience to generate code and queries, create AI plugins using a low/no-code experience, enable custom Q&A, tailor semantics and components within the plugin and deploy to Microsoft Teams, Power BI and web. With AI-driven insights, customers can focus on telling the right data story and let Copilot do the heavy lifting.
• Organizational data is hosted on Microsoft’s unified foundation, OneLake, which provides a single source of truth and reduces the need to extract, move or replicate data, helping eliminate rogue data sprawl. Fabric also enables persistent data governance and a single capacity pricing model that scales with growth, and it’s open at every layer with no proprietary lock-ins. Deep integrations with Microsoft 365, Teams and AI Copilot experiences accelerate and scale data value creation for everyone. From data professionals to non-technical business users, Fabric has role-tailored experiences to empower everyone to unlock more value from data.

Azure Cosmos DB

• ​Burst capacity: Developers can achieve better performance and productivity with burst capacity, which allows customers to utilize the idle throughput capacity of their database or container to handle traffic spikes. Databases using standard provisioned throughput with burst capacity enabled will be able to maintain performance during short bursts when requests exceed the throughput limit. This gives customers a cushion if they’re under-provisioned and allows them to experience fewer rate-limited requests. This update is generally available.
• ​Hierarchical partition keys: More efficient partitioning strategies and improved performance are made possible by hierarchical partition keys, which enable up to three partition keys to be used instead of one. This removes the performance trade-offs that developers often face when having to choose a single partition key and enables more optimal data distribution and high scale. This is generally available.
• ​Materialized Views for Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL: With Materialized Views, now in preview, users will be able to create and maintain secondary views of their data in containers that are used to serve queries that would be too expensive to serve with an existing container. Materialized Views can easily create and maintain data between two containers.
• ​Azure Cosmos DB “All versions and deletes” change feed mode: Developers will be able to get a full view of changes to items occurring within the continuous backup retention period of their account, saving time and reducing app complexity. This is in preview.
• ​.NET and Java SDKs Telemetry + App Insights: Monitoring apps will be easier with this update, now in preview. The Azure Cosmos DB .NET and Java SDKs support distributed tracing to help developers easily monitor their apps and troubleshoot issues, thereby improving performance and developer productivity.

Windows Platform

• After listening to developer feedback, Microsoft created a home for developers on Windows with a renewed focus on productivity and performance across all stages of the development lifecycle. These features, now in preview, include:
• Dev Home will allow users to quickly set up their machines, connect to GitHub and monitor and manage workflows in one central location. Dev Home is open source and extensible, allowing users to enhance their experience with a customizable dashboard and the tools they need to be successful. Users can also add GitHub widgets to track projects and system widgets to track CPU and GPU performance.
• Windows Package Manager now includes WinGet configuration, which handles the setup requirements for an ideal development environment on a Windows machine using a WinGet configuration file, reducing device setup time from days to hours. Developers no longer need to worry about searching for the right version of the software, packages, tools or frameworks to download or settings to apply. WinGet configuration reduces this manual and error-prone process down to a single command with a WinGet configuration file.
• Dev Drive is a new type of storage volume designed to provide developers with a file system that meets their needs for both performance and security. It is based on the Resilient File System (ReFS) and combined with a new performance mode capability in Microsoft Defender Antivirus provides up to 30% performance improvement in build times for file input/output (I/O) scenarios over the in-market Windows 11 version. The new performance mode is more secure for developer workloads than folder or process exclusions, providing a solution that balances security with performance.
• Windows Terminal is getting smarter with GitHub Copilot X. Users of GitHub Copilot will be able to take advantage of natural language AI both inline and in an experimental chat experience to recommend commands, explain errors and take actions within the Terminal app. Microsoft is also experimenting with GitHub Copilot-powered AI in other developer tools like WinDBG to help developers’ complete tasks with less toil.

Click here to read the Microsoft Build 2023 Book of News!

Enjoy!