Microsoft is participating in SUSECON Digital 2021 to bring the latest technical integrations and support to SUSE Linux users. In the three-day event, Microsoft will participate in several activities from keynotes and demo sessions to booths.

We will share the latest innovation that enables mission-critical SUSE workloads to migrate and operate in Azure during the event. We will cover the latest advancement of SAP on Azure with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, enabling high-performance computing for specialized workloads, the latest feature updates with SQL on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, running SUSE workloads in hybrid with Azure Arc, and automating management services with Azure Automanage.

On the main stage, Arpan Shah, our General Manager of Azure Infrastructure and Edge, will join Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology and Product Officer of SUSE, for a keynote session, “Bridging mission-critical workloads across hybrid clouds with SUSE on Azure,” to discuss the latest innovations with SUSE. And we will also be featuring Kate Goldenring, our software engineer and contributor of Project Akri, in the edge world keynote to talk about the latest development of the connected edge with Kubernetes. 

Bridge workloads across hybrid clouds

Here’s a preview of what you will hear from us:

In

Microsoft is excited to join Red Hat Summit 2021. It is our fifth year consecutively participating, and we look forward to engaging with the Red Hat community. In the April segment (April 27-28), Scott Guthrie, our executive vice president of Cloud + AI, will join Paul Cormier in the keynote “Open hybrid cloud: Changing what’s possible” to talk about our partnership, followed by an Ask the Expert session, “Azure Unplugged: Everything you need to know running Red Hat workloads on Azure.” Later in the June segment (June 15-16), we will feature more in-depth technical sessions and demos.

During the event, we will share the latest developments that enable Red Hat customers to operate natively in Azure. We will cover innovations across migration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) workloads, building cloud-native apps with Azure Red Hat OpenShift, running Red Hat workloads in hybrid with Azure Arc, operating and managing enterprise Java apps, and automating all tasks with Ansible on Azure.

Here’s a preview of what you will hear from us:

In addition to migrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to Azure Pay As You Go images, Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux now also supports Azure Reserved Instances. This allows customers

This post was co-authored by Altaf Tambawala, Principal Program Manager, Azure

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Cloud Services (extended support), which is a new Azure Resource Manager (ARM)-based deployment model for Azure Cloud Services. The platform-supported tool for migrating existing cloud services to Cloud Services (extended support) also goes into preview today.

Cloud Services (extended support) has the primary benefit of providing regional resiliency along with feature parity with Azure Cloud Services deployed using Azure Service Manager (ASM). It also offers some ARM capabilities such as role-based access and control (RBAC), tags, policy, private link support, and use of deployment templates.

The ASM-based deployment model for Cloud Services has been renamed Cloud Services (classic). Customers retain the ability to build and rapidly deploy web and cloud applications and services. Customers will be able to scale cloud services infrastructure based on current demand and ensure that the performance of applications can keep up while simultaneously reducing costs. Migrating to ARM will allow customers to set up a robust infrastructure platform for their applications.

Available migration paths

Cloud Services (extended support) provides two paths for customers to migrate from ASM to ARM:

Re-deploy: Customers can deploy a

Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Prevent exceeding your budget with forecasted cost alerts New cost view for subscriptions What’s new in Cost Management Labs Demystifying cloud economics New ways to save money with Azure New videos and learning opportunities Documentation updates

Let’s dig into the details.

Prevent exceeding your budget with forecasted cost alerts

Staying on top of your costs is critical. Luckily, you can easily set up predefined alerts as you approach your budget in Azure Cost Management and Billing. Now you can define alerts based

“This post continues our Advancing Reliability series highlighting initiatives underway to constantly improve the reliability of the Azure platform. In 2018 we shared steps we’re taking to improve virtual machine (VM) resiliency using live migration. In 2019 we shared how we’re further improving virtual machine resiliency with Project Tardigrade, which identifies host failures and recovers from them through memory-preserving soft kernel reboots. In 2020 we shared our AIOps vision for improving service quality using artificial intelligence. Today, we wanted to provide an update on how these efforts are evolving by introducing Project Narya, an end-to-end prediction, and mitigation service. As I shared at Microsoft Ignite last week, Narya has become an important part of the intelligent infrastructure of Azure. The post that follows was written by Jeffrey He, a Program Manager from our Azure Compute team.”—Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure

This post includes contributions from Principal Data Scientist Manager Yingnong Dang and Senior Data Scientists Sebastien Levy, Randolph Yao, and Youjiang Wu.

Project Narya is a holistic, end-to-end prediction and mitigation service—named after the “ring of fire” from Lord of the Rings, known to resist the weariness of time. Narya is designed not only to predict and mitigate Azure host

Microsoft Azure is a key enabler of the digital transformation journey of our customers today. Customers are using Azure to spur business innovation and realizing how running in Azure makes them more resilient, more agile, and more efficient. They are looking to migrate more and more of their existing portfolio of applications to Azure to realize this value. On the Azure Migrate product team, we are focused on simplifying the migration process for our customers so that they can migrate their workloads swiftly. In July last year, we introduced a new enhanced version of Azure Migrate. Azure Migrate is the hub for all your migration needs featuring a collection of tools across the discovery, assessment, and migration phases for multiple migration scenarios including servers, applications, and databases. We’ve continued to innovate and have since added multiple new capabilities such as agentless application discovery and dependency analysis to make it even easier for you to plan and execute migrations to Azure.

One of the most popular tools in Azure Migrate’s portfolio of tools is the Azure Migrate: Server Migration tool. The server migration tool lets you migrate servers and the applications on them to Azure virtual machines. The server migration

Whether you’re a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Introducing the Azure Advisor Score Create subscriptions with ARM templates Tell us what you need when verifying billed charges What’s new in Cost Management Labs New ways to save money with Azure New videos and learning opportunities Documentation updates

Let’s dig into the details.

Introducing the Azure Advisor Score

Wouldn’t it be great to have some assurances that you’re running your workloads in a cost-efficient manner? That’s exactly what Azure Advisor gives you and now, with the Advisor Score, it’s easier than ever for you

As businesses look to the cloud to ensure business resiliency and to spur innovation, we continue to see customer migrations to Azure accelerate. Increasingly, we’ve heard from business leaders preparing to migrate that they could learn from our best practices and want general help thinking about migration, and we started a blog series to help share those even more broadly. In our kick-off blog for this series, we shared that landing zones are a key component to anticipating and mitigating complexities as part of your migration. In this blog, we will cover what landing zones are and the importance of getting cloud destinations ready in advance of the physical migration, as that generates significant benefit in the long-term.

IT and business leaders often ask us about how they can both enable their teams to innovate with agility in Azure and remain compliant within organizational governance, security, and efficiency guardrails. Getting this balance right is critical to cloud migration success. One of the most important questions to getting it right is how to set up destination Azure environments we call landing zones.

At Microsoft, we believe that cloud agility isn’t at odds with setting up the right foundation for migration initiatives—in fact,

Moving to the cloud creates an opportunity to pause and think about how to operate the IT environment. Most organizations in the world have seen their ability to innovate and adopt cloud technologies slowed down by the rules and operating model that governs their existing IT environments. Organizations have their own set of processes, tools, and dedicated staff to ensure that these environments can continuously support business needs.

With the move to a cloud environment, IT has access to new tools and processes that unblock IT operations. By revisiting the operating model, technology-focused teams and Azure partners can help organizations improve agility, cost, and scale.

Azure landing zones in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure are designed to accelerate efforts to map, modernize, or even reimagine the operating model. Azure landing zones help build a cloud environment aligned to the optimal technology operations specific to your needs in the cloud.

As the following analogy illustrates, a standardized foundation can’t fit the variety of needs seen by organizations and operating models. Respecting any need for options and customization, we provide a range of landing zone architectures and implementation options. Organizations can use the implementation option that most clearly aligns to

Organizations today are changing how they run their businesses to ensure safety and efficiency. As we work closely with our customers, their top priorities include optimizing business costs, scaling for a remote workforce, and ensuring business continuity. As a result, cloud migration remains a priority and partners play a critical role.

To support your cloud migration projects, we are committed to solutions that optimize costs, scale efficiencies, and bring unmatched security and compliance. We have amazing offers, like Azure Hybrid Benefit, reserved instances, and free extended security updates to help our customers save money. Azure also delivers the lowest total cost of ownership for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads, with up to 3x better performance over AWS (GigaOm*).

We are also seeing increasing adoption of specialized workloads like the Azure VMware Solution as customers look to migrate their entire IT estate to Azure. Lastly, Azure does all of this while remaining flexible, so customers can extend their on-premises investments and leverage them as they move to the cloud. The new Azure Stack HCI preview is one example that we just announced.

Today, we’re sharing new Azure services that help accelerate migration.

Leverage new Azure infrastructure services to migrate workloads