The Big Announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2019

Yesterday wrapped up Day 1 of the 2019 Microsoft Ignite event. As always there was no shortage of announcements for IT professionals of all walks of life. In this blog post we’re going to talk about some of the bigger announcements that have impacts in the infrastructure space, as well as office services as well. So let’s dive in!

Azure Arc

There is no doubt that Azure Arc was the headline of the show for many attendees. In short, Azure Arc is designed to be a control plane for Multi-Cloud / Multi-Edge Deployments. Meaning, single-pane-of-glass management for all computing resources regardless of where they live. Many organizations have compute resources in many locations, including on-premises, Azure, other cloud environments…etc..etc, and the big challenge has always been maintaining effective management of these disparate systems. Azure Arc is designed to address this issue.

With Azure Arc, your on-premises resources actually appear in the Azure Console and can be managed in much the same way as you would manage a VM running in Azure. The on-prem resources could then be integrated with Azure services such as Log Analytics and Azure Policies. Additionally, as a demo during the Azure technical keynote, an instance of the Azure SQL DB service was actually pushed down to one of the on-premises VMs, just as if it was another Azure resource!

If you’d like more details on this feature, we’ll be putting together some content in the near future. In the meantime check out the video below that’s been put out by the Azure Advocacy Team.

Project Cortex

Another noteworthy announcement from the keynotes today was Project Cortex. The stated goal of Project Cortex is to take all of the data that resides in an organization’s Office 365 tenant and create usable knowledge out of it by leveraging AI. For example, you set a meeting with a co-worker. This feature would see that you’ve set a meeting with your co-worker and would do things like show you the last couple of documents you shared with that person. Or, another example would be topic centers and knowledge centers. These assets are automatically created and updated by AI and present applicable information to people in various office applications. The whole goal is to more readily present the information you need when you need it. More preliminary information on Project Cortex can be found here.

Azure Quantum

A year or two back at a previous Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft showed off some enhancements in the realm of quantum computing. If you follow the news in quantum computing, you likely know that it’s a radically different computing model and will fundamentally alter the tech scene. Azure Quantum is a collection of quantum services from Microsoft and a number of other vendors that is designed to enable open access to quantum resources. The other thing regarding this service that’s nice to see is that it’s being done with openness in mind. Open source is a key design decision and will help benefit everyone involved in bringing quantum computing to the masses in the coming years.

If you’re interested in finding out a bit more about these new features, Microsoft has a website now setup for Azure Quantum here.

Additional Options for the Intelligent Edge and Azure Stack

As you likely know from previous years, Azure Stack was designed to bring a purpose-built appliance with Azure services to your datacenter. It’s seen widespread adoption since its release, especially in the enterprise and service provider space. However, Microsoft sees edge use cases (think branch offices and remote locations) as a key area where Azure stack can be leveraged extensively. With this in mind, Microsoft has created several different variants of Azure Stack for a vast swath of compute use cases. These use-cases ranged from branch office retail stores with a small Azure Stack Edge Device in their building, to search and rescue teams needing to process drone data, from “Ruggedized” Azure Stack instances in their backpacks!

We’ll be talking more about Azure Stack in the coming weeks and months, but if you’re interested in more information regarding how all these options fit together, Microsoft has updated its Azure Stack product site with many of these new offerings.

Interview with Jeffery Snover

Further Information

The announcements mentioned here are simply the tip of the iceberg. There were several other smaller announcements that came out of Microsoft today, including things like new VM sizes in Azure IaaS, a new Performance Monitor application, and GA of Windows Admin Center 1910. We’ll be bringing you updated information on these topics as the week progresses, and also be on the lookout for blogs on each of these areas on the Altaro blogs in the near future!

Stay tuned for more information!