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Introduction Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability (MCfS) empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress and business growth by bringing together a set of environmental, social, and governance capabilities across the Microsoft cloud portfolio plus solutions from its global ecosystem of partners. Through this, organizations are enabled to gain the transparency and insights they need to manage their environmental footprint, embed sustainability through their organization and value chain, and create new value in a changing landscape. MCfS API (Preview) overview MCfS provides APIs to access emissions data related to your Azure usage.…

This one-pager outlines a use case for industries and manufacturing as, for example, consumer electronics manufacturing, but it can be perfectly applied to almost all domains that involve factories (such as clothing, as an example). Nowadays, every manufacturer applies some quality and security controls inside the factories. Those can be divided into people security (employees) and quality control (what is being manufactured). Those two vectors can be automated in a relatively easy way by controlling what the manufacturer considers most important constantly, as “anything can happen anytime”. Potential solution’s goals: For quality control thermal video i…

In your WordPress Managed offering, go to webssh of your SCM site - https://<app name>.scm.azurewebsites.net/webssh/host Install the GD extension with Webp support using the below command. apk add --no-cache --virtual .build-deps autoconf pkgconfig gcc g++ gawk make zlib-dev libpng-dev libwebp-dev \ && docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-webp \ && docker-php-ext-install gd \ && apk del .build-deps Copy the newly installed gd.so file to a persistent file storage. mkdir -p /home/dev/extensions cp /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20200930/gd.so /home/dev/extensions/gd.so Now write a post-startup scr…

We all understand the importance of cost optimization in cloud infrastructure. Azure offers numerous tools and strategies to assess, manage, and reduce costs. In this blog post, I will share insights and tips on cost optimization in Azure. Based on our experience, we have identified several commonly used Azure services that contribute significantly to monthly costs. For each service, I will suggest cost-saving measures that can be easily implemented. However, before implementing these techniques, it is crucial to reevaluate your technical architecture to optimize performance and efficiency. This may involve considering alternative services or architectures, such as …

This article is brought to you by the Nonprofit Tech Acceleration (NTA) for Black and African American Communities Program Technical Team. For information on how to take advantage of the granted offerings or free technical consultation, please visit: Supporting Black Community Nonprofits | Microsoft Nonprofits Azure WordPress is a service provided by Microsoft Azure that enables you to easily deploy, manage, and scale WordPress websites on the Azure platform. WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that is used to create websites and blogs. With Azure WordPress, you can deploy WordPress on Azure App Service, a fully managed platform for buil…

Today, we are excited to announce Windows 365 Frontline is in public preview. You now have the ability to provision Cloud PCs for shift and part-time workers or others who only need a Cloud PC for a limited amount of time during their work day. I'm going to share a few use case scenarios, then offer details on how you can provision and manage Windows 365 Frontline Cloud PCs. How Windows 365 Frontline helps simplify provisioning for IT Windows 365 Frontline makes it easier and more affordable to extend the power of Cloud PCs to frontline and shift work employees so they can experience the benefits of Windows in the cloud. A single Windows 365 Frontline license supp…

Azure API Management (APIM) is one of the PaaS products offered by Azure which allows you to publish, manage, secure and monitor APIs. One of the features of APIM is the ability to control the traffic to your APIs using policies such as rate limits and quotas. Rate limits are policies that prevent API usage spikes on a per subscription or per key basis by limiting the call rate to a specified number per a specified time period. Quotas are policies that enforce a hard limit on the number of calls that can be made to an API within a billing period. In this blog post, we will focus on how to configure rate limits for different operations in APIM using the `rate…

Some Always Encrypted cmdlets in the SqlServer PowerShell module need to communicate with key stores holding SQL Server column master keys. When a key store is an Azure service, e.g., Azure Key Vault, the cmdlet needs to present an Azure AD-issued authorization token when connecting to the service. Currently, the SqlServer PowerShell module provides its own cmdlet for authenticating to Azure AD - Add-SqlAzureAuthenticationContext, which stores the acquired tokens in a token cache internal to the SqlServer module. The cmdlet suffers from problems like limited authentication methods and currently it supports only Azure Key Vault, etc. Until now! The release …

The demand for deploying agents in bulk on on-premise SQL servers is increasing, and manual deployment of the agent in bulk is a highly time-consuming task. Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server extends Azure services to SQL Server instances hosted outside of Azure: in your data center, in edge site locations like retail stores, or any public cloud or hosting provider. It's worth noting that the SQL Server instance that you intend to enable with Azure Arc can be installed on a virtual or physical machine running either Windows or Linux. To onboard a Azure Arc-enabled SQL server, If your SQL Server instance is not yet connected to Azure, you can initiate the connectio…

We’ve been hard at work improving the Microsoft Store experience in Intune in preparation for the Microsoft Store for Business and Education retirement. In November 2022, we released a new and improved Microsoft Store app management experience in Intune, leveraging Windows Package Manager, along with other improvements. You can learn more by reading Update to Endpoint Manager integration with the Microsoft Store on Windows or watching . Additionally, we discussed the new Store experience and answered customer questions in this video: Unpacking Endpoint Management: The future of app management in Intune. While the new Microsoft Store integration and app type in Int…

Today, Azure Communications Services announces the general availability of Email service, expanding its comprehensive suite of multichannel communication APIs. Businesses can embed email in their customer engagement applications to enhance their customer’s communication experience. This new Email service is powered by Exchange Online and meets the security and privacy requirements of enterprises. In addition, Azure Communication Services Email provides low code /no code capabilities through Power Platform and Azure Logic Apps. With in-depth analytics and engagement tracking capabilities, Azure Communication Services Email helps businesses improve their customer engagemen…

This article is brought to you by the Nonprofit Tech Acceleration (NTA) for Black and African American Communities Program Technical Team. For information on how to take advantage of the granted offerings or free technical consultation, please visit: Supporting Black Community Nonprofits | Microsoft Nonprofits Microsoft Viva Sales is a new app that works with Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Sales CRM and works with other non-Microsoft CRM solutions like Salesforce. Microsoft didn't want to brand Viva Sales as "Dynamics" because it also can work with other non-Microsoft-developed CRM platforms. Viva Sales will be available for no additional charge to Dynamics 365 custo…

Scenario Sequence number in a service bus message only guarantees the extractor order of messages, but not the processing order. In the diagram below to make sure M1, M2 & M3 are processed also in order, it requires sessions to be enabled on the service bus queue. [attachment=36752:name] In the diagram, there are three messages in the service bus queue M1, M2 & M3. And there are two competing consumers (Consumer1 & Consumer2) listening to the message broker. Consumer1 picks up M1.Consumer2 picks up M2. Consumer 2 finishes processing M2 andConsumer2 picks up M3 At this point, Consumer1 has not completed processing M1 yet. Consum…

We are thrilled to announce that the Microsoft 365 Copilot is coming to OneNote. This powerful tool combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data from the Microsoft Graph—notes, calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more—and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into a powerful productivity tool. All of this is done within our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise. We know that too much time is spent on the mundane tasks of work and not enough time is spent on the work that brings us joy and ignites our creativity. That's why Copilot is being integrated directly into OneNote. It works with you, embe…

As more and more businesses move their data and applications to the cloud, the need for powerful and reliable database solutions has never been greater. Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server is a fully managed service that provides users with a highly scalable, available, and performant PostgreSQL database. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of our new query performance insight feature for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, designed to help users better understand and optimize the performance of their database queries. Why query performance monitoring matters? Database queries are the backbone of any application and quer…

We're pleased to announce that the Microsoft Information Protection SDK version 1.13 is now generally available via NuGet and Download Center. In this release of the Microsoft Information Protection SDK, we've focused on adding preview support for offline publishing and have made changes in how MIP SDK consumes Office documents and emails protected with AES in cipher block chaining (CBC) mode. Offline Publishing Until now, applying protection to a file required an online call to fetch a publishing license from the rights management service. In MIP SDK 1.13, we've added public preview support to enable offline publishing. Now, after making an initial co…

Last November we announced the private preview of the Azure Orbital Space SDK, a product that makes application development for space as easy as developing on the ground. Today we are announcing an exciting new opportunity to work with the European Space Agency (ESA) Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space using the Azure Space SDK to fly your application in space. ESA’s vision for edge computing in space is to foster an ecosystem of Earth observation applications. This challenge is designed to align with this goal and is open to a global audience of space, EO, and AI enthusiasts. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the global community to explore the potential of …

Series Overview Orchestration allows conditional logic and enables users to take different paths based upon outcomes of a previous activity. Building upon the concepts of conditional paths, ADF and Synapse Pipelines allow users to build versatile and resilient workflows that can handle unexpected errors that work smoothly in auto-pilot mode. This is an ongoing series that gradually levels up and helps you build even more complicated logic to handle more scenarios. We will walk through examples for some common use cases, and help you to build functional and useful workflows. Please review the first installment in the series: Part 1: Error Handling and Be…

A few weeks ago, we announced the ability to quickly label your Custom NER and Custom text classification projects with generative models. Today, we’re adding more features powered by Azure OpenAI, and introducing utterance suggestions for Conversational Language Understanding. This continues our journey of enhancing Language services with GPT to improve and accelerate our customization experiences. Conversational Language Understanding allows you to create custom models to detect a user’s intent and extract relevant information from their queries. A significant part of that process is providing data to train machine learning models in the form of utterances that r…

Printing is still essential. We often hear that “print is dead”—but printing is still an essential daily activity for many people working to support their customers and partners. Universal Print makes printing easier than ever, and does away with the need for print servers, enabling a more sustainable print management infrastructure in the cloud. As the number of organizations, people, and active printers registered with Universal Print continues to grow, we are working hard to add features that will make printing simpler and more efficient. Listening to your needs Microsoft 365 for Enterprise combines Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise (Office 365), Window…

Everyone’s learning journey is unique and the process of acquiring new technical skills can be overwhelming. It's not always clear which resources will be the most beneficial for you and your learning path. The Microsoft Learn Community and our Learn experts are here to help you build expertise, answer your questions, and help you achieve career goals. One of the best ways to validate your skills is with world-class, industry recognized Microsoft certifications. Benefits of getting certified The process of getting a Microsoft certification will take time and focus, but the proven benefits are worth the effort. Microsoft Certification continues to be the indust…

Let's dive into why relative performance data for Windows 365 helps you compare different configurations and choose the one that suits your workload best. Many years ago, I built the first large scale performance lab for the series of products that would become Office 97 for Windows and Office 98 Macintosh Edition. This process taught me a lifetime of lessons about the challenges of collecting performance data. I would continue to acquire new learnings during my experiences in SQL Server, Internet Explorer, Windows, and more. After 28+ years at Microsoft, my key takeaway after being involved in countless performance studies—internally and externally with our partner…

Author(s): Arun Sethia is a Program Manager in Azure HDInsight Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team. Introduction On February 27, 2023, HDInsight has released Spark 3.1 (containing stability fixes from Spark 3.0.0), part of HDI 5.0. The HDInsight Team is working on upgrading other open-source components in the upcoming release. In Spark 3.1, the community has added 1700+ improvements, 1680+ fixes, and 130+ new features. In addition, we also added some performance improvements in 3.x, which will benefit customers significantly. Some of the exciting new features and improvements are: Performance enhancement - AQE, Dynamic Partition Pruning, etc.) …

Terraform, a widely-used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, streamlines provisioning and management of cloud resources through declarative configuration files. A core component of Terraform is its state file—a JSON file that preserves your infrastructure's current state—essential for updates, rollbacks, and modifications. However, improper handling of the Terraform state may lead to security vulnerabilities. This article highlights the significance of protecting Terraform state in Azure and offers best practices to ensure its security. The Need for Terraform State Security Securing Terraform state is crucial for several reasons: Prevent unauthorized acces…

I often receive various requests from customers while working on FastTrack projects, and I have compiled some examples to help you build your solution on top of a data lake using useful tips. Most of the examples in this post use pandas, and I hope they will be helpful for you as they were for me. Please note that all examples in this post use pyspark. In my scenario, I exported multiple tables from SQLDB to a folder using a notebook and ran the requests in parallel. In this post, we will discuss the logic of reusing the same session mentioned here at MSSparkUtils is the Swiss Army knife inside Synapse Spark. I will show comments made by my colleague mart…