As AI continues to remodel industries, Microsoft is increasing its world cloud infrastructure to fulfill the wants of builders and prospects in all places. At Microsoft Construct 2024, we’re unveiling our newest progress in growing instruments and providers optimized for powering your AI options. Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure is exclusive in the way it gives alternative and suppleness in efficiency and energy for purchasers’ distinctive AI wants, whether or not that’s doubling deployment speeds or reducing working prices.
That’s why we’ve enhanced our adaptive, highly effective, and trusted platform with the efficiency and resilience you’ll must construct clever AI purposes. We’re delivering on our promise to assist our prospects by offering them with distinctive cost-performance in compute and superior generative AI capabilities.
Highly effective compute for basic function and AI workloads
Microsoft has the experience and scale to run the AI supercomputers that energy among the world’s greatest AI providers, corresponding to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, ChatGPT, Bing, and extra. Our focus as we proceed to develop our AI infrastructure is on optimizing efficiency, scalability, and energy effectivity.
Microsoft takes a programs strategy to cloud infrastructure, optimizing each {hardware} and software program to effectively deal with workloads at scale. In November 2023, Microsoft launched its first in-house designed cloud compute processor, Azure Cobalt 100, which allows general-purpose workloads on the Microsoft Cloud. We’re saying the preview of Azure digital machines constructed to run on Cobalt 100 processors. Cobalt 100-based digital machines (VMs) are Azure’s most energy environment friendly compute providing, and ship as much as 40% higher efficiency than our earlier technology of Arm-based VMs. And we’re delivering that very same Arm-based efficiency and effectivity to prospects like Elastic, MongoDB, Siemens, Snowflake, and Teradata. The brand new Cobalt 100-based VMS are anticipated to boost effectivity and efficiency for each Azure prospects and Microsoft merchandise. Moreover, IC3, the platform that powers billions of buyer conversations in Microsoft Groups, is adopting Cobalt 100 to serve its rising buyer base extra effectively, attaining as much as 45% higher efficiency on Cobalt 100 VMs.
We’re combining the most effective of business and the most effective of Microsoft in our AI infrastructure. Alongside our customized Azure Cobalt 100 and Maia sequence and silicon business partnerships, we’re additionally saying the final availability of the ND MI300X VM sequence, the place Microsoft is the primary cloud supplier to deliver AMD’s strongest Intuition MI300X Accelerator to Azure. With the addition of the ND MI300X VM combining eight AMD MI300X Intuition accelerators, Azure is delivering prospects unprecedented cost-performance for inferencing eventualities of frontier fashions like GPT-4. Our infrastructure helps completely different eventualities for AI supercomputing, corresponding to constructing massive fashions from scratch, working inference on pre-trained fashions, utilizing mannequin as a service suppliers, and fine-tuning fashions for particular domains.
Azure Migrate and Modernize
Curated assets and knowledgeable assist emigrate or modernize your on-premises infrastructure
One among Microsoft’s benefits in AI is our means to mix hundreds of digital machines with tens of hundreds of GPUs with the most effective of InfiniBand and Ethernet based mostly networking topologies for supercomputers within the cloud that may run massive scale AI workloads to decrease prices. With a range of silicon throughout AMD, NVIDIA, and Microsoft’s Maia AI accelerators, Azure’s AI infrastructure delivers essentially the most full compute platform for AI workloads. It’s this mix of superior AI accelerators, datacenter designs, and optimized compute and networking topology that drive value effectivity per workload. Meaning whether or not you employ Microsoft Copilot or construct your personal copilot apps, the Azure platform ensures you get the most effective AI efficiency with optimized value.
Microsoft is additional extending our cloud infrastructure with the Azure Compute Fleet, a brand new service that simplifies provisioning of Azure compute capability throughout completely different VM sorts, availability zones, and pricing fashions to extra simply obtain desired scale, efficiency, and price by enabling customers to regulate VM group behaviors routinely and programmatically. In consequence, Compute Fleet has the potential to significantly optimize your operational effectivity and enhance your core compute flexibility and reliability for each AI and general-purpose workloads collectively at scale.
AI-enhanced central administration and safety
As companies proceed to develop their computing property, managing and governing your entire infrastructure can grow to be overwhelming. We hold listening to from builders and prospects that they spend extra time looking for data and are much less productive. Microsoft is targeted on simplifying this course of via AI-enhanced central administration and safety. Our adaptive cloud strategy takes innovation to the following degree with a single, clever management airplane that spans from cloud to edge, making it simpler for purchasers to handle their total computing property in a constant means. We’re additionally aiming to enhance your expertise with managing these distributed environments via Microsoft Copilot in Azure.
We created Microsoft Copilot in Azure to behave as an AI companion, serving to your groups handle operations seamlessly throughout each cloud and edge environments. By utilizing pure language, you possibly can ask Copilot questions and obtain personalised suggestions associated to Azure providers. Merely ask, “Why is my app gradual?” or “How do I repair this error?” and Copilot will navigate a buyer via potential causes and fixes.
Microsoft Copilot in Azure
Handle operations from cloud to edge with an AI assistant
Beginning at this time, we will likely be opening the preview of Copilot in Azure to all prospects over the following couple of weeks. With this replace, prospects can select to have all their customers entry Copilot or grant entry to particular customers or teams inside a tenant. With this flexibility to handle Copilot, you possibly can tailor your strategy and management which teams of customers or departments inside your group have entry to it. You may really feel safe realizing you possibly can deploy and use the device in a managed method, making certain it aligns together with your group’s operational requirements and safety insurance policies.
We’re regularly enhancing Copilot and making the product higher with each launch to assist builders be extra productive. One of many methods we’ve simplified the developer’s expertise is by making databases and analytics providers simpler to configure, handle, and optimize via AI-enhanced administration. A number of new abilities can be found for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in Copilot for Azure that simplify widespread administration duties, together with the power to configure AKS backups, change tiers, find YAML recordsdata for enhancing, and assemble kubectl instructions.
We’ve additionally added pure language to SQL conversion and self-help for database administration to assist your Azure SQL database-driven purposes. Builders can ask questions on their knowledge in plain textual content, and Copilot generates the corresponding T-SQL question. Database directors can independently handle databases, resolve points, and study extra about efficiency and capabilities. Builders profit from detailed explanations of the generated queries, serving to them write code quicker.
Lastly, you’ll discover a couple of new safety enhancements to the device. Copilot now contains Microsoft Defender for Cloud prompting capabilities to streamline threat exploration, remediation, and code fixes. Defender Exterior Assault Floor Administration (EASM) leverages Copilot to assist floor risk-related insights and convert pure language to corresponding stock queries throughout knowledge found by Defender EASM. These options make database queries extra user-friendly, enabling our prospects to make use of pure language for any associated queries. We’ll proceed to develop Copilot capabilities in Azure so that you may be extra productive and targeted on writing code.
Cloud infrastructure constructed for limitless innovation
Microsoft is dedicated to serving to you keep forward on this new period by supplying you with the facility, flexibility, and efficiency you have to obtain your AI ambitions. Our distinctive strategy to cloud and AI infrastructure helps us and builders such as you meet the challenges of the ever-changing technological panorama head-on so you possibly can proceed working effectively whereas innovating at scale.
Uncover new methods to remodel with AI
Key Microsoft Construct classes
