News from Microsoft Ignite 2023

For those who experienced the “real Microsoft Ignite” this years event is not the same. We are defiantly in the era of hybrid whether you like it or not. Although, Microsoft does not disappoint on their release news for 2023.

Ignite Book Of News

I had the chance to briefly read up on this years book of news 2023. As you probably expect it is infused by AI. But what other cool stuff can we find? Lets take a look, but first lets get the AI related stuff out of the way.

I will update the list once I have the time to read through all the news, and read up on the details.

AI updates form Ignite

There is a a lot to unpack, but after OpenAI announcements a week ago, I was particularly interested in what features Azure OpenAI would get.

• Model Catalog
  A catalog of fine-tuned models from Hugging Face, Meta, and other providers.
• Azure AI Studio
  A revamped portal to built your custom AI solution. Brings in model selections, plugins, the model catalog, etc.
• Prompt Flow is now generally available in machine learning, as well as in preview for Azure AI studio
• Foundation model fine tuning through API
  This will allow companies that today uses LLAMA in their own applications to host the model on Azure OpenAI instead of GPU enabled compute, and fine tune through the APIs
• GPT4-turbo and GPT4-turbo vision in preview and release by end of year
• New ML translation model can now translate text without first translate to English, and then to the requested language
• For customers who want to run on-premises. New images are available, like entity recognition
• Kubernetes AI toolchain operator lets you run and distribute LLMs across your nodes in AKS.
• Microsoft Copilot For Azure. Just as you thought who needs another copilot. Microsoft announces your new friend helping you out with the ARM control plane.
• Microsoft Copilot for Service and copilot for sales. Integrates with CRM, Salesforce, ZenDesk etc. Giving your sales and support super powers.

Compute and data updates

Compute is the foundation to everything in the cloud. A few interesting things that stand out to me, are the latest updates to confidential compute (which I believe will be standard in the future).

• Confidential containers for AKS is now in preview.
• Azure SQL hyperscale gets a price cut. This service was (to me) already fairly priced compared to other options.
• Partition scaling for CosmosDb
• CosmosDb copilot (sneaking in with other news here)

Infrastructure and core Azure

• Azure Boost too much to write. But this is quite a huge step for the overall Azure platform. Azure Boost moves the network and host management from servers on to purpose built chips. The results are huge performance gains.
• SCOM managed instance. For long term followers you know I have a warm heart for Ops Manager. Microsoft is helping customers on to their cloud with SCOM managed instance.
• Azure business continuity center
• Chaos Studio generally available
• Kubernetes Fleet Manager is GA, which lets you manage multiple AKS clusters more seamlessly. This is a very welcome release, as I have personally battled with managing a fleet without the tool.