Microsoft Ignite Nov 2023 Digest
The event happened on 2023/11/15 — 2023/11/17. Main themes: Generative AI, Azure AI Studio, Microsoft Fabric, Copilot-enabled Microsoft products (https://copilot.microsoft.com).
AI
@microsAzure Machine Learning: Prompt flow, LLM programming framework (like langchain); new model like Mistral, Phi, Jais, Code Llama, NVIDIA Nemotron available in Model catalog (no-code environment for fine-tuning and deploying foundation models like Llama 2, Code Llama, Stable Diffusion); integration with OneLake, facilitating a seamless transition between Microsoft Fabric and Azure Machine Learning; Model-as-a-service; managed feature store
Azure AI Studio: newly designed platform for AI and GenAI, incorporating Responsible AI and Azure AI Content Safety
Azure AI Vision, Image Analysis 4.0, Florence foundation model (text-to-image)
Azure OpenAI Service adds DALL·E 3, GPT-3.5 Turbo model with a 16k token prompt length and GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision (GPT-4V)
New features in Azure AI: new task-optimization summarization capability in Azure AI Language; new machine translation model capable of translating from one language to another without translating in English as an intermediary; Personal Voice, users can get AI replicating their voice in a few seconds by providing a 1-minute speech sample as the audio prompt, and then use it to generate speech in any of the 100 languages supported; text to speech avatar allows customers to create synthetic videos of a 2D photorealistic avatar speaking
Integration of Azure AI Video Indexer, Azure AI Search and Azure OpenAI Service offers users a comprehensive solution for capturing essential insights from video content and enables natural language question-answering, video summarization and efficient content search
Azure AI Search adds vector search/Semantic ranker
Compute
Azure M-series Mv3 family: memory optimized, for running SAP HANA workloads with direct Azure IaaS deployments and SAP RISE on Azure
Confidential containers on Azure Kubernetes Service
Microsoft Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework
Confidential virtual machine (VM) option for Azure Databricks: specifying AMD-based confidential VMs when creating an Azure Databricks cluster
Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, Azure confidential VMs with Intel TDX
Data
Amazon S3 shortcuts allow organizations to unify their data in Amazon S3 with their data in OneLake (a single virtualized data lake for their entire organization across Amazon S3 buckets and OneLake — without the latency of copying data from S3 and without changing overall data ownership.)
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2) shortcuts
Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform: a unified analytics service
Azure Cosmos DB updates (Microsoft Copilot for Azure integration in Azure Cosmos DB, Vector search in Azure Cosmos DB MongoDB vCore)
Enhanced Monitoring, HA/DR, security updates of SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc
pgvector support, azure_ai Extension for Postgres (With a few lines of SQL code, you can create embeddings from your data using the power of Azure OpenAI LLM’s, and then store these embeddings in your database)
Infra & Operation
Two new chips, Microsoft Azure Maia (AI Accelerator chip designed to run cloud-based training and inferencing for AI workloads) and Microsoft Azure Cobalt (cloud-native chip based on Arm architecture optimized for performance, power efficiency and cost-effectiveness for general purpose workloads)
Azure Boost: enables greater network and storage performance at scale, remote storage performance of 12.5 Gbps (gigabits per second) throughput and 650K IOPS (input/output operations per second) and a local storage performance of 17.3 Gbps throughput and 3.8M IOPS.
AMD’s latest GPU, the AMD Instinct MI300X support
NC H100 v5 virtual machines with latest NVIDIA GPUs
Azure IoT Operations: a unified, end-to-end Microsoft solution, across cloud to edge with Azure Arc, with Management plane, Application development, Cloud-to-edge data plane, Common infrastructure
Azure in VMware environment with Azure Arc
Azure Ultra Disk Storage: 400,000 IOPS and 10,000 MB/s per disk
Azure Storage Mover: migrate on-premises file shares (SMB, NFS) to Azure file shares and Azure Blob Storage
Developer
Microsoft Credentials for AI and Cloud Skills to prove your skills: AI, Azure OpenAI Service, Power Apps, Cloud-native, Microsoft Fabric
Azure Container Apps: Dedicated GPU workload profiles, Azure Container Apps landing zone accelerator, Azure Container Apps code to cloud (focus on code rather than infra)
Vector database add-ins: Qdrant, Milvus and Weaviate
Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager: multi-cluster management
Copilot
Data
Copilot in Microsoft Fabric: use conversational language to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models or visualize results.
Azure
Copilot for Azure: helps design, operate (manage resources), troubleshoot, optimize Azure environment
Dynamics 365
Microsoft Copilot for Service in Dynamic 365 to unlock generative AI-powered conversations across customer’s data. Agents will be able to ask Copilot for Service questions in natural language and receive relevant insights pulled from customer and product data sourced from knowledge repositories.
Microsoft Sales Copilot: Meeting recaps in Teams, create a meeting preparation brief including a summary of the account and opportunity, names and titles of meeting participants, open tasks related to the opportunity, relevant highlights from recent meetings, relevant email threads
Field Service Copilot
Microsoft 365
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, integrated into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. Microsoft Copilot Dashboard for admin and leaders to know the impact, adoption of Copilot
Copilot in Teams: visualize spoken discussion points in Teams meeting and organize them in Whiteboard, suggest more ideas, writing assistant. Copilot in Teams Phone allows users to get real-time summarization and insights during calls.
Copilot in Microsoft Outlook: Preparing for meetings (detailed summary on meeting invite, related emails and files), schedule meetings (what if no commonly available slots for every participant?)
Copilot in Microsoft Loop: use information from a document linked in the prompt to generate even more relevant responses
Copilot in Microsoft Word: help users comprehend what has changed in a document
plugins for Microsoft Copilot via Teams message extensions to extend Copilot for Microsoft 365
Copilot for Microsoft 365 developer sandbox
Microsoft Copilot Studio: build your own standalone custom copilot, like OpenAI GPTs (https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com)
Other
Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise
Power Platform
Copilot to assist Power automate app, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents development
Security
Microsoft Security Copilot will be embedded into Microsoft Purview accelerate investigation and response with comprehensive summary of alerts and information. Use natural language to define search queries in eDiscovery to enable faster and more accurate search iterations by eliminating the need to use keyword query language. Embedded scenarios will be surfaced in Data Loss Prevention, Insider Risk Management and eDiscovery and Communication Compliance. Asset intelligence
Microsoft Security Copilot within the Microsoft Intune admin center.
Microsoft Security Copilot will also be embedded in Microsoft Entra (identity management) to assist in investigating identity risks and helping with troubleshooting daily identity tasks, such as why a sign-in required multi-factor authentication.
Power Platform
Payment processing integration in Microsoft Power Pages, integrations with the following payment gateways: Stripe Payments, Braintree Payments, eWay. Sample multistep form to collect donations
