Unleashing Innovation: The New Era of Compute Power Behind Azure AI Solutions
As AI continues to transform industries, Microsoft is expanding its global cloud infrastructure to meet the needs of developers and customers everywhere. Microsoft Build 2024we're showcasing our latest advances in developing tools and services optimized to support your AI solutions. Microsoft's cloud infrastructure is unique in that it offers choice and flexibility in power and performance to meet customers' unique AI needs, whether by doubling deployment speed or reducing operational costs.
That's why we've built our adaptive, high-performance, and trusted platform with the power and resilience you need to build intelligent AI applications. We keep our promise to support our customers by providing them with exceptional value in compute power and advanced generative AI capabilities.
Powerful computing power for general and AI workloads
Microsoft has the expertise and scale to operate the AI ​​supercomputers that power some of the world’s largest AI services, such as Microsoft Azure OpenAI ServiceChatGPT, Bing and more. As we continue to build out our AI infrastructure, we focus on optimizing performance, scalability and energy efficiency.
Microsoft takes a systems approach to cloud infrastructure, optimizing both hardware and software to efficiently handle workloads at scale. In November 2023, Microsoft introduced its first homegrown cloud compute processor, Azure Cobalt 100, enabling general-purpose workloads in the Microsoft Cloud. We announce the preview of Azure virtual machines running on Cobalt 100 processors. Cobalt 100-based virtual machines (VMs) are Azure's most energy-efficient compute offering, delivering up to 40% more performance than our previous generation of Arm-based VMs. And we're delivering the same Arm-based performance and efficiency to customers like Elastic, MongoDB, Siemens, Snowflake, and Teradata. The new Cobalt 100-based VMs are designed to improve efficiency and performance for both Azure customers and Microsoft products. In addition, IC3, the platform that powers billions of customer conversations in Microsoft Teams, is adopting Cobalt 100 to more efficiently serve its growing customer base, achieving up to 45% more performance on Cobalt 100 VMs.
We are combining the best of the industry and the best of Microsoft in our AI infrastructure. In addition to our customized Azure Cobalt 100 and Maia series and partnerships with the silicon industry, we are also announcing the general availability of the ND MI300X VM Serieswhere Microsoft is the first cloud provider to bring AMD's most powerful Instinct MI300X accelerator to Azure. With the addition of the ND MI300X VM, which combines eight AMD MI300X Instinct accelerators, Azure offers customers unprecedented price/performance for inference scenarios from leading-edge models such as GPT-4. Our infrastructure supports various scenarios for AI supercomputing, such as building large models from scratch, running inference on pre-trained models, using models as service providers, and fine-tuning models for specific domains.
Azure Migrate and Modernize
Selected resources and expert help to migrate or modernize your on-premises infrastructure
One of Microsoft's advantages in AI is our ability to combine thousands of virtual machines with tens of thousands of GPUs with the best InfiniBand and Ethernet-based network topologies for supercomputers in the cloud that can run large AI workloads at a lower cost. With a variety of silicon from AMD, NVIDIA and Microsoft's Maia AI accelerators, Azure's AI infrastructure provides the most comprehensive compute platform for AI workloads. This combination of advanced AI accelerators, data center designs, and optimized compute and network topology delivers cost efficiency per workload. That means whether you use Microsoft Copilot or build your own Copilot apps, the Azure platform ensures you get the best AI performance at optimized costs.
Microsoft is expanding our cloud infrastructure with the Azure Compute Fleeta new service that simplifies the provisioning of Azure compute capacity across different VM types, availability zones, and pricing models to more easily achieve desired scale, performance, and cost by allowing users to automatically and programmatically control the behavior of VM groups. As a result, Compute Fleet has the potential to significantly optimize your operational efficiency and increase your core compute flexibility and reliability for AI and general purpose workloads simultaneously at scale.
AI-powered central management and security
As organizations continue to expand their computing resources, managing and controlling the entire infrastructure can become overwhelming. We consistently hear from developers and customers that they spend more time searching for information and are less productive. Microsoft is focused on simplifying this process through AI-powered centralized management and security. Our adaptive cloud approach takes innovation to the next level with a single, intelligent control plane that extends from the cloud to the edge, making it easier for customers to manage their entire computing infrastructure in a consistent way. We also want to improve your experience managing these distributed environments by Microsoft Copilot in Azure.
We built Microsoft Copilot on Azure as an AI companion to help your teams seamlessly manage operations across cloud and edge environments. Using natural language, you can ask Copilot questions and get personalized recommendations about Azure services. Simply ask, “Why is my app slow?” or “How do I fix this error?” and Copilot will walk a customer through possible causes and solutions.
Microsoft Copilot in Azure
Manage operations from cloud to edge with an AI assistant
Starting today, we will open the preview of Copilot on Azure to all customers over the next few weeks. With this update, customers can choose whether to allow all of their users to access Copilot or only grant access to specific users or groups within a tenant. This flexibility in managing Copilot allows you to customize your approach and control which groups of users or departments in your organization can access it. You can feel confident knowing that you can deploy and use the tool in a controlled manner and that it complies with your organization's operational standards and security policies.
We are continually improving Copilot and enhancing the product with each release to help developers be more productive. One of the ways we have simplified the developer experience is by making databases and analytics services easier to configure, manage, and optimize through AI-powered management. Several new capabilities are available for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in Copilot for Azure that simplify common management tasks, including the ability to configure AKS backups, change tiers, locate YAML files for editing, and create Kubectl commands.
We've also integrated natural language into SQL conversion and self-help for database management to support your database-driven Azure SQL applications. Developers can ask questions about their data in plain text and Copilot will generate the appropriate T-SQL query. Database administrators can independently manage databases, resolve issues, and learn more about performance and features. Developers benefit from detailed explanations of generated queries that help them write code faster.
Finally, you will notice some new security improvements to the tool. Copilot now includes Microsoft Defender for the Cloud Prompting capabilities to streamline risk discovery, remediation, and code fixes. External attack surface management for Defender (EASM) uses Copilot to generate risk-related insights and translate natural language into corresponding inventory queries for data discovered by Defender EASM. These features make database queries more user-friendly and enable our customers to use natural language for all related queries. We will continue to expand Copilot capabilities in Azure so you can be more productive and focus on writing code.
Cloud infrastructure for limitless innovation
Microsoft wants to help you stay ahead in this new era by giving you the power, flexibility, and performance you need to achieve your AI ambitions. Our unique approach to cloud and AI infrastructure helps us and developers like you address the challenges of the ever-changing technology landscape head-on, so you can continue to work efficiently while innovating at scale.
