Microsoft Azure now supports NVIDIA GPU Cloud for AI, HPC workloads Microsoft and NVIDIA are targeting data scientists, developers and researchers with preconfigured containers with GPU-accelerated software for running their AI and high-performance computing tasks. Read more: https://zd.net/2MBmVD8

A number of U.S.-based customers connecting to Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365, Azure Active Directory and Visual Studio Team Services, are reporting outages this morning, September 4. The issue seems to stem from problems in Microsoft's South Central U.S. datacenter.

Also: Windows 10 how-to: Ed Bott's free tech support guide

The problems also are affecting users in other regions who are using services that authenticate with Azure Active Directory and who are attempting to use the Azure Resource Manager, I'm hearing from users on Twitter.

An Office 365 service health status page notes that some users have been unable to authenticate or connect to Office 365 services. The Office 365 admin center also has been down for these customers since at least 9:09 a.m. UTC (5:09 a.m. ET), according to that page.

Credit: Microsoft's Azure status page

"We've determined that a data center issue caused a subset of the Office 365 service to become degraded. We're connecting some of the affected services to an alternate infrastructure, while remediating the underlying issue within the datacenter," Microsoft's message says.

Also: Microsoft Windows U-turn removes warning about installing Chrome, Firefox CNET

Office 365 doesn't run on Azure, but it does use Azure Active Directory authentication services.

An Azure Support message on Twitter acknowledged the problem in the South Central U.S. and said that "engineers were still working on the resolution of an issue affecting resources" there. Microsoft is "actively monitoring for impact to other regions also," the message said, directing customers to see status.azure.com for further updates. But as a number of Twitter users noted, they were unable to access that page.

Those who can see the Azure status page may see this message (as of 10:25 a.m. ET):

"Starting at 09:29 UTC on 04 Sep 2018, customers in South Central US may experience difficulties connecting to resources hosted in this region. Engineers have isolated an issue with cooling in one part of the data center, which caused a localized spike in temperature, as the preliminary root-cause, which has now been mitigated. Automated data center procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect when temperatures hit a specified threshold and critical hardware entered a structured power down process. Engineers are now in the process of restoring power to affected devices as part of the ongoing mitigation process. "Some services may also be experiencing intermittent authentication issues due to downstream Azure Active Directory impact, and engineers are separately working on mitigation options for this also. "The next update will be provided at 15:00 UTC or as events warrant."

I've heard from one contact that a lightning strike in the San Antonio, Texas, area may have caused the cooling system to go down in Microsoft's datacenter there.

Update (September 4, 11 a.m. ET): The Office 365 service health status page was updated, noting that Exchange, Power BI, SharePoint, Teams and Intune users all may be affected. The page says "This issue could potentially affect any of your users who are hosted out of the San Antonio data center," but I'm hearing from users outside the U.S. who say they are also affected. Next update from Microsoft is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. UTC (12:30 p.m. ET).

Update (September 4, 1:45 p.m. ET): I'm hearing from a number of users worldwide that their Microsoft cloud services are coming back.

Also: Microsoft 365: A cheat sheet TechRepublic

Here's an update about why some customers not using U.S. Central datacenter may have been affected, from Azure Identity division's Alex Simons (via Twitter):

"Many of you are asking -- here's a quick update. Azure AD Service has been experiencing load issues in North America with several high volume tenant doing massive auth retries. Availability in some NA (North American) tenants has dropped to 70%. Tenants in Europe and Asia are not effected. "Mitigations are underway and capacity has now returned to >90% in North America and should be back to full availability very soon. We are deeply sorry for any negative impact to our customers are experiencing."

(Just to be clear, I've been hearing from Microsoft cloud customers outside the U.S. who have been affected, in spite of what Simons' tweet says.)

Update (September 4, 3:50 p.m. ET): I still am having problems seeing the Azure status page, but this is the latest from that page (forwarded to me by a Microsoft spokesperson), which does confirm the lightning strike and cooling-system impact -- plus the impact on services in other regions:

CUSTOMER IMPACT: Starting at 09:29 UTC on 04 Sep 2018, customers in South Central US may experience difficulties connecting to resources hosted in this region. Additionally, this issue impacts Azure Active Directory authentication, which may impact services in other regions.

PRELIMINARY ROOT CAUSE: A severe weather event, including lightning strikes, occurred near one of the South Central US datacenters. This resulted in a power voltage increase that impacted cooling systems. Automated datacenter procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect and critical hardware entered a structured power down process.

ENGINEERING STATUS: Engineers have successfully restored power to the datacenter. Additionally, engineers have recovered a majority of the impacted network devices. While some services are starting to see signs of recovery, mitigation efforts are still ongoing.

NEXT UPDATE: The next update will be provided by 20:00 UTC or as events warrant.

Update (September 4, 4:50 pm. ET): The The Azure Support account on Twitter said, that as of 4:15 p.m. ET, engineers had restored power to the South Central U.S. datacenter. (Because of the cooling system problem, "automated datacenter procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect and critical hardware entered a shutdown process," they said.)

Non-regional services like Azure Active Directory "encountered an operational threshold for processing requests through the South Central US datacenter. Initial attempts to fail over into other datacenters resulted in temporary traffic congestion for those reasons."

Recovery efforts were still ongoing as of this update from Azure Support.

Update (September 5, 4:20 p.m. ET): Some users continued to experience lingering problems from yesterday's datacenter outage.

Some users were getting messages indicating their access to Outlook or Skype were being throttled. Microsoft officials were telling these users that an update was introduced to the components that manage authentication" which caused users to get this message. Microsof officials said they were reverting the update to remediate the problem. (Thanks to Rob Lavin for the info. on that one.)

Previous and related coverage:

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Related stories:</s>Business users of Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure services had a hard time getting their work done Tuesday as the software giant reported widespread outages that resulted from temperatures overheating in one of its data centers.

Microsoft said the problem occurred at a facility in Texas and impacted Azure users in the south-central area of the United States.

According to Microsoft’s Azure Support Twitter feed, “A severe weather event, including lightning strikes,” occurred near the data center that caused a power surge, which impacted the cooling system.

As a result, the facility went into a shutdown process to keep the Azure servers and other data center gear from overheating. Among the services affected by the outage were Microsoft’s Office 365 and Active Directory offerings.

Azure is a set of cloud-based services used for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services that Microsoft manages through a network of its own data centers. The services include website operation, storage and data networking management. Microsoft Azure competes in the cloud-services business with the likes of Amazon Web Services.
• Cybersecurity: Don’t be in a rush to click on links to fake sites possibly from Russia At 11:33 a.m. Pacific time, Microsoft’s Azure Support tweeted that engineers had successfully restored power to the data center and had recovered a majority of the network devices affected by the shutdown. The company said “mitigation efforts” were continuing in order to get all of the services involved back up and running.</s>A number of U.S.-based customers connecting to Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365, Azure Active Directory and Visual Studio Team Services, are reporting outages this morning, September 4. The issue seems to stem from problems in Microsoft's South Central U.S. datacenter.

The problems also are affecting users in other regions who are using services that authenticate with Azure Active Directory and who are attempting to use the Azure Resource Manager, I'm hearing from users on Twitter.

An Office 365 service health status page notes that some users have been unable to authenticate or connect to Office 365 services. The Office 365 admin center also has been down for these customers since at least 9:09 a.m. UTC (5:09 a.m. ET), according to that page.

"We've determined that a data center issue caused a subset of the Office 365 service to become degraded. We're connecting some of the affected services to an alternate infrastructure, while remediating the underlying issue within the datacenter," Microsoft's message says.

Office 365 doesn't run on Azure, but it does use Azure Active Directory authentication services.

An Azure Support message on Twitter acknowledged the problem in the South Central U.S. and said that "engineers were still working on the resolution of an issue affecting resources" there. Microsoft is "actively monitoring for impact to other regions also," the message said, directing customers to see status.azure.com for further updates. But as a number of Twitter users noted, they were unable to access that page.

Those who can see the Azure status page may see this message (as of 10:25 a.m. ET):

"Starting at 09:29 UTC on 04 Sep 2018, customers in South Central US may experience difficulties connecting to resources hosted in this region. Engineers have isolated an issue with cooling in one part of the data center, which caused a localized spike in temperature, as the preliminary root-cause, which has now been mitigated. Automated data center procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect when temperatures hit a specified threshold and critical hardware entered a structured power down process. Engineers are now in the process of restoring power to affected devices as part of the ongoing mitigation process. "Some services may also be experiencing intermittent authentication issues due to downstream Azure Active Directory impact, and engineers are separately working on mitigation options for this also. "The next update will be provided at 15:00 UTC or as events warrant."

I've heard from one contact that a lightning strike in the San Antonio, Texas, area may have caused the cooling system to go down in Microsoft's datacenter there.

Update (September 4, 11 a.m. ET): The Office 365 service health status page was updated, noting that Exchange, Power BI, SharePoint, Teams and Intune users all may be affected. The page says "This issue could potentially affect any of your users who are hosted out of the San Antonio data center," but I'm hearing from users outside the U.S. who say they are also affected. Next update from Microsoft is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. UTC (12:30 p.m. ET).</s>Microsoft is working to fully restore key services in its Azure cloud platform after an outage in a US region.

Since 9am GMT on Tuesday, Azure services have been intermittently unavailable to customers of Azure's South Central US region, due to an outage affecting Azure Storage and the wide range of services that rely on it, including Machine-Learning Studio, Cloud Services, Database for SQL, Functions and more.

While the outage initially resulted in online Microsoft services such as Office 365 and Azure Active Directory being unavailable for some customers in other regions, access has now been restored, with the problems attributed to congestion caused by automated failover procedures.

As of 11am GMT on Wednesday, some Azure services in the South Central US region remain affected, although Microsoft's support site says "engineers have restored storage availability for the majority of impacted services, and most customers should now be seeing signs of recovery".

Azure engineers are now working on recovering impacted Azure Storage scale units and the remaining storage-dependent services in South Central US, work Microsoft says is mostly complete.

Microsoft blamed the outage on a "severe weather event", which it said included lightning strikes that occured near one of the South Central US datacenters.

"This resulted in a power voltage increase that impacted cooling systems. Automated datacenter procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect and critical hardware entered a structured power down process," according to the Azure status update.

An infrastructure outage at one of the major cloud platforms can take down the many of the high-level services these platforms offer, despite the redundancy and automated recovery built into these platforms.

In March last year, a wide range of Amazon Web Services offerings in the US-EAST-1 region were unavailable after an engineer inadvertently took a large number of Amazon Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) servers offline.

While cloud outages hit the headlines because of the large numbers of people affected, some analysts advise the advantages of the public cloud over in-house infrastructure offset the risk of an occasional hiccup.

Modern firms are so reliant on the major cloud platforms that earlier this year insurance provider Lloyd's warned the failure of a top cloud service for just three days could cost the US economy $15bn.</s>SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 4, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Automation Anywhere®, a leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), today announced its flagship Automation Anywhere Enterprise is now one of the only Digital Workforce Platforms to support the world's four major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The Automation Anywhere Enterprise platform can be deployed on-premises, in a hybrid cloud, or on leading cloud platforms to provide scale and flexibility, offering a wide range of options to meet the highly demanding deployment needs of organizations. Many companies are moving their applications from on-premises to be hosted in private and public cloud instances. Automation Anywhere offers an excellent migration path to accelerate this move to the cloud.

"Our superior architecture ensures greater flexibility to work with more native cloud provider services than any other vendor," said Abhijit Kakhandiki, Senior VP, Products and Engineering at Automation Anywhere. "Coupled with our workload management and on-demand scaling, customers can take advantage of the elastic infrastructure that cloud providers bring to the table, lowering total cost of ownership for any size company."

"With such a broad set of cloud certifications, customers can accelerate their transition to cloud-based applications, deploying bots safely, and accurately migrating data to cloud and hybrid cloud environments," said Peter Meechan, Chief Corporate Development Officer at Automation Anywhere. "Coupled with Bot Store, one of the world's first and largest online marketplaces for off-the-shelf plug-and-play bots, Automation Anywhere is rapidly expanding its open ecosystem. The opportunity has never been better for cloud-based software developers to create an alliance with one of the industry's largest ecosystems for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and integrations with some of the world's leading enterprise software companies."

Automation Anywhere offers RPA, cognitive and analytics technology to enable end-to-end automation of business processes for global organizations. The Automation Anywhere Enterprise platform has already been deployed across more than 1,100 of the world's largest companies, saving hundreds of millions of hours of manual tasks.

For further information on these supported cloud options, please visit:



Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com/ 



Google Cloud Platform: https://cloud.google.com/ 



IBM Cloud: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/ 



Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/
• Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/automation-anywhere

About Automation Anywhere



Automation Anywhere is a leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the platform on which more organizations build world-class Intelligent Digital Workforces. Automation Anywhere's enterprise-grade platform uses software bots that work side by side with people to do much of the repetitive work in many industries. It combines sophisticated RPA, cognitive and embedded analytic technologies. Over 1,100 organizations use this AI-enabled solution to manage and scale business processes faster, with near-zero error rates, while dramatically reducing operational costs. Automation Anywhere provides automation technology to leading financial services, insurance, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, telecom and logistics companies globally. For additional information, visit www.automationanywhere.com.</s>Microsoft executive Scott Guthrie should get credit for many things, including the success of Azure and, before that, .Net. The thing that Guthrie arguably has done best, however, has nothing to do with a particular technology, and everything to do with a particular approach to building technology.

In his words, it's all about "getting laser-focused on customer needs and [making] your customers super, super happy, " Guthrie said in an interview with Business Insider.

But not all of one's customers, and that's the key.

Guthrie's secret is not much of a secret—everyone talks about focusing on customer needs. The difference between great companies and also-rans, however, is how well a company can deliver on those customer needs.

Oh, and which customers they care most about.

For example, in this same interview, Guthrie spoke about the work Microsoft did with Netflix to get Silverlight (and video streaming) right. But at the same time, he was talking with Blockbuster about the same things. Blockbuster, unlike Netflix, didn't make a serious play in streaming video, and went out of business not long thereafter. Microsoft likely made more money from Blockbuster than Netflix, but it was Netflix that proved the superior guide to where Microsoft's technology needed to go.

This seems obvious in retrospect, but I doubt it was so clear at the time. In a very Clay Christensen Innovator's Dilemma sort of way, our best customers are often our worst enemies when it comes to seeing the future, and building for it. In ensuring that these high-end customers are "super, super happy," we can unwittingly over-engineer our products until we become "super, super bankrupt."

One way to ensure that this fixation with a few customers doesn't sidetrack a vendor is to do as Guthrie has done: Constantly meet with and poll a variety of customers. As he has built out the Azure business, his focus has been on looking to real customer needs, and then thinking back on Microsoft's unique, differentiated way of meeting those needs.

Most of the cloud vendors—including Amazon Web Services (AWS)—now talk a good hybrid game. The difference for Microsoft is that it has decades of experience servicing the data center/desktop side of customer needs. There is no better company, at least in terms of background, to continue to serve that side of the enterprise so long as it can also heed those same customers as they start to reach into cloud workloads. Done right, Microsoft Azure is in pole position to "get laser-focused" on hybrid cloud customer needs, and satisfy them.

For Guthrie, this is both Netflix and Blockbuster land. For those companies that want to accelerate faster into cloud (Netflix), Microsoft can help them. For those inclined to resist or delay (Blockbuster), Microsoft can satisfy those needs while also pointing to a new, superior way to do business. The customer ultimately must choose to take those steps into the future, but Microsoft is setting itself up to be the ideal sherpa along the way.

Is this all Guthrie's doing? No. But he's a key part, and his leadership suggests a great way that all companies can figure out better methods for listening to, and buildin for, their customers.</s>Microsoft was scrambling to get a number of cloud-based services up and running this morning, after a lightning strike near one of its San Antonio data centres caused a voltage surge. This in turn forced a power-down when cooling equipment failed, triggering an Azure outage locally and issues with Office 365 globally.

The outage even took the Azure service status monitor offline.

The company said in an Azure status update: “Engineers are prioritizing the restoration of storage resources in order to recover all services with dependencies on these impacted resources. As storage mitigation continues to progress, a necessary extended mitigation phase is required.”

The company added that while power had been restored and software load balancers for Azure storage scale units recovered, work to recover a number of services was still ongoing. The outage appears to have also affected Office 365 users globally also: the enterprise software is not based on Azure, but does use Azure Active Directory authentication services.

Azure Outage: Enough Being Done on Resilience?

Pete Banham, cyber resilience expert at Mimecast, said: “Today’s incident at Azure was another clear reminder for the need for organisations to build in their own redundancy rather than rely on a single vendor. All organisations, including Microsoft, need to consider what downstream effects there may be from losing a critical service due to technical failure or human error.

“Should employees around the world using Office 365 be reliant on a single Azure DC in the US? Services will always fail and IT leaders need to ensure they have not outsourced responsibility to a lone cloud service.”

Speaking to Computer Business Review, he added: “It’s an open question how one data centre outage can cause so much disruption… clearly companies like Microsoft want to benefit from economies of scale, but from a mission-critical side of things, if users can’t even check support, that’s a challenge.”

Microsoft has been contacted for comment.

See also: Microsoft Office 365 Outages Reported Across UK</s>
• Meet Scott Guthrie, the executive VP of Microsoft's cloud and artificial intelligence business.
• He's a long-time Microsoft exec, and a trusted lieutenant to CEO Satya Nadella — the two worked together to get the Microsoft Azure cloud business off the ground.
• In this interview, Guthrie discusses what he learned from working with Netflix on streaming, how he works with Nadella, and what he believes is Microsoft's secret weapon in the cloud wars with Amazon and Google.
• He's as well known for his red polo shirt as he is for his technical acumen and leadership skills.

Steve Jobs had the black turtleneck. Mark Zuckerberg has the hoodie. And Scott Guthrie has the red polo shirt and jeans.

If you don't recognize that name — or the outfit — chances are good you're not a software developer.

Guthrie, Microsoft's head of cloud and AI, may not be famous enough to have started a fashion trend . Among developers, though — especially Microsoft developers — he's a rock star, his trademark outfit every bit as iconic as the turtleneck.

The 20-year Microsoft veteran has been a driving force behind the cloud business now seen as one of the company's biggest growth opportunities, and in recent years has emerged as one of the most important figures at Microsoft under the reign of CEO Satya Nadella.

The faith Nadella has placed in Guthrie was underscored earlier this year when Guthrie was handed responsibility for Microsoft's artificial intelligence, right alongside the company's nascent augmented reality business, core pieces of Windows operating system engineering, and even some of Microsoft's custom AI processor manufacturing.

Guthrie tells Business Insider the goal was to "centralize a lot of our core silicon, AI, operating systems, storage teams, networking teams, [and they're] now all cohesively in one place as part of my team." It reinforces Microsoft's technological strategy, as competition with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and others only more fierce.

It's an extension of what Guthrie says he and Nadella have been trying to accomplish for as long as the two have been working together — or even before that: Deliver Microsoft's vast collection of technologies and services as a powerful and irresistible set of tools, not just a legacy requirement, that build on each other and allow businesses to thrive.

Now, as Nadella's Microsoft moves ahead with a corporate re-invention that requires winning over customers, partners, investors and even employees, the man in the red polo shirt is the critical element that many insiders say has played a key role in the strategy. For Guthrie, though, it's something that started well before Nadella was CEO.

"It's not like we just changed magically four years ago," says Guthrie. "The ethos that we try to have of 'let's be customer first...' That is something that I've always embraced throughout my career."

Guthrie joined Microsoft as a general manager with its developer businesses in 1997, right after finishing his four-year degree at Duke University. In his ten-year tenure in that role, he helped create Microsoft .NET, a programming framework that remains popular today.

It was in 2007 that the red polo became a part of his signature look. Attributing the success to his "lucky" red polo, he decided not to mess with success, and wore it to all future presentations, even after getting promoted to corporate VP in 2008.

"Now if I don't wear a red polo and I do a talk, I got hundreds of Twitter comments," says Guthrie. "'Why am I not wearing the red polo?'" Indeed, when Guthrie toured the world last year to hype Azure with partners and developers, it was called the "Red Shirt Dev Tour." Even before that, in 2009, Microsoft aired a video at a conference comparing the red polo to Steve Jobs' famous black turtlenecks.

Guthrie says that the first time he wore the red polo to a customer meeting was a presentation to Netflix. The company wound up going all-in on using Microsoft Silverlight as the technology backend to power its streaming video-on-demand service for web browsers.

And Guthrie says that working so closely with a customer like Netflix taught him a valuable lesson. By working with Netflix to get Silverlight just right, it made the Netflix streaming service that much better, while also helping Microsoft zero in on how to make the technology better for customers in the real world.

"It taught me the value of just getting laser-focused on customer needs and if you made your customers super, super happy," he says. "You can be successful and they can be successful." Netflix only stopped using Silverlight in recent years, after Microsoft pulled the plug on the technology.

On the flipside, he says, he remembers talking to Blockbuster around the same time, and asked what they were doing about streaming...only to be met by shrugs. Blockbuster had made, and would continue to make, some moves into streaming, until going out of business. But it never embraced technological change as Netflix did.

"It's amazing how things have turned out," says Guthrie.

It was in 2011 that Guthrie first took over large parts of the cloud computing platform then known as Windows Azure. He had been tasked by Satya Nadella, who had just been named president of the Microsoft Server and Tools Business (STB), to reinvent Windows Azure – a struggling service that then-CEO Steve Ballmer had pegged as crucial to the future of Microsoft, but that was infamously so complex, not even some Microsoft execs could use it.

Guthrie says that he and Nadella quickly clicked, owing to their similar outlook on running a team. Guthrie calls it "continuous improvement," and Nadella calls it a "growth mindset," but the philosophy is the same: Always be talking to customers, figuring out how to solve problems, and getting better.

"A 'growth mindset' is a better, more uplifting term," says Guthrie. Indeed, Nadella has made it a hallmark of his leadership style as CEO. "So I've latched onto that now."

Guthrie took the opportunity to rethink how Windows Azure worked, focusing the product on what made it special.

"One of the off-sites that I did with my leadership team was just, you know, let's let's get crisp on: 'How do we want to be differentiated?' Not different, differentiated," recalls Guthrie. "And let's double down on doing that, and really nail that because if we just do one of everything, we're probably not going to be unique in a couple of years."

The answer to that question, said Guthrie, was the same then as it is today: Amazon Web Services and other rivals like Google Cloud may have similar cloud technology, but they can't match Microsoft's existing inroads with the enterprise, including integrations with existing products like Windows Server. In other words, just like he saw with Netflix, Guthrie figured that if Microsoft could solve real customer problems, they could sell to real customers.

"What we're trying to do in our spaces is be less reactive to the other competitors and just get super laser focused on our customer, and really work back and say how do we be uniquely differentiated to serve their needs," says Guthrie.

Guthrie was just the guy to spread the gospel. He was respected among Microsoft's programmers as a top-flight engineer in his own right, but also among the senior leadership for being someone who really understood the business.

"He knows the business, and he knows how all the services work and how to use them," says Mark Russinovich, a long-time Microsoft executive who now serves under Guthrie as CTO of Windows Azure.

"Scott's probably the best product manager at the company," agrees 26-year Microsoft veteran Jason Zander, named Executive VP of Azure earlier this year. "He is amazing in his ability to go up and down in terms of depth," says Charlotte Yarkoni, a corporate VP of Azure growth and ecosystems.

Everything started changing in 2014. Nadella's overhaul of Windows Azure and the cloud business — spearheaded by Guthrie — had been so successful, few questioned it when he was named CEO of the company.

"Satya and Scott recognized the existential threat of cloud to Microsoft's future," says Dave Bartoletti, a VP and principal analyst with research firm Forrester. "It's been one of the most successful corporate turnarounds, I think."

Guthrie assumed his boss' old job, placing him in command of that side of the business. Over time, Guthrie's role expanded to include almost every single product and service that Microsoft sells to businesses.

From there, things only accelerated, as Guthrie and Nadella's customer-first philosophy was free to spread through the rest of the company. Windows Azure, renamed just Azure in 2014, has become one of Microsoft's strongest growth stories. Microsoft's overall commercial cloud revenue surged to about $23 billion in its last fiscal year, accounting for roughly 21% of the company's total revenue.

A big part of the turnaround has been a general mellowing with regards to the competition, with Microsoft ending its cold war with the open source software world. Nowadays, Linux accounts for about a third of all Azure virtual machine usage. Microsoft itself is the number-one corporate contributor to open source projects. And, perhaps most tellingly, Microsoft shelled out $7.5 billion to buy GitHub, the startup at the center of the open source software world.

"[Microsoft buying GitHub] would have been inconceivable a decade ago," says Guthrie. "It would be inconceivable, frankly, four years ago." He says that when it comes to the company's attitude on open source, "'night and day' might even be too easy a term."

That mellowing has also touched Microsoft's employees, who are now empowered to work more closely with each other, without feeling like they're in competition. Microsoft's newest FPGA chip for artificial intelligence was inspired by a lot of the custom processor design work on the Microsoft Xbox games console, says Zander.

Similarly, Dr. Peter Lee, a corporate VP of Microsoft Research and one of its chief leaders, says that his organization is "joined at the hip" with the Azure team — breakthroughs on artificial intelligence, silicon processor design, and even how to build better data centers, go straight back to the cloud business.

That attitude has "sort of infected the rest of the company," says Lee. "This is the most collaborative the company has ever been," says Zander.

Guthrie's world recently got larger, with pieces as seemingly disparate as augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and chunks of Windows engineering. But Guthrie says it's all part of the same playbook: Helping customers move to the cloud and update the ways they do business.

A car company might use Azure to power its connected car software, Microsoft databases and AI to analyze the data it gets, and a pair of HoloLens goggles in the dealership to help customers visualize paint color options. And that's not to mention that they might use Microsoft Dynamics to help keep track of customer relationships, Windows Server in their own data centers, or perhaps, soon, GitHub to store and track all the code they're writing.

"And so although the technology pieces are distinct, they all fit together in terms of enabling something that really is one plus one equals three," says Guthrie.

Still, there's work to be done. Amazon Web Services is still the number-one cloud computing provider, outstripping Azure by most objective measures. At the same time, Microsoft is benefitting in some unexpected ways from the rise of Amazon, as retailers shun the idea of relying on their biggest competitor for cloud computing services. Guthrie acknowledges that this dynamic "certainly doesn't hurt," even as Microsoft signs a big cloud deal with Walmart.

Ultimately, though, Guthrie says that he never wants to rest on his laurels. He cites a favorite catchphrase from Intel founder and CEO Andy Grove: "Only the paranoid survive."

"I don't think it's like a mountain where you just you get to the top of the mountain and you're going to have climbed it. Now I've got to climb down," says Guthrie. "It's one of those things that is sort of the continuous journey that hopefully we never finish because there's always opportunities to do better."</s>SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of a family of open source projects including Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime and Cloud Foundry BOSH, announced today additional keynote stage participants at the annual European Summit at the Congress Center in Basel, Switzerland, October 10-11, 2018. Standard registration for the event ends this Friday, September 7, before price increases by 176 euros.

More than 1,000 enterprise developers, architects, engineers and executives from around the world are expected to attend the Basel Summit. Attendees will learn about Cloud Foundry from those who build and use it every day. They will join other developers, end users and CIOs to gain first-hand access to Cloud Foundry roadmaps, training and tutorials, and to see how others are using Cloud Foundry to support continuous innovation and application portability.

"These new additions to the keynote stage broaden the lineup to include end users talking about their journey, partner discussions, and live demos. We've also added new track topics and offer the only available in-person Cloud Foundry developer certification," said Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. "Platinum sponsors Dynatrace, Pivotal, SAP, and Swisscom are helping ensure we bring the very best to our Cloud Foundry community in Europe."

Cloud Foundry Foundation will carry on the tradition of hosting a diversity event at Basel Summit. There is one sponsorship remaining for the Diversity Luncheon. The sponsorship will directly support The Chasing Grace Project, with the total amount going towards production of the series. Google and IBM have sponsored Diversity Luncheon itself, which will include a screening of an episode from the docuseries The Chasing Grace Project, written and directed by Jennifer Cloer, co-founder of Wicked Flicks Productions.

There will also be a free Hackathon for developers with prizes awarded to the top three teams and first place winners announced on-stage during Thursday morning keynotes. The 2018 Boston Summit winning Hackathon team will be featured in the Experiments track.

Cloud Foundry is an open source technology backed by the largest technology companies in the world, including Dell EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP and SUSE, and is being used in production by leaders in manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. Only Cloud Foundry delivers the velocity needed to continuously deliver apps at the speed of business. Cloud Foundry's container-based architecture runs apps in any language on your choice of cloud â Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, VMware vSphere, and more. With a robust services ecosystem and simple integration with existing technologies, Cloud Foundry is the modern standard for mission critical apps for global organizations.

About Cloud Foundry Foundation

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent non-profit open source organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard for delivering the best developer experiences to companies of all sizes. The Foundation projects include Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, BOSH, Open Service Broker API, Abacus, CF-Local, CredHub, ServiceFabrik, Stratos and more. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, and is used by more than half the Fortune 500, representing nearly $15 trillion in combined revenue. Cloud Foundry is hosted by The Linux Foundation and is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: https://www.cloudfoundry.org.</s>The more Azure grows, the harder it is to manage through its portal. After all, graphical user interfaces rarely scale beyond a few machines. With a global Azure deployment, you’re going to be running hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual machines, containers, and Azure service endpoints. It’s not a job for fallible humans, where one misconfiguration can result in a significant service outage.

That’s where Azure’s Resource Manager (ARM) comes in. It is an important part of work with Azure. The infrastructure elements that make up an application also make up a template that’s stored, ready for use and reuse. Although you can store them in your Azure account, you can able store templates outside Azure, such as in a GitHub repository. Because they’re JSON documents, you can edit and manage them in any tool that can work with JSON, like Visual Studio Code or the full Visual Studio IDE.

Templates are easy to manage and deploy with the Azure Portal, but things get much more interesting when you start to mix in the Azure CLI. With the CLI running locally on your PC, managing Azure through a command line makes a lot of sense once you’re working at scale.

Instead of clicking through a GUI, a deployment is now a matter of a couple of lines of script. You first set up an Azure Resource Group, then you deploy your templates. Once provisioned, you get a notification in the CLI and your application is ready to run. Note: If you prefer to use the Azure Portal’s built-on Cloud Shell, make sure your templates are in a storage account associated with the account that’s running the shell.
A Microsoft Azure datacenter in Texas goes down due to a cooling system failure. Outages in cloud services were reported worldwide (Zdnet)