Discover secure, future-ready cloud solutions—on-premises, hybrid, multicloud, or at the edge
Learn about sustainable, trusted cloud infrastructure with more regions than any other provider
Build your business case for the cloud with key financial and technical guidance from Azure
Plan a clear path forward for your cloud journey with proven tools, guidance, and resources
See examples of innovation from successful companies of all sizes and from all industries
Explore some of the most popular Azure products
Provision Windows and Linux VMs in seconds
Enable a secure, remote desktop experience from anywhere
Migrate, modernize, and innovate on the modern SQL family of cloud databases
Build or modernize scalable, high-performance apps
Deploy and scale containers on managed Kubernetes
Add cognitive capabilities to apps with APIs and AI services
Quickly create powerful cloud apps for web and mobile
Everything you need to build and operate a live game on one platform
Execute event-driven serverless code functions with an end-to-end development experience
Jump in and explore a diverse selection of today's quantum hardware, software, and solutions
Secure, develop, and operate infrastructure, apps, and Azure services anywhere
Simplify operations and management from cloud to edge with an AI companion
Create the next generation of applications using artificial intelligence capabilities for any developer and any scenario
Build, train, and deploy models from the cloud to the edge
Your platform for developing generative AI solutions and custom copilots
Enterprise scale search for app development
Apply advanced coding and language models to a variety of use cases
Unified speech services for speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech translation
Add natural language capabilities with a single API call
Easily conduct machine translation with a simple REST API call
Unlock insights from image and video content with AI
Accelerate information extraction from documents
Use AI to monitor text and image content for safety
Gather, store, process, analyze, and visualize data of any variety, volume, or velocity
Limitless analytics with unmatched time to insight
Design AI with Apache Spark™-based analytics
Govern, protect, and manage your data estate
Hybrid data integration at enterprise scale, made easy
Provision cloud Hadoop, Spark, R Server, HBase, and Storm clusters
Real-time analytics on fast-moving streaming data
Build, train, and deploy models from the cloud to the edge
Enterprise-grade analytics engine as a service
Scalable, secure data lake for high-performance analytics
Fast and highly scalable data exploration service
Access, manage, and act on data and insights by connecting every data source and analytics service together on a single platform
Access cloud compute capacity and scale on demand—and only pay for the resources you use
Provision Windows and Linux VMs in seconds
Manage and scale up to thousands of Linux and Windows VMs
Deploy and scale containers on managed Kubernetes
Build and deploy Spring Boot applications with a fully managed service from Microsoft and VMware
Quickly create powerful cloud apps for web and mobile
Execute event-driven serverless code functions with an end-to-end development experience
A dedicated physical server to host your Azure VMs for Windows and Linux
Cloud-scale job scheduling and compute management
Migrate SQL Server workloads to the cloud at lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
Provision unused compute capacity at deep discounts to run interruptible workloads
Build and deploy modern apps and microservices using serverless containers
Develop and manage your containerized applications faster with integrated tools
Deploy and scale containers on managed Kubernetes
Deploy and scale containers on managed Red Hat OpenShift
Build and deploy modern apps and microservices using serverless containers
Execute event-driven serverless code functions with an end-to-end development experience
Run containerized web apps on Windows and Linux
Launch containers with hypervisor isolation
Deploy and operate always-on, scalable, distributed apps
Build, store, secure, and replicate container images and artifacts
Seamlessly manage Kubernetes clusters at scale
Azure Kubernetes Service Edge Essentials is an on-premises Kubernetes implementation of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that automates running containerized applications at scale.
Support rapid growth and innovate faster with secure, enterprise-grade, and fully managed database services
Migrate, modernize, and innovate on the modern SQL family of cloud databases
Build or modernize scalable, high-performance apps
Build apps that scale with managed and intelligent SQL database in the cloud
Fully managed, intelligent, and scalable PostgreSQL
Modernize SQL Server applications with a managed, always-up-to-date SQL instance in the cloud
Fully managed, scalable MySQL Database
Migrate SQL Server workloads to the cloud at lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
Accelerate apps with high-throughput, low-latency data caching
Accelerate your data migration to Azure
Modernize Cassandra data clusters with a managed instance in the cloud
Deploy applications to the cloud with enterprise-ready, fully managed community MariaDB
Deliver innovation faster with simple, reliable tools for continuous delivery
Services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software
Continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform and cloud
Plan, track, and discuss work across your teams
Get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos for your project
Create, host, and share packages with your team
Test and ship confidently with an exploratory test toolkit
Quickly create environments using reusable templates and artifacts
Use your favorite DevOps tools with Azure
Full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network
Optimize app performance with high-scale load testing
Quickly spin up app infrastructure environments with project-based templates
Build, manage, and continuously deliver cloud applications—using any platform or language
Powerful and flexible environment to develop apps in the cloud
A powerful, lightweight code editor for cloud development
World’s leading developer platform, seamlessly integrated with Azure
Comprehensive set of resources to create, deploy, and manage apps
A powerful, low-code platform for building apps quickly
Get the SDKs and command-line tools you need
Build, test, release, and monitor your mobile and desktop apps
Full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network
Optimize app performance with high-scale load testing
Quickly spin up app infrastructure environments with project-based templates
Streamline development with secure, ready-to-code workstations in the cloud
Get Azure innovation everywhere—bring the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises workloads
Secure, develop, and operate infrastructure, apps, and Azure services anywhere
Cloud-native SIEM and intelligent security analytics
Build and run innovative hybrid apps across cloud boundaries
Experience a fast, reliable, and private connection to Azure
Synchronize on-premises directories and enable single sign-on
Migrate, modernize, and innovate on the modern SQL family of cloud databases
Services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software
Fully managed, intelligent, and scalable PostgreSQL
Extend cloud intelligence and analytics to edge devices
Manage user identities and access to protect against advanced threats across devices, data, apps, and infrastructure
Consumer identity and access management in the cloud
Manage your domain controllers in the cloud
Seamlessly integrate on-premises and cloud-based applications, data, and processes across your enterprise
Automate the access and use of data across clouds
Connect across private and public cloud environments
Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at scale
Reliable message delivery at massive scale
Reduce time, risk, and cost of energy exploration and production
Azure Data Manager for Agriculture extends the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform with industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to bring together farm data from disparate sources, enabling organizations to leverage high quality datasets and accelerate the development of digital agriculture solutions
Connect assets or environments, discover insights, and drive informed actions to transform your business
Unlock insights for intelligent local actions and global visibility. Enabled by Azure Arc
Connect, monitor, and manage billions of IoT assets
Use IoT spatial intelligence to create models of physical environments
Extend cloud intelligence and analytics to edge devices
Go from proof of concept to proof of value
Create, connect, and maintain secured intelligent IoT devices from the edge to the cloud
Build intelligent edge solutions with world-class developer tools, long-term support, and enterprise-grade security.
Making embedded IoT development and connectivity easy
Use an enterprise-grade service for the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle
Add location data and mapping visuals to business applications and solutions
Simplify, automate, and optimize the management and compliance of your cloud resources
Build, manage, and monitor all Azure products in a single, unified console
Govern, protect, and manage your data estate
Stay connected to your Azure resources—anytime, anywhere
Streamline Azure administration with a browser-based shell
Your personalized Azure best practices recommendation engine
Simplify data protection with built-in backup management at scale
Monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud costs with transparency, accuracy, and efficiency
Implement corporate governance and standards at scale
Keep your business running with built-in disaster recovery service
Improve application resilience by introducing faults and simulating outages
Full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network
Deliver high-quality video content anywhere, any time, and on any device
Encode, store, and stream video and audio at scale
Studio grade encoding at cloud scale
A single player for all your playback needs
Deliver content to virtually all devices with ability to scale
Securely deliver content using AES, PlayReady, Widevine, and Fairplay
Fast, reliable content delivery network with global reach
Simplify and accelerate your migration to the cloud with guidance, tools, and resources
Simplify migration and modernization with a unified platform
Keep your business running with built-in disaster recovery service
Accelerate your data migration to Azure
Appliances and solutions for data transfer to Azure and edge compute
Monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud costs with transparency, accuracy, and efficiency
Blend your physical and digital worlds to create immersive, collaborative experiences
Create multi-user, spatially aware mixed reality experiences
Render high-quality, interactive 3D content with real-time streaming
Use IoT spatial intelligence to create models of physical environments
Build for mixed reality using AI sensors
Automatically align and anchor 3D content to objects in the physical world
Build and deploy cross-platform and native apps for any mobile device
Send push notifications to any platform from any back end
Build, test, release, and monitor your mobile and desktop apps
Create cloud-powered mobile apps faster
Add location data and mapping visuals to business applications and solutions
Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at scale
Enterprise scale search for app development
Add cognitive capabilities to apps with APIs and AI services
Create multi-user, spatially aware mixed reality experiences
Quickly create powerful cloud apps for web and mobile
Build multichannel communication experiences
Connect cloud and on-premises infrastructure and services to provide your customers and users the best possible experience
Create your own private network infrastructure in the cloud
Deliver high availability and network performance to your apps
Build secure, scalable, highly available web front ends in Azure
Establish secure, cross-premises connectivity
Host your Domain Name System (DNS) domain in Azure
Fast, reliable content delivery network with global reach
Protect your Azure resources from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
Rapidly ingest data from space into the cloud with a satellite ground station service
Experience a fast, reliable, and private connection to Azure
Extend Azure management for deploying 5G and SD-WAN network functions on edge devices
Centrally manage virtual networks in Azure from a single pane of glass
Private access to services hosted on the Azure platform, keeping your data on the Microsoft network
Protect your enterprise from advanced threats across hybrid cloud workloads
Cloud-native SIEM and intelligent security analytics
Build secure, scalable, highly available web front ends in Azure
Safeguard and maintain control of keys and other secrets
Establish secure, cross-premises connectivity
Protect your Azure resources from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
Fully managed service that helps secure remote access to your virtual machines
A cloud-native web application firewall (WAF) service that provides powerful protection for web apps
Protect your Azure Virtual Network resources with cloud-native network security
Central network security policy and route management for globally distributed, software-defined perimeters
Get secure, massively scalable cloud storage for your data, apps, and workloads
High-performance, highly durable block storage
Scalable, secure data lake for high-performance analytics
Simple, secure and serverless enterprise-grade cloud file shares
Enterprise-grade Azure file shares, powered by NetApp
Simplify data protection with built-in backup management at scale
Massively scalable and secure object storage
Appliances and solutions for data transfer to Azure and edge compute
Industry leading price point for storing rarely accessed data
Elastic SAN is a cloud-native storage area network (SAN) service built on Azure. Gain access to an end-to-end experience like your on-premises SAN
Manage persistent volumes for stateful container applications
Azure Managed Lustre is a fully managed, cloud based parallel file system that enables customers to run their high performance computing (HPC) workloads in the cloud
Build, deploy, and scale powerful web applications quickly and efficiently
Quickly create and deploy mission-critical web apps at scale
Publish APIs to developers, partners, and employees securely and at scale
Fast, reliable content delivery network with global reach
Enterprise scale search for app development
Add real-time web functionalities easily
Easily build real-time messaging web applications using WebSockets and the publish-subscribe pattern
Add location data and mapping visuals to business applications and solutions
Streamlined full-stack development from source code to global high availability
Build multichannel communication experiences
Optimize app performance with high-scale load testing
Easily add real-time collaborative experiences to your apps with Fluid Framework
Build and deploy modern apps and microservices using serverless containers
Empower employees to work securely from anywhere with a cloud-based virtual desktop infrastructure
Enable a secure, remote desktop experience from anywhere
Provision Windows desktops and apps with VMware and Azure Virtual Desktop
Provision Windows desktops and apps on Azure with Citrix and Azure Virtual Desktop
Set up virtual labs for classes, training, hackathons, and other related scenarios
Streamline development with secure, ready-to-code workstations in the cloud
Build, manage, and continuously deliver cloud apps—with any platform or language
Analyze images, comprehend speech, and make predictions using data
Simplify and accelerate your migration and modernization with guidance, tools, and resources
Gather, store, process, analyze, and visualize data of any variety, volume, or velocity
Bring the agility and innovation of the cloud to your on-premises workloads
Connect, monitor, and control devices with secure, scalable, and open edge-to-cloud solutions
Help protect data, apps, and infrastructure with trusted security services
Simplify and accelerate development and testing (dev/test) across any platform.
Bring together people, processes, and products to continuously deliver value to customers and coworkers.
Build secure apps on a trusted platform. Embed security in your developer workflow and foster collaboration between developers, security practitioners, and IT operators.
Give customers what they want with a personalized, scalable, and secure shopping experience.
Turn your ideas into applications faster using the right tools for the job.
Create reliable apps and functionalities at scale and bring them to market faster.
Reach your customers everywhere, on any device, with a single mobile app build.
Respond to changes faster, optimize costs, and ship confidently.
Build apps faster by not having to manage infrastructure.
Connect modern applications with a comprehensive set of messaging services on Azure.
Accelerate time to market, deliver innovative experiences, and improve security with Azure application and data modernization.
Use business insights and intelligence from Azure to build software as a service (SaaS) apps
Move to a SaaS model faster with a kit of prebuilt code, templates, and modular resources.
Explore services to help you develop and run Web3 applications.
Build mission-critical solutions to analyze images, comprehend speech, and make predictions using data.
Uncover latent insights from across all of your business data with AI.
Protect your data and code while the data is in use in the cloud.
Build machine learning models faster with Hugging Face on Azure.
Save money and improve efficiency by migrating and modernizing your workloads to Azure with proven tools and guidance.
Optimize costs, operate confidently, and ship features faster by migrating your ASP.NET web apps to Azure.
Simplify and accelerate development and testing (dev/test) across any platform.
Enhanced security and hybrid capabilities for your mission-critical Linux workloads.
Reduce infrastructure costs by moving your mainframe and midrange apps to Azure.
Extend SAP applications and innovate in the cloud trusted by SAP.
Move your SQL Server databases to Azure with few or no application code changes.
Migrate your Windows Server workloads to Azure for unparalleled innovation and security.
Protect your data and code while the data is in use in the cloud.
Accelerate time to market, deliver innovative experiences, and improve security with Azure application and data modernization.
Seamlessly integrate applications, systems, and data for your enterprise.
Run your Oracle database and enterprise applications on Azure.
Migrate MongoDB workloads to the cloud and modernize data infrastructure with MongoDB Atlas on Azure.
Maximize cloud business value for your organization by leveraging Azure products and services to implement FinOps best practices that can support cloud cost optimization.
Drive faster, more efficient decision making by drawing deeper insights from your analytics.
Accelerate time to insights with an end-to-end cloud analytics solution.
Minimize disruption to your business with cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Get fully managed, single tenancy supercomputers with high-performance storage and no data movement.
Bring innovation anywhere to your hybrid environment across on-premises, multicloud, and the edge.
Deliver ultra-low-latency networking, applications and services at the enterprise edge.
Run your mission-critical applications on Azure for increased operational agility and security.
Experience quantum impact today with the world's first full-stack, quantum computing cloud ecosystem.
Deliver ultra-low-latency networking, applications, and services at the mobile operator edge.
Explore services to help you develop and run Web3 applications.
Bring Azure to the edge with seamless network integration and connectivity to deploy modern connected apps.
Migrate your Windows Server workloads to Azure for unparalleled innovation and security.
Connect devices, analyze data, and automate processes with secure, scalable, and open edge-to-cloud solutions.
Build open, interoperable IoT solutions that secure and modernize industrial systems.
Help safeguard physical work environments with scalable IoT solutions designed for rapid deployment.
Meet environmental sustainability goals and accelerate conservation projects with IoT technologies.
Ensure compliance using built-in cloud governance capabilities.
Minimize disruption to your business with cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Protect your data and code while the data is in use in the cloud.
Cloud-native network security for protecting your applications, network, and workloads.
Explore services to help you develop and run Web3 applications.
Get started easily, run lean, stay agile, and grow fast with Azure for startups
Accelerate mission impact, increase innovation, and optimize efficiency—with world-class security
Find reference architectures, example scenarios, and solutions for common workloads on Azure
Do more with less—explore resources for increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and driving innovation
Search from a rich catalog of more than 17,000 certified apps and services
Plan a clear path forward for your cloud journey with proven tools, guidance, and resources
Get the best value at every stage of your cloud journey
See which services offer free monthly amounts
Only pay for what you use, plus get free services
Find the options that work best for you
Explore special offers, benefits, and incentives
Estimate the costs for Azure products and services
Estimate your total cost of ownership and cost savings
Learn how to manage and optimize your cloud spend
Understand the value and economics of moving to Azure
Find, try, and buy trusted apps and services
Get up and running in the cloud with help from an experienced partner
Find the latest content, news, and guidance to lead customers to the cloud
Build, extend, and scale your apps on a trusted cloud platform
Reach more customers—sell directly to over 4M users a month in the commercial marketplace
AI + Machine Learning, Azure DevOps, Azure Machine Learning, DevOps, Industry trends
By Kate Baroni Principal Customer Engineer, Azure Engineering
Posted on
7 min read
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies extend the capabilities of software applications that are now found throughout our daily life: digital assistants, facial recognition, photo captioning, banking services, and product recommendations. The difficult part about integrating AI or ML into an application is not the technology, or the math, or the science or the algorithms. The challenge is getting the model deployed into a production environment and keeping it operational and supportable. Software development teams know how to deliver business applications and cloud services. AI/ML teams know how to develop models that can transform a business. But when it comes to putting the two together to implement an application pipeline specific to AI/ML — to automate it and wrap it around good deployment practices — the process needs some effort to be successful.
DevOps has become the de-facto development standard for cloud services. It places an emphasis on process, automation, and fosters a culture that encourages new ways of working together across teams. DevOps is an application-centric paradigm that focuses on the platform, instrumentation, and process to support applications: what is the infrastructure needed to support the application? What tools can be used to automate it? What is the release process for QA/production?
AI/ML projects have their own development methodologies including CRISP-DM and Microsoft Team Data Science Process (TDSP). Like DevOps, these methodologies are grounded in principles and practices learned from real-world projects. AI/ML teams use an approach unique to data science projects where there are frequent, small iterations to refine the data features, the model, and the analytics question. It’s a process intended to align a business problem with AI/ML model development. The release process is not a focus for CRISP-DM or TDSP and there is little interaction with an operations team. DevOps teams (today) are yet not familiar with the tools, languages, and artifacts of data science projects.
DevOps and AI/ML development are two independent methodologies with a common goal: to put an AI application into production. Today it takes the effort to bridge the gaps between the two approaches. AI/ML projects need to incorporate some of the operational and deployment practices that make DevOps effective and DevOps projects need to accommodate the AI/ML development process to automate the deployment and release process for AI/ML models.
Based on lessons learned from several Microsoft projects including the Mobile Bank Fraud Solution, some suggestions for bridging the gap between DevOps and AI/ML projects follow.
DevOps for AI/ML has the potential to stabilize and streamline the model release process. It is often paired with the practice and toolset to support Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). Here are some ways to consider CI/CD for AI/ML workstreams:
Use metrics and telemetry to inform what models will be deployed and updated. Metrics can be standard performance measures like precision, recall, or F1 scores. Or they can be scenario specific measures like the industry-standard fraud metrics developed to inform a fraud manager about a fraud model’s performance. Here are some ways to integrate AI/ML metrics into an application solution:
AI/ML models need to be updated periodically. Over time, and as new and different data becomes available — or customers or seasons or trends change — a model will need to be re-trained to continue to be effective. Use metrics and telemetry to help refine the update strategy and determine when a model needs to be re-trained.
The AI/ML pipeline is an important concept because it connects the necessary tools, processes, and data elements to produce and operationalize an AI/ML model. It also introduces another dimension of complexity for a DevOps process. One of the foundational pillars of DevOps is automation, but automating an end-to-end data and model pipeline is a byzantine integration challenge.
Workstreams in an AI/ML pipeline are typically divided between different teams of experts where each step in the process can be very detailed and intricate. It may not be practical to automate across the entire pipeline because of the difference in requirements, tools, and languages. Identify the steps in the process that can be easily automated like the data transformation scripts, or data and model quality checks. Consider the following workstreams:
Model Re-training and Refinement
An automated end-to-end process for the AI/ML pipeline can accelerate development and drive reproducibility, consistency, and efficiency across AI/ML projects.
Versioning is about keeping track of an application’s artifacts and the changes to the artifacts.
In software development projects this includes code, scripts, documentation, and files. A similar practice is just as important for AI/ML projects because—typically—there are multiple components, each with separate release and versioning cycles. In AI/ML projects, the artifacts could include:
Versioning can help provide:
A practical example of the importance of versioning for the AI/ML team happens when the performance of a model changes unexpectedly, and the change has nothing to do with the model itself. The ability to easily trace back inputs, dependencies, model, and data set versions could save days or weeks of effort.
At a minimum, decide on a consistent naming convention and use it for the data files, folders, and AI/ML models. Several different teams will be involved in the modeling process and without naming conventions, there will be confusion over which data sets or model versions to use.
Container architectures have the potential to streamline and simplify model development, test, and deployment. And as a package-based interface, containers make it easy for software applications to connect. Containers create an abstraction layer between models and the underlying infrastructure. This lets the AI/ML team focus on model development and not worry about the platform. Containers can easily enable:
The adoption of DevOps has been very effective at bringing together software development and operations teams to simplify and improve deployment and release processes. As AI and ML become increasingly more important components for applications, more pressure will exist to ensure they are part of an organization’s DevOps model. The suggestions presented are examples of some steps to move towards an integration of two methodologies. To get started, please use some of the links below and please share your feedback and your experience!
Let us know what you think of Azure and what you would like to see in the future.
Provide feedback
Build your cloud computing and Azure skills with free courses by Microsoft Learn.
Explore Azure learning
AI + Machine Learning, Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Service Fabric, Microsoft Purview, Partners
AI + Machine Learning, Analytics, Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI Service, Best practices, Management and Governance, Thought leadership
AI + Machine Learning, Analytics, Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI Service, Best practices, Management and Governance, Microsoft Purview, Thought leadership
Azure Functions, Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Machine Learning, Customer stories, Internet of Things, Thought leadership
Leave a Reply