Azure Updates: Container Storage; NVIDIA; New OpenAI model

Microsoft General Manager Aung Oo announced the general availability of Azure Container Storage. Microsoft describes the offering as the industry’s first platform-managed container native storage service. Designed for price performance and low latency, Container Storage is intended to support a widespread shift from VMs to containers. The offering is intended to be tightly integrated with Kubernetes, reduce the need to interact with control plane APIs, and streamline storage management. Microsoft has included support for Ephemeral Disks and Azure Disks in a bid for “comprehensive” volume management support.  

NVIDIA and Microsoft announced a collaborative resource for developers and organizations to promote AI enabled apps. According to Microsoft, developers who choose to use NVIDIA—whether running Visual Studio Code or GitHub—can take advantage of flexibility, productivity, and scalability. NVIDIA supports these objectives with Harness NVIDIA-optimized software, Nemotron models, NIM inference microservices, and Hugging Face integrations. 

Microsoft announced the launch of a new OpenAI model. Dubbed GPT-4o-2024-08-06, the new model is aimed at enhancing productivity through Structured Outputs, JSON schema, and support of GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini models. It provides two different forms of structured outputs: user-defined JSON schema and a more accurate “strict mode.”