Azure Updates: Application Gateway; AI; Red Hat OpenShift

Senior technical program manager Rajesh Nautiyal shared the availability of mutual transport layer security (mTLS) protocol and online certificate status protocol (OCSP) support in Application Gateway. mTLS involves verification and authentication of digital certificates on both ends of an encrypted TLS connection.

“TLS and mTLS protocols are used to encrypt network communication between client and server. In TLS protocol only the client verifies the validity of the server prior to establishing the encrypted communication. The server does not validate the client during the TLS handshake. mTLS, on other hand, is a variation of TLS that adds an additional layer of security by requiring mutual authentication between client and server. This means that both the client and server must present a valid certificate before the encrypted connection can be established. This makes mTLS more secure than TLS as it adds an added layer of security by validating authenticity of client and server,” Nautiyal wrote.

mTLS is recommended for IoT devices, organizations with a zero-trust approach, and to secure against brute force and credential stuffing. Customers can follow tutorials to setup the new option and use trusted signed certificates.

AI platforms and infrastructure principal lead John Lee shared AI breakthroughs with NVIDIA. The two companies have an ongoing collaboration to support AI supercomputing, combining Azure scalable compute and NVIDIA GPUs. So far, Microsoft is the first company to use NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs, NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking, and the NVIDIA AI enterprise software. NVIDIA announced widespread adoption of this hardware by other companies at Supercomputing 2022. Together, the two companies are supporting Nuance Precision Imaging for radiologists. Hazy Research is using the technology for MLPerf goals and Microsoft itself is scaling up a 530B Parameter GPT-3 model.