Tuesday was a great day for me. I had the chance to talk on AzureConf for the first time and it was really great. AzureConf is the biggest Microsoft Azure online conference and it was on for the 3rd time. I’m really honored, being among this great line-up of speakers. The conference was streamed from the Channel 9 studios on the Microsoft campus in Redmond and had several thousands of viewers (stats might be shared later on). Scott Klein organized the conference this year and I really want to thank him and his team for the good organization and the chance we all got.
This blog post is the story of my day.
The preparation
Since I knew I had to present on Hybrid Connections, I immediately started planning for this talk. I had never given this talk before (had presented Hybrid Connections as part of my session on www.itproceed.be), so there was a lot of preparation needed. I used the existing presentation of TechEd as input and guideline, but added more specific content and details to it in order to position Hybrid Connections and compare it with Service Bus Relay and Virtual Networking.
I also had some specific questions and things I wanted to get clarified, and for that I could count on the help and guidance of Santosh Chandwani (PM on the hybrid connections team). As always, I spent most of the time on my demo for which I used our Codit Integration Dashboard and moved it to the cloud, while the data and back end services were still on premises. I also built a new mobile service and a universal app, my first time. And to end, I exposes a managed API through Azure API Management.
Preconf-day
The day before conference, all speakers were invited for technical pre-checks in the Channel 9 studios. It was great to see the famous studio and all the equipment that was used there. You immediately felt the atmosphere was really nice over there.
We got to know the nice crew of people there and had to test our laptops for screen projection, network connectivity and sound. That seemed to be very important as both Mike Martin and me had some screen resolution issues. Scott also handed our shirts and we all went our own way to prepare for our talk, the day after.
AzureConf day
October 20 started. After final dry run of the demo, we drove to the studios at 6:45AM. Tension was building, as we saw the twittersphere getting more active about this event. People from all over the world were tuning in for the keynote of Scott Guthrie.
We settled ourselves in the speaker room and all watched Scott Guthrie detailing out a lot of nice announcements that can be found on the azure blog.
The live sessions
We were watching the sessions from the other speakers, either from the speaker room, or from the ‘channel9 war room’. I believe the content of the sessions was very good and showed a good variety of services that are available on the Microsoft Azure platform. The live sessions are available on channel 9 as well. So if you have missed a session, go ahead and watch it online.
- Michael Collier: Michael talked about the resource manager in Azure. Very interesting capabilities of a service that will definitely evolve over time.
- Mike Martin: Mike had a nice session on one of the topics that is crucial for every company: backups. He showed who the Azure platform offers features & services for this.
- Sam Vanhoutte: I guess that’s me. Hybrid connections, web sites, mobile services, service bus relay & API management. All in one session.
- Seth Juarez: This was a great session on one of the newest services in Azure: Machine learning. By combining humor and complex maths, he made the complex subject of Machine learning much more ‘digestable’.
- Rick G Garibay: Rick gave a session that was very similar to the sessions I gave on IoT at the UKCSUG, Cloudburst and WAZUG. Positioning the investments of Microsoft around IoT and discussing Reykjavik and the concepts of cloud assisted communications. Great to see the complex demo worked. I can guarantee it’s not easy.
- Vishwas Lele: Vishwas showed tons of tools and concepts (of which I believe Docker and the Traffic Manager for SharePoint were really nice).
- Chris Auld: Chris talked about DocumentDB, the new document database in Azure. A real good explanation and demonstration of the backend for MSN and Onenote.
Everything was recorded in the Channel 9 studios and here’s a nice group picture of all live speakers with the Channel 9 crew.
The recorded sessions
And to add to the great live content, there are also a lot of recorded sessions available on Channel 9. I would encourage you all to have a look and download those sessions to watch whenever you have the time as there’s real great content out there.
It was a real honour and pleasure to be part of this group of great speakers. And with this, I would like to thank Scott Klein for having me over, the great crew of Channel 9 and all speakers for the great time.
Sam
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