On Wednesday, September 23rd, I was in Utrecht for Azure Fest 2026, a free, community-driven event for everyone working with Azure. I attend a fair number of conferences every year, but what always draws me to Azure Fest is the mix of deep technical sessions and stories that go beyond the standard product pitch. This year was no different. Below is an overview of the sessions I attended.
Don’t Automate the Past: Rethinking What We Can Make Possible with Azure and AI
The day kicked off with a keynote from Marcel de Vries, and it immediately set the tone. His point: we have a habit of using new technology to make the world we already know faster. Datacenters moved to the cloud, existing processes got digitized, and now we’re asking AI to do the same work just a little quicker. But what if the real opportunity isn’t automation, but reinvention? He talked about how AI is increasingly becoming an intelligence layer across the entire organization, from individual productivity to agents that actually take action, and how Azure, Microsoft Foundry and Fabric provide the context, governance and control needed to apply that at scale. The part that stuck with me most was his observation that it’s not the technology holding us back, but our existing experience, organizational structures, and the understandable desire for control.
From Local to Cloud-Native: Real-World Azure Arc in Action
After the keynote I sat in on Tom Claes’ session on Azure Arc. A recognizable topic for anyone working in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Tom used a live demo to show how Azure Arc can cut down on that overhead by bringing on-premises, multi-cloud and edge resources under a single management layer. What I liked about this session is that it didn’t stay stuck in slides, the demo made it immediately clear where Arc actually adds value and how you’d get started with it in practice. The great thing about the session was that Tom also actively asked the audience questions to see if they were paying attention, that’s a really good trick, in my opinion.
Where Water Isn’t Guaranteed: Azure, AI and IoT for Africa’s Last Mile
One of the sessions that stuck with me the most was Dionisio Nunes’ talk on Jila, a water reliability platform built on Azure. The premise is disarmingly simple: most cloud solutions assume users are mostly online, that notifications just arrive, and that GPS pins on a map make sense to everyone. In large parts of Africa, that assumption simply doesn’t hold. Mobile data is expensive, power outages are the norm, and OTPs don’t always come through. His story was very engaging because he cited real-life situations and would go on to explain the situation in Africa and how he had resolved it. Dionisio showed how raw tank readings get turned into meaningful events, things like alerts, refill detection, and signals that a device has gone offline. The part I found most interesting was his take on AI: not a chatbot bolted on to check a box, but time-series forecasting used to answer very practical questions. When will the tank run dry? When is the next refill likely?…
Event-Driven DevOps: Automating Azure with Event Grid System Topics
Later in the day I caught Hans Muns’ session on Event Grid system topics. His angle: modern DevOps on Azure isn’t just about pipelines, it’s about making your platform reactive. With system topics, you can automatically respond to changes in your Azure environment and trigger workflows the moment resources are created, updated, or deleted. Even though there was some criticism at times during the session, or he forgot to mention certain important points, he consistently managed to get back on track by keeping things as engaging as possible for the audience. He walked through how system topics actually work, how to connect Event Grid to various automation and orchestration tools, and closed with a live demo where a resource change automatically kicked off a deployment-related action.
Cloud native platform engineering on Azure
The last session of the day was Geert van der Cruijsen’s talk on building a self-service engineering platform on Azure, rooted in cloud native principles. He started with Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem, but quickly made clear that sovereignty and control are inseparable from that conversation. His demos covered tools like GitOps, Argo CD, Crossplane and Terranetes, with a running thread of when to reach for which one. What I took away most was how he showed sovereignty requirements and AI-driven development increasingly shaping architectural decisions for platforms like this. The demonstrations he gave were very clear, and I felt he really managed to spark the interest of everyone in the audience, he also occasionally challenged himself with a slightly more complex topic during his talk, which the audience loved.
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