Microsoft Azure - Key takeaways from the BUILD Conference
On day 2 of the BUILD conference in San Francisco - the keynote discussion was presented by Scott Guthrie - who runs Azure for MS.
In my opinion - if there is one area of Microsoft that is really executing in a leadership position it's Azure.
From it's humble beginnings of some hosted services like Web Sites and Databases - Azure today has 30 regions and over 1M servers - and is growing rapidly. Those 30 regions are more than AWS and Google combined.
Along side traditional VM hosting capabilities the PaaS services that are available are simply amazing. From Web to Mobile, Big Data to HPC and IoT to Analytics, Machine Learning and Containers - MS continues to innovate in the space and expand offerings.
One of the more strategic announcements that MS made yesterday was that the new Xamarin software would be free to Visual Studio users. Combined with what is called the Xamarin Test Suite - a mobile developer can test their application across hundreds to different mobile OS platforms all at once and be able to troubleshoot and fix issues immediately. Very powerful.
What this does is place Visual Studio and Xamarin as a leading mobile development and testing platform with a natural extension to Azure for the backend services. This is true even for Android and iOS developers not just Windows 10 UWP.
Another key announcement was Service Fabric. Modern apps tend to use different architectures than traditional on-prem n-tier apps. Concepts like containers, microservices and asynchronous data processing come into play which Azure does very well.
As the name implies microservices perform small parts of the application function in either stateful or stateless operation and can scale and run autonomously from other parts of the application. This provides great flexibility and resiliency to apps.
Service Fabric allows you to define and manage the application as a collection of these services along with all of the dependencies, scaling, maintenance, etc. It can take a while to wrap your head around it - but once you get it - the types and scale of applications that can be developed are immense.
Next, MS announced something called Power BI Embedded. This is a great tool for allowing developers to include Power BI graphs / charts directly into their applications with little to no coding and supports real time updates.
Finally comes Azure Functions. Azure functions is an event driven compute on demand capability. You don't have to define a VM, etc. This is great for use cases like IoT monitoring. So instead of having a VM constantly running a service that will only be used when a particular event occurs - you can have a "function" that runs only when that event occurs and you are only charged for the resources used to run that function.
In my opinion - this approach could be the future of app development and deployment in the cloud. First came VMs, then Containers and now Functions. Obviously it all depends on the use case and application architecture - but think about the ability to just upload code and have the cloud determine what resources are required to run it and when to run it and then turn off when not needed.
All in all some very powerful announcements from MS and I expect Azure to continue to be where the real growth for MS comes from in the coming years.
In my opinion - if there is one area of Microsoft that is really executing in a leadership position it's Azure.
From it's humble beginnings of some hosted services like Web Sites and Databases - Azure today has 30 regions and over 1M servers - and is growing rapidly. Those 30 regions are more than AWS and Google combined.
Along side traditional VM hosting capabilities the PaaS services that are available are simply amazing. From Web to Mobile, Big Data to HPC and IoT to Analytics, Machine Learning and Containers - MS continues to innovate in the space and expand offerings.
One of the more strategic announcements that MS made yesterday was that the new Xamarin software would be free to Visual Studio users. Combined with what is called the Xamarin Test Suite - a mobile developer can test their application across hundreds to different mobile OS platforms all at once and be able to troubleshoot and fix issues immediately. Very powerful.
What this does is place Visual Studio and Xamarin as a leading mobile development and testing platform with a natural extension to Azure for the backend services. This is true even for Android and iOS developers not just Windows 10 UWP.
Another key announcement was Service Fabric. Modern apps tend to use different architectures than traditional on-prem n-tier apps. Concepts like containers, microservices and asynchronous data processing come into play which Azure does very well.
As the name implies microservices perform small parts of the application function in either stateful or stateless operation and can scale and run autonomously from other parts of the application. This provides great flexibility and resiliency to apps.
Service Fabric allows you to define and manage the application as a collection of these services along with all of the dependencies, scaling, maintenance, etc. It can take a while to wrap your head around it - but once you get it - the types and scale of applications that can be developed are immense.
Next, MS announced something called Power BI Embedded. This is a great tool for allowing developers to include Power BI graphs / charts directly into their applications with little to no coding and supports real time updates.
Finally comes Azure Functions. Azure functions is an event driven compute on demand capability. You don't have to define a VM, etc. This is great for use cases like IoT monitoring. So instead of having a VM constantly running a service that will only be used when a particular event occurs - you can have a "function" that runs only when that event occurs and you are only charged for the resources used to run that function.
In my opinion - this approach could be the future of app development and deployment in the cloud. First came VMs, then Containers and now Functions. Obviously it all depends on the use case and application architecture - but think about the ability to just upload code and have the cloud determine what resources are required to run it and when to run it and then turn off when not needed.
All in all some very powerful announcements from MS and I expect Azure to continue to be where the real growth for MS comes from in the coming years.
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