A few years back (November 2016) I attended the Microsoft UK Partner Summit at Twickenham Stadium, London. I wrote something about that here.
Well today I am back there at the home of English rugby to hear some more stuff from Microsoft. This event is two days though now, but I am only able to be there on the first day and to be honest this is the most relevant to me.
There are three tracks running during the day for the different audiences.
My intention is to arrive for a quick coffee and meet up with some industry peers I would think before heading down to the “Kubernetes & AKS” monster breakout session that if you check above is spanning the whole day.
AKS – Azure Container Service
AKS – Azure Container Service was brought out as preview at the end of October 2017, following on from ACS (Azure Container Service) (Because that’s not confusing!) AKS will be making it even easier to manage and operate your Kubernetes environments, all without sacrificing portability. This new service features an Azure-hosted control plane, automated upgrades, self-healing, easy scaling, and a simple user experience for both developers and cluster operators. With AKS, customers get the benefit of open source Kubernetes without complexity and operational overhead.
This is not a new thing from Microsoft within Azure the ACS version has been around since 2015 with support for multiple container orchestrators. AKS is focused on Kubernetes.
This session interested me because of the focus around containers, and I want to learn more about how Kubernetes looks and feels but also what workloads are people using them for? Stateful, stateless, what are the requirements for data availability?
The intention is probably to stay in this class till lunch time, hopefully from there I will have picked up enough new information on what Microsoft are doing in this space. And the nature of the class looks very similar to how it worked a couple of years back when they walked through creating a company within Azure, it was a great session.
“leading in the AI era – Industry scenarios”
After lunch I have marked off to go and see “leading in the AI era – Industry scenarios” the intent here is very similar. AI is a big new buzz word in the industry, don’t get me wrong there is something there and we are moving fast toward a more AI driven world. I wanted to hear in this short session what Microsoft are seeing in the industry, if I can also understand what workloads or data this then generates what is the availability or protection requirements here, this session will give me a good overview of that I believe.
At this point in the day the oracle on Azure doesn’t really interest me. And neither does the azure offers, so this will either be a good time to catch up with email or head back into the Kubernetes room for another hour.
Data Warehousing – Data Lakes
The last session I would like to catch is “Data Warehousing – Data Lakes” much like containers this is something I have been exploring specifically around Hadoop and big data use cases. One of the thing that really interests me here is the Internet of things for the business and the use case of all that data to be sent to a data lake for warehousing. I really want to hear what Microsoft have got to say about this but also this will help with some content I am working on around this area. Of course, we also want to understand more of the real-world use cases and the protection of this data or more to the point how can we better leverage this data.
For those that will make the second day, its more around the modern workplace, looks to be talking at the application layer and even devices. I will be heading from London up to Manchester where day one of IP Expo kicks off and I have a similar set of sessions and people I want to listen to and speak to.
You can find more information here on the event.
If you are at either, then come and say hi.