If you are like me and were unable to get away from the office to attend Microsoft Build 2019 you will be glad to know that Microsoft has published all the sessions and are available online at no charge.
Being a developer focused conference most of the announcements were geared towards developers. You can see a complete list of searchable announcements here. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/?updatetype=microsoft-build&Page=1
I’m more of an infrastructure guy, so some of the more interesting announcements to me were the following.
Azure VMware Solutions is now generally available – I guess if I was heavily invested in VMware and was looking to expand into Azure this announcement would certainly open up some interesting possibilities. It looks like if I use a bare-metal instance or dedicated instance I can basically have an ESX host running in Azure. I guess if you are doing a hybrid-cloud deployment and want to easily move workloads back and forth between on-prem and Azure his makes sense. If this excites you leave me a comment telling me why.
Azure Quickstart Center enables new customers to build cloud projects with confidence – I haven’t looked into this yet, but this looks VERY interesting to me if it is what I think it is. As cloud adoption continues to grow so does the required skill set of the IT professional. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is one of those skills the wise IT professional will want to become comfortable with.
Just two years ago I would talk to customers and this skill set was non-existent, or really just something the largest IT consultants or cloud providers had any experience in. Over the past year I have seen this skill set become more common with the customers I work with and is often the preferred deployment method. The IaS technology has also matured over that period.
I predict that if you don’t already manage your cloud deployment with IaC you will be in the near future. I’m hopeful that this new offering from Microsoft could be a great intro to those IT professionals looking to gain some IaC experience and knowledge. After I have had a look at it I’ll post a follow-up article.