Please welcome your host John Gossman, Lead Architect at Microsoft Azure.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Good morning everyone, and welcome to Azure Open Dev.
In this event, you'll learn best practices for using open-source and Azure together.
You'll hear from open-source thought leaders at companies like Canonical, Chef, Docker,
Pivitol, and Red Hat.
And we also have speakers from Microsoft teams who are both using and producing open-source.
These speakers will be demoing how to use Node and Java with Azure.
And we`ll show you how you may wanna integrate open-source DevOps tools into your Azure workflow.
We also have sessions on how to use containers and container orchestrators, both to bring
your maybe new micro services based applications as well as existing lift and shift applications
into containers and onto Azure.
But before we go too into the agenda, I wanna back up and give you a little bit about our
vision for Azure and open-source.
You may be wondering, why does Microsoft love open source and where are we going with it?
So to settle all that context, I wanna tell you something about myself.
I'm an architect in the Azure team.
My focus is on developer tools and systems for Azure developers.
And of course, this includes our Microsoft products.
Our SDKs, our CLIs, our Portal, and our ReST APIs, but it also includes increasingly open-source
tools from the companies and communities that we're gonna be talking about today.
My job is literally to work with the companies and communities behind these open-source technologies
to make sure that they work great on Azure.
For example, one of the most important technologies for open-source on Azure is Linux.
And as a result I worked with both the Linux vendors like Canonical and RedHat and I also
sit on the Linux foundation board to make sure that the community and governance model
for Linux is strong.
This all means that I have a very interesting perspective on what's going on.
I sit at the intersection of Microsoft with our partners, our customers, and the communities
that are working on Azure.
And I get to see how people's lives are changing as developers and users in the cloud.
It's a very exciting place to be and it's a lot of fun.
I'm gonna back up and say it's actually a very exciting time to be alive, if you think
about it.
We live in one of these times of incredible, very rapid technological change.
In fact, I like to say we live in a world of science fiction.
Think about all the things that just a few years ago you would have said where something
you only see in a movie, or read a novel that you have now today.
Things like self driving cars and of course electric cars.
And I saw on the news today that people are starting to talk about flying cars finally.
And we have machine learning and artificial intelligence that are so good that we actually
kinda take it for granted that we can talk to our phone and it will understand us and
answer back.
And we have private companies that are doing space declaration and building spacecraft.
We even have space tourist.
In fact, Mark Shuttleworth, from Canonical who will be here later talking has visited
the International Space Station, how cool is that?
Well, in all these changes developers lives are changing very rapidly too.
The Cloud revolution is one of those times like the PC revolution or the web revolution
or the smartphone revolution where everything seems to be changing at once.
And developers have to kinda raise their game to be learning the new technologies while
still working with existing technologies that they've been using for years.
So you might have a mainstream application where there's a strong ecosystem around the
technology using, but you might be adding new features to that thing.
And you might be moving the cloud or adopting DevOps practices.
Meanwhile, you also need to be looking at new and emerging technologies like containers
and serverless, where the best practices haven't necessarily been written down or maybe aren't
even known.
So there's a lot of burden to learn new things all the time.
So one thing I do know about Microsoft is that we understand developers.
Microsoft is a company by, of and for Developers.
If you think about it, we were founded by two famous developers, Bill Gates and Paul
Allen.
And they were building a product for developers, Microsoft basic and the company has followed
up through that time with other innovative developer products like .NET or Visual Basic,
Visual Studio.
Development productivity is actually at the core of the Microsoft DNA.
And I've talked to a lot of developers at Microsoft and one thing I've found is, like
the developers everywhere, Microsoft developers love open-source.
We love to be able to read the code, to get our hands on it, to be able to debug it, to
interact with it in a ways that we couldn't do with just proprietary code.
In fact open-source, you really need to think about as it's a way to scale a project beyond
what can be done in any single organization.
Even a big organization with a lot of developers on staff, like Microsoft.
Open-source allows us to collaborate with our customers, our partners, and even our
competitors in a way that we couldn't do in other cases.
You can, rather than simply report a bug, you can go in, find the line of code and maybe
even fix it, or certainly help isolate the thing.
Or implement a feature that you need or want in that product.
The key ingredient that backs all this though is you need to have strong and diverse communities.
Without strong, diverse communities, none of this is possible.
So Microsoft has a basically a four pronged approach to open source.
First of all, we just need to make it work, right?
So one of the things that we have to do is just enable these various open source projects,
whether that be fixing it ourselves, or helping the other partners and communities that are
working on these products.
Secondly, where appropriate we wanna try and add value by offering these open source products
as services.
Perfect example to this are recently announced MySQL and PostScript services where developers
can use the standard MySQL and PostScript interfaces that they're familiar with.
It's not some strange fork but by us providing it as a service it takes the operational burden
off of the developers for using that product.
Increasingly we are also releasing Microsoft projects as open source, famously .NET for
example is a great example for this.
The reason we wanna do this is because to get back into that collaboration cycle where
I talked about where we can now collaborate in new ways with our customers and our partners.
And literally scale these projects beyond the boundaries of what can be done just at
Microsoft.
And finally, we need to contribute to open source ecosystems.
And this means both code contributions, and it also means backing the big institutions
and foundations that enable strong communities.
For example, the Linux Foundation, or the Apache Foundation, or the Open Compute Project.
The result of all of this, is that today, there are over 15,000 Microsoft employees
with GitHub accounts, so that they can work in different ways on these open source projects.
But that's just a statistic, let me tell you a couple specific stories.
You've probably have heard of Anders Hejlsberg and know him as the creator of C# programming
language and before that Turbo Pascal.
Well, Anders latest project is TypeScript.
TypeScript is a strongly typed superset of the JavaScript programming language.
But it compiles down to standard JavaScript, which means it will run anywhere that JavaScript
runs.
Which basically means everywhere.
And Anders has been doing this entire project on GitHub in the open.
in fact, as you can see, he is the leading contributor to the TypeScript project.
So here we have a case of one of the most legendary language designers of all time and
one of Microsoft`s most senior and productive developers.
And he's doing his project entirely in open source on GitHub.
If you're not familiar with Visual Studio code, I highly recommend you go check it out.
Visual Studio Code is a light weight editor and IDE.
It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux and it's available for free download.
Of course Visual Studio code supports Microsoft languages like C#, F# and TypeScript.
But it also is a great development platform for Node and Golang programming.
In fact, recently I've talked to some startups in the Valley that are entirely Go Shops and
yet they are developers in the last year have switched almost entirely to using Visual Studio
code.
Because they find it the most productive way to do Go language development.
These are developers that actually don't use a lot of other Microsoft products.
Well, Visual Studio code is based on the open-source Atom editor, and is entirely available on
GitHub in an open-source form.
But we don't only contribute to Microsoft-backed projects.
I'm sure you've heard of Docker, and we're gonna hear from the Docker company later today.
But you may be surprised to find out that John Howard from the Windows team is the leading
contributor in the last 12 months to Docker and the fourth leading contributor of all
time.
There's so much open source going on in Microsoft now, that it's actually pretty hard for me
to keep track of.
Certainly five years ago I probably could have told you about all the major Open source
projects at Microsoft.
Two years ago I could have given you the basic landscape.
Literally today, I find out about new open source work at Microsoft a couple times a
week.
I knew that LinkedIn had created Kafka and was its biggest user.
but I was surprised to find out that Bing was one of the next two biggest users of Kafka
and had been so for a couple of years.
I found out about LightGBM from listening to a podcast.
Not a Microsoft podcast, just a machine learning podcast and the speaker started talking about
one of the latest things that showed up in the last year is this thing LightGBM and he
said that came from Microsoft, and I had to go look it up.
So it`s an exciting time to be a developer and to work in the cloud with open source.
Microsoft is committed to using open source in our products and enabling open source for
our customers and partners.
And that`s why we`re here today for this event.
So we got a whole lot of other things coming on the rest of the day.
Next up is Scott Johnson from Docker who will talk about modernizing traditional applications
and bringing hybrid applications to Azure.
I hope you enjoy the day.
>> [APPLAUSE]