As promised. In the last episode,
I am back with all the goodies from Microsoft build 2020 however,
there are more than 600 sessions in 48 hours on security data,
AI, machine learning, developer tools, and so much more.
So I needed some help and you get a break from me,
which is an added bonus.
I'll get Daniel and Brian from A Cloud Guru to share some of their best bits,
but do you know what it means to attend an online event?
MS Build is a Microsoft event that normally happens in person. However,
as we're all in lockdown and can't travel, Microsoft has changed the event,
so it's now a digital conference.
The MS Build homepage has content running 24 seven with a number of additional
sessions running concurrently.
You could then join any of those sessions with a click of a button and jump
between them if needed. Very nifty.
Each session also has a Q&A section where you can ask the presenter any
questions that you might have. Okay, onto the news. Daniel, take it away.
Awesome. Thanks Lars. Hey Gurus. I'm Daniel Stinchcomb.
Microsoft has made quite a few announcements at Build and while some reveals
like the Surface Book 3 have me giggling like the giant man-child I am,
some are much more important. Maybe.
Some of the announcements made that continue to strengthen Microsoft security
posture are things like Publisher verification and Azure External Identities
being released to public preview.
Publisher verification is a feature long overdue to make sure that as you hand
over the keys to your kingdom,
you at least get the warm fuzzy feeling of a blue check mark that tells you your
new application is allowed access to all the things.
Azure External Identities expands on how users can register with your Azure
Active Directory environment by allowing enrollment from new external sources
beyond Microsoft accounts such as Google or Facebook.
Microsoft is also continuing the journey.
It started back in 2019 with Microsoft authentication libraries by now bringing
Angular support.
Now I can really geek out with the new details on CosmosDB encryption.
I think I'll leave Brian to explain that one to you.
Thanks so much for that introduction, Daniel. So like Lars mentioned,
I am Brian Roehm.
I'm one of the Azure Training Architects and I want to take just a couple of
minutes to talk to you about my insights from the Microsoft Build conference.
From all of the data points,
I'm going to talk primarily around big data and AI and from there there's really
two concepts that I've kind of picked up across all of the seminars that I've
attended. The first is accessibility.
Microsoft wants accessibility,
they want to make all of their services to be able to be utilized by a wide
variety of IT professionals. This carries through with tools such as CosmosDB.
When you look at CosmosDB,
traditionally the price has excluded a lot of people from being able to jump in
and really experiment and learn and utilize some of those tool sets and
features. Not anymore.
Cosmos is rolling out a new pricing structure that's going to allow a lot more
developers to get in and play with it. When we step in and we look at AI,
same kind of thing.
Microsoft has been working on designer and they're working on,
in addition to that,
a number of tool sets that will really lower that standard to allow developers
and architects,
people that aren't traditionally data scientists to go in and begin to create
machine learning experiments with drag and drop interfaces and to be able to do
things that traditionally would have taken years of mathematics and research to
understand how to build an experiment.
That's absolutely amazing and it's going to open up an explosion of new
technology and new toolsets and innovations.
The second piece of that is the old normal is not the new normal, you know,
pre COVID-19 pre coronavirus.
We had a lot of companies that were doing things in-house.
Now in almost every seminar that I've watched,
Microsoft has seen an explosion of almost 5 times the growth in all of their
services.
All of these companies that were traditionally on-prem are beginning to move
into the cloud because of necessity. That old normal is not going to return.
A lot of these companies are going to be picking up these cloud technologies,
these AI technologies, these big database technologies,
and leveraging those to really grow their business and expand into new
directions. So what does that mean to you?
There's going to be a huge need for qualified architects and developers and it
professionals to be able to step into these roles and pick that up.
This is the time to be jumping in and looking at new certifications,
new ways to grow your career,
to pick up some of these tool sets and skills that are going to be incredibly in
demand. They already are in demand, they're just growing.
And this has been shown over and over again in the seminars.
So I hope that's been helpful. Um, like I said,
there's a ton of amazing things and I suggest that you jump out to Microsoft and
start to look at some of the other new big database and AI technologies that are
rolling out. It's quite amazing. So with that, I'll turn it back over to you,
Lars.
Thanks Brian. In case you missed it.
I also did a session on Loving Online Learning. At Build live,
which you can check out in the description.
It was a panel discussion that touched on the ways that online learning is
rapidly adapting to the COVID-19 global changes.
Now let me take you through some of the best news when it comes to developer
tools and DevOps, container technology and more.
Visual Studio Codespaces is the new name for Visual Studio Online.
Codespaces enables developers to work remotely from anywhere with fully
configured cloud hosted development environments that can be created in just
minutes.
There are now a lot more features and you can even launch Codespaces directly
from within a GitHub project. Amazingly cool tech,
Azure Kubernetes services or AKS now has support for Windows Server Containers,
Private Clusters and Azure Advisor integration. You can also use Azure Arc.
Microsoft's hybrid cloud solution for including services at other non-MS
datacenters on premises with AKS too.
GitHub Actions for Azure are now integrated into Visual Studio Code and the
Azure CLI and in the Azure Portal itself. And finally,
new GPU and GUI capabilities for windows subsystem for Linux or WSL as well as
other core Linux features. If you want more details on this,
check out the Linux Unplugged podcast, episode 354 also
from the ACG network. Of course,
we couldn't cover everything from Build 2020 so use the link in the description
to find out all the details from the event.
Thanks again for joining Brian,
Daniel and I for this special Build episode of Azure This Week. Again,
so see you next week and keep learning Cloud Gurus.