Keep Calm and Carry On Hacking
Last week our team hosted 15 software companies at our Reading offices for one of our new “Design for Azure” (aka ‘Platform as a Service’) “Code With” Hacks. We had over 150 applicants for the event - https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x2796288abcd – many more than we expected, and unfortunately, many more than we could accommodate. The good news is that we will be running more in the new year, as we have had incredible feedback from attendees that it really helped support and accelerate their move to Azure.
We had a great mix of software companies, some with long established relationships with Microsoft, others new to working with us and keen to build a commercial and technical relationship. Some were migrating well proven workloads to Azure, other had plans to disrupt their chosen markets. Some were working with leading edge technologies, others with more traditional line of business technology stacks. Some were moving existing on-premise systems to Azure, others prototyping and developing brand new applications optimised for Azure. The one thing they had in common, they wanted to be on Azure…
A lot of the time was spent on “whiteboard” design discussion (which Surface Hubs are particular good at) as many folk wanted to sanity check their ideas or discuss possible architectural designs, and the feedback made it clear that this was one of the most valuable aspects of the hack. This hack was very much positioned as a “line of business” hack, so much of technical conversations were around the ideas of serverless, micro-services and containers, and focused on technologies such AppServices, Functions, Container Services, Kubernetes, Service Fabric and the like, alongside a variety of database and data store discussions. We had a lot of great questions around identity and security, especially as it related to Azure Active Directory. DevOps was also a very hot topic, and many companies wanted to talk about how to best build their deployment processes.
We will be running more hacks in the new year, so in the meantime, Keep Calm and Carry On Hacking…. and if you would be kept updated on future hacks, please register your interest at https://aka.ms/ukocpisvhack0817
And, if the whole world of serverless, micro-services, containers and the like are of interest, our team will be kicking off the new year with a “Serverless, Microservices and Containers” Azure workshop on 18th of January in London – to register for a place, go to https://aka.ms/ukocpisv180118