And this is the third keynote today for Build 2019 day 1. It’s also the last keynote, as the two other days do not have dedicated keynotes. You can check out my recap posts for Microsoft 365 keynote and Satya Nadella’s vision keynote also.
This keynote should have plenty of announcements and high energy from Scott Guthrie!
Scott Guthrie on stage so it’s time to start!
He’s promising a demo filled keynote, so I’ll do my very best to capture the announcements and interesting bits. 95% of Fortune 500 companies are using Azure. Possibly many have a multi-cloud strategy but still, it’s an impressive number.
Partner Co-Sell program is first. Microsoft salespeople get a quota relief every time they help sell a partner solution. More info here.
This will probably be one of the larger themes for Microsoft’s next fiscal year, and I’m very interested to see what the details are for this Co-Sell program.
Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge next.
We’ll go deeper into hybrid apps and developer tools. Stack Overflow survey shows that Visual Studio Code is preferred (50%) as a top dev tool, as well as Visual Studio (~31%).
Scott Hanselman on the stage to do a demo.
And it seems the demo is not working. ScottGu back on stage to assist – I think we saw something similar a year ago, too!
First demo is about using Visual Studio 2019 and showing some of the new features, such as the .editorconfig file.
Live Share for Visual Studio is shown next. I’ve yet to actually have a need for this (the little coding I do, I do home alone) but every time I see a demo on it, it’s very impressive.
Hosted Developer Environment next, accessible through https://online.visualstudio.com. Thus, VSO is back from the dead 🙂
ScottGu is back. GitHub next. It’s the largest developer community on the planet with over 36 M developers.
Azure Pipelines gets new capabilities, including integration with Kubernetes and multi-cloud support. More info here.
Donovan Brown to demo Azure DevOps. Great energy, as always!
ScottGu back again and we continue with GitHub. Announcing Azure AD sign-on support for GitHub. Enabled through GitHub settings. See the announcement here. The same will work vice versa, thus using GitHub accounts one can sign-in to Azure.
Announcements for App Service on Linux (perpetual free tier and Virtual Network support). Azure Functions get new capabilities, including PowerShell support, Premium Plan and the ability to use serverless APIs with Azure API Management integration.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) announcement includes general availability for Serverless for AKS. KEDA (Kubernetes-based event-driven auto-scaling) is a new project providing auto-scaling and event-triggered container creation. See details here.
Hybrid (Intelligent Edge) next. Edge devices scale from the big (Azure Stack) to the small (Hololens 2).
Moving to AI, and building AI solutions. On a high level, there’s pre-built models (Cognitive Services, essentially) and custom models (using Azure ML).
Some new announcements for the former – new Cognitive Services including Decision Category and Vision services.
Azure Cognitive Search is now generally available. See the announcement here. Several updates to Azure Machine Learning also.
Moving on to Azure Data Analytics.
SQL Database, PostgreSQL and MySQL get hyperscale capability allowing scaling up to hundreds of terabytes of data. Azure SQL DB Hyperscale is generally available (see details here). Public Preview available for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale. New Azure Serverless Databases, billing is per second (Azure SQL gets this first). Azure SQL Database Edge announced.
Cosmos DB next, and it’s getting Jupyter Notebook support and Spark support. Also support for ML models is now available.
Power BI and Azure SQL Data Warehouse next. A demo on Power BI is shown.
Azure Data Factory is being used to ETL the data to Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
We get a demo on PowerApps, more for educational purposes it seems.
And that’s it for this keynote! This was a bit deeper than the other two keynotes, but I felt it also tried to paint the big picture that Azure really has something for every developer. It was interesting to see that Power Platform was thrown in, maybe to remind that also no-code/low-code is an option for building apps.
Thanks for reading! As always, you can voice out your thoughts via Twitter (@jussiroine & @rencore), or in the comments below.