We reached the destination (Park Plaza hotel sec-17, Chandigarh)
on time @ 8:30 AM. We filled up the registration form and received the ID card
to attend the event. After waiting for approx. half an hour, we entered inside
the conference hall. A very big hall with big projector screens near the stage,
big logo of Microsoft all around, the red colored stage background and very
good seating arrangements welcomed us. On our table, we got a notepad and a
pencil for making notes during presentation.
We also got a feedback form from the registration desk. We
saw the name of speakers for the very first time and also the topics which were
to be talked about during the event.
We all took some time to connect our Laptops to Wi-Fi and
when all was set, it was time for event to get started. Keynote on Azure was
presented by ‘Saurabh Kirtani’. He introduced himself as ‘Technology Evangelist’
at Microsoft and operates from Delhi. I quickly googled and Wikipedia described
this role as “A technology evangelist is
a person who builds a critical mass of support for a given technology, and then
establishes it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network
effects”
Saurabh described iaas, pass and saas examples. He also
explained ‘Pizza as a service’ analogy to describe these three services in the
Azure cloud. Using PPT slides, he explained features of Azure and benefits that
many organizations are leveraging. About 57% of top 500 fortune companies are
using Microsoft Azure cloud services. Live game streaming is being done on this
platform. He also explained how scalable this service is. We got a pass to
login to manage.windows.azure.com and explore the various services of Azure.
Overall his presentation was amazing. I saw the audience glued to the screens
and wondering (just like me), can Azure do so much? He can be connected on
twitter @saurabhkirtani
‘Runeet Vashisht’ was the next speaker. He introduce himself
as Development lead of Azure in Microsoft. He talked about how virtual machines
are configured on Azure, how powerful are the load balancers on Azure platform,
Ramp-up and Ramp-down of threads running for a specific App. We practiced with
him on our system and configured virtual machine, selected the data center and
other features of Azure configuration. So, we saw a full demo of configuring a
Web App on Azure including configuring Application server, Database server,
number of thread selection, schedulers and other features. He also explained about
the Web Role & worker Role concept and how we can publish from Visual
studio. We got to know that deployed environments can be swapped as well. So,
if a staging environment is up-to date then we can swap it with the production
environment and make staging as updated production environment without the
downtime. We also learned about scheduling the deployment in different deployment
slots. Overall, this session was very informative and we all liked this. He can
be connected on twitter @runeetv
We had a tea break for 15 minutes and we joined back for the
next session. This session was very interesting as this was on ‘Storage’
feature of Azure. This session was presented by ‘Prabhjot Bakshi’ who works is
also indirectly connected with Microsoft. With his unique presentation skills,
Prabhjot explained about BLOB, TABLES & QUEUES. A storage can have a
maximum of 500 TB of space. He made us think a lot as many concepts were new to
us. He showed us how containers feature works in Azure storage. Quickly using a
small code snippet in Visual studio, he uploaded an image to the BLOB. So we
learned that how data (images, PDFs etc) can be loaded easily and accessed with
a direct URL. He also explained about the PAGE BLOB and BLOCK BLOB. He can be
connected on twitter @prabhjotbakshi
We had a lunch break of 45 minutes. I have to mention here
that Lunch was super. We had a good time eating good food.
Next session was on Data Analytics and IoT in Azure and was
taken by ‘Prabhjot Bakshi’. We were all very excited to know that we were going
to learn about these topics. Prabhjot started with couple of very interesting
examples. One was, how to track number of red cars currently running on road.
So, the feature that does Data Analytics in Azure is called ‘Machine learning’.
He defined this as ‘Predictive analysis of past data’ and ‘Machines to think
like us’. Two programming languages are used for Data Analytics: R Language
& Python Language. To be very frank, I heard the name R language for the
very first time. Now was the time to see the live demo of Data Analytics inside
Azure. By using Splitter feature and web services, data analysis was displayed.
Data was displayed in a tabular format. We understood the concept of Data
Analytics and knew that we have to do a lot of homework.
Next two sessions were more on Azure Mobile services, the
number of programming languages it supports and many more services that are
inside Azure. One was taken by Saurabh and other was by Runeet, both from
Microsoft. A Microsoft User Group for Chandigarh was announced.
Another tea break, and then we were back for creating our
individual solutions on Azure. We completed our solution in given time and got
opportunity to present this on stage. Event ended with last presentation and was
followed with Dinner.
A great day with a number of learning takeaways.
