TechEd North America–First Impressions

  • Article

Editor’s note: The following post was written by Windows Azure MVP Brent StinemanJust got out of the second day keynote for TechEd North America in sunny and almost unbearably muggy (at least for this Minnesotan) Orlando, Fl. Its my first trip to TechEd and honestly the experience has been awesome. I’ve only attended a couple sessions so far, mainly because I’ve been either networking with folks I know, a few new folks, or best yet helping staff the Windows Azure booths for Microsoft.

The Keynotes

There are only two keynotes for this event, day 1 and day 2. The Monday keynote was all about cloud. Public and private. I’d seen all the public cloud stuff last week online during the Meet Azure live event. But the private cloud gave me much to chew on.

First thing I need to do is give credit to the System Center and Server 2012 teams. About a year ago, I posted a blog post about missed opportunities. Essentially, I didn’t believe that Microsoft’s “private cloud” was really that. It was just another example of cloud washing. Well I was WRONG. Microsoft’s private cloud has the features that are IMHO critical: resource pooling, redundancy/failover, automated resource management, and most importantly self service. While it doesn’t have the seemly deployment model that is present in Windows Azure (yet), it does give us the ability to easily provision and deploy virtual machines. Add to it some of the “infrastructure glue” things that aren’t really my expertise and you have a solution that’s really competitive with VMWare. It will take some time to change minds enough to get people to leave existing investments, but Microsoft has definitely gotten serious about competing with them.

Day two was all about Windows 8. I learned a couple UI tricks which addressed some issues I had with the platform (the mail app still needs SMTP/POP support) as well as got a better idea of what the WOA (Windows on ARM) experience will be like. Yes, you WILL be able to manage and trust ARM devices from your enterprise, yes you will be able to have internal/private app stores, yes you will still have a desktop mode. Not any real clarification though on building apps for ARM beyond what’s already been published regarding WinRT. But that will hopefully come in time. Still, the future it bright and I think consumers are going to really like Windows8. Unfortunately, beyond providing support for BYOD (bring your own device), I can’t see anything compelling enough to force the enterprise to migrate, especially if they already migrated to Windows 7.

Staffing the Booth

I spent about 4.5hrs yesterday staffing the “Migrating Applications” Windows Azure booth. The last time I manned a convention booth like this was at E3 when they launched the XBox. It was much easier than that experience. Partially because TechEd is about 90% less of a zoo, and partially because I know the product. Or at least I knew it well enough yesterday to help answer folks questions about migration of applications.

I met some great folks, many of which I shared some experiences with. There were a couple folks from the University of Iowa (my brother is an alum there and I grew up less than an hour from the campus). They worked in the civil engineering area and had some great questions about data and Homeland Security requirements. They were the only real stumper I had during the shift and were still great to talk to and very understanding that I couldn’t directly answer the question. But they appreciated the compliance knowledge I did have.

What really surprised me was how much interest there was in moving apps. The message the Windows Azure is ready for prime time is really coming through. One person even looked at me and said “Windows Azure is everywhere, I can’t ignore it”.

I’m back at the booth this afternoon for my final 4.5hr shift. Between the keynote and writing this blog post, I won’t really make any sessions today but It’s a small price to pay for the great opportunity to network with the folks at Microsoft and potential cloud adopters. I’ve never been asked for and handed out so many business cards.

Sessions

I’ve only squeeze in two sessions for far. One was Scott Gu on Windows Azure (pretty much what we saw last week), and the other was a System Center MVP from Belgium on creating a private cloud in 75 minutes. There’s no way I could do it that fast, but I could follow along enough to see how complete the picture was for Microsoft’s Private cloud.

Both sessions were great, but I’m looking forward to more. Tomorrow and Thursday will definitely be stacked with great info so I’m going to reexamine my planned sessions. There’s not much new for Windows Azure for me here, but there is definitely a lot to learn about Microsoft’s Private Cloud and the potential for Windows 8.

Until next time!