Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2016, margin notes

Summit this year was held as usual. Almost as usual. The Hyatt Regency Bellevue hotel and all other Bellevue hotels from November 7 to 10 were filled with geeks and nerds.

But on November 8, I entered the central Hyatt hall and suddenly realized that there were not geeks around, but normal-looking people, although with the same enthusiastic faces. After a minute, I realized that I was at a meeting of the Republican Party, and on the stage they announced that the Republicans had caught up with the Democrats. Everyone was screaming with delight, although no one had yet believed in victory ...

The summit was held under the sign of Azure, Microsoft cloud technology. The dam collapsed, the skies fell, and almost all the sessions were about Azure. A couple of years ago, few programmers encountered the development, installation, and maintenance of programs in cloud. All this happened locally, side by side, on workstations or on servers. But it seems that soon there will be no big programs left on the local computers. Local computers will only be used as terminals during mainframe times. Spiral helix.

Azure now has more than a hundred different services . I hardly already know even approximately what they all do and what they are responsible for. And every month they are getting more and more. One list of preview services is more than 20 pieces. The guys at Microsoft showed us new versions of services, and many times it was Wow! We saw something that no one else had done before. Microsoft in recent years has melted its industrial programming experience with fresh methods and ideas from the open source community. The guys rush forward is not at all with the old, familiar speed of enterprise monsters and hold themselves tight in the saddle.

Visual Studio Code is a light version of VS, works on Mac, Linux, Windows, supports a lot of languages. And don't worry about money, VS Core is free. I repeat, it is lightweight, geeky and similar to the works of JetBrain, but not like the work of Microsoft.

No one expects big changes from SQL Server, but what about the Data Lake Store or SimpleStore, about Data Factory? We can say that it is time to try it all.
Try now to find on your server something that does not find its counterpart in Azure. Found? Hardly. And now let's try the opposite. What is the result?

Came, it's time to start to deal with the prices for cloud-services. Already not expensive, and it makes sense. By the way, Price Calculator is now easier and clearer.
I am not campaigning for Azure. In this segment there is almost a monopolist - Amazon, and on the approach of Google. Understand that you are better.
But I state my feelings from the point of view of a programmer who works in his particular niche, with his technologies. You may have a completely different view, absolutely correct and completely opposite to mine.
And now I'm talking to myself. It is time for me to begin to deal with prices, otherwise I will leave behind the locomotive, for which I am destined to run and run ...

But it is better not to pay attention to the calculator, since all Azure services can be tested for free. Many services have an initial free level.

How about fear of becoming addicted to Microsoft? Reasonable sets of programming languages ​​and operating systems are supported. It's good.

Want something that isn't there yet? I go to the site Feedback I post my idea and if enough people vote for it, it will be implemented. I tried the example of Logic Apps, API Services. Feedback works, oddly enough.

I am now interested in Machine Learning, and in it Microsoft is not in the last positions. Azure ML Studio is an interesting thing. The editor works in a browser, and the models train and work on Microsoft servers. Ready-made models for processing speech, languages, video, search are summarized together under the heading Microsoft Cognitive Services . If you create your own Neural Network model, then Cognitive Toolkit , known as CNTK, will help. And if you are a hard-core programmer, then there is also a Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit with a trendy LightGBM . Do not forget about the R Server , which is now supported by Microsoft.

In general, according to the results of the summit, it can be concluded that there are now two directions in the trend. Cloud has already left childish pants, is ready for production and starts pushing at the usual, standalone applications. Machine learning is the hottest direction, much is still to come, and it is not too late to jump into the second car.