Episode 9: Cloud Coreyography

Microsoft has experienced a renaissance. By everything that we've seen coming out of Microsoft over the past few years, it feels like the company is really walking the walk. Instead of just talking about how it’s innovative, it’s demonstrating that. Microsoft has been on an amazing journey, making the progression from telling customers what they need to listening to them and responding by building what they ask for.

Today, we’re talking to Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President of Azure Compute at Microsoft.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Customers are asking for Microsoft to help them through support and enabling platforms
• Storytelling efforts through advocates, who play a double role – engaging and defending Microsoft
• Customers moving to the Cloud are focused on a continuum and progression; they have stuff to move from one location to another and want all the benefits–better agility, faster startup time, etc.
• Virtual serial console into existing VMs; this is how people are using this and Microsoft is going to, if not encourage this behavior, at least support it
• Microsoft is the only Cloud with a single-instance SLA
• Serial consoles: Windows' has seen less usage, partly due to operational aspects of Windows vs. Linux. It's not a GUI; it's scripting.
• Does the operating system matter? From a Cloud perspective, it shouldn't have to matter; you should be able to deploy it the way you want
• Edge enables much more complex and segregated scenarios; that combination with cognitive searches running locally will make it accessible anywhere
• Branding challenge as customers start to notice that devices are smarter and more complex; will they lose awareness that Microsoft Azure is powering most of these things - they shouldn’t care
• An awareness of not just what's possible, but what's coming; the democratization of AI
• Education and fear gap of trying something new and taking that first step; make products and services stupid and simple to use
• Customers return to add cognitive services and AI capabilities to existing, running deployments, environments, and applications
• Multi-Cloud solutions can be successful, but there's a caveat; they’re actually built on a service-by-service perspective
• Azure Stack, offers consistency, but some people may place blame on it for poor data center management practices; some expectations and regulations may be frustrating to some customers, but lets Microsoft offer a consistent experience
• Freedom and flexibility have been challenges for Microsoft and other products for private Clouds
• What people need to understand about Azure, including from a durability and reliability experience
• To some extent, scale becomes a necessary prerequisite for some applications
• Microsoft has taken many steps and is the leader in various areas
  
  

Links:

• ReactiveOps
• Microsoft Azure
• Corey Sanders on Twitter
• The Robot Uprising Will Have Very Clean Floors
• Kubernetes
• Cassandra
• Azure Stack