I attended the Azure Iaas for IT Pros online event yesterday. It’s a four day event, day one was great! A good intro to Azure and what it can do. While I have been very curious about Azure I have also been lazy (and got too many other things going on) to actually play with Azure or learn more about it. So this felt like a good way to get up to speed.
Azure looks great, of course! One thing that struck me during the sessions was how all the speakers constantly call out to Linux and Open Source technologies. That’s just amazing considering how just a few years away Microsoft was so anti-Open Source. They kept showing Ubuntu VMs as something you can deploy on Azure, and did you know you can manage Azure (or maybe the Windows/ Linux VMs in it, I am not sure) using Chef and Puppet?! Wow! That’s just cool. In fact the sessions on day 3 are totally Linux/ Open Source oriented – on how to use Chef and Puppet, how to use Docker, and how to deploy Linux. Nice! :)
I think I’ll play around a bit with Azure today just to get the hang of it. I think I didn’t appreciate some of the stuff they presented because I haven’t worked with it and so wasn’t sure how it all fit together/ affected an IT pro like me.