Microsoft Connect is a combined event with DevIntersection’s Azure and AI conference. Connect also comes a week after “that other cloud vendor” has a convention in Vegas. As a result, the conference struggles to get above the noise from the previous week. Connect is put forward as a chance to get the latest in Azure, AI and tools.
Kicking off Connect was Donovan Brown with a dedicated keynote to discuss Azure DevOps. A one-line definition would be a multiple generation evolution of VSTS, TFS and friends all hosted to scale in the Azure ecosystem. Primarily Azure DevOps is made up of five functions:
· Azure Boards
· Azure Test Plans
· Azure Pipelines
· Azure Artifacts
· Azure Repos
A quick tangent. Microsoft is close to falling into their common naming trap. Remember when everything was “.NET”? Then everything was “Live”? Azure is the new peanut butter that is at risk of being spread too thick over everything.
The real takeaway for me was Pipelines. The ability to orchestrate builds, tests, and releases at Azure scale is impressive. The tool appears to be very well done. Microsoft is all about developers and it shows with Pipelines. Microsoft is eating their own dog food and had some very impressive stats on builds, tests, and various other metrics to show. If you are already running Jenkins or Concourse or some other orchestration tool, there is no reason to rip out what you have. If you are looking for to start, or are in the Microsoft VSTS/TFS ecosystem, Pipelines is worth taking a look at.
Donovan started the message that was repeated over the conference. Any device, any platform, any language. If there was a thread running through the conference it was that. He showed the DevOps suite doing builds across Windows, Linux and Mac devices, tests across the same and then deployments to any cloud, on prem or mobile app store.
Final takeaway from Monday night was the focus on GitHub integration. Microsoft’s recent acquisition was discussed frequently Monday and Tuesday. Azure DevOps has some deep integrations already with more on the way. What is immature is Microsoft’s positioning of Github. The DevOps suite has Repos. Donovan’s positioning was that GitHub was for open source but Repos was for closed source. That messaging was not consistent throughout the other sessions and hallway discussions. There is work for Microsoft to do to massage this positioning internally and externally.
Predictions are dangerous but my guess is Repos has two uses for the next couple of years. It becomes the bridge to get legacy on prem TFS installations online and into git. There will be a need for on prem source code installations for a number of heavily regulated enterprises for a while that a local version of Repos can also support. Otherwise the deep integrations to GitHub continues and that becomes the defacto repository. GitHub is already where the developers are so it makes sense to just focus there.
Tuesday was the Guthrie and Hanselman show. They had back to back keynotes where they hosted several individuals. There was some significant overlap between the two so I’m not going to differentiate.
Visual Studio 2019 and the next updates to VS Code were released. Intellicode is the next iteration of Intelisense and it could be interesting. Intellisense has always showed alphabetically the methods, properties, etc of objects as you were writing code. Intellicode takes this further by leveraging ML models and context to present what you are most likely to want. You can train these models on your own libraries and code to help fit your needs and styles. (Is there a future opportunity for SEO to get your libraries to pop to the top? How do you right libraries to make them respond to the context and models the most effectively?)
Distributed development is becoming more of the norm. Teams spread across the region, state, country or world is more common. Microsoft’s Live Share will be powerful to supporting. Live Share allows for multiple people to view, update, test code at the same time across Visual Studio or VS Code. This sharing was also demonstrated across Windows, Linux and MacOS. I want to see how it works across residential broadband, but it appeared very responsive and useful in the demo environment. I think we will find it used within the office as often as it is across offices.
Donovan made another appearance to show a more complex Pipeline integration. Speaking to their enterprise customers, demonstrated a Service Now integration to show how you can implement gates where needed.
Scott Guthrie then shared Microsoft has open sourced Windows Forms and WPF. Microsoft’s move to open source continues to impress. To show they were serious about taking contributions from the community, they cleverly used this to demonstrate the deep GitHub integrations into Visual Studio and VS Code. Merging pull requests from within Visual Studio.
Also within the IDE family was code lens. Quickly showing who changed what code when with a simple mouse over. This will be a powerful tool when troubleshooting.
Live unit testing showing real time pass/fail as tests are running in the background. More developer efficiency.
Dev Spaces for Azure Kubernetes (AKS) also is not generally available. Powerful developer environments that automagically create a set of container namespaces to control flow to let a developer troubleshoot and develop the services within their IDE. This allows a developer to leverage the Visual Studio debuggers and breakpoints they are familiar with today across a complex container microservice application.
Guthrie announced Virtual Nodes and Cloud Native Bundles. Two new concepts for the K8S ecosystem that they contributed to the CNCF. I’ll admit to not fully grokking the capabilities they were looking to deliver. Hallway and online conversations after indicated others were trying to understand as well.
Rimma Nehme was brought onstage to show the next phases of CosmoDB. Multi-master write across any region with single digit millisecond latency was the big takeaway. With the multiple API’s available (Mongo, Cassandra, etc), this is quietly becoming a powerful tool.
Given this was an Azure and AI conference, Seth Juarez was brought onstage to talk about Azure Machine Learning. They are delivering this capability via containers allowing you to use it in the Azure cloud ecosystem or even on prem in your own container environment. The NBA was used as the example with their photo recognition platform they use to spin pictures out to social media at a rapid rate.
Nat Friedman and Jess Frazelle (newly of GitHub) showed up to discuss GitHub. A demonstration of actions (GitHub serverless functions) and driving home the deep integrations into the Microsoft developer experience.
There was more including an update to the .NET Foundation governance structure showing a further dedication to open source community; Jupyter notebooks was demonstrated for the data science crowd; .NET Core 3 with side by side deployments and others.
Microsoft showed off they are coming back to being the best at developer tools specifically the IDE. Impressively they are delivering that focus across operating systems beyond Windows. They also still speak enterprise very effectively when it comes to cloud. Amazon definitely showed a strong enterprise competency at their gathering last week, but Microsoft’s experience still shines. I expect you will see developers using the impressive Microsoft tools to deliver on Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft needs to clarify their position on GitHub. They need to avoid muddying the Azure name and need to stick with a crisp definition of serverless. I took more away about developer tools than Azure itself even though it is positioned as an Azure conference. Oh and they should really pick a different week for this event. The shadow of Amazon was big and dark in the hallway and after events. They risk being noise and not signal especially if trying to show off Azure.
Microsoft graciously paid for my conference admission and hotel for this event.
