Microsoft Build 2019 | AI-Driven Collaboration and Hybrid-Cloud Innovations for Microsoft 365 & Azure

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SyncedReview

4 min readMay 6, 2019

Over 6,000 developers and computer scientists poured into Seattle’s Washington State Convention Center this morning for Day 1 of Microsoft Build 2019, the company’s annual developer conference. Microsoft used the occasion to announce a new AI-driven collaboration and hybrid-cloud innovations across Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure.

In his keynote Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined the company’s vision and developer opportunities across Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Gaming. “Microsoft is committed to providing developers with trusted tools and platforms spanning every layer of the modern technology stack to build magical experiences that create new opportunity for everyone.”

*Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at Microsoft Build 2019*

AI-Driven Collaboration — Fluid Framework

Microsoft introduced Fluid Framework, a novel web-based platform and componentized document model for shared interactive experiences that enables intelligent agents to work alongside humans to co-author and fetch content, provide photo suggestions, identify experts, translate data, etc. The framework will be available to developers later this year via a software development kit.

Microsoft’s Future Vision of Intelligent Agents

Microsoft envisions every organization soon having an intelligent agent, just like they now have websites. The company is developing new solutions that deliver more intelligent, customer-centric experiences by building conversational interfaces from data and machine learning rather than from rules, intent, and code. Microsoft wants to enable developers to work with multiple intelligent agents in various domains.

The technology will be available to developers in the Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Bot service, and will be integrated into future conversational experiences including virtual assistant Cortana.

New Features And Capabilities to Power And Safeguard Kubernetes Workloads

At last month’s Google Cloud Next conference, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian introduced Anthos, a hybrid cloud management product based on Kubernetes that allows customers to run managed container services on multiple cloud or hybrid cloud deployments. Not to be outdone, Microsoft is releasing new features for its Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to secure Kubernetes workloads.

Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) as an open source component that supports deployment of serverless event-driven containers on Kubernetes.
Azure Policy for AKS to block runtime violations and secure AKS clusters in a centralized, consistent manner

Quantum Programming

In response to the increasing number of developers exploring the tremendous potential of Quantum computing, Microsoft designed Q# for quantum programming. At Build, the company open-sourced Q# compilers and simulators.

Build Scalable, Low-Latency Applications

When developing modern cloud applications, building a foundation for AI capabilities and effectively managing the exponential growth of application data is critical. Microsoft’s new Hyperscale (Citus) option in its Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL Database Hyperscale are designed to help developers leverage their existing skills to build advanced, highly scalable and low-latency applications.

“As computing becomes embedded in every aspect of our lives, the choices developers make will define the world we live in,” Nadella told the Build audience.

Microsoft is again demonstrating its determination to stay ahead of new technologies and to make these available in a timely manner to help developers create intelligent and productive solutions.

Microsoft Build 2019 runs through Wednesday, May 8.

Journalist: Fangyu Cai | Editor: Michael Sarazen

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