Over 200,000 participants registered to hear about the transformative impact of our AI technology across more than 300 sessions at Microsoft Build
last week. Over the years, Build has helped to demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to its mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Since the first conference in 2011, we have taken the opportunity to share the latest tools and updates for developers using Microsoft technology. This year, we raised the bar with AI-enhanced features that will help improve efficiency, enhance experiences, and drive innovation like never before.
Our team, Azure Edge and Platform, is responsible for the foundation on which nearly every Microsoft product and service is built, resulting in significant contributions to the conference programming this year. During the event, our sessions centered on a few key messages:
- Our adaptive cloud approach
empowers customers to build, deploy, and scale applications seamlessly from cloud to edge.
- Microsoft brings AI to every device, improving decision-making and personalizing experiences.
- Azure Monitor
simplifies operations and security across environments, helping to ensure application resilience.
We directly contributed to over 20 different sessions, including demos and labs, and staffed booths throughout the conference. With around 4,000 people attending sessions in person, our teams had a tremendous opportunity to engage with participants. These interactions are always invaluable, helping to bring the voice of our customers into our work.
Here are just a few of the things we took away based on our conversations with participants during the conference:
- Excitement about Azure Kubernetes Service
is growing. We have made a number of recent announcements
about how we are making it easier to develop enterprise class Kubernetes applications that run on the edge. At the show, our hands-on lab allowed customers to get a taste of using these capabilities to solve real world problems as well as hands-on technical experience. Edge Storage Accelerator (ESA), a storage system designed for Arc-connected Kubernetes clusters, is an example of one such offering. The lab provided the participants with valuable insights about the practical applications of these technologies, including the ability to use ESA to migrate data from on-prem to Azure.
- They are excited to partner with us! Attendees had an opportunity to experience LLMs locally (Phi-3, Mistral, LLaMA 2, Stable Diffusion) and go through an entire conversion/optimization loop using Microsoft's Olive tools
. They also saw us showcase those models running on three laptops from different hardware vendors. Between running LLMs on devices with nominal computing power to DirectML’s support of local LLM deployment, engineers are curious and eager to work with us.
- The excitement around our adaptive cloud approach and strategy is growing. Some attendees were curious about our adaptive cloud solutions and how our Azure ecosystem can support migration and long-term management, with much of the interest driven by the increasing price from on-prem service providers and organizational efforts to cut costs.
- The adaptive cloud use cases we demonstrated resonated with attendees, with many visitors to our booth and labs expressing appreciation for the Jumpstart
initiative, which offers ready-to-use code and scenarios. At our booth, our demonstrations included real-time AI inferencing capabilities for People Safety, Manufacturing Quality, and other scenarios. As we showed how to build and scale apps to run across cloud and edge, participants shared that the Gen AI Cerebral use case was exactly what they envisioned to help innovate their processes and Agora for Manufacturing has incredible potential for leveraging the patterns and examples they need to optimize production line operations. Attendees were eager to explore Azure Arc Jumpstart
references and discuss how the approach will fit their scenarios, particularly how they can deploy and run AI workloads at the edge in their own environments. Check out the adaptive cloud approach session if you missed it!
- Our investments in developer experience continue to make waves, with new features in Dev Home, enhancements to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), performance improvements in dev drive, and customer excitement around Windows Sandbox – a great way to test apps in a clean environment!
- There is a lot of enthusiasm around observability, especially new features in Azure Monitor
and how it delivers comprehensive observability across cloud and edge environments. Many attendees expressed specific interest in exploring Dynamics monitoring from Application Insights and how it can be used to track workflow failures or latencies proactively and effectively.
We always love to hear from the people and organizations using our products. They help to reinforce our focus on optimizing our tools and help to inform our decisions going forward. Whether sharing feedback around API support that Windows containers offer, expressing anticipation about leveraging the tools and training we provide to build their own Copilots, or commenting on Azure portal interactions and how we can simplify tenant management for admin users, attendees at Build enlightened us, inspired us, and left us even more excited to continue innovating!
A huge thank you to everyone in the team who contributed to our presence at Build and to all the attendees for spending the time exploring, asking questions, and bringing excitement!
In case you missed it, you can watch recorded and on-demand sessions about the pivotal new AI products, tools, and features we showcased at #MSBuild here
.
