I had the pleasure of attending Microsoft’s two day FutureDecoded event in London Excel, thanks to Kainos for sending me.
The two days consisted of multiple Keynotes and numerous breakout sessions, in fact over 100 of these!
- Michael Wignall – Microsoft UK CTO
- Cindy Rose – Microsoft UK CEO
- Jason Zander – Executive Vice President, Azure
- Chris Bishop – Microsoft Research Cambridge
Impressive lineup! Keynote opened and the topic was clear, “AI” and how maximising that opportunity, could shape technology into an even better place!
On top of this, with the cloud presence growing rapidly on a daily basis, “2.5 quadrillion bytes of data” created daily, AI and advanced algorithms will assist in efficient and rapid analysis of this!
- 54 Azure regions, that is more than AWS & Google combined!
- 4500+ peering locations
- 130+ edge sites
Azure is still the most cost effective cloud for Windows Server & SQL, save up to 82% with combined reserved instances + Azure Hybrid benefit!
“At Microsoft, we aim to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. In the case of AI, that means helping UK organisations harness it’s potential both successfully and responsibly”
©Cindy Rose – Microsoft UK CEO
- Real-life technical decision points in using cloud & container technology: Modernising the NHS
- Understanding the use of technology trends today
- Mind the skills gap: attracting and retaining the critical skills to support your transformation
- containerised environments using AKS and Azure service mesh
- automation of these containers
- AI
A simplified architecture of Kubernetes
- Microsoft managed
- Control plane free of charge
- Automated upgrades and patches
- Secured and hardened
- Easy & auto cluster scaling
- Self-healing
- Want to run Linux based workloads in containers
- Wanting to use Kerbernetes but not build & manage the infrastructure
- Ability to run modern micro-transactions architectures
- Have fine grained control over compute, storage & network
- Remain framework, platform & stack agnostic
- Knowledge mining: Azure Cognitive Search
- Machine Learning: Azure data bricks, Azure machine learning, Azure AI infrastructure
- AI apps & agents: Azure bot service
- GPU intensive workloads: N Series
- CPU intensive workloads: D, F, M, L, H series
- FPGA intensive workloads: Project brainwave
Amount of data consumption
My last breakout session was not technical but was interesting to hear how Microsoft were assisting with attracting and retaining the critical skills through their recruitment process along with Adam Donnelly and Rory Hanratty, giving a brief outline of how Kainos attract and retain the critical skills.
Day1 ended with a keynote with Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock MBE and the legend himself Sir Michael Caine CBE – great story from Maggie along with a fun interview with Michael!
- Satya Nadella – Microsoft CEO
- Jenny Lay-Flurrie – Microsoft CAO
- Rt Hon Esther McVey MP
“Microsoft Mission: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
© Satya Nadella – Microsoft CEO
- Azure Stack with Leonovo
- AI in healthcare: NHS & Microsoft transforming healthcare together by putting the patient at the centre and leading change with AI
- Microsoft Optics for the Cloud: How Microsoft Research are re-thinking future Data Centre technology
It was great to hear some use cases by Lenovo where access to the Azure portal is not possible or feasible, where Azure Stack is implemented into the customer’s environment to give them an onsite Azure portal with nearly all the features the direct Azure Portal has.
Again, AI being showcased and how it is assisting in healthcare, this was a Q & A session with general questions around AI and how it can be used to assist in healthcare related issues along with a successful use case.
