I have just spent the first day at the conference Microsoft Ignite | The Tour.

The conference was free I just needed to arrange travel and accommodation. Microsoft have really looked after me and all the other guests, breakfast and lunch has been provided, I got a free t-shirt, coffee (or tea) all day plus a beer or glass of wine to end the day. And that’s before you collect any free stuff the vendors are giving away.

The first session was Designing resilient cloud applications with Matt Soucoup and talked about some cloud technologies like Azure key vault and serving static files from blob storage. Unfortunately this had a few technical issues with the demos. I think it was just connectivity with the MongoDB backend but this slightly spoiled the session. As this was the only technical problem I noticed all day I can let it pass.

Next was a session on Azure DevOps mainly build and release pipelines called Deploying your application faster and safer with Brian Benz. A lot of this I knew but good to reinforce I am doing things correctly.

Next was a session on Application Insights called Detecting application anomalies with Telemetry with Matt Soucoup.

Probably the most useful session was on Docker and Kubernetes called Integrate containers and Kubernetes into your Azure DevOps build and release model with Marco De Sanctis. Going to spend some time looking through the examples from this session.

A session on Serverless covered Azure Functions, Azure Logic apps and the other Azure Serverless offerings. Investing in Serverless: less servers, more code with Simona Cotin.

Lastly was a panel discussion on the changes facing IT Pros and SysAdmins. What is the future of the IT Pro in a DevOps & Cloudy world? with Jennifer Stirrup, Baki Onur Okutucu, Amy Boyd and Stephen Thair. Should they learn to code, how should they make sure they keep up.

Tomorrow I have a loads more sessions, including ones about mental health, Azure pipelines, more Kubernetes stuff and dealing with failure.