TalaTek Senior Analyst Joshua Grove attended Microsoft’s IT Camp: “Extending your Datacenter with Microsoft Azure” on June 11, 2015.
Microsoft IT Camps are a 300 level, expert-led, one-day events that allow professionals hands-on experience with new technology.
The “Extend your Datacenter with Microsoft Azure” IT Camp was designed for professionals working with the need for a flexible IT infrastructure that can scale on demand. It’s about extending a datacenter to the public cloud, and working in a hybrid cloud model.
A hybrid cloud model can provide the best of both worlds, allowing businesses to take advantage of external resources when it makes sense.
This IT Camp showed how the Microsoft hybrid cloud combines Microsoft Azure with a business’ datacenter, or a hosting service provider’s datacenter.
Attendees learned about Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, and Storage – the core building blocks of Microsoft Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). They were also introduced to Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings of Azure – Azure Websites and Azure SQL. Identity in the cloud using Microsoft Azure Active Directory was also covered, along with exploring Backup and DR scenarios using Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery services.
Microsoft Technology Evangelist, Yung Chou, gave the presentation. In addition to providing extensive information on building systems with Microsoft’s Azure, the presentation included an in-depth review of new features in Windows 10.
These included a new Start Menu, Cortana (personal digital assistant), Microsoft Edge Web browser to replace IE (Internet Explorer), updated Mail and Calendar, Windows Hello (Biometric authentication with face, iris, or finger authentication with the key bound in hardware).
The Camp included four labs: the creation of virtual networks, machines and storage using the Web interface and PowerShell; building an Active Directory; working with Identity including implementing multi-factor authentication, and automating a deployment of SQL and IIS to automatically deploy a web application.
Features of Azure were also discussed, such as the Locally Redundant Storage (LRS).
