After a great first day here at TechEd Europe in Barcelona, there is so much news to share that I almost don’t know where to start!
It wasn’t so long ago that TechEd Europe was mostly a venue for Microsoft to share news and guidance from TechEd North America with European customers. There wasn’t often much that was developed between the two events, but these days nothing could be farther from the truth! You can really see new openness and agility of Microsoft highlighted in all the news that has happened since TechEd North America in May, and much of the news yesterday was due in no small part to the efforts of MS Open Tech.
Let’s begin with the TechEd Europe keynote. Mark Russinovich showed us details of how Docker works with Azure in a demo using WordPress running on Ubuntu (using technology enabled by MS Open Tech). Next, Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure, showed us details of the new marketplace on the Azure Portal and its current roster of partners:
Here’s what Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group had to say about the announcement in his blog post yesterday:
Last week, at our Cloud Day event in San Francisco, I announced a new Azure Marketplace that helps to better connect Azure customers with partners, ISVs and startups. With just a couple of clicks, you can now quickly discover, purchase, and deploy any number of solutions directly into Azure.
Let’s drill down into some of those partners, ISVs and startups that MS Open Tech has been working with, starting with IBM:
IBM Images on Azure
Last week Microsoft announced an historic agreement with IBM to include IBM Virtual Machine images on Microsoft Azure. Yesterday the first images were released, thanks to the superb effort of MS Open Tech’s engineering staff. Here’s what you see when you search the Microsoft Portal VM images:
IBM also announced support for a Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) arrangement for other select IBM software, on Windows or Linux.
IBM is also expanding support of IBM software running on Windows Server Hyper-V running in customer datacenters, as well as hybrid scenarios for Azure and other public clouds. Have a look at IBM’s updated licensing policies for installing supported IBM software on virtual machines on Azure.
A TypeSafe Template Certified for Azure
Another icon in that Keynote Image is TypeSafe, the company behind Play Framework, Akka, and Scala, among other things. Typesafe has released the Reactive Maps Activator template on Azure, so that developers can work with the Typesafe Reactive Platform (Play Framework, Akka, and Scala) natively on Azure.
NGINX Plus is now Azure Certified for Virtual Machines
MS Open Tech also worked with NGINX Inc. to enable the commercial load balancer and web accelerator NGINX Plus to be Azure Certified for Virtual Machines and available in the Azure Gallery. Enterprises can now deploy and manage NGINX Plus across Azure Virtual Machines providing advanced application delivery, load balancing and video streaming capabilities with consolidated billing and management from Microsoft.
Basho’s Riak Open Source Distributed Database now Azure Certified
Riak is an open source distributed database built for fault tolerance, high availability and operational simplicity is another new Azure Certified VM Image. Riak stores data using a simple key/value scheme, and offers a number of supported client libraries. Riak is a community supported open source product. Documentation is available at http://docs.basho.com
Move Websites to the Cloud with the new Azure Websites Migration Assistant
Another announcement yesterday was the official release of the Azure Websitejs Migration Assistant, which enables simplified migration of existing IIS Websites to Microsoft Azure.
The Azure Websites Migration Assistant runs on an IIS server or a local client with IIS 6 or later installed. Once you have installed the Azure Websites Migration Assistant, you can use it to migrate Websites from any server in your network for which you have admin access, as shown here:
As part of the migration, an analysis is performed on your Websites and databases and a migration readiness report is provided outlining any potential migration issues. Next, migration of content and databases is enabled via a simple wizard-like interface.
Have a look at the getting started documentation and this Azure Blog post for full details on how to get started with the Azure Websites Migration Assistant. Also, note that this release is open source, and the code is available here.
Great Response to Yesterday’s MS Open Tech iOS, Android, and IntelliJ News
Yesterday my colleague Doug Mahugh released blog posts about the new Office 365 SDKs for iOS and Android, and the MS Open Tech Tools plugin for Microsoft services for Android Studio and IntelliJ. Press response has been great, to say the least. TechCrunch had a great summary of the news:
Microsoft says that it plans to offer more Office 365 APIs in the future, including for tasks, Yammer and its recently announced Office Graph. Given that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said that Office 365 is the most strategic API for the company, chances are that we will see these new APIs sooner than later.
Also new today are a number of Office 365 SDKs for iOS and Android Microsoft Open Technologies that make it easier for mobile developers to work with the new APIs. The iOS SDK currently only supports Objective-C, but support for Apple’s new Swift language is coming soon. These two new SDKs supplement the company’s existing Visual Studio SDK.
I’m looking forward to more details of all the great news over the remaining three days. I’d like to hear more about what you think of all these new partnerships, products and services, and how these new announcements fit into your Cloud plans. Leave a comment below, and if you’re here in Barcelona and you see me at the show be sure to say hello!
