Global Azure Bootcamp 2016: Redmond edition
I had the honor of presenting a session during the 2016 Global Azure Bootcamp, a worldwide event held in 162 confirmed locations. The individual events at each location are typically run by Microsoft MVPs and community leaders.
This year, I gave a talk in Redmond, on the Microsoft campus. Coincidentally, the event took place in the same building my team works out of. This event was run by Manesh Raveendran, a Microsoft Azure MVP. Feel free to say hi to Manesh on Twitter at @ManeshRavendran.
I may have snuck up behind another presenter to grab this pic…
About 30-40 attendees participated, and we had a content-packed agenda, along with afternoon hands-on labs.
For my session, I spoke about the concept of polyglot persistence, the idea of using multiple databases within an app, taking advantage of each database’s core strengths. This talk included overviews and demos of each core non-relational database type: key/value, document, column, and graph.
The demos took advantage of Azure’s database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offerings, such as Table Storage, Redis, and DocumentDB. I also demo’d DataStax Cassandra, as this is a certified offering in the Azure Marketplace which rolls out an entire Cassandra cluster automatically. For the graph database, I demo’d with Neo4j. The talk wrapped up with a walkthrough of a hypothetical storefront, and we dreamed up best-fit suggestions for shopping cart, product descriptions, order history, product suggestions, and website logging/telemetry.
All of the talk materials are on my Github repo, github.com/dmakogon/globalazure2016.
A big THANK YOU to Manesh for offering a speaking slot, and to the super-awesome audience who didn’t get stressed when I threw stress balls at them. And thanks to Andrew Liu (@aliuy8) of the DocumentDB engineering team, for letting me know about the event.
If you haven’t been to a Global Azure Bootcamp before, I highly recommend them - same time, next year. And if one isn’t in your area, feel free to step up and volunteer to organize one!