Ignite The Flames - A recap of Microsoft biggest event in 2024
Every time Satya gets onto the stage for the keynote starting Microsoft Ignite 2024, he seems to capture us with the wildfire of new product announcements.
I never find the keynote boring: I really enjoy Satya’s presentation style, especially when collaborating with partners. While I couldn’t be physically in Chicago, I definitely was able to watch the online recordings.
That said, there was a lot to get excited about. You could see the investments Microsoft is making in AI. There were a ton of new product releases and public previews becoming available.
It's time to review and recap some of the online recordings. Beware, I might be a bit biased.
- Gijs ReijnCloud Engineer
Day 1 Recap - It’s all about Artificial Intelligence (AI)
My entrance in the AI world has just started, but the amazement during Satya’s keynote blew me away how far it already is. You could already get a sense of it when you scattered through all the registered sessions that were being hosted. Everywhere was AI.
Now I knew Microsoft 365 Copilot was already in-place. However, during Satya’s presentation, you could see the investment Microsoft has done in integration Copilot in the Microsoft 365 suite. One expansion on it, was Copilot for Pages.
Windows Devices and Infrastructure
One device that grabbed my attention, was the launch of Windows 365 Link. This is a device to enable users to work securely in a familiar Windows desktop. It allows you to connect to the Microsoft Cloud with ease. The device in itself is pretty small and represents the thin-clients we are already familiar with. It's refreshing to see a new device being added to Microsoft's flagship.
With WSUS being deprecated, you can clearly see Microsoft’s investment being in Windows Autopatch. Besides that, Microsoft continues to enable hotpatching for Windows, which is now in preview.
With hotpatch for Windows, you can download updates in the background. When these are finished, they will become effective immediately upon installation without the need for a device reboot. Hotpatching was already available for Windows Server 2022 and above, but it has now come to Windows devices as well. Lastly, AI integration comes with Windows Autopatch later this year. With this feature, admins can easily manage and get information quickly, as it leverages data from Copilot in Intune.
Day 2 Recap - Platform Engineering on the rise
Platform Engineering has become the mainstream trend these days in the IT industry and for good reason. It attempts to fill the gap by providing developers secure access, emphasis on self-service, productivity, and many more. Mark Weitzel and Daniel Sol gave an interesting session named Platform engineering: creating scalable and resilient system. They gave a pretty fascinating demo on Azure Deployment Environments (ADE) and shown a philosophy to start right and stay there. Given that, they summarized it into three categories of buckets:
- Start Right: Providing the right tools and adhering to organizational policies.
- Stay Right: Ensuring compliance with established rules.
- Get Right: Helping teams achieve compliance in brownfield environments.
There were also two new private previews announced to help enterprise work with GitHub repositories at scale. Check out the following picture on each of these previews.
Inside Azure innovations
Mark Russinovich, the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, provided a session inside the Azure innovations. Mark started of by providing some amazing statistics on the growth of Azure. There are more than 175,000 miles of WAN cabling and 200+ data centers. In the below image, you can see a short recap on some of the services and there usages.
The infrastructure side had some compelling updates too. From Azure Linux reaching General Availability (GA), to an introduction of Azure Container Storage. Both work in conjunction with each other as it integrates with Kubernetes, allowing you to mount persistent volumes to store data. Lastly, the Godzilla G-Series have been expanded to 832 cores and 24 terabytes of RAM. If you have some budget and require to run heavy workloads, this machine is the go to goat.
Security
During the Proactive security with continuous exposure management, Brjann and Tomer shown the Microsoft Security Exposure Management solution. The tool is now generally available and provides a unified dashboard that works together with Microsoft Defender XDR and Security Copilot. This solution is ideal for folks sitting in SecOps.
Day 3 Recap - Empowering Developers
This was the most exciting day for me because I spotted some snippets in the Enhance IT Pro and Developer productivity with new improvements to advanced tools session that I contributed to. The Microsoft teams are accelerating in the area of getting developers up to speed as quickly as possible. This means whenever a new developer comes into your organization, it would be helpful to provide the tools within an instant and bootstrap their local environments. During the presentation, Kayla Cinnamon and Craig Loewen provides us with new insights in the work that has been done lately in tools like:
- Power Toys
- The Windows Subsystem for Linux
- Windows Terminal
- WinGet
You can configure nearly all of these solutions using WinGet as the orchestration tool by creating a .winget file. This new file type can be easily authored in code editors like Visual Studio Code. Additional updates included sudo on Windows, easy code snippets in Windows Terminal, performance enhancements on DevDrive, and GitHub Copilot in the Windows Terminal chat.
Conclusion
There is so much more to cover. While writing this article, I kept thinking, how am I going to get through all this incredible content provided to us? I guess I can’t in this lifetime and I have to be picky about it.
In the last section, you’ll find helpful resources that summarize the key highlights of Microsoft Ignite 2024.