Global Azure Bootcamp 2015 – Belgium

Last Saturday I organized, together with my employer Info Support and the Azure user group Azug, the Belgian location for the Global Azure Bootcamp. Across the entire globe 183 locations were doing the same thing, getting people together to learn and hack away on Microsoft’s cloud platform. We organised sessions and provided room so everyone could join in the labs that had been created.

The first session was presented by Johnny Hooyberghs. He gave an introduction on Visual Studio Online with a focus on getting builds set up. His session covered both the hosted build environment and creating a custom VM with your own build server. He also showed how you could add custom build steps to extend the process.

The second session was presented by Tim Mahy. He dived into Azure Search as a Service. He used his own experiences to fuel his talk, an approach I always like. He also explained everything that works underneath the public API of Azure Search which showed that it’s built on proven technology.

This third session was presented by myself. I’ve been experimenting with Azure Machine Learning for some time now and wanted to share what I’ve learned so far. I introduced the basic concepts of machine learning and how they relate to concepts in AzureML. I created one experiment to predict the income level of somebody, based on sample labs you can find in AzureML. For the second half of my talk I had created an online movie database (how original). I used the API of The Movie Database to get some realistic data. I then created an experiment in AzureML to get suggestions for these movies. I closed with some info on what I’ve been working on in my spare time.

Learning about machine learning, really interesting service to use in your handlers @messagehandler #globalazure pic.twitter.com/rUjpn7SzpK

— Yves Goeleven (@YvesGoeleven) April 25, 2015

The fourth session was presented by Hans Peeters and Glenn Dierckx. They had created an enormous demo around everything App service related. They started off with an API service and eventually created a Web App, a mobile app and closed by creating a logic app which combined everything they had done so far.

The final session was presented by Reinhart De Lille. Not a deep dive in technology this time, his talk showed the other side of the coin: “How to get your company from on-premise to a cloud first world”. Quite a way to end the day, as many of the attendees probably don’t dwell on this much.

I’ve gathered the slides here.

People could also deploy compute instances to aid in breast cancer research. At the end of the day 117 billion data points were analysed and little Belgium was on the in the top 10 of contributing countries!

 

Looking forward to next year!