Microsoft Tech Summit 2018 (Day 2)

(This post originally appeared at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-tech-summit-2018-day-2-duncan-k-g-campbell/)

After day 1 of the 2018 Microsoft Tech Summit in Singapore comes, surprisingly enough, day 2.

Yesterday's Mr Jif was back, and to confuse me even more he was talking about "damons".

As irritating as it is to hear jif and damon (you can add lettooce and suchlike to the list) it was startling to find that there were so many participants at the summit who'd spoken to him for whom containers were new territory.  Indeed, from a show of hands in the venue, half of the audience had only heard of containers in the last year.

The IT press has been banging on about containers along with devops, IoT, blockchain, machine learning (whilst pretending it's AI), etc for the past few years.  Either it's just the IT press that I read, or it's just that I read the IT press and many others in the industry don't.

Choose your speaker

Next time I need to be careful about who's talks I attend.  The talks by actual engineers have demos with real content that I can appreciate.  I just need to avoid talks by "program managers" - the PowerPoint Architects of the IT presentation community.

What was out of this world?

Cosmos DB stood out.  From what the speakers described, the data model is Atom-Record-Sequence and you can access through various different models, such as MongoDB.  It has some pretty impressive performance claims, and is certainly worth further investigation.

But what about the Demo Gods?

Of course the Demo Gods struck.  There were demonstrations.  What would one expect to happen?

T-shirt?

The T-shirt rules were different this year.  Lat year you'd just to complete the evaluation form.  This year you'd to talk to one of Microsoft's on-hand experts and get a voucher that could be redeemed for a T-shirt.

I had no burning questions.

Anyway, the T-shirts I gather from conferences become instant gifts for my children.  Also, the queue for T-shirts on Day 1 was tens of yards long - I was too dumbstruck to take a photograph.