Microsoft has experienced a renaissance. By everything that we've seen coming out of Microsoft over the past few years, it feels like the company is really walking the walk. Instead of just talking about how it’s innovative, it’s demonstrating that. Microsoft has been on an amazing journey, making the progression from telling customers what they need to listening to them and responding by building what they ask for.

Today, we’re talking to Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President of Azure Compute at Microsoft.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Customers are asking for Microsoft to help them through support and enabling platforms

Storytelling efforts through advocates, who play a double role – engaging and defending Microsoft

Customers moving to the Cloud are focused on a continuum and progression; they have stuff to move from one location to another and want all the benefits–better agility, faster startup time, etc.

Virtual serial console into existing VMs; this is how people are using this and Microsoft is going to, if not encourage this behavior, at least support it

Microsoft is the only Cloud with a single-instance SLA

Serial consoles: Windows' has seen less usage, partly due to operational aspects of Windows vs. Linux. It's not a GUI; it's scripting.

Does the operating system matter? From a Cloud perspective, it shouldn't have to matter; you should be able to deploy it the way you want

Edge enables much more complex and segregated scenarios; that combination with cognitive searches running locally will make it accessible anywhere

Branding challenge as customers start to notice that devices are smarter and more complex; will they lose awareness that Microsoft Azure is powering most of these things - they shouldn’t care

An awareness of not just what's possible, but what's coming; the democratization of AI

Education and fear gap of trying something new and taking that first step; make products and services stupid and simple to use

Customers return to add cognitive services and AI capabilities to existing, running deployments, environments, and applications

Multi-Cloud solutions can be successful, but there's a caveat; they’re actually built on a service-by-service perspective

Azure Stack, offers consistency, but some people may place blame on it for poor data center management practices; some expectations and regulations may be frustrating to some customers, but lets Microsoft offer a consistent experience

Freedom and flexibility have been challenges for Microsoft and other products for private Clouds

What people need to understand about Azure, including from a durability and reliability experience

To some extent, scale becomes a necessary prerequisite for some applications

Microsoft has taken many steps and is the leader in various areas

Links:

ReactiveOps

Microsoft Azure

Corey Sanders on Twitter

The Robot Uprising Will Have Very Clean Floors

Kubernetes

Cassandra

Azure Stack