Developers are essential to the world we live in, and the work you do is critical to the success of organizations in every industry. Microsoft empowers innovators like you on your unique journey. With an end-to-end cloud platform, Microsoft Cloud lets you quickly and easily innovate and create a secure foundation for all your applications.
At Microsoft Ignite, we explore how to increase productivity and flexibility with Azure’s cloud-native solutions and low-code app development enables you to iterate quickly and go to market faster—and how to access the most comprehensive set of tools for development at Microsoft. There’s so much we can learn from each other on this journey, let’s dive into the key topics, announcements, and trends you’ll leave with after Microsoft Ignite.
Accelerate innovation with the most complete cloud developer platform
The Microsoft Cloud is a comprehensive platform that enables developers to build incredible solutions. At the core of the Microsoft Cloud is Azure, the underlying infrastructure that enables you to build anything you can imagine. Using Azure DevOps and Azure Kubernetes Service, Ernst and Young Global Limited (EY) has built more agile practices and shifted into a rolling product-delivery approach of software and services. They have been able to develop and deploy solutions faster and with more confidence across a wide range of environments.
We are committed to helping you do more with less. With the Microsoft Cloud toolbox filled with Visual Studio, Azure, GitHub, and Power Platform, you can build reliable, scalable, and high-performance cloud-native applications.
Surging demand for digital solutions and an increasing shortage of technical skills is forcing organizations to adapt their IT development strategies. By empowering everyone to contribute to development processes, IT can multiply technical capacity, accelerate development cost-effectively, and innovate with the business. Adopting the world’s most complete set of integrated low-code development tools means organizations can modernize operations at scale, differentiate services and experiences, and accelerate their journey to the cloud in a secure, governable, and cost-effective way.
During Microsoft Ignite, I’m excited to share some news and updates designed to address these needs and improve the overall developer and maker experience even further with our beloved tools and Microsoft Cloud platform—all designed to help you quickly code and ship from anywhere with confidence.
Increasing productivity and quality for hybrid development teams
Microsoft’s developer cloud is purpose-built to support teams through the entire software development lifecycle. Azure provides the cloud infrastructure that quickly builds a robust, resilient application that scales and is easy to maintain and operate.
I am happy to announce Azure Deployment Environments is available for preview.
- Microsoft Dev Box and Azure Deployment Environments pair together to give developers a complete cloud-powered workflow for any project that can be fully managed by IT admins.
- Dev Box offers developers high-performance, cloud-based workstations that help get you coding quickly.
- Azure Deployment Environments enables teams to spin up the infrastructure needed to run their project in the cloud quickly and on demand.
- Azure Load Testing helps teams test and meet scale and performance goals with confidence.
I am excited to announce the preview of GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps.
- Which brings GitHub’s industry-leading, developer-focused security tooling to Azure DevOps.
- GitHub streamlines our workflows and processes through better collaboration and automation.
- GitHub Advanced Security provides a native application security solution within our development workflow, enabling the management of open-source dependencies, custom code, and secrets across the software lifecycle.
Drive application innovation and modernization at scale with cloud-native architectures
Cloud-native apps can deliver new levels of scale and performance and provide even greater reliability. Using cloud-native design patterns helps achieve the agility, efficiency, and speed of innovation that organizations need to deliver value to end users. Azure Kubernetes Service enables developers to take full advantage of the Kubernetes ecosystem and scale cloud-native applications. For example, the Forza team utilized autoscaling Azure Kubernetes Service during the launch of Forza Horizon 5 to meet the challenging performance demand of 10 million concurrent players at launch—the biggest first week in Xbox Game Studios history.
The goal of using cloud-native technologies is to abstract the infrastructure from developers, freeing them to focus on building more cloud-optimized applications. Today, I’m proud to announce Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager preview, which allows you to easily manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters, run multi-cluster workloads and services, and ensure consistent configuration, access, and governance across your Kubernetes environment.
How modernizing enterprise applications enables you to do more with less
Azure’s fully managed application platform service offerings such as Azure App Service and Azure Spring Cloud are uniquely differentiated for .NET and Java customers in that they enable customers to modernize applications with minimal code changes and increased developer velocity. With Azure application platform services, you offload the management of the underlying cloud infrastructure to Azure, which allows you and your developers to focus on app innovation rather than managing, configuring, securing, and updating the underlying infrastructure (because Azure does that for you). This helps streamline costs by modernizing your apps using readily available skills. Further, generates trust and customer loyalty thanks to industry-leading platform security from Azure, which is built right into the platform. Easily integrate your internal and external stakeholders in the modernization journey and get maximum scale without having to worry about over-provisioning or under-provisioning resources. With Azure App Service and other Azure application platform services, you can innovate more and build more value for your business.
One example of a customer taking advantage of Azure’s managed services and serverless compute options is COFCO International, China’s largest food and agricultural business corporation. COFCO International utilized Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions to create new solutions for application integration, data aggregation and reporting, and data governance, which has enabled them to make decisions faster and provide better visibility with improved analytics capabilities.
Streamline low-code governance in your organization
With Power Platform, Microsoft provides a central low-code platform that allows makers to enjoy shared components and common building blocks, allowing organizations to bring low-code assets into a central framework and give IT the visibility to govern centrally at scale. Power Platform runs on top of Azure and benefits from the strengths of Azure’s security, advanced management capabilities, and rich set of industry-specific certifications.
Power Platform enables IT to gain visibility and control over applications at scale with Managed Environments, now generally available. Managed Environments is a brand-new capability to streamline and simplify governance at scale. It gives you more control with sharing limits, security and reliability validations, and the ability to customize the maker onboarding experience.
Power Pages: low-code web development
Power Pages is now generally available. Power Pages is an enterprise-grade connectivity platform for organizations to build and launch external self-service websites. The Power Pages platform allows them to connect with their customers, partners, and communities and share business data, collaborate, and automate business processes with them at scale and securely. Learn more about building secure business websites.
Low-code is a critical tool for skilling today’s workforce
Power Platform has empowered millions of people to do more with less and build mission-critical apps for their businesses. Now with the new Power Up program, people without development backgrounds can transform their careers through a guided training program and community. The Power Up upskilling program provides training, offers certification, and recognizes people who excel.
There are so many new and exciting capabilities to experience and dive into at Microsoft Ignite. You can learn more about these announcements and how Microsoft is committed to delivering the best development experience at the session Accelerate innovation with the world’s most complete cloud developer platform. Join us throughout the entire event for breakout sessions, demos, opportunities to connect with experts, learning experiences, and much more.
Thank you, and enjoy Microsoft Ignite!