3rd #AzureGov Meetup – Cortana Intelligence, ServiceFabric & Mesosphere

 

This guest post is from Brent Wodicka at Applied Information Sciences.

The third #AzureGov meetup was held at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston on April 27th. This meetup was again well attended and featured three great presentations relating to next-gen cloud applications for government and micro-services.

Mehul Shah got the session started with an overview of the Cortana Intelligence Suite, including the latest announcements coming out of BUILD 2016. The talk started with a lap around the platform, and then focused in on some key areas where features are rolling out quickly – including the Cognitive Services APIs. The session included some good discussion from the group related to potential use cases, and the ability to adapt the services to any number of business verticals. More about the Cortana Intelligence Suite here, and Build 2016 here.

The second session focused on building microservices on Azure. Chandra Sekar lead the discussion that began with a general discussion about the options you have for building microservices on the platform, including container technologies and the Azure Service Fabric. Chandra then went into detail and showed a great demo of a sample microservice built on the Azure Service Fabric. The demo explained how stateful micrososervices can be built using the Service Fabric, and demonstrated the resiliency of this model by walking through a simulated “failure” of the primary service node and recovery of the service – which occurred very quickly and maintained its running state. Cool stuff!

The final speaker was Keith McClellan, a Federal Programs Technical lead with Mesosphere. Keith began by talking about what Mesosphere has been up to, its maturity in the market, and the recent announcement of the DC/OS project. DC/OS is an exciting open source technology (spearheaded by Mesosphere) which offers an enterprise grade data-center scale operating system – meant to be a single location for running workloads of almost any kind. Keith walked through provisioning containers and other interesting services (including a SPARK data cluster for big data analysis) on the platform – and actually provisioned the entire stack on Azure infrastructure. I was impressed with the number of services already available to run on the platform today. More about DC/OS here.

If you haven’t already, join the DC Azure Government meetup group here, and join us for the next meeting. You can also opt to be notified about upcoming events or when group members post content.