Microsoft Build 2018 – Keynote 1 Summary

Charlotte Yarkoni, Corporate VC Ecosystems

Microsoft got its start by building developer tools and developers is always at its heart. The developer advocates go where developers are, even at unexpected places. All at Microsoft arew here to understand what is important to developers and to empower developers.

Developers over 70 countries are attending Build, youngest attendie is 10 years old.

Recently launched Azure for Students. Microsoft for Startups investing 500 millions. Significant investments in Marketplaces and in the online presence like docs.microsoft.com.

There has never been a better time in technology.

Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge

Satya Nadella

Bill Gates talking about Apple stock this morning, that is the new Microsoft.

Last year we talked about opportunity and responsibility, topics so far amplified. 12 months after it is everywhere. The developers are driving this.

The rise and fall of american productivity. What a great impact industrial revolution and the digital industry has had. The core technology of the industrial revolution are nowhere to be seen, they are invisble.

This is what we are seeing now. The world is becoming a computer, the computer is getting embedded everywhere. The computing power that is getting distributed and how it is used to collect data to create rich experiences in our lives. That is the opportunity that we have.

But we also have responsibility. These technologies are creating growth by iensuring that every industry is growing and creating jobs. We have a responsibility to to ensure trust in our technology. The power of technology far outstrips our ability to control it and its impact on future generations. The choices we make is going to define the future.

Microsoft focuses on 3 core pillars:

1. Privacy: ensure and protect privacy as a fundamental human rights. GDPR, the Cloud Act. Ensure that customers are in control and so is their data.
2. Cybersecurity: we need to act with collective responsibility across the tech sector to help keep the world safe.
3. Ethical AI: we need to ask ourselves not only what computers can do but what they should do. Microsoft formed and ethical commitee, investments in tools. We need good AI, to make good choices for the future. We need a datasheet for the data so we can know what the data came from and what it is used for. AI is biased and we need tools to debias. We need privacy preserving AI or private AI.

This is what grounds Microsoft to empower every person and organization to achieve more. Focus on building technology to empower others to build more technology.

Your success is our success!

Two platform opportunities: Azure and Microsoft 365. There is a shift to the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge.

Azure is being built as the world’s computer. But Microsoft is not stopping there, Azure is being built out to the edge with Azure Stack, Azure IoT Edge and Azure Sphere.

Azure Stack is just one year old, supports multiple scenarios. Azure IoT Edge runs on both Linux and Windows.

Announcing open sourcing Azure IoT Edge Runtime.

Announcing AI Developer Kit, partnership with Qualcom.

Announcing Windows SDK and Commercial Drone Solutions with Azure IoT Edge and AI, partnership with dji. Bring Azure IoT Edge right to the drone. Azure Sphere brings together secure MCU, secure OS and cloud security.

Demo

Rockwell uses Azure to predict maintenance, detect visual defects and anomalies. IoT Edge enabled to escape the cloud and download it on the devices. Using Qualcom camera. Rockwell doesn’t have to send all the data from the camera, they only sends alerts. Using Qualcom drones to detect anomalies with the same model.

Moving to the technology of AI

When it comes to AI breakthroughts, Microsoft has many. The pace with which these breakthroughs are coming. What matters is can we translate these into frameworks, tools and services for developers to take it into every industry and organization. This requires scale, the most productive toolchain and openness.

Azure AI with Cognitive Services, 35 services today. The key is that it can be customized: bring your labeled data to customize the models and deploy it where you need it. These cognitive services are ushered in many edge devices.

Announcing Speech Devices SDK and Reference Kits, Azure AI-enabled edge devices.

Announcing Project Kinect for Azure, it will have the best spacial understanding, object recognition.

The next big thing is Conversational AI. Bots are the new apps. Every company will build branded agents. Every agent should be able to converse across multiple personal assistants. We now see a tremendous amount of momentum.

Announcing Bot Framework updates. Launching 100+ new features to give bots more customization. The separation of how you build the conversational dialog and the toolchain that you need to build a branded asset of where it shows up, that is what Microsoft is enabling.

Make sure there is openness in every layer. You don’t get locked in into one particual neural processing, it will be openned up.

Announcing Project Brainwave, real-time AI on cloud and edge.

Multi-sense, multi-device experiences

Microsoft 365 has people at the center for work and life. During a single day you are working with multiple devices, you are in multiple places, interacting with multiple senses. Meta orchestration is what we need to do. That is what Microsoft 365 does.

With Fluent you can modernize a Win32, WPF, UWP app. You can add senses: ink, gaze. Add application richness with multiple senses. Timeline allows you to go to the phone to the pc and back and complete your task as one. Introducing new capabilities for the phone, take the phone and treat the pc as the second device. You can have Excel call a function in Azure. These are all extensions of M365.

Microsoft is making sure that Cortana can converse with other personal digital assistants. Microsoft as working together with Amazon to bring Alexa and Cortana together.

On Echo:

Open Cortana.

Cortana here. What can I do for you?

On Windows PC:

Open Alexa.

Hi there, Alexa here. How can I help?

Every Windows and Office developers are Microsoft 365 developers. The underpinning is Microsoft Graph, this ability to have users activity. Individuals and organizations own their data and give developers access. Microsoft wants to take real world data and web data. Data that spans not just the digital but also the physical world. The graph becomes richer that more we use it and the more data it has.

New SaaS applications to take spacial data from HoloLens. Spacial analytics provides data in context. World-sensing devices provide spacial data and context for eorkflows.

Announcing two new mixed reality services: Microsoft Remote Assist to collaborate in Mixed Reality to solve problems faster and Microsoft Layout to design spaces in context with Mixed Reality.

AI services for meetings: find and book meeting rooms, schedule meetings, searchable transcripts, multiple simultaneous translations, video and audio feed, insights and notes. Accurately show is speaking and when. Pick up meeting items automatically. It help interaction in the room and remote access. Cortana is in the workspace and it can help.

Opportunity in the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is limitless. This shift is shaping two other platforms: Gaming and Dynamics 365. All four platforms co-evolving with one major shift.

How to empower more people and organizations, that is what it is really about. Ensure that technology is reaching everyone.

Announcing AI for Accessibility.

(Stretching break)

Microsoft Azure

Scott Gutthrie, Corporate VP Cloud + AI

Due to cloud computing we have the ability to innovate faster and at a greater scale than ever before. It can be overwhelming. The expectation to know all these technologies and be up to date all the time. With this understanding, how to shape Azure. Having lots of features is not everything but how you use it is the success.

Having a cloud that you can trust. Azure is a broad platform.

Five areas of innovation:

DevTools and DevOps

Visual Studio and complete DevOps solution with VSTS, completely integrated with Azure.

Available today Visual Studio Live Share, works across VS and Code. Live Share extension, generate and share the link, join session. IDE populated with the context and language services. See cursor, select code, independently inspect the code and solution explorer, follow cursor, set breakpoint, get hover tips during debugging. Live share is real-time collaborative development. Live share provides secure connection, shared servers with access to localhost hosted on the other machine, shared live terminal instance to the other machine. Free for all Visual Studio and Code on every platform.

There is a change on how Microsoft does open source. Microsoft is the largest single corporate contributor to open source on GitHub. Microsoft has the largest open source community with Visual Studio Code.

Announcing deeper integration with GitHub: Visual Studio App Center + GitHub integration for iOS and Android app development.

DevOps demo with VSTS by Donovan Brown, DevOps advocate: Kanban board, 77000 tests running 600 times a day. Release gates. Automated safe deployment. New feature in the Azure portal: new feature DevOps projects.

Friends don’t let friends right click publish.

New: DevOps project with Azure Kubernetes Service.

Containers and Serverless

AKS is fully managed Kubernetes orchestration service with auto patching, auto scaling and more. New feature Devspaces for AKS, inner loop development with containers. AKS and DevSpaces demo by Scott Hanselman.

Loosely coupled serverless architecture with Serverless Code and Serverless Workflow. Take advantage of serverless based computing, execute code in event driven way. It can save you money by not having to pay for resources you are not using. Reliable event delivery and eliminate polling with Azure Event Grid.

Internet of Things

IoT is experiencing exponential growth. > 20 Billion IoT devices by 2020.

Services:

• Azure IoT Hub to securely manage billions of devices and works with any device, Logic App Designer to integrate with services like Twitter.
• We want to run logic at the edge as well. Azure IoT Edge allows easily and reliably to deploy apps using containers, supports Azure ML, Functions and Streaming Analytics. End to end security from device to cloud.

Data

How to store and represent the data with Azure. Many choices of Azure Operational Data Services. Cosmos DB scales horizontally, supports many APIs. New pricing options, new multi-master write support.

Artificial Intelligence

Integrate Azure Search with cognitive services for built-in enrichment of content suing Azure AI. NBA’s growing data problem: 32 teams, 80 games. Data lake became data swamp. Perfect analytics layer but a learning layer is needed. Building a smart data platform in an AI-driven approach. PhotoSorter using cognitive services like Cognitive Search, Face API, Video Indexer API. Apply cognitive skills to the data that you have with the AI first approach to cognitive understanding.

You can build your own AI model with this three steps flow:

1. Step 1: Prepare data by transforming the data into intelligence. This is what data scientists do for 80% of the time. Azure Databricks is Spark based analytics platform optimized for Azure.
2. Step 2: build and train. Azure Machine Learning.
3. Step 3: deploy. It can run anywhere. Docker Containers. Azure Kubernetes Service.

Starbucks demo: data and AI services. Technology is core to the Starbucks experience everywhere. Blockchain for supply chain from beans to cup, agronomy, inventory, scheduling, industry leading mobile applicstion. The biggest transformation has been with the partners. Build it once and leverage it anywhere in the world.