global azure bootcamp 2018

One pager showing the local partners here in Quebec city.

On Saturday April, 21st 2018 was the 6th edition of the Global Azure Bootcamp: https://global.azurebootcamp.net/ all around the world hosted by 284 locations (in its first edition in 2013, it was just 90 locations).
In Quebec city it was our 4th edition and we got ~200 people. We were lucky despite the sunny day we got, actually the first spring day there, to have such interest from our attendees.

Logo of the Global Azure Bootcamp 2018.

This year was my first year as co-organizer and speaker, I really appreciated the experience. I would like to share with you our recipe here in Quebec city regarding how we made this possible. It’s basically a mix of:

Strong organizers with 4 years of experience with this event, Frédérick Dugas and Mario Lafond. Patrice Lacroix and myself were involved for the agenda, the engagement with our local partners and our local MVPs
Passionate Microsoft speakers: André Michel, Sylvain Cadoret, Jean-François Doré and myself.
Engaged and experienced local partners: CGI, CloudOps, Cofomo, DimOnOff, Edgenda and Victrix
Dedicated local MVPs: Hinault Donfack, Julien Maitrehenry and Maxime Coquerel
Active local communities: mainly the AzureQC Meetup with the help of DockerQC and DotNetQC Meetups

The other recipe we have is having great contents delivered by great speakers! 3 Keynotes, 9 breakout sessions split in 3 rooms and 2 kiosks.

Here is the agenda we got:

9am-12pm - Keynotes
- Azure in the context of the Quebec Government by André Michel, Microsoft
- Azure Updates and Roadmap by Jean-François Doré, Microsoft
- OSS & Azure by Adrian Todorov, CloudOps and Mathieu Benoit, Microsoft
12-1pm - Kiosks
- MVPs - Ask the experts
- HoloLens demo by CGI
1-1:50pm - Breakout sessions
- Monitoring with Azure by Pier-Luc Rodrigue, Edgenda
- Architecture your solutions in Azure by André Girard, Cofomo
- Azure IoT for Smart Cities by Daniel Noiseux and Serge Munger, DimOnOff
2-2:50pm - Breakout sessions
- How to adopt Azure? by Jean-François Doré, Microsoft
- Welcome to “IoT-Az-Ar”! by Franck Desert and Michael Bourgoin, CGI
- Replace RSA key by AAD MFA by Vincent Dumouchel and Gaétan Labrecque, Victrix
3-3:50pm - Breakout sessions
- Azure Stack by Sylvain Cadoret, Microsoft
- Artificial Intelligence with Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service by Hinault Donfack
- Containers and DevOps demo by Julien Maitrehenry and Maxime Coquerel
4-5pm - Kiosks
- MVPs - Ask the experts
- HoloLens demo by CGI

What was new this year was having at 12-1pm and 4-5pm two kiosks:

Local MVPs with their “Ask the experts” kiosk: Hinault Donfack, Julien Maitrehenry and Maxime Coquerel

Picture of the MVP’s booth where we could see local MVPs talking with participants during a break.

CGI Quebec with their HoloLens and IoT demos kiosk: Franck Desert, Jordan Mayer and Michael Bourgoin

Picture of someone at the CGI’s booth wearing the Hololens.

Picture of the CGI’s booth where they show cased Azure services with IoT, Cognitive services, Hololens, etc.

Regarding the opening Keynote I co-delivered with Adrian Todorov, we did an interesting exercise to show 2 demos (Azure DevOps project + AKS) within the 1h15min slot we had in front of ~200 people. Here are some photos and here is the document of our presentation:

Picture of me on the stage illustrating the statement from Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella about “Microsoft loves Linux”.

Picture of Adrian on the stage talking about the difference between VMs and containers.

Picture of Adrian on the stage doing a demo of AKS from within the Azure Cloud Shell.

Picture of me on the stage showing the 4 pillars of Microsoft’s approach with Open Source: Enable, Integrate, Release and Contribute.

Picture of me on the stage showing the Azure DevOps project from within the Azure portal.

Again, a really great GABC 2018 edition which couldn’t be a success without all the people, customers, partners and local communities mentioned in this blog article.

See you next year for sure! ;)