Microsoft Inspire is Microsoft’s largest partner event of the year, and the 2021 edition (like 2020’s) took place entirely online. We attended a combination of live and on-demand sessions online from 14-15 July 2021. Microsoft made a lot of interesting and exciting announcements at the event, some of which we’ve highlighted here for you.
At Microsoft Inspire, you can be inspired by a wide range of experts and industry leaders from Microsoft. The line-up includes several familiar names, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, COO Judson Althof, and President Brad Smith.
Just like in previous years, Microsoft is announcing a host of new features relating to the container orchestration platform Azure, Dynamics 365, Kubernetes, Windows, and others. We’ve done a round-up of the most exciting news from the first day of the event:
Smart defaults for Azure Kubernetes Service
Smart defaults are now available as a preview in AKS. These are scenario-specific cluster configurations that can be rolled out at the push of a button. They help customers avoid known pitfalls when configuring clusters and help them get started quickly and safely.
The feature also saves users a lot of time, as it eliminates their time spent reading documentation and testing different settings.
More information is here available.
New migration capabilities including Azure Migrate App Containerization
Microsoft has announced new capabilities that simplify migration to the cloud. These include the feature Azure Migrate App Containerization, which provides support for deploying containerized apps to the Web App for Containers tool. This tool helps to modernize existing ASP.NET and Java web apps, The containerization tool packages apps as containers and deploys them as containerized apps on AKS or Azure App Service Containers.
Preview of Azure Kubernetes Services for Azure Event Grid
A preview of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – the service for managing the routing of events from source to destination, plus enabling near-real-time notifications – is now available as an event source for Azure Event Grid. Customers can now sign up for two events: the availability of a new Kubernetes version and the availability of a new version of a node image.
More information can be found here.
Free access to Microsoft Dynamics 365 data from Teams
Microsoft Teams users can now view and edit Microsoft Dynamics 365 data for free in Teams, regardless of whether they have a Dynamics 365 licence. Microsoft aims to give customers more flexibility and improve customer workflow productivity.
Any employee with a Teams licence can now view data in Dynamics 365 directly from Teams. Access rights ensure that data is accessible only to users who are actually allowed to access it. More details are here available.
Windows 365: Streaming Windows experience to any device
Another major announcement is Windows 365, which gives you
Windows 10 – or Windows 11 once it becomes generally available later this year – as a cloud service. Windows 365 streams the full Windows experience from the Microsoft Cloud and is available for all devices.
According to Microsoft, Windows 365 is ushering in a new hybrid category of PCs: the Cloud PC, combining the power of the cloud and capabilities of an individual device to provide a personalized Windows experience. Windows 365 is available for a per-user monthly fee.
More information can be found here.
More announcements
Want to hear more announcements and news about Microsoft Inspire? Have a look at the ‘Book of News’ that Microsoft publishes each year about Inspire. The 2021 edition is available here.
