In less than a week, Team Lifehacker will be in New Orleans for TechEd North America, the climax of our World Of Servers adventure. Throughout this week we’ll be looking at what our contest winners hope to learn from the experience. First up: David Klemke, our prize-winning TechEd 2012 blogger.
I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to Windows Server 2012 than TechEd Australia last year as it highlighted the most important features of Microsoft’s latest operating system. For me, the highlights were the incredible improvements with PowerShell V3.0, Hyper-V reaching base feature parity with ESX and the massive amount of cloud integration that was available with Windows Server 2012.
Whilst I’ve tinkered with it myself at home and set it up for a fledgling small business I haven’t yet been given the opportunity to deploy it in production. This might just be a case of waiting for SP1 (as most enterprises do) but I think there’s some tangible benefits to be had already and that’s exactly what I’m looking to get out of TechEd North America: ideas and solutions I can sell to the business owners I work with.
Working in Canberra my primary clientele consists of Australian government departments and whilst I don’t need to sell them on the benefits of Windows as a platform, it’s next to impossible to get them to consider external cloud providers. Primarily this has been due to most of the availability regions being outside of Australia which causes issues with data sovereignty but even with the availability of AWS in Sydney many have shied away due to the uncertain transition path.
With Microsoft bringing Azure to Sydney sometime next year though this could have the potential to make that transition a whole lot easier, especially when combined with tools such SCVMM 2012. With that in mind I’ll be diving deep into the sessions that deal with building private clouds and their integration with Azure, and looking towards building solutions ready to take advantage of Azure when it lands in Australia.
I also think I’ll be getting a lot of benefit out of the deep dives focusing on developing with the Azure platform. As my long-time readers will tell you I’ve been developing on the cloud for a long time now and I’m always looking to take advantage of the latest features that Microsoft releases for the platform. Indeed I believe that, whilst the cloud won’t be the be all and end all platform, it will become a bigger part of the work system admins like myself do. Understanding Azure’s capabilities and what I can use them for will help me deliver better solutions for the businesses I service, something I’m always striving for.
Thinking about it further I still feel like I’ll only be scratching the surface of Windows Server 2012’s capabilities and I’m sure there will be a few sessions that I’ll end up jumping into just because they sound good. Suffice to say I think I’ll be spoiled for choice as I was at TechEd Australia although this time I’ll be making far more efficient use of my time, now that I know what I’m in for!
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