#AzureGovMeetup Recap: Cloud DemoPalooza!

March 1, 2018

Last night’s AzureGov Meetup was an exceptionally fantastic one! The team challenged the Azure Government DC user community to create and share 12-minute demos to showcase cool tech that can help accelerate your cloud implementation.

We received a terrific response to the challenge and it resulted in a rock-star lineup of speakers, demos and an inside scoop on what’s moving the needle in government technology today. The presenters included:

  • Patrick Curran, Director, Federal Group, Planet Technologies
  • Mark Joscelyne, Head of Technical Operations, Public Sector, Frame
  • Deepak Mallya, Chief Cloud Architect, Cloudwave, Inc.
  • John Osborne, Principal OpenShift Solutions Architect, Red Hat
  • Steve Michelotti, Lead Dev Evangelist, Microsoft Azure Government

You can watch ALL the demos here at the archived livestream. (It’s available for a limited time, so check it out today!) Read More…

#AzureGov Meetup Recap: Jumpstart Your Move To the Cloud

February 1, 2018
It’s a New Year, and a new (or continuing!) resolution for many government agencies is to finally (and fully!) take advantage of cloud computing. But the same old problems persist: Where to start? How to start? And who can help?

With those challenges in mind, Microsoft and AIS kicked off 2018 with a solid #Azure Meetup speaker lineup of cloud and industry experts to help figure out where to begin and what valuable training resources are available. They also provided insight on some government use cases and best practices for cloud onboarding success.

Last night’s speakers included:

  • Guy Cavallo, Deputy CIO, Small Business Administration
  • Brian Harrison, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft
  • Bernarldo “Bernie” Ellis, Senior Program Manager, Azure Government, Microsoft

In case you missed it, you can watch the entire Meetup via the archived livestream here.

Reserve your spot for February’s meetup today. As always, these events are free to the public and offer great networking opportunities both before and after the show! If you won’t be able to make it, just follow AISteam on Twitter for photos, highlights and links to the livestream. Read More…

Building a Real World Solution on Azure Government with Machine Learning

November 15, 2017
Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with Steve Michelotti, Program Manager on the AzureGov team and talk about a Machine Learning (ML) application we built for a federal agency. This application is a great example of how AIS leverages the latest innovations on the AzureGov platform to build applications that align with agencies’ missions – and go beyond IT support to directly assist in meeting the mission objectives.

Specifically, this application was designed to help analysts get personalized recommendations (based on their own preference settings, ratings provided by their co-workers) for stories they need to analyze as part of their daily work.

Brent Wodicka from AIS described this application in an earlier blog post. Read More…

#MSBUILD Azure Cosmos DB Demo on AzureGov

October 27, 2017
We took Rimma Nehme’s excellent demo from BUILD 2017 and recreated it for AzureGov.

In a nutshell, we took the Marvel Universe Social Database and loaded it in Azure Cosmos DB as a graph database. Then we built a simple web page that invoked Gremlin queries against Cosmos DB.

The key theme of this demo is the ease with which you can create a globally distributed database that can support low latency queries against the Marvel Universe graph database. In the context of AzureGov (as shown below), we can seamlessly replicate the data across the three AzureGov regions by clicking on these regions within the Azure portal.

Here’s a quick look at the demo:

#AzureGov Meetup Recap: Intersection of Cybersecurity & Digital Transformation for Gov

October 19, 2017
For government, cybersecurity isn’t just a challenge—it can also be a roadblock that stands in the path of a long-awaited digital transformation.

Agencies are tasked with balancing the highest security measures with innovation, as today’s employees and citizens alike insist that their data be conveniently available anytime, anywhere. Where do you even start?

Last night’s AzureGov Meetup had a BIG audience hoping to get an answer to that question!

Read More…

Ignite 2017: Bring Cloud Innovation to Your Mission/Services with Azure Government

October 6, 2017
Steve Michelotti and I presented a session on AzureGov last week at Microsoft Ignite 2017 in Orlando. It focused on demonstrating the innovative capabilities in AzureGov that are specifically designed to help government agencies with their mission. We dedicated about 80% of the session to live demos.

Steve started out with a brief description of AzureGov and how to get started…along with some recent news announcements, including API Management and Key Vault. Steve then quickly transitioned into demos related to Cognitive Services, Azure IOT and Power BI. I conducted two demos related to Cosmos DB Graph database and the CNTK deep learning algorithm on an N Series GPU machine.

Please watch the video below and let us know if you have any questions.

About Last Night: #AzureGovMeetup Recap “Enhancing Government Services Through Advanced Analytics”

April 27, 2017

Data is all around us, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to abstract relevant insights from our data that lead to intelligent action. Last night’s #AzureGovMeetup dove deep into advanced analytics capabilities, and attendees got a firsthand look at how raw data is transformed into actionable insight.

It included highly interactive and demonstration-focused sessions by Microsoft data and cloud experts, as well as AIS’ own CTO and Microsoft MVP, Vishwas Lele. Esri also presented a demo of advanced spatial analytics in the cloud.

          

In case you missed it, AIS livestreamed the demos on Twitter. Watch the videos below and be sure to follow us @AISTeam. (And check out the #AzureGovMeetup hashtag for more photos and insights from the outstanding lineup of experts.) Next month’s Meetup will be Wednesday, May 31 at 6 p.m. RSVP today!

Building & Deploying Java Applications Using Visual Studio Team Services

April 11, 2017

In a previous blog post, we discussed a quick overview of Continuous Integration and Deployment of .NET applications using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). This involved building and deploying regular old .NET applications with VSTS—something that we would definitely expect a Microsoft service to handle. However, there is some lesser-known support that VSTS has for other frameworks, including Java. The Microsoft VSTS website even has a portal page proclaiming their Java support: “Love Java? So do we!”

VSTS support for Java build frameworks such as Maven and Ant came in handy for AIS recently, as we were tasked with developing some new features for an older Java desktop application for a federal client. And I will have to say that all of the VSTS tools for Java applications worked flawlessly. We were able to easily add the Java project source code to a Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) repository hosted online in VSTS. Oracle even has an extension for integrating with a TFVC workspace—allowing us to check in changes right from the JDeveloper IDE. Read More…

About Last Night: #AzureGovMeetup Recap – How to Apply Cognitive Services to Your Agency’s Mission

March 30, 2017

The emerging technology of cognitive services teaches computers to understand the world as we humans do. Last night’s #AzureGovMeetup in DC focused on exactly how the exciting and powerful capabilities of cognitive services can help government agencies better meet their unique missions and improve citizen services and engagement.

Our speakers included Justin “Doc” Herman, program lead of Emerging Citizen Technology, Technology Transformation Service, General Services Administration, who shared how government is advancing the use of emerging technologies. The night also featured compelling presentations and demos on Microsoft Cognitive Services by Steve Michelotti, senior program manager, Azure Government; and Ken Hausman, data platform solution architect of Microsoft.

In case you missed it, AIS livestreamed a few portions of the event on Twitter. Watch the videos below and be sure to follow us @AISTeam. (And check out the #AzureGovMeetup hashtag for more photos and insights from the outstanding lineup of experts.) For future DC AzureGov Meetup dates and details, go here. We hope to see you next month! Read More…

#AzureGovMeetup Recap: Achieving Governance in Today’s Cloud Era

February 27, 2017

With the ever-increasing complexity and proliferation of data, protecting our nation’s most valuable information is not an easy task. In response to this growing challenge, this month’s Microsoft Azure Government DC Meetup covered practical strategies for governance to help attendees prepare for today’s cloud era.

A great group of government/industry professionals and governance subject matter experts covered a wide array of governance and security topics, including:

• Empowering users while protecting sensitive information

• Ensuring compliance across platforms including: on-premises, hybrid, or cloud-hosted SharePoint/O365 deployments

• Enforcing governance by leveraging automation tools to ensure seamless provisioning of service requests across your organization’s varied lines of business.

In case you missed it, AIS livestreamed a few portions of the event on Twitter. Watch the videos below and be sure to follow us @AISTeam. (And check out the #AzureGovMeetup hashtag for more photos and great quotes from the outstanding lineup of expert speakers.) For future DC AzureGov Meetup dates and details, go here. We hope to see you next month!