Bill Wilder (@codingoutloud.com)

Boston Azure AI: Boston Azure is changing calls signs I was in the audience at the Microsoft PDC on Nov 3, 2008 where Windows Azure was unveiled on stage by Ray Ozzie in the conference's opening keynote. At the 16:45 mark he graciously tipped his hat to Jeff Bezos and the AWS team, then announced…

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Boston Azure AI: Boston Azure is changing calls signs I was in the audience at the Microsoft PDC on Nov 3, 2008 where Windows Azure was unveiled on stage by Ray Ozzie in the conference's opening keynote. At the 16:45 mark he graciously tipped his hat to Jeff Bezos and the AWS team, then announced Windows Azure - a platform with two services: Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables, Queues) and Cloud Services (Web Roles, Worker Roles) - all with the illusion of infinite scale. Later that same day I got hands-on Windows Azure coding experience in a special booth staffed by Microsoft engineers (and the engineer helping me was Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk)). I got to test drive those new super-cool Azure services. From my perspective this was the beginning of the conversation about Platform as a Service (PaaS) in the cloud - and the start of horizontal scale as a mainstream architecture pattern. What an event! Around 15 months from this initial announcement, on Feb 1, 2010, Windows Azure reached "GA" (general availability). In between the initial announcement in 2008 and the GA date in 2010, Boston Azure was born. On Oct 22, 2009, Boston Azure debuted as the first community group of its kind - the first one dedicated to learning about the Azure platform. This post is an update on that journey. Like so much of the rest of the technology world, we have the AI bug too. Accordingly, after 15 years as Boston Azure we are changing calls signs to Boston Azure AI. Simultaneously we are attempting some ambitious in-person training events (see bottom of post for more on this). http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2025/01/19/boston-azure-ai-boston-azure-is-changing-calls-signs/