Fifteen years ago, I attended my first Global Azure event. In those days, it was called "Global Windows Azure Boot Camp." Two years later, I organized a full-day Global Azure event in the Detroit area.

When I moved to Chicago, I discovered that Azure MVP / Microsoft Regional Director Eric Boyd was doing the same thing here. He invited me to help, and I gladly accepted.

Global Azure is an annual event held each spring to promote the education of Microsoft's cloud platform. What began as a one-day event has expanded to three days - April 16-18 this year. Sessions were held on these days in 73 different cities all around the world.

Eric and I decided to limit this year's Chicago Global Azure event to one full day - Friday, April 17! I reserved the multi-purpose rooms at the downtown Chicago Microsoft office, while Eric's company, ResponsiveX, sponsored the event, buying food and drinks for attendees.

Eric kicked off the day with a presentation titled: "Azure Is Now Old Enough to Drive," in which he told the history of Microsoft's cloud platform.

Phanindra Gangina followed with, "Zero-Friction Cloud-Native: Building and Deploying Portable Microservices with Dapr," explaining an approach to building scalable, cloud-native microservices using Dapr as the distributed application runtime.

Brian Haydin shared how he creates, deploys, and maintains AI agents in his talk: "AgentOps for Real: Evals, Tracing, and Regression Tests for AI Agents on Azure."

After lunch (Lou Malnatti's pizza), I delivered a presentation on Observability in Azure, titled "Navigating Cloudy Horizons with Azure Monitor and Application Insights."

Pete Rodriguez delivered the final presentation of the day, discussing how he uses Copilot to support DevOps processes in Azure. Pete's participation was fortuitous because one of the scheduled speakers neglected to show up.

We closed with a Panel Discussion. All five of the day's speakers answered questions on issues in cloud computing. This conversation generated numerous questions from the audience, who stayed well past the scheduled closing time.

The day was a great success. Many attendees told me they learned a lot from the sessions. I am grateful to Eric for organizing the event, to Pete for his flexibility, to the speakers for sharing their knowledge, and to the audience for taking a day to learn and network.

We plan to return next year.