Finding space for this year's [Global Azure]() event was a challenge, but Eric Boyd worked his network, and George Roberts was able to reserve a hall inside the McDonald's world headquarters in Chicago's West Loop.

Global Azure has a long history. It began over twelve years ago as the Global Windows Azure Boot Camp. I hosted an event in 2013 in Southfield, MI, years before I joined Microsoft. Community organizers host events the same week in cities around the world.

Saturday's Chicago event started with a presentation by Microsoft MVP and Regional Director Eric Boyd, who gave a history of Azure in the context of how he worked with the platform. Eric was an early adopter and proponent of Azure and has built a business focused mainly on Azure services. Dan Rey spoke next, educating us about Azure data centers and how they have evolved to meet growing demand. George Roberts then told us how McDonald's migrated to Entra from Active Directory and the challenges they had to overcome. After lunch, Dee Peterson spoke about using the Well Architected Framework to create resilient applications in the cloud. To close the day, I gave a presentation on Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

Over thirty people attended the event - an impressive number given that we scheduled it late and the sunshine tempted folks to enjoy outdoor activities. The audience was engaged for the six hours of presentations, asking many relevant questions and hanging out afterwards to connect with the speakers and organizers.

This event was an excellent opportunity to engage the community, educate people about Azure, and promote in-person events. As we closed, Eric and I announced a rebirth of the Chicago Cloud Computing User Group, which will host a meeting at the Downtown Chicago Microsoft office on June 5.