Microsoft participated in this year’s Forloop Summit, showcasing advanced features to aid developers in cloud deployment and management.
Statistics from the Cloud Africa 2018 report state that the use of cloud by medium to large organisations in Africa has more than doubled between 2013 and 2018. Due to the benefits of cloud in offering efficiency and scalability, more than 90 percent of surveyed companies in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria have plans to increase their spending on cloud computing in the next year.
In line with this, Microsoft has said it is arming developers in Nigeria with skills to manage the complexity of modern enterprise cloud requirements. While many organisations have moved to a cloud-first technology strategy, many are still in the early stages of implementing this strategy. To help businesses navigate their cloud options, Microsoft created its Azure stack.
The Azure Stack gives customers a consistent cloud experience – true hybrid across infrastructure, apps, and data to enable application innovation. For organisations with industry-driven regulatory requirements, latency issues or connectivity – this is a game changer.
At the Summit, developers were shown the capabilities of the Azure stack. The solution enables a consistent development experience for cloud-native and traditional applications, with the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge and across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
Microsoft Azure Stack, which offers Azure in a customer’s data centre or in disconnected scenarios, help developers work in the following hybrid scenarios:
- The Azure platform is designed with productivity in mind, removing friction or potential blockers so developer teams can get more done. This includes providing integrated tools for DevOps, innovative container solutions, functions-based computing tools and a marketplace with offerings that assist users in building anything across multiple devices —from mobile to internet-scale apps – using the tools and platforms they love.
- Advanced open source container/container orchestration tools, bringing open source services like Postgres & MySQL to Azure, and open sourcing to make Microsoft tools usable for all.
To further aid developers to iterate at scale, Mr. Wale Olokodana, Cloud and Enterprise Business Group Lead MEA emerging markets said that Azure provides 12months free trial and $200 credit to developers on azure.com. Developers can register on cloudsociety.microsoft.com to access technical trainings online.