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 it turns out that the impressive 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. As of this writing, it has around 3.500 members according to Meetup.com.
(For a long time after we started hosting events we had people attending other events see our signage and curiously pop their head in to ask “What’s Azure?” When I’d answer “that’s Microsoft’s public cloud platform” they would very often react with a puzzled look and the follow-up question: “Cloud? What a cloud?” So yes, those were early days.)
That first event was held at the Microsoft NERD building in Cambridge MA. Mike Werner said a few words, I gave a short talk about cloud benefits and the coming opportunity (and somehow managed to reference “the Internet is … a series of tubes” comment by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens) and Brian Lambert (@softwarenerd) was the featured speaker who talked about queuing patterns in Azure Storage which was part of my journey of getting interested in cloud-relevant patterns (which culminated in me writing a book – Cloud Architecture Patterns – a few years later). Michael Stiefel was Boston Azure’s second-ever speaker.
Heady days from 2008 to 2010!
The times they are a-changin’
“You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’.” –Bob Dylan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_kPNFL3dY and do yourself a favor and check out the movie A Complete Unknown).
A few things have changed since then. The PDC conference is no longer – though content has been subsumed into the Build conference. Windows Azure is now just Azure. There are hundreds of Azure services, not two. And Ray Ozzie is no longer at Microsoft (but has the Blues in the best sense of the word).
And Boston Azure is still at it. We’ve delivered more than 150 free events and still going strong. Now also delivering events virtually since the you-know-what made in-person events so difficult. Back in the early days George Babey and Nazik Huq signed on to help me run things. These days – and for some time now – our leadership team is Jason Haley (@haleyjason), Veronika Kolesnikova (@veronika_dev1), and me.
But technology continues to evolve, and we need to evolve too. Today Artificial Intelligence is playing a role similar to the role played by public cloud platforms back 15 years ago: everything is different so what does that mean? what will come out next? what does this make possible? how can I make use of this? how do I learn this stuff? This is exciting, right??
Changing Call Sign to Boston Azure AI
With no end in sight for AI to slow down, the three of us running Boston Azure – Veronika Kolesnikova (@veronika_dev1), Jason Haley (@haleyjason), and myself (@codingoutloud) – have decided to update our community group for 2025 by changing call signs – Boston Azure is now Boston Azure AI.
We’ve been emphasizing AI topics for a while already. Veronika is a long-time Microsoft MVP for AI, Jason is a long-time Microsoft MVP for Azure who last year was reclassified to the AI category, and myself as a long-time Azure MVP was re-classified last year as Dev Tools (presumably due to giving so many talks on GitHub Copilot, the AI coding assistant, in the prior year), so this emphasis also aligns with where the group’s leadership is spending time. At any rate, this rename should at least help us more clearly communicate to the community what we intend to offer.
Where to Find Boston Azure AI
With the rename, we are retooling some of our properties. Some are new, some are renamed from bostonazure version. You can find us at the following destinations:
- X/Twitter: 🐦 https://x.com/bostonazureai – renamed, so if you followed before you are still following
- Bluesky: 🟦 https://bsky.app/profile/bostonazureai.org – yeah, we did the fancy domain version 😉
- YouTube: 🎥 https://www.youtube.com/@bostonazureai (renamed) – we have more than 50 videos posted
- GitHub: 🛠️ https://github.com/bostonazureai – created a new GitHub Organization for this and will be migrating over the old content, including the C# + Semantic Kernel + Azure OpenAI hands-on workshop materials shortly (see bottom of this post for more – we are running an event on Jan 31)
- Meetup: 📅 https://meetup.com/bostonazureai – renamed, so if you were a member before you are still a member
- Website: 🌐 https://bostonazureai.org – coming soon
- Email: ✉️ hello@bostonazureai.org – we used a gmail address for the first 15 years, but now we are getting fancy with the bostonazureai.org domain. Hit us up if you want to offer a talk (in person or virtual) or have a suggested topic for us!
And, fittingly, we also have a shiny new logo.
Hands-on AI Coding Workshop: C#, .NET 9, and Semantic Kernel on Azure OpenAI
In another evolution, Jason Haley and I are experimenting with offering Boston Azure AI in-person hands-on AI coding workshops during the workday. The community events we’ve historically offered have been only nights and weekends – non-working hours. We’ll see how this works out. We have our second such in-person during-the-workday hands-on coding workshop focused on using C#, .NET 9, and Semantic Kernel on Azure OpenAI coming up on Fri Jan 31, 2025 held in Cambridge MA. You can sign up here. Free.
And we have a weekend event on the schedule to participate in Boston Azure edition Boston Azure AI edition of the Global AI Bootcamp in March. You can sign up here. Free.
Buckle in. Looking forward to an exciting next few years!
🤖 ☁️
