I’m not the biggest Microsoft fan in the world. Heck! I was never a Microsoft fanboy – neither Apple, btw. But I see that now, with Google and Apple, Microsoft is the underdog with quite some interesting stuff, since Windows 10, Edge Browser and even Azure platform.

So today, Microsoft is hosting #AzureCon 2015 and oh boy, I was surprised with a few things.

This is their current Azure Stack:

And their analytics platform:

Quite impressive also when you look at their N family VMs, with GPUS and RDMA network:

Now, what really impressed me was these new features:

Full serial support on Linux when booting

Windows serial mode:

ExpressRoute for O365 and Skype for business (which is a direct connection to Microsoft from several network providers)

And finally, Microsoft is presenting Docker and Mesos on Azure with a Mac Laptop and using Safari…. 

Now that’s a lot of “love”, as Azure CTO said. Its really impressive how Microsoft changed these few years. It was a completely ground-up change when it comes to technology and I find Azure a serious competitor for the amazing Amazon Web Services. The most remarking thing is how Docker grew so fast between cloud providers and is now almost a standard on containers.