Those of you who know me know that I am also the Founder and President of the Nashville Microsoft Azure Users Group.  This group has grown from four members four years ago to 563 members today. In fact, the group has doubled in size in just the last year alone. This is a testimonial to how Azure is catching on here in Nashville, and globally.

And speaking of globally, we just held our annual Global Azure Bootcamp Event all day Saturday April 22nd in conjunction with Azure groups all over the world.

On torrentially rainy day in Nashville, with a flood watch in effect, we had 40 attendees out of the 77 that signed up for our event. Not a bad turnout for a rainy all-day Saturday event.    We will be doing a satisfaction survey soon, but all the informal feedback was positive, even effusive. We even picked up 14 new members for the group as a result.

We had 12 sessions in two simultaneous tracks, including 4 presenters from Microsoft.

Topics included:

• Microsoft Cloud Vision and Roadmap (Keynote)
• Azure Security
• Backup, High Availability and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery
• Operations Management Suite
• Hybrid Networking Services
• Citrix on Azure
• Azure Storage
• Azure Compute
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the Azure Resource Manager
• Azure Stack
• Azure Service Fabric
• Azure Container Service

I did the talks on Operations Management Suite and Azure Stack.

Alert Logic provided an excellent breakfast from Jason’s Deli. Lunch was provided by Microsoft, and the afternoon break was ice cream provided by Vaco, our perennial refreshments sponsor for the last four years.

The raffle gave away stuff from the global and local sponsors, including two $100 gift cards. There was also SWAG in the form of trial subscriptions of software from the global sponsors. Our thanks to all to our local sponsors, including:

• Microsoft
• AlertLogic
• Vaco
• Provisions Group
• Coretek Services

As well as the global sponsors that provided SWAG for the event.

Lots of great photos were taken by Ukela Alred and will be uploaded to the Meetup Site Photos Section/Bootcamp Album shortly.

And a big shout out to Ukela and Scott Schreier who helped with registration and getting folks in and out of the building when the elevators stopped stopping at the 4th floor at Microsoft at  2PM.   Also to Scott for providing those two big agenda posters in front of each meeting room.

We will do this again next year

Bill Zack