Ignite 2015 is over and it’s time to get back to work.   From the conference, as with any conference or show I attend, I’ve come home with a pretty decent list of to-dos.   This time my list is mostly Azure stuff.   Look into creating a billing report for VMs, fix some runbooks, do some performance testing with SQL Server on different types of Azure VMs, etc.

Ignite was fun, but I’m not sure it was as awe-inspiring as it was for me two years ago.   I feel like the sessions weren’t as technical and they really didn’t have as much big news to share.   Everyone basically knows that Microsoft wants everyone to use Azure or Office 365.  Everyone knows they think mobile technologies are critical.   Everyone knows they want admins to use PowerShell for everything.

I think I learned more from the expo hall than from the sessions, which is unusual.   My normal experience has been getting pushed a bunch of sales pitches from booth babes and old men.   This year had quite a bit of that, but there was a pretty wide range of vendors in attendance.   I REALLY enjoyed the little Hadoop 101 provided by HortonWorks.   That’s one technology that I want to just do.   The Microsoft booths were all very informative, though crowded.   I went to the Azure AD stand 3 times to ask a simple question and each time it was packed with people.   I guess folks are really interested in that, while the RMS booth next to it had no one visiting.

Overall, I’ll go again, and probably next year even.   I do want to hit ChefConf next year, so I’m figuring Ignite may be out, but we’ll see.