5th Global Azure Boot Camp Nepal 2017 Organized Successfully

The fifth edition of Annual Global Azure Bootcamp was held on April 22, 2017. The one-day event spanned 36 hours across 250 different places around the world. The event was organized by ASP. Net Community and The Cloud Power at Shanta Plaza, Ratopul.

The event focused on the cloud offerings by Microsoft Azure and other open source technologies. The event focused on all tech enthusiasts who have been using Azure and wish to discover more about the cloud platform. Three sessions were conducted throughout the whole day, each session of 45 minutes to one hour. The sessions included:

1. Getting started with NodeJS and MongoDB with Azure App Service and Azure DocumentDB
2. Using Serverless Architecture for image analysis with Azure Functions, JavaScript, Cognitive Services and Azure Storage
3. Creating a load balanced web farm with Linux and Azure Virtual Machine

TechLekh caught up with Mahesh Dahal, Microsoft Valued Professional, who was the organizer of the event. He focused on the fact that although it has been some time since Nepal started using Azure in different sectors, scenarios, and conditions like an earthquake, and reconstructions, people still do not know the importance and features of Azure.

“The main aim of the event is to let people know about the capacity of fantastic cloud service. People normally tend to limit Azure to hosting and servers, which is not true. Azure has more than 1000 services including machine learning, Office 365, cognitive service etc. This time we have tried to teach practical implementation to the participant rather than theoretical knowledge. We have a set of codes for each participant and they are supposed to develop an application from the codes. They will then host the application in Azure and distribute it using the farm. Anyone can participate in the event irrespective of their prior knowledge in development. The event is supported by Microsoft, it has provided us with free credits of Azure equivalent to Rs. 10000.” says Mr. Dahal.

We also interacted with other members of the organizing committee and some participants of the boot camp to know about the event. This is what they had to say.

“This is the fifth time we are organizing this event. This time we had decided to provide practical implementations to the participants. Thus, this time there are no presentations, instead, the participants are practically doing the task on their laptop. The main aim of the boot camp is to teach the participants to use the cloud services and choose the service that best suits them out of all services. We have got positive feedback from the participants regarding the event.”

– Alok Pandey, Chief Technical Officer of Braindigit, a Microsoft MVP and has been involved in ASP.Net community for a long time. He was one of the organizers of the event.

“With drastic improvements in the field of cloud services, numbers of users of these services has also grown in Nepal. Audiences are much more mature than they used to be a few years back. They know a lot about the features of Azure than in the previous boot camp. The audience participation is encouraging, almost all the participants were able to perform tasks assigned to them.”

– Ravi Mandal, a software developer, and a Microsoft MVP, has been working on Azure for the last three years. He was a tutor for this year’s boot camp. 

“Ever since we have started using Azure in our organization, the main change we have noticed is regarding our backup. Previously, while using physical storage for backup, our server used to fail almost weekly, now with Azure we have not faced such problems. We have been using Azure only for backup purpose till now, but now we are planning to implement share-point too. The boot camp has proved to be far better than what I expected. I was not expecting the sessions to be such detailed; almost 70 percent of the content included today was new to me. Now I have learned to deploy the application in Azure. The boot camp will help me bring changes in our organization. I plan to introduce Azure in mobile surveys done in our organization so that we can implement a cross-platform application.”

– Sunil Singh works as IT officer and has been using Azure in his organization since last year. He was one of the participants.

“I have been using Azure for a year. My knowledge about Azure was limited to few topics like virtual machines, app services, etc. This boot camp introduced me with new topics in cognitive science, use of git etc. It has given me a great start and I am going to continue learning more. I hope this boot camp will be organized next year too, with further enhancements like the inclusion of tutorials development, in-depth emphasis, real-time practice etc.”

– Yamu Poudel, a developer, and server side expert, is the chairman of Hello World Corp. He was one of the participants for the event.

Overall, the application seemed to be a success. The response of the participants was great, they seemed to be satisfied by the event. We hope that the next Global Azure Boot-camp turns out to be a bigger hit.

Event Gallery

Photos credit: 8K Productions

Edited By – Awale Sushil