Mark Russinovich

Technical Fellow, Windows Azure Product Team

Microsoft Corporation

Whether or not you're using the public cloud today, it's critical to understand how Microsoft is building Microsoft Azure and the expanding capabilities of the cloud into the company's infrastructure strategy. Using the learning from over 200 enterprise cloud services and the global datacenters that support those services, Microsoft is adding capabilities to both Windows Server and Microsoft Azure. In some cases, features added to Windows Server are first appearing in Microsoft Azure, such as Hyper-V's support for 8 cores.

Microsoft Azure, Microsoft System Center, and Windows Server together form the backbone of the Microsoft cloud platform, which allows customers to choose to run workloads in their own datacenters, in a service provider's datacenter or in Azure. Based on their own unique business needs, customers are able to shape an IT strategy that both leverages existing resources and also takes advantage of cloud economics and cloud capacity.

In his opening keynote address, Mark Russinovich, a Technical Fellow in Microsoft's cloud and enterprise division and an architect for Microsoft Azure, will explain how organizations are using the Microsoft infrastructure products to build private and hybrid clouds. While many are using Windows Server and Microsoft System Center to build cloud infrastructures within their internal datacenters, Microsoft's commitment to consistency between clouds means that they can easily tap into Microsoft Azure when they need added compute or storage capacity. Others have ported entire applications and associated data to Microsoft Azure or are running customer and partner-facing sites.