Global Azure, a global community effort where local Azure communities host events for local users, has been gaining popularity year by year for those interested in learning about Microsoft Azure and Microsoft AI, alongside other Azure users. The initiative saw great success last year, with the Global Azure 2023 event featuring over 100 local community-led events, nearly 500 speakers, and about 450 sessions delivered across the globe. We have highlighted these local events in our blog post, Global Azure 2023 Led by Microsoft MVPs Around the World.
Looking ahead, Global Azure 2024 is scheduled from April 18 to 20, and its call for organizer who host these local events has begun. In this blog, we showcase the latest news about Global Azure to a wider audience, including messages from the Global Azure Admin Team. This year, we will directly share the essence of Global Azure's appeal through the words of Rik Hepworth (Microsoft Azure MVP and Regional Director) and Magnus Mårtensson (Microsoft Azure MVP and Regional Director). We invite you to consider becoming a part of this global initiative, empowering Azure users worldwide by stepping up as an organizer.
What’s New in Global Azure 2024?
For Global Azure 2024 we are doing multiple new things:
- Last year we started a collaboration with the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador program. This year we will build on this start to further expand the activation among young professionals to join Global Azure and learn about our beloved cloud platform. As experienced community leaders, no task can be more worthy than to nurture the next generation of community leaders. We are working with the MLSA program to help young professionals arrange their first community meetups, or to join a meetup local to them and become involved in community work. We are asking experienced community leaders to mentor these young professionals to become budding new community leaders, they need guidance in how to organize a successful first Azure learning event!
- For the -24 edition of our event, we are working on a self-service portal for both event organizers and event attendees, to access and claim sponsorships that companies give to Global Azure. As a community leader you will sign in and see the list of attendees at your location. You can share sponsorships directly with the attendees and the people who attend your event can claim the benefits from our portal.
What benefits can the organizers gain from hosting a local Global Azure event?
There is no better way to learn about something, about anything, than to collaborate with like-minded people in the learning process. We have been in communities for tech enthusiasts for many years; some of our best friends are cloud people we have met through communities, and the way we learn the most is from deep discussions with people we trust and know. Hosting a Global Azure Community event for the first time could be the start of a new network of great people who know and like the same things and who also need to continuously want to and need to learn more about the cloud. For us, community is work-life and within communities we find the best and most joyful parts of being in tech.
Message to the organizers looking forward to hosting local Global Azure events
For community by community - that is our guiding motto for Global Azure. We are community, and learning happens here! As a hero, it is your job to set up a fun agenda full of learning, and to drive the event when it happens. It is hugely rewarding to be involved in community work, at least if we are to believe the people who approach us wherever we go - "I really like Global Azure, it is the most fun community event we host in our community in X each year". This is passion, and this is tech-geekery when it is at its best. You are part of the crowd that drives learning and that makes people enthusiastic about their work and about technology. We hope that your Global Azure event is a great success and that it leads to more learners of Azure near you becoming more active and sharing with their knowledge - as our motto states!
Additional message from Rik and Magnus
Global Azure has global reach to Azure cloud tech people everywhere. We are looking for additional sponsors who want to have the potential to reach these people. You need to give something away, like licenses or other giveaways to become a sponsor. When you do we can in turn ensure that everyone sees that yours is a company that backs the community for tech and who supports learning.
This year, we are also particularly keen to hear from our MVP friends who have struggled in the past with finding a location for their event but have a Microsoft office, or event space nearby. We are keen to see if we can help, but we need people to reach out to us so we can make the right connections.
If anyone out there in the community is interested in stepping up to a global context, we are often looking for additional people to join the Global Azure Admins team.
Azure is big, broad, wide, and deep - there are so many different topics and technologies that are a part of Azure. Withing Global Azure anything goes! AI is a very valid Global Azure focus, because AI happens on the Azure platform and somehow data needs to be securely transported to, ingested, and stored in Azure. Compute can happen in so many ways in the cloud and you can be part of using the cloud as an IT Pro management/admin community as well as a developer community. We have SecOps, FinOps, DevOps (all the Ops!!). Global Azure is also very passionate about building an inclusive and welcoming community around the world that includes young people and anybody who is underrepresented in our industry.
To find out more, head to https://globalazure.net and read our #HowTo guide. We look forward to seeing everyone's pins appear on our map.