Takeaways from Microsoft's Open Azure Day event

Microsoft hosted its single-day Open Azure Day Linux-focused event, with technical deep dive sessions geared toward big questions in data and development today. The event emphasized themes like deploying containerized apps with RedHat OpenShift, working with VMware Tanzu, and lots of perspectives about Linux and Kubernetes.

Microsoft doubled down on its recent publicity about Azure Cache for Redis and emphasized the value of Database for PostgreSQL in a morning of technical sessions.

A look at Azure Cache for Redis

Principal product manager Amiram Mizne hosted a session looking at how customers can develop mission-critical apps with Azure Cache for Redis. Redis is an open-source in-memory database often used for quick user interactions like web-session store, job queue management, and messaging among other scenarios

According to Mizne, Redis has been pulled from Docker Hub two billion times so far. Red Enterprise, developed by Redis Labs, has the same underlying features but added capabilities on-top. A key goal for Redis Labs and Microsoft is to improve developer productivity. To achieve this, the joint team has worked out the back-end so that users can get set up in a few minutes using Azure portal CLI, automate deployments with ARM or Terraform templates and take advantage of fully-managed options.