Case Study: Microsoft

Microsoft Azure for Research Program

Project Overview

Microsoft Research (MSR) is a division of Microsoft consisting of more than 1,000 scientists and engineers across the globe, making up one of the most highly respected computer science research teams in the world. The MSR team identified a need to create a set of Azure training targeted at universities and academic users worldwide. The goal was to build the best possible content and training to entice researchers from all parts of academia to think of Azure first when it comes to utilizing cloud technologies, and to encourage future cloud research focused on the Microsoft Azure platform. The program itself is described at the following web site links below:

Azure Research Project

Azure Research Project Training

After performing a broad search for potential partners, MSR selected Atmosera as partner of choice.

Why Atmosera?

MSR needed a partner that was expert at creating deep technical content on Azure and related technologies, developing instructional material, and training on technical content at the highest level. Atmosera met this criteria across the board.

  • Atmosera is an Azure Gold Partner with extensive experience in Azure technologies.
  • Atmosera has been Microsoft’s #1 developer trainer worldwide for well over a decade. Microsoft has put over 35,000 internal developers through Atmosera training programs, while maintaining the highest training ratings (measured through student evaluations and internal Microsoft surveys) of any other vendor.
  • Atmosera’s instructor-led training (ILT) division is experienced in providing training on a global scale.

Conclusion

There were several requirements for this program that made it unique among Azure training offerings.

  • All development and other tools used are open source and cross platform. This reflects both the nature of the audience (academics and universities typically prefer use of open source), as well as the general market trends in the development community away from proprietary tools and towards open source technologies. For example, development languages such as Python and R were used over C#.
  • Training content was focused on research type scenarios rather than typical LOB development. For example, modules were focused less on “building a web site,” and more on scenarios such as High Performance Computing, Big Data, Streaming Analytics and IoT, etc.

Below are examples of the initial Azure training modules developed:

  • Microsoft Azure Storage and Azure CLI
  • Microsoft Azure Machine Learning
  • Azure Internet of Things (IoT) using Stream Analytics and Data Factory
  • Big Data Analytics using Hadoop, Spark, and Power BI
  • High Performance Computing in Azure

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