The last week of January 2020, Genus sent two of our colleagues to Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond (USA) to attend the Microsoft LEAP conference. LEAP is a five-day conference for developers and architects seeking the best possible professional training in Microsoft technologies directly from the source. The conference aims to provide a deep understanding of Microsoft technologies, Microsoft’s vision and roadmaps, best practices for modernizing legacy architectures, and a thorough insight into Azure and it’s nearly 500 services.

During the conference, we got to meet and interact with speakers, engineers and program managers directly involved in developing Azure services, and we learned more about why, how and when to deploy the different technologies Microsoft provide. With speakers such as Scott Guthrie (EVP, Cloud & Enterprise), Jason Warner (SVP Technology GitHub) and Mark Russinovich (CTO Microsoft Azure), Microsoft clearly showed that this conference is important for them as well as for their partners.

Briefly summarized, you can say that LEAP is focused on the technologies of tomorrow. New subject areas and learning opportunities were introduced each day, including security, performance, scalability, DevOps and best practices. By participating, our developers not only got inspiration from one of the largest software companies in the world, but also received the best possible foundation for developing modern and future oriented services for our customers.

We also learned about Microsoft’s climate policy, where they aim to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove all historical carbon emissions by 2050. Being a technologically sustainable low-code platform, it feels good building our cloud offering on top of an environmentally sustainable cloud infrastructure.

We believe that the future of Genus is in the cloud, based on a micro services architecture running on Kubernetes. Thus, it was gratifying to receive confirmation directly from Microsoft that such architectures are prioritized with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). Running .NET based micro services on AKS is still in preview, but is targeted to be in “General Availability” within the summer of 2020. This is well aligned with our own development pace for the next generation of Genus running on AKS.