The final day of Microsoft Ignite 2016.

It was a shorter day today with many of the sessions only available in the morning. Final sessions were up until early afternoon and then it was the big goodbye. The showcase finished on Thursday and many of the Microsoft staff had left after the party last night, well, if they were not too hung over.

I was pretty pumped about the big final day session on Active Directory Federation Server (AD FS) v4 in Windows Server 2016, as well as Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS). Hosted by Samuel Devasahayam (@MrADFS) and outlining a technology that forms the core of the work I do at Kloud in terms of Azure and Office 365 - Azure Active Directory (AAD).

There were a lot of cool things mentioned. Some of which I had no idea about:

• 123,000+ on-premises ADDS environments actively sync to Azure AD
• AD FS authenticates 45 million users a month
• Microsoft based identity solutions (AD FS and Azure AD Connect) accounts for 94% of all sync and federation with Azure AD and Office 365
  • Ping Federate is in second place with only 1.6 million user account authentications per month (out of that 45m total mentioned earlier)

Some truly crazy statistics!

The remainder of the sessions were also on point. Featuring topics on “architecture” in the 300/400 bands and delivering on value. Both related to Azure, but, some overlap with previous sessions. Not ideal, but, overall, I think these were great.

Final night in Atlanta and headed out to a place called Hop City that was located in an awesome converted warehouse looking building with a whole bunch of restaurants and take away for nibbles, good meals and good biers. I am now a big fan of Belgium cherry bier!

I didn’t realise what a big craft bier scene there was in America, or more specifically Atlanta. Thanks to Darren (@darrenjrobinson) for showing me what’s what with his great expertise on all things craft bier.

This brings to an end to the adventure that is America, Atlanta, and of course Microsoft Ignite. I had some expectations going in. I had some preconceptions on the environment and what I had accumulated from the media on America. I must say that Atlanta at first seemed like an odd choice for a conference and not a place I would have gone out of my way to see. However, I can certainly say that the people in all the places I visited blew me away and provided a laid back, fun, social and super helpful atmosphere. Be it in a restaurant, an Uber or a friendly face on the street, the people made the city and the conference. I wouldn’t mind coming back one day and have only good thoughts of Atlanta as a whole (Ps. I still think having 55 streets with the name Peachtree is a bad idea- confusing as).