25–27 May 2021, online. Second all-virtual Build, three days this time. The conference where Microsoft put a flag in the ground on AI — quietly, in the form of a Power Apps natural-language-to-Power Fx feature that nobody quite realised was the start of an era.
What we took away
- Azure OpenAI Service preview. GPT-3, Codex, embeddings — the foundation everything later would build on. Power Apps shipped the first GPT-3-powered Microsoft product in the same keynote.
- Visual Studio 2022 roadmap published. First 64-bit Visual Studio, public previews to follow shortly after Build. The day-to-day tool we still spend most of our lives in got a credible reset.
- Azure Container Apps introduced — serverless containers built on KEDA, Dapr, and Envoy.
- Teams as a developer platform — Fluid components in Teams, Teams Toolkit, expanded Microsoft Graph APIs. Useful for the internal-tool work we do for customers like Kühne+Nagel.
- Cosmos DB serverless GA across APIs, Azure SQL Database Ledger preview.
- Satya teased "one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade" — Windows 11, unveiled five weeks later.
Why it mattered
The Azure OpenAI Service preview is the thread that, four years later, would let us build production AI features into customer SaaS products without sending a single payload to a non-EU jurisdiction. At the time we registered for the wait-list immediately.
"Microsoft loves developers." — Nadella's signature framing for the conference.
Three years later that line is still the title of the Build 2021 blog post.
Microsoft Build
Azure OpenAI
Visual Studio
Power Platform