Bots are the future, Microsoft proclaimed at this year’s Build conference, and now the company is inviting developers to submit their own for inclusion in a publicly-available bot directory.
In an email to developers cited on Windows Central, Microsoft said it was seeking submissions of chat bots made using its open-source Bot Framework. The Framework, announced at Build, includes bot builder SDKs for C# and Node.js, available on Github, plus a Bot Connector for connecting your bot to Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger and other popular conversational channels.
Once the directory goes live—on a yet-to-be-determined date—users will be able to search for and download a range of bots. For now, Microsoft’s directory page includes just a few sample bots released during Build, including a Bing News Bot and one that generates captions for photos. But Microsoft said more than 20,000 developers have already signed up to use the bot framework.
Click here to submit your bot or register for the framework if you’ve not yet signed up. Learn more about the bot framework here.
Seamless Hybrid Environment
Atmosera’s architects collaborated extensively with the health service provider’s IT staff to determine the optimal environment. Many of their applications would have to be re-written to take advantage of Azure, it was determined that a combination of a private cloud and a public cloud offered the best compromise to meet their budget and timeline. The final solution entailed fourteen instances in Azure and nine Virtual Machines (VMs) in a compliant multi-tenant environment based on the Microsoft Cloud Platform. The provider’s telephony server and some of their core databases were also moved to an Atmosera colocation facility.
Colocation of the phone system with Atmosera guaranteed the health service provider high availability, constant monitoring, and enterprise-grade power with backup. “The core of their business revolves around their telephony,” stated Jeremiah Reinmiller, Senior Systems Engineer at Atmosera. “Having that never go down is crucial to them. That’s probably the biggest advantage they have realized: simply not having to worry.”
The multi-tenant cloud environment was designed with a dedicated firewall so that any activity within the networking space would remain secure and private to the health service provider. Such a hardened environment was critical to maintain HITRUST compliance. Resources such as storage and compute, however, would be deployed as shared resources. This lowered the overall cost while simultaneously delivering affordable scalability.
Atmosera also stood up the Azure infrastructure and integrated the colocation and Azure environments, enabling the health service provider to fully roll out their DevOps initiatives and deliver performance improvements for their internally-developed applications.
Atmosera’s involvement did not stop with architecting and deploying the environment. The health service provider’s internal IT resources were limited, which created a bottleneck for their growth. Atmosera assumed the ongoing management and maintenance of the hybrid environment, including managing the firewalls and switches. Clayton Siemens, Azure Architect at Atmosera, affirmed, “In addition to hosting the customer’s products and platforms, we act as their IT support shop. They can rely on us for design recommendations, issue remediation, and advice on best practices.”
