Azure Thursday Archives

Azure Thursday – March 2022

Sarah Laan: When superpowers combine; Azure & Octopus Deploy

Microsoft Azure is a great option for organisations looking to host their IT infrastructure in the cloud or as a hybrid partner. While Octopus Deploy is a tool that can help you automate the deployment of your infrastructure and software releases all in one place.

In this talk, we’ll cover off the possibilities of using Octopus Deploy to help your developers, release managers, and operations folk deploy and manage their Azure resources.

Kendall Roden: Azure Container Apps

At Ignite, Microsoft announced Azure Container Apps, a serverless application-centric hosting service that enables users to quickly deploy containerized applications and microservices to Azure without the need to configure and manage underlying infrastructure resources or container orchestrators. Azure Container Apps runs on Azure Kubernetes Service, and includes several open-source projects: Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), and Envoy. This open-source foundation enables teams to build and run portable applications powered by Kubernetes and open standards without the operational overhead and management complexity of working with the platform directly. Join this session to hear from the container apps PG about the offering, how it fits into the Azure Portfolio and where it is headed!

Azure Thursday – February 2022

Esther Barthel: Transitioning Ops to the Cloud, adding Dev skills to the mix

This session offers tips and tricks to add core Developer skills to your skillset, so you can transition from (on-premises) Operations to a Cloud DevOps role. This session will zoom in on some basic knowledge and terminology that will make it easier to understand the shift in work and competencies for DevOps engineers.

Keep in mind that this session is not a technical deep dive that helps you pick the right tool for the job at hand, but it focuses on some basic knowledge of DevOps processes that will help you to plan the next steps in your career and pick those DevOps competencies that will put the fun back into your work.

Barbara Forbes: Infra as Code: Bicep for the Azure enterprise

If you work with Azure, you will want to use infra as code. Maybe you have are familiar with ARM templates already. Have you heard of Bicep? It has a lot to offer when you use infra as code in an enterprise environment. How do you make use of all the possibilities that are available to deploy your Azure infrastructure? We will consider a few of the great code solutions that Bicep has to offer and how VSCode can help you create templates. To see a real-life scenario, we take a look at how Bicep can be used to ensure the right mix between flexibility and usability. And to bring it together, let’s see how it fits into your CICD process. In the end, you will have the tools to start and the insights to take it all to the next level.

Azure Thursday – January 2022

Frank Buters: Getting rid of silo’s, Embracing MLOps, Democratize data all sounds catchy but how?

Having come across of many examples, especially within the financial sector (Banks, Insurance, Pensions), where data, modelling and IT activities take place in different teams across departments, we know about some of the pains of our customers. So how can technology, and in particular Azure technology, help here? During this Azure Thursday event we will discuss and experience how Azure Synapse Analytics together with Azure Machine Learning can help relieve some of these pains. We will show you how a model can be deployed as a stand-alone API, and how easy it is to use the same model to score records in a traditional data warehouse. In this way, we hope to give a flavor of how state-of-the art techniques can go hand-in-hand with more traditional ways of processing and storing data.

Anna-Maria Wykes: Terraforming the Cloud: A guide to using Terraform to control cloud deployments

Azure provides us with many ways to deploy our workloads, but how can we do this repeatable and cross-cloud? During this session, I am going to start with the basics and work my way up to managing dependencies, managing state, and how to leverage Terraform in Azure DevOps.

Azure Thursday – December 2021

This evening we had two amazing speakers again!

Gianni Castaldi & Jeroen Niesen: How to run an Azure SOC like Ninja’s

Most companies use Microsoft Azure as their cloud. With the use of Azure, companies are bringing sensitive data to Azure. Just as on-premises you want to make sure that your data is well protected and is compliant with the law and regulations of your company’s industry. Azure has all components available to create a next-gen SOC. In this session,

Jeroen and Gianni will tell you how you can build a SOC in Microsoft Azure and make sure that you get the best alerts, and do not get overloaded with security alerts. Jeroen and Gianni will Discuss Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft 365 Defender, Kusto, API, and much more.

Suzanne Daniels: Hej! An intro to Backstage

Backstage is Spotify’s Developer Portal, and now a thriving Open Source project donated to CNCF with a growing community of contributors. It’s been adopted with companies like Expedia, Netflix, American Airlines, and Epic Games.

Suzanne will share the story why Backstage was developed and why it became the core of Developer Experience at Spotify. You’ll get a brief tour of the Backstage platform, the plugin ecosystem, and get an understanding of the key use cases for Backstage. Suzanne’s passion is finding ways to help developers and engineers get the tools and skills to do what they do best: creating the software this world runs on while trying to innovate and make sense of buzzwords at the same time. She’s organizer of events, host and a speaker on both technical topics and more in general on transformation & innovation.

Azure Thursday – October 2021

The October event was a collaboration with our sponsor Capgemini. This was a fully virtual event recorded in our studio and streamed to our YouTube channel. This time we had three speakers:

Arjan Nieuwenhuis: Keeping track on all your apps

Managing your apps during the whole software development lifecycle and beyond is hard as apps come in all shapes and sizes and can target multiple platforms. Keeping track on your apps from early stage development to production can be a handful, especially as target platforms are whole ecosystems.

To help you bringing these ecosystems together Visual Studio App Center provides a integrated service on Azure. Assisting in all the stages of the software development lifecycle, bringing it all together in one integrated place.

Join me in exploring the current state of Visual Studio App Center and sneak peek on what is coming soon.

Marilag Dimatulac: Applying Message Brokering & Event-Driven Architecture on Azure

The most fun part with any cloud architecture styles is seeing it in action. In this session, I’ll demonstrate how we can design and implement event-driven applications on the cloud. We’ll look into several building blocks, from using event modeling to communicate our specification, to implementing in-process messaging in .Net Core with the mediator pattern, and finally using Queues & Event Grid on Azure to wire things together and complete our story.

John Papa: You’ve built an app and you want it to scale.

Do you want CI/CD, custom domains, SSL certificates, APIs, global scale of your static in assets, authentication, and authorization? And whether your favorite web framework is Svelte, Vue, React, Angular or something else entirely, you’ll learn how to build a static web app on Azure and go from GitHub repo to global scale.

Azure Thursday – September 2021

The September event was the first event after summer break and our first in-person event since March 2020! Of course, we streamed the event to our YouTube channel as well. This time we have two amazing speaker again:

Stacey Cashmore: Building your personal online brand using Static Blazor Apps, one step at a time

We’re told that by using services such as Medium, dev.to etc that we are diluting our personal brand. That we should be posting to our own site and building ourselves up. But making that move can seem huge! Rather than eating the elephant – which can seem impossible – how about slowly moving to your own space? Build your brand whilst still using those great features that attracted you to your chosen platform in the first place. With the joint power of client-side Blazor and static web apps in Azure you no longer need to run web servers or App Services in order to host your site online. You can get set up in minutes! In this session we’ll set up a new Blazor Wasm Application and Azure Function, deploy to Azure and then fetch blog posts from dev.to to link to them in our page. We’ll also talk about next steps – and how to eat the elephant one bite at a time – to create your personal brand!

Marcel de Vries: Azure Cloud Transformation done right

The past years we have been involved in many so-called cloud transformation projects. Many of those projects had big issues, and we learned a ton of things how not to do the transition! Think about things that will cause problems like: A cloud Competence Center, A Cloud Platform team, Asking the operations team how to move to the cloud, etc. These are common mistakes made every day that prevent you from gaining traction and speed. You might succeed, but you will go through a lot of pain and suffering. In this session, I will share an approach that we build based on our mistakes and learnings that will help you move to the cloud at speed. I will share the organizational, human an cultural side of things, a strategy on how to onboard teams and how to avoid common mistakes that are even promoted as best practices by high paid cloud consultants! I will also cover some technical details like setting up subscriptions, permissions and tools in the right way, so it won’t hurt you after your 10th team is onboarding! This session is all about what we learned and how you can avoid these issues yourself.

Watch the stream

You can watch the full recording of the stream here:

Azure Thursday – July 2021

Thursday, July 3rd was our last Azure Thursday before summer break! This time, we had the following awesome speakers:

Patrick van den Born & Rick Stijnman | Deploying Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session with Azure DevOps, Terraform and Packer

DevOps, Scrum, infrastructure-as-code, AVD, and cloud: what do they mean to the sysadmin? Many organizations are on the eve of, or already busy with, the migration from a traditional management or project organization to an agile approach, but what does such a transition entail?

Rick will explain the journey from a traditional management organization to a Scrum/DevOps approach. Patrick will then explore the DevOps approach in practical terms, focusing on rolling out Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session (‘Win10MS’) on Azure. You will learn how infrastructure-as-code (via Terraform) and image-as-code (via Packer) can be deployed using Azure DevOps.

Poornima Nayar | Getting started with Azure Static Web Apps

In this session, we will get introduced to Azure Static Web Apps. We will look into what it takes to build a Blazor WebAssembly based Static Web App to Azure. We will first look at what it takes to power it using a REST API while getting into grips with some of the basic concepts about Azure Static Web Apps. After that we will also have a look at how we can get a Static Web App powered by a GraphQL endpoint.

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You can watch the full recording of the stream here:

Azure Thursday – June 2021

Thursday, June 3rd was Azure Thursday again. This time, we had the following awesome speakers:

Yusuf Yusuf | Monitoring & Debugging Distributed Systems in Azure

The development of containers and container orchestrator has made it easier for people to develop distributed systems. Distributed systems have the benefit of making an application more scalable and reliable. But when something goes wrong within that system, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint and fix the issue compared to a standard single system. In this session I will demonstrate how with the help of Azure Monitor, you can not only detect and diagnose issues, but also visualize performance.

Jordi van Drunen & Stefan Dingemanse | Introduction to WVD and how to use Azure DevOps for Image

Quick introduction to WVD and how to use Azure DevOps for Image and Software management.

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You can watch the full recording of the stream here:

Azure Thursday – May 2021

Thursday, May 6, we organized another Azure Thursday again. This time, we had the following speakers:

Sarah Maston | Project 15

Project 15 from Microsoft (aka.ms/project15) began when Sarah Maston realized that solutions and skills of the commercial solutioning world could help scientific projects be accelerated. She realized this after a safety platform she had invented for safe schools had a new use case of anti-poaching. Additionally, what was the real difference in the prevention of loss from a store from preventing the loss of a pangolin.

Now entering its second year, Project 15 from Microsoft has partnered with many NGO organizations including the GEF Small Grants Programme implemented by the United Nations Development Programme. This session will cover the origin of Project 15 and how as Sarah and her co-founder Daisuke Nakahara developed the Project 15 Open Platform to accelerate the development of IoT solutions in the scientific space.

Sander van de Velde | Solving real world problems using ML.Net and Azure IoT edge

Life is strange for IoT devices. They are ‘born’ in the outside world all alone, or they are on the move, or they are located in places which are hazardous, not easy to access, and nobody is there to nurture them.
But still, they have to execute logic locally and make intelligent decisions on their own using eg. ML.
Luckily, Azure IoT Edge comes to the rescue Zero-touch provisioning and deployment.
In this session, attendees learn how Azure IoT Edge is brought to life successfully for intelligence on the edge and how Azure provisioning services help unattended provisioning.

Watch the stream

You can watch the full recording of the stream here:

Azure Thursday – April 2021

April 1st was Azure Thursday again! This time, we had three amazing speakers and sessions:

Jonah Andersson | Things to Consider Before Migrating Old .NET Applications to Cloud

Jonah Andersson shares her past experience and important lessons learned about migrating and developing old .NET applications to the Azure cloud. Find out how that project turned into a fiasco not because of Azure but of other factors. Never make the same mistakes.

Dawuda Iddrisu | Best practices for deploying MERN stack applications on Azure

As an engineer, it never ends with development. Deployment is always part of your package. Microsoft Azure has proven to be reliable to deploy just about any application. In this session, Kati Frantz and Dawood Iddris will show you all about deploying your MERN Stack Application and some best practices to follow. A couple of questions that will be answered include should I use PAAS or IAAS, how do I handle the CORS issue, how do I provision a database, do I need a replica of the database, how about latency, how often should I back up my database and so much more. Join us to learn it all along with us in a demo session.

Robin Smorenburg | The Azure Bakery

Welcome to ‘The Azure Bakery.’ In this talk, we’ll bake a delicious layered Azure cake. The idea behind this talk is to approach Azure in an easy to understand and fun way. The goal is to engineer and deploy solutions in the best way possible. At the same time, we’re trying to keep it simple. We’ll bake the foundational layers of every future Azure solution. What is needed when building these solutions?

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You can watch the full recording of the stream here: