Speaker

AL Rodriguez

AL Rodriguez

Developer, Developer, Developer

Orlando, Florida, United States

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AL Rodriguez is a developer, cloud enthusiast, sometimes-blogger, and definitely NOT 3 kids in a trench coat. His background with .NET will usually take over when he starts a new project. Whether it’s a backend, frontend, UI testing, or even Infrastructure as Code, C# is his first thought for developing high quality solutions.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • C#
  • .NET
  • Azure
  • Pulumi
  • OpenTelemetry
  • IoT
  • DevOps
  • IaC

DevOps like a Dev

As DevOps professionals, a lot of our problem solving is more akin to using tools as they're given to us. Those tools force us to think a certain way, which can be sub-optimal at times. How do developers get around their tools working sub-optimal? They build something new to work around the limitation, or replace it altogether. We don't usually build anything new, and I'm jealous. So let's look at some DevOps engineering tasks and use a developer mindset to accomplish them by writing custom code to create more robust solutions.

Setting Up Your C# Pit of Success

Writing code is only 40% of the work. Maintaining high-quality code is maybe another 20%. Reviewing PRs and updating dependencies are just some of the manual processes we have to deal with that regularly take us away from the fun part of development: writing code. But we're developers, and we can automate these processes. Nay, we MUST automate or risk becoming less efficient the longer we work on a codebase. Thankfully, the 20+ year lifespan of C# and .NET means it has some features built-in to help us enforce certain levels of code quality.

In this session, we'll look at the common pitfalls that take us away from writing code. We'll also look at different ways to automate those processes and discuss the pros and cons of those approaches. By the end, we'll have covered what you can do to set up your own pit of success for your C# projects.

Intro to OpenTelemetry for Developers

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, open standard for observing distributed applications. With OTel, you can trace individual requests and view specific metrics about the system's current state. It's like a superset of traditional logging and can be used with or instead of log statements.

In this session, we'll review the basics of OpenTelemetry, discuss why you should consider using it, and see a demo of using it across backend services.

Entire Stack C#

Full stack apps are great and all, but they're not all the code written for an application. "Full Stack" only means front-end and back-end code. As developers we write code for other scenarios where the available tooling is less than ideal. Let's take things a step further and create a Full Stack solution that uses C# for as much as possible. The backend web service, a frontend web app, CI/CD pipelines, and some Infrastructure as Code to manage creating/updating the cloud infrastructure. A couple lines of YAML, a bit of JSON, and whole lot of C# love.

Azure IaC for Developers with C#

Writing the code for an application is an entire project, and then automating cloud resources with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is another entire project on top of that. Writing IaC means you have to know what services the application needs, plus knowledge of the cloud provider hosting the app. Finally, you need to know the toolset you're using to provision the cloud infrastructure.

As developers, IaC doesn't usually fall on us, but we're the ones creating the application. We should be able to automate the creation of cloud resources our applications need. And we should do it with code, the best way we know how.

In this session we'll look at how to use C# and Pulumi together for writing Infrastructure as Code to create Azure services and then deploy our apps to it. Then we'll refactor the code with some abstractions to make the code easier to work with.

Infrastructure as Code for Developers

Writing the code for an application is an entire project, and then automating cloud resources with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is another entire project on top of that. Writing IaC means you have to know what services the application needs, plus knowledge of the cloud provider hosting the app. Finally, you need to know the toolset you're using to provision the cloud infrastructure.

As developers, IaC usually doesn't fall on us, but we're the ones creating the application. We should be able to automate the creation of cloud resources our applications need. And we should do it with code, the best way we know how.

Let's discuss what IaC is. Then we'll write some IaC code using Pulumi, a tool for writing IaC using the programming languages we're used to. When we're done, you'll understand enough of the basics to add Pulumi IaC to your projects.

Azure Managed Identities: Connect Without Connection Strings

While connection strings, tokens, client secrets, and username/password combos are easy to use, using them may be too easy. In a world where tokens get leaked almost daily, you DO NOT want to be the person who leaked it by committing to source control, just posting a picture of yourself online with a password plainly behind you on a post-it note, or some other accident.

Azure Managed Identities change how you authenticate to other Azure services. By abstracting the authentication token away, you and your application never see a token value. Remember, you can't lose what you don't have.

Let's explore Azure Managed Identities and see how easy they are to use in our codebase. We'll also update an application to convert it from using connection strings to using a Managed Identity for all authentications.

Update Conference Prague 2024 Sessionize Event

November 2024 Prague, Czechia

Atlanta Developers' Conference 2024 Sessionize Event

September 2024 Alpharetta, Georgia, United States

DevOps Days Tampa Bay 2024 Sessionize Event

September 2024 Tampa, Florida, United States

Beer City Code 2024 Sessionize Event

August 2024 Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

Denver Dev Day | May 2024 Sessionize Event

May 2024 Denver, Colorado, United States

Atlanta Cloud Conference 2024 Sessionize Event

March 2024 Marietta, Georgia, United States

Orlando Code Camp 2024 Sessionize Event

February 2024 Sanford, Florida, United States

Boston Code Camp 35 Sessionize Event

November 2023 Burlington, Massachusetts, United States

THAT Conference WI 2023

Performed an Introduction to Pulumi session: https://thatconference.com/activities/e08J2wOT0aIUjpcXmTXr

July 2023 Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, United States

Orlando Code Camp 2023 Sessionize Event

March 2023 Sanford, Florida, United States

ONETUG Meetup

Performed a deep dive presentation on using NuGet for .NET package management. Going over the creation of NuGet packages, and how to include them in your entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), including hosting them within Azure DevOps and strategies for working with pre-release versions.

https://www.meetup.com/ONETUG/events/256542757

January 2019 Orlando, Florida, United States

AL Rodriguez

Developer, Developer, Developer

Orlando, Florida, United States

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