Alon Fliess
Microsoft Regional Director, Azure AI Platform and IoT MVP, ZioNet CTO
Tel Aviv, Israel
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Alon Fliess is a distinguished Software Architect and CTO with over three decades of experience at the forefront of software development. As the founder of ZioNet, Alon leads a dynamic platform that offers advanced software development services and plays a crucial role in mentoring the next generation of developers. His leadership and innovation in the field have earned him the prestigious titles of Microsoft Regional Director since 2010 and Microsoft MVP since 2005, recently focusing on the Azure AI Platform.
Alon's passion for modern software architecture is exemplified by his mastery in designing Microservices-based solutions—an approach that promotes agility, scalability, and resilience in complex systems. His deep understanding of cloud-native technologies and relentless drive to explore emerging trends like AI and machine learning positions him as a thought leader.
Alon is a globally recognized figure in the developer community and a prolific contributor to industry knowledge. His role as a co-author and technical reviewer, along with his frequent conference speaking engagements, ensures that he is at the forefront of shaping the region's discourse on cloud computing and software development practices. As the Israeli Azure Developer Community leader, he plays a pivotal role in this endeavor.
Beyond his professional achievements, Alon is a relentless explorer of new technologies. His personal projects often blur the line between work and passion, as he spends his nights coding, experimenting with AI, and engaging in 3D printing. His enthusiasm for continuous learning and innovation makes him an inspiring speaker who brings a wealth of practical insights and future-forward thinking to every lecture.
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The Complexity of Simplicity: Mastering Backend Best Practices for Reliable Software
In theory, writing simple code should be straightforward—but in practice, it's one of the most challenging tasks developers face. The pursuit of simplicity in software development often reveals hidden complexities that, if not addressed, can lead to catastrophic failures. This lecture is designed to address these challenges, as many startups falter not due to a lack of innovation but to the inability to manage the intricacies of building robust, resilient software.
This lecture delves into the often-overlooked challenges of backend development, where seemingly simple tasks require a deep understanding of best practices to ensure system reliability, correctness, and scalability. We'll explore essential topics such as state management, error handling, logging, access rights checks and how these practices contribute to building maintainable, scalable, and resilient software.
We'll also tackle advanced concepts like idempotency, concurrency control using e-tags, and the critical role of queues in ensuring resilience and continuity. The lecture will address the complexities of handling massive data in API queries, including pagination, sorting, and handling data changes between requests.
You'll learn how to implement retry mechanism strategies through real-world examples, monitor dead-letter queues, and ensure that your code behaves predictably under stress. We'll also discuss the importance of end-to-end integration testing, stress testing, and the concepts of chaos engineering, ensuring the system tolerates random failures.
By the end of this session, you'll have a comprehensive understanding of the hidden complexities in backend development and practical insights into how to write code that is not only simple but also robust, resilient, and scalable. These insights will equip you with the knowledge and skills to tackle backend development challenges effectively.
Semantic Kernel: Redefining C# Development with AI-Driven Solutions
Join Alon Fliess, Azure AI Platform MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, for a transformative lecture exploring how Semantic Kernel is ushering in a new era of software development. In a world where deterministic algorithms are no longer sufficient on their own, developers and architects must embrace hybrid solutions that integrate deterministic logic, heuristic approaches, and cutting-edge AI technologies such as generative AI and machine learning.
This session dives into the paradigm shift in software engineering, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of building systems that must evaluate and manage non-deterministic results alongside deterministic logic. With the increasing use of AI agents that generate solutions and validation agents that safeguard and guide their output, responsible AI practices are becoming central to modern software development.
Attendees will gain insights into the capabilities of Semantic Kernel, a project that seamlessly integrates C# with AI-driven functionalities. By combining traditional programming approaches with AI capabilities, developers can craft systems that are not only intelligent but also adaptable to complex and evolving environments. This lecture will showcase real-world applications of Semantic Kernel, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize diagnostics, analysis, and decision-making in sophisticated systems.
By the end of the session, C# developers and architects will have a deep understanding of the concepts and methodologies driving this paradigm shift. They will leave equipped with the tools and knowledge to harness Semantic Kernel and its capabilities, bridging the gap between conventional programming and the dynamic, AI-powered future of software development.
Mastering Microservices: Unleashing the Power of Dapr in Distributed Systems
This lecture dives into practical Microservice Architecture, emphasizing how Dapr facilitates decoupling service logic from resources, enabling seamless operation across cloud environments and local development setups. We'll explore the complexities inherent in distributed applications and how Dapr's design effectively addresses these challenges. By providing built-in support for state management, messaging, and resilient communication, Dapr simplifies the construction of scalable, distributed systems, allowing developers to focus on business logic while ensuring consistency and reliability across different platforms. Join us to uncover how Dapr is revolutionizing microservice architecture, making it more accessible and robust for developers.
From Media to Insights: Practical Azure AI-Based Solutions at Scale
Azure AI Services provides a comprehensive platform for transforming diverse media formats into actionable insights, enabling the creation of robust, cloud-based solutions tailored to complex industries. In this session, we will explore how these capabilities can be harnessed to design scalable systems for media analysis, entity extraction, and advanced data interaction, focusing on legal applications.
The lecture will showcase TrialKit, an innovative solution developed for public defense offices that seamlessly integrates diverse Azure AI capabilities to process and analyze various media types, including documents (PDFs, Word, Excel, text), videos, audio files, and images. Using tools such as Azure AI Video Indexer, Azure AI Search Indexer, Azure OpenAI Services, and Semantic Kernel, TrialKit extracts entities, properties, relationships, and occurrences, enabling intuitive and efficient entity-based browsing and routing. The system empowers legal professionals with advanced features like entity-focused navigation, conversational legal case agents, and media-rich case discovery.
We will dive into the architecture of the system data analysis pipeline, demonstrating how advanced AI tools like Semantic Kernel and CosmosDB Vector Search are leveraged to process and unify disparate data sources. This exploration will cover the challenges of designing a resilient, multitenant, secure, and scalable solution, the strategies employed to integrate Azure’s AI offerings, and the innovative methods used to transform unstructured data into structured insights for legal professionals.
This session provides a comprehensive guide to harnessing Azure AI Services to create intelligent systems capable of solving real-world challenges, offering invaluable insights for anyone tackling large-scale, multi-modal data integration and analysis projects.
Embracing Flexibility and Interoperability with Azure EventGrid MQTT Broker for IoT
This concise session delves into the strategic pivot towards the Azure EventGrid MQTT Broker in IoT applications, emphasizing its synergy with the rising trend of adopting standard, cross-platform, non-proprietary technologies. Unlike the Azure proprietary Azure IoT Hub, the EventGrid MQTT Broker provides enhanced flexibility for developing and tailoring IoT backends to meet diverse requirements.
The discussion centers on the benefits of this shift, mainly focusing on the broker's ability to integrate with a variety of platforms and technologies seamlessly. This strategy improves interoperability and enables developers to create IoT solutions that are more adaptable to evolving requirements and technological advancements.
Additionally, the lecture includes a practical demonstration, showcasing an end-to-end solution complete with the necessary DevOps scripts for creating Azure resources, device certificates, and tools. This segment offers attendees an insight into deploying and utilizing the EventGrid MQTT Broker, underscoring the ease and efficiency of its setup and management. The demonstration illustrates the broker's seamless integration capabilities across diverse platforms and technologies.
Building Resilient Systems: The Architect’s Guide to Microservices with Dapr
The modern software architect faces the challenge of delivering more with less—ensuring high cohesion and low coupling, 24/7 availability, scalability, and seamless deployment, all while managing limited resources. Microservice Architecture (MSA) promises to alleviate these pains by offering a framework that supports the agility and adaptability required in today’s fast-paced development environments. But how do you effectively implement MSA in practice?
This comprehensive session delves into the essence of MSA, exploring how it addresses the primary concerns of modern distributed systems. We’ll begin by discussing the theoretical foundations of MSA, including software architecture evolution, the CAP theorem, eventual consistency, and the principles that underpin microservices. You’ll gain insights into how MSA can be the key to creating resilient, scalable systems.
Building on this foundation, we’ll transition to the practical side of MSA, demonstrating how to leverage Dapr Components and services to bring MSA to life. We’ll show you how to use local containerized resources for development, reducing costs and complexity. Learn how to deploy applications to the cloud, demonstrate IaC with Bicep, and learn how Dapr, as an abstraction layer, enables seamless switching between local and cloud resources without modifying your code.
We’ll cover running integration tests locally and in the cloud through live demonstrations, automating deployments with GitHub Actions, and more. By the end of this session, you’ll have a solid understanding of MSA's theoretical and practical aspects, empowering you to implement and manage microservices effectively in your projects.
Using Dapr Actor Model to Implement the Saga Pattern
The Saga pattern is a widely used architectural pattern for managing long-running distributed transactions. It breaks a complex transaction into smaller, loosely-coupled sub-transactions, known as saga steps. It executes them in a coordinated manner to ensure atomicity, consistency, and isolation across the distributed system.
This lecture will introduce the Saga pattern and its benefits in distributed systems. We will then provide an overview of the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr). This open-source runtime simplifies the development of cloud-native applications by providing a set of building blocks for distributed systems.
We will dive deeper into Dapr's Actor Model, a programming model that provides a framework for building highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems. We will explore the key concepts of Actors, such as state, messaging, and activation, and how they can implement the Saga pattern.
We will then demonstrate how to use Dapr Actors to implement the Saga pattern in a distributed system. We will follow a step-by-step guide on implementing the Saga pattern using Dapr Actors and show how it can handle failures, retries, and compensations.
By the end of the lecture, attendees will have a solid understanding of the Saga pattern, the Actor Model, and how to use Dapr Actors to implement complex long-running distributed transactions. They will also learn best practices and techniques for designing and implementing scalable, resilient, distributed systems.
To Microservice or Not to Microservice? How?
Do more with less, the pain of the modern architect. High cohesion & low coupling, high availability (24/7/365) & scale, ease of deployment and operation with modern DevOps. Our systems need to support all these quality attributes while providing more functionality with fewer resources. We need to be agile, we need to embrace changes, we need to have a better way!
Micro-Service-Architecture (MSA) promises to bring a cure to the architect's pains, but does it deliver?
In this lecture, the audience will be presented with the essence of the MSA approach, how does it answer the main concerns of modern distributed systems, how to get started, how to migrate current solutions architecture to MSA by adopting an evolutionary migration path. What to be careful about and the signs that we are on the right track.
We will talk about software architecture evolution, the CAP theorem and eventual consistency, MSA principles, hosting & containers, versioning, orchestrators and decupling business processes among microservices.
By the end of this lecture, the participant will have a better understanding of why, when and how to embrace the MSA approach.
The Home Industrial Revolution - Tools and Techniques
This lecture presents the Makers' secrets, or how you can take your gadget idea and build it at home. I'll give step-by-step: how you can design an electrical system for a System-on-a-Chip IoT device and sensors, manufacture the electrical circuit board, solder the SMD components, design the 3D-printed device box, develop the embedded software, develop the cloud backend software, and have an end-to-end device connected IoT system, all at your home office.
Microservices in practice - Seamless Local-to-Cloud Development with Dapr
Developing cloud applications requires managing diverse cloud resources. In this lecture, we will introduce Dapr Components, demonstrating how to use local containerized resources to develop locally and reduce the development environment cost. We will also show how to use Visual Studio Docker support for container development and debugging.
We will then showcase how to deploy your application and resources to Azure Container Apps using Bicep, a domain-specific language for deploying Azure resources. We will demonstrate how to use Dapr as an abstraction and adaptation layer, allowing you to seamlessly switch between local and cloud resources like Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage without changing a single line of code.
Additionally, we will demonstrate how to run integration tests locally and against Azure Container Apps, ensuring your application works seamlessly in the cloud. Finally, we will showcase how to automate deployments using GitHub Actions, making deploying updates and new features to Azure Container Apps easy.
By the end of the lecture, attendees will thoroughly understand how to use Dapr Components, Docker Compose, and Bicep to create a seamless local-to-cloud development experience. They will also learn best practices and techniques for using local containerized resources, deploying applications and resources to Azure Container Apps using Dapr, running integration tests locally and in the cloud, and automating deployments using GitHub Actions.
Generative AI and Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Exploration for Developers
In this insightful 75-minute lecture, Alon Fliess, CTO of ZioNet and a recognized Microsoft Regional Director & Microsoft Azure MVP, delves into the fascinating world of Generative AI with a focus on Large Language Models (LLMs).
The lecture will explore the core components of LLM processing, including tokenizing text into manageable units, embedding these tokens into numerical vectors, utilizing transformer architectures to understand contextual relationships, and configuring the output layer for specific tasks such as text generation or classification.
The session will also explore prompt engineering and introduce various base models.
A highlight of the lecture will be an exploration of CoPilot tools, followed by an in-depth examination of how to embed LLM capabilities into your applications using the Azure OpenAI API. Practical demonstrations will illustrate how to become part of the ChatGPT ecosystem by implementing a ChatGPT plugin, empowering developers to create custom AI-powered experiences.
Concluding with a discussion on advanced tools like Auto-GPT, this lecture promises to be an engaging and informative experience for those already using LLM, ChatGPT, and CoPilot. Whether you want to deepen your understanding of generative AI or explore new ways to integrate it into your work, this lecture offers valuable insights and practical guidance.
Extending ChatGPT with C#: Building a PC Diagnostics Plugin
In the era of conversational AI, ChatGPT has emerged as a powerful tool for natural language understanding and generation. This 75-minute lecture, led by Alon Fliess, CTO of ZioNet and a Microsoft Regional Director, will delve into the exciting world of extending ChatGPT by building custom plugins using C#.
The session will begin with an overview of ChatGPT and the potential to enhance its capabilities through plugins. Participants will gain insights into the ChatGPT ecosystem and how they can leverage their existing C# .NET skills to be part of this innovative landscape.
The core of the lecture will focus on a hands-on demonstration of creating a PC Diagnostics plugin. This real-world example will showcase how developers can interact with Windows Event Log, File System, Registry, Performance Counter, System, and Network Information to troubleshoot problems, analyze system states, create diagnostics graphs, and obtain a situational picture of the status of computers within an organization.
By the end of this session, attendees will have a comprehensive understanding of how to develop ChatGPT plugins using C#. They will be equipped with the knowledge and inspiration to create their plugins, extending ChatGPT's capabilities to meet specific needs and contribute to the broader AI community.
Join us for this enlightening lecture and discover how you can harness the power of ChatGPT and C# to create innovative solutions beyond mere conversation.
Architecture Stories from the Trenches - Lesson Learned
Architecture is the outcome of the analysis process, and it defines the components, their properties, the connection between components, and the properties of those connections. Architecture is the driving force of any engineering project, including software! Whether you choose it or it just happened, all systems have an architecture.
Not all projects start with a solid architecture and some projects are over architectured.
In this talk, we discuss the meaning of software architecture and the architect's role. Then, we look at successful projects and those that failed and provide us the food of thought and the lesson to learn.
Finally, we will surface the software-architecture fashion move toured the microservice architecture, micro frontend, and cloud approach, and how these changes influence the architect's role.
Microservice Solution With Serverless Functions and Serverless Containers – Pros and Cons
Microservices – the cure for all software problems, is it?
Services are autonomous! Database for each service! Don't share code – share contracts! Continues Integration and continues deployment!
All of these are great ideas, but how?
In this lecture, we dive into the code of a .NET 7 C# based Microservices system, focusing on two serverless approaches: Azure Functions and the new Azure Container Apps. First, we start with the minimal approach of Azure Functions App as the service hosting model. Learning about resource binding and triggers to work with Cloud services such as Azure Storage Queue and CosmosDB. Then, we continue with Azure Containers Apps and Dapr, understanding the similarities between the containers-based serverless and function-based approaches.
With the knowledge gained in this lecture, the participants can choose how they implement their next microservice solution.
C# Source Code Generators in Practice
Code generation is a powerful tool that can save time and ease the development process. With C# 9 there is finally an officially supported mechanism for generating source code into your .NET projects as part of the compiler pipeline. Write code that writes code!
You can use C# source code generators by adding the generator NuGet package to your code, or even better, build and share your package.
We will see how source-code generators work, the pros and cons, and how we can leverage them as consumers or producers.
To understand the possibilities, I will present an open-source project that utilizes source code generation: The Azure IoT Source generator lets you develop a full-featured IoT hub client in seconds!
Alon Fliess
Microsoft Regional Director, Azure AI Platform and IoT MVP, ZioNet CTO
Tel Aviv, Israel
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