Eventing, Serverless, and the Extensible Enterprise

“Serverless” computing describes the latest wave of (cloud-) application platform technologies, where the complete responsibility for running and scaling the platform infrastructure hosting the application code is taken on by a cloud provider. The greatest upside of “serverless” platforms is that they provide an architectural harness that enables more developers to build highly scalable applications, and ready-made tooling to operate them. Serverless apps are increasingly interconnected with eventing and messaging infrastructures that take care of robust, high-scale data flows into and between app services and functions. In this talk, Clemens Vasters, Messaging Architect at Microsoft and standards architect working on OASIS AMQP and CNCF CloudEvents, will discuss the role of events and messaging in “serverless” and how the combination enables “the extensible enterprise” – enabling businesses to rapidly build and run extensions to their core application portfolios with minimal complexity

Azure Messaging - Standards Matter

In this session, Microsoft's lead architect for Messaging, Clemens Vasters, will provide an overview of the Azure Messaging services (Event Hubs, Event Grid, and Service Bus) in the industry context and with a lens on interoperability. You will learn about the various standardization activities that Microsoft is involved in to help drive interoperability across different platform and cloud vendors, and how those standards surface in Microsoft's platform services. You'll be getting a little crash course in some key protocols like HTTP, AMQP, MQTT, Kafka and will learn how they overlap or complement each other. You'll also learn about higher level standards such as CNCF CloudEvents and OPC UA that provide a layer of abstraction for special use-case scenarios.

Exploring Flow Architectures

Borrowing the term “Flow Architectures” from the title of James Urquhart’s recently published book, Clemens Vasters will explore the elements of event-driven and message-driven architectural approaches that are fundamental for many sophisticated, large scale business solutions. We will consider systems yielding and being driven by discrete events, systems that emit, aggregate, and act on signals derived from event streams, and we will explore required and desired coupling between elements of a system and what effect that coupling has on application architecture. We will also clean up with the misguided notion that some elements of messaging, like queues, are somehow “traditional” or “legacy”, while event streams are “modern” – they are facets of the same toolbox.

What is a Message Queue and when and why would I use it?

I'm the lead architect in central engineering of Microsoft Azure's messaging and eventing services fleet and one observation we keep making is that developers don't know about queues and what to do with them. This session is a 101 basic introduction into what a message queue is, what solution patterns it helps with, and what to do with features like dead-lettering and expiry. This session isn't about what's new, it's about the whole concept. The talk is not product specific and applies to anyone's product's and services, even though I'll certainly mention our own.

Target audience is all developers who haven't been using queues yet or are mistaking some other technology (Kafka?) for a message queue. Min duration is 40 minutes.

Azure Service Bus - Behind the scenes

Azure Service Bus is the planet's most powerful hyperscale PaaS message queuing platform. Running in "ring zero" of the Azure platform, Azure Service Bus is the reliability bedrock for many Azure services, but also for Microsoft's own internal commercial systems, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics, and of course tens of thousands of customer solutions. Your airport check-in, settling the bill for your online purchase, the package delivery at your doorstep, and unlocking your vehicle with a mobile app may all run through Azure Service Bus. In this session we will pull away the curtain and give you a deep-dive look at how Service Bus is built and run.

Azure Event Hubs - Behind the Scenes

Azure Event Hubs is a hyperscale PaaS event stream broker with protocol support for HTTP, AMQP, and Apache Kafka RPC that accepts and forwards several trillion (!) events per day and is available in all global Azure regions. This session is a look behind the curtain where we dive deep into the architecture of Event Hubs and look at the Event Hubs cluster model, resource isolation, and storage strategies and also review some performance figures.

15+ years of building cloud PaaS services. Ask me anything.

I was on the team building Microsoft Azure before that name existed. I built our first PaaS provising workflow service and billing data collector. I wrote a bunch of Azure Relay (that still exists) and work/worked on Azure Service Bus, Event Hubs, Event Grid, Stream Analytics, IoT Hub, Notification Hubs, Microsoft Fabric, on numerous standards like AMQP and CloudEvents, and have helped countless customers with their messaging and eventing solutions and I'm still here and having fun.

This session is about whatever you want to know and the questions you want to ask. No slides.

Make it a cozy setting. Very happy to do that session in an interview format.

Type-safe, polyglot messaging and eventing: Stream/Queue/Topic "of T"

A long time ago, the introduction of templates and generics helped to make applications written in languages like C++, C#, Java far more robust by allowing for common data structures like collections to handle specific types. More recent designs like Rust and TypeScript started with support for generics at inception. Especially in business applications, strong type systems help avoiding simple errors like omitting fields or losing information due to mismatched data types.

In asynchronous, inter-application messaging and eventing, we don't yet have equivalently strong type-safety model that works end-to-end and across multiple vendor platforms, but the building blocks are in the works.

In this session, Clemens Vasters, Product and Standards Architect in the Microsoft Messaging and Real-Time Analytics team and member of the CNCF CloudEvents and xRegistry projects, discusses the schema models, schema registries, metadata projects, code generators, and other tooling, and an interoperability roadmap towards "Stream of T"

45+ minutes required

Azure Messaging - Streams, Queues, and Pub Sub

Azure Messaging services, including Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Relay, Azure Stream Analytics, and Fabric Event Streams, offer a suite of tools for reliable message delivery and event-driven architecture. This session will provide a clear understanding of each service’s capabilities and how they can be integrated to build scalable, resilient applications.

We’ll discuss the selection process for the right messaging tool based on your application’s needs, supported by real-world examples. The focus will be on practical guidance and best practices for implementing a cohesive messaging strategy on Azure, and we will look at the latest news from each product.

Join us to learn how Azure’s messaging services can streamline your application’s communication layer, fostering efficiency and innovation in your cloud-based solutions.