Azure Policy: Simplifying governance at scale

Let's admit it: compliance is boring, but needed. When your Azure environment grows, the complexity grows with it. How are you going to ensure your developers don't leave storage accounts open to the public internet? How will you ensure app services only accept HTTPS traffic? What about cost management, which team owns this resource group?

In this session, we will cover this in depth so you can sleep well knowing your environment is secure, cost-efficient and compliant. The following topics will be covered:
- Creating a logical grouping of your subscriptions with management groups.
- Setting up policies, both built-in and custom policies.
- Grouping policies together in initiatives.
- Monitoring compliance and dealing with non-compliance through remediation.
- Sending event grid events when things become non-compliant.
- Automating policy changes with Bicep and Pipelines.
- Bonus: Using tags to ensure ownership, then applying cost management with team-based budgets.

Creating a distributed local development environment with Dapr and .NET Aspire

As a .NET developer, you will have either built distributed apps or heard about them. Distributed apps, microservice or not, come with a new set of complexities that you previously didn't have to deal with. However, those complexities are easily embraced by setting up a good local development environment.

This is where Dapr and .NET Aspire come in.

Dapr allows you to abstract infrastructure away from your app code, allowing you to focus on writing your business logic and let Dapr deal with connecting to things like Message Brokers, State Stores and other services .NET Aspire then orchestrates all those dependencies during local development, connecting them all together seamlessly and then, during runtime, providing a single pane of glass to observe your applications' behaviour.

This session will show you how to set up your local environment, whether this is via Rider or Visual Studio. We will use a demo app to demonstrate the different abstractions that Dapr offers and how to integrate them with multiple services running locally on your development machine.

Then, we will explore the different ways in which Aspire collects logs, traces and metrics via OpenTelemetry. You can use this to see how your different services interact and where issues in your apps occur. We will even go as far as creating custom metrics and traces that will enhance the capabilities of OpenTelemetry even further.

Lastly, we will discuss what will happen when you deploy your application. There are multiple compute options that support Dapr natively, such as Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Apps. However, there are more options that we will also cover.

Testcontainers - a practical deep-dive

Are you mocking your dependencies, especially during unit tests? Tired of setting up infrastructure before running your integration tests? There are other ways to go about this! Testcontainers are a lightweight, disposable means of running your infrastructure such as a database. In this session we will explore the different ways in which we can use the excellent Testcontainers-dotnet library and hopefully give you solid foundation of using it in your own projects.

This talk is aimed towards .NET developers who want to level up their skills.