Cloud Infrastructure for Developers

Developing applications can be challenging enough—and now you have to worry about where it gets deployed as well? In this session, we will cover some basics of cloud infrastructure, how to test against local and cloud based resources, and how to figure out what services will work best for your application. Using a code first approach, you’ll learn how to codify those services and tie it all together with build and release scripts.

Overcoming Technology Indecision

There are a wide variety of different technology patterns, development languages, hardware configurations, cloud services, data models...phew! Understanding them all is a challenge unto itself, but finding what fits best for your project or organization can be a separate challenge altogether. In this talk, I illustrate common-sense methodologies for choosing programming languages, design patterns, implementation patterns, as well as how to get started with selecting appropriate cloud services to get the job done.

Fault Driven Development

Failure IS an option! Developing cloud-first applications can be fundamentally different than building traditional on-prem applications. As a cloud app developer, you need to be prepared for and expect failures in your code as well as in your app environment. This session will arm you with tools to be proactive with fault tolerance and reactive with fault handling.

Core Azure Solutions: Governance and Administration

Azure asset and subscription maintenance can be overwhelming. Attend this session to gain insight into how to create policies, implement role-based access control, and produce reports to keep the auditors happy.

Core Azure Solutions: Automation (Ops)

Automation accounts are just the beginning. This session will cover creating automation jobs using Azure Automation Runbooks, Logic Apps, Functions, and PowerBI to make mundane tasks less of a chore.

Core Azure Solutions: Automation (Dev)

Delivering value is all that matters at the end of the day. This session will show you how to shift left and deliver value by automating development environments and components using local and cloud resources.

Azure DevOps vs. DevOps on Azure

Unfamiliar with Azure DevOps Services? Not sure of where to start with DevOps for the Azure cloud platform? This session will summarize the different verticals within Azure DevOps Services, covering the basics along with new features and functionality, and will also cover the wider topic of DevOps on Azure.
Toolchains and programming languages do not need to be replaced with Microsoft-specific products. Many integration scenarios exist with popular non-Microsoft toolsets, including:
- Jenkins
- TeamCity
- Bamboo
- Bitbucket
- GitLab
- Octopus Deploy
This session moves at a brisk pace and assumes general knowledge of development concepts such as source control management, continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment, and distributed systems.

Clown Migration Plan

This session is geared toward addressing the biggest challenge faced when attempting to successfully cultivate a DevOps culture and undergo a digital transformation: people. From inconsistent communication to lack of vision, from saboteurs to resume builders, we will cover several types of personas who you most likely will run into during the course of your transformation. Identifying common pitfalls (and not-so-common ones too), we will inspect what to look for and how to get all teams working together toward a common goal.

From Migration to Innovation: Capitalizing on the Cloud

Join your peers for a special breakfast event facilitated by Azure expert Josh Garverick, author of Migrating to Azure: Transforming Legacy Applications into Scalable Cloud-First Solutions, Microsoft MVP, and 10th Magnitude Cloud Solution Architect.

From Migration to Innovation: Capitalizing on the Cloud is an event designed especially for technical decision makers and enterprise architects who are responsible for keeping legacy applications relevant in today’s cloud-first world.

With an emphasis on Azure cloud migration and innovation enablement, this event is focused on how to plan for a successful Azure migration that positions your organization to capitalize on the cloud through organizational transformation, optimization, and ultimately innovation.

Assess Your Legacy: Understanding the entire application portfolio, including dependencies and risks, will set the stage for migration candidate selection. Discuss how to ensure you’re examining all angles to capture the complete estate.

Plan for Your Future: Sound architectural plans and capital investments require careful consideration. Explore where to consider nurturing and supporting workloads in preparation for the cloud.

Capitalize on the Cloud: Whether making a greenfield or brownfield move, a well-planned approach is critical to the success of your migration – and to your ability to make the most out of your cloud investment.

Practical Dev Containers (and Codespaces)

Simplify how your teams work! Using shared configurations and underlying tools makes onboarding new developers easier and removes friction from the development process. In this talk, we examine using GitHub Codespaces for capturing base development environment requirements, integrating tools such as precommit and checkov, integrated custom CodeSpaces image management, OS edge cases, and isolated/confidential uses.

Relevance: The flexibility and power of Codespaces allows individual developers and teams alike to make starting a new project easier as well as collaborating on improvements to shared developer environment configurations. This leads to faster onboarding and lowers the bar to being productive in a software development project.

Case Studies or Examples: The primary example is centered around developer onboarding and time to productivity. Many regulated industries struggle with securing containerized technologies for their developers when their technology is extremely locked down or even air-gapped. Having ways to enable collaborative functionality (Codespaces and consequently DevContainers) makes this more attainable while still giving risk and compliance teams peace of mind. Another example is OS usage. Not everyone uses Ubuntu, Debian, or Alpine. There are segments that work exclusively with CentOS for legacy support but switched to RHEL or a similar Linux flavor, and support for that in the devcontainer features ecosystem is not at parity with Ubuntu/Debian.

Key Takeaways:
- Discover simple, as well as advanced, methods for streamlining configuration to facilitate developer productivity
- Gain insights into off-label or divergent use cases related to custom Codespaces images, configurations, and features
- Understand how to position themselves to have conversations with other teams on how to implement this functionality while still maintaining a secure and compliant posture

Confessions of a Lazy Engineer

Go ahead, be lazy...within reason. In this talk, I walk through methodologies, tooling, and real-world examples to illustrate how you can do more with less and still have time to decompress at the end of the day. The ultimate goal is to remove friction from your day-to-day so you can focus on solving the important problems.

Intended audience is inclusive of software engineers, infrastructure engineers, platform engineers, architects, and anyone else who may benefit from finding simpler ways to work.

FinOps: Cost Management in Azure

Using cloud services can be cheaper than traditional on-premises datacenters, but it can be much more expensive if you're not careful. Learn more about the fundamentals of cost management in Azure, techniques for promoting visibility of cloud costs, and changes to processes to promote financially responsible usage of cloud services. Having a line of sight into consumption as well as a set of guardrails to help keep costs rational will go a long way to affording your engineers more innovation time.