Thiago Almeida
Serverless @ Microsoft (and BBQ)
Redmond, Washington, United States
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Thiago has worked on a variety of companies as a developer, architect, and team leader building applications and experiences. He is a former Microsoft MVP and joined Microsoft in 2011 and since then has been working directly with customers driving adoption and development of industry leading applications and services. He's now part of the Azure Functions product group as a technical PM in the developer platform division.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Stop Writing Glue Code: Building Event-Driven Apps with Azure Functions and Connectors
You know the drill. The product manager wants "a quick thing that watches a SharePoint Online or OneDrive folder, runs the file through an LLM, and pings the team in Teams." You know it's not quick. It's OAuth refresh dances, polling loops, exponential backoff, schema drifts, and 200 lines of glue before you write a single line of business logic.
This session removes the glue. We'll build that exact app, with the help of Copilot: SharePoint Online (or OneDrive) → Function → AI analysis → Teams. All live, end-to-end, in one Azure function app, with the new Connectors integration handling the auth, retries, schema, and throttling between your code and 1,400+ connectors.
You used to write the glue. Now you write the function and the gateway is the contract.
Agents That Actually Do Things: Connecting AI Agents to the Real World with Azure Connectors
Most enterprise AI agents can summarize your inbox. Very few can actually file the expense report, update the CRM, kick off the deployment, or page the on-call. The gap between knowing and doing is where most agent demos quietly die and where enterprise value actually lives.
This session is about closing that gap. We'll walk through how Azure Connectors give agents real hands: 1,400+ pre-built actions across SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, M365, GitHub, and more, with auth, governance, and audit already solved. Then we'll get strategic: when to host or combine your agent in Microsoft Foundry or Azure, with real customer patterns and the architectural tradeoffs.
Building an AI App Network: Orchestration Across Azure Functions, Container Apps, and Web Apps
Imagine typing a message in Microsoft Teams and kicking off an AI workflow that automatically spreads across Azure Functions, Container Apps, and Web Apps all stitched together as a single application through Durable Task Scheduler. It ties these services into one coordinated workflow, scheduling activities to the right machine, fanning out to leverage each service's scale, and orchestrating the results back together.
Each AI agent checkpoints its progress along the way, so if anything fails, the system picks up right where it left off. And when it's done, the result lands right back in the Teams channel where it all began.
In this talk, we'll show how Durable Task Scheduler lets you compose an app from your existing Azure services, now enhanced with AI-native capabilities: natural language agents on Functions equipped with skills to react to Teams messages and schedule orchestrations, durable Copilot agents with MCP tools and GPU inference on Container Apps, and front-end experiences on Web Apps. You'll see how agents built with the GitHub Copilot SDK become durable and resilient with automatic checkpointing, and how Durable Task Scheduler connects all of this without needing a separate message broker or custom routing logic.
Walk away with a clear, reusable pattern for building AI workflows where every service contributes what it's best at and meets your users where they already work.
Securing your cloud applications with identity and networking best practices (be ready for blizzard)
In this session you'll learn techniques and best practices that experts use to improve their security posture for managed cloud applications in Azure including how to properly configure managed identities for applications, microservices and APIs; how to deploy securely; and and private networking techniques to get your apps locked down tight. We'll go through several IaC techniques to make it easier and more repeatable to do this in the future.
Building Bulletproof AI Agents (for real this time)
The agent landscape is rapidly evolving beyond simple RAG. Today's most sophisticated agents have self-directed planning, multi-agent handoffs, and external tool integration. We're here to cut through the noise with practical patterns and strong opinions on how to build reliable, production-grade agents.
In this talk, we'll dive into the brand-new Durable Agents features, showing you how to build resilience directly into your agent-to-agent and tool calls. We'll also cover how to deploy powerful Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and secure them with OAuth and Entra. Finally, we'll demonstrate how to achieve extreme scale and cost efficiency using Azure Functions' Flex Consumption plan. You'll leave with a clear roadmap for building serious, durable, and scalable AI agents.
Event-Driven Architectures at Scale: Real-World Patterns with Azure Functions Flex Consumption
Discover how to architect and scale modern event-driven solutions using Azure Functions and the new Flex Consumption plan. In this session, we’ll explore real-world scenarios—ranging from IoT-driven inventory management and automated workflows to AI-powered document processing and dynamic pricing—demonstrating how serverless patterns can transform retail and beyond.
You’ll learn:
* How to design resilient, scalable event-driven systems with Azure Functions, Event Hubs, Service Bus, and Cosmos DB.
* Best practices for leveraging Flex Consumption’s advanced scaling, cold start improvements, and cost efficiency.
* Techniques for handling high-throughput data ingestion, orchestrating complex workflows, and integrating AI/ML for real-time insights.
* Security, observability, and infrastructure-as-code strategies for production-grade serverless apps.
Whether you’re modernizing legacy integrations or building greenfield cloud-native solutions, this session will equip you with actionable patterns and lessons learned from building smart, scalable, and reliable event-driven applications on Azure.
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