Speaker

Toon Vanhoutte

Toon Vanhoutte

Azure MVP | CTO @ Noest | Founder @ Your Azure Coach

Kuurne, Belgium

Hi! I'm Toon Vanhoutte, Azure Solution Architect and Microsoft Azure MVP. My duty is to design and deliver reliable, secure and scalable applications in the Azure cloud. I'm not scared to take up big challenges and to dive into development mode.

As a managing partner of Noest, my focus is to create a vibrant, local community of Microsoft enthusiasts with a "getting-things-done" mentality. I'm a quite active member of the Microsoft Azure community and was speaker on several community and company events. I love to share my experiences and learn from others during workshops, presentations and blogs. Being an Azure MVP, I'm actively collaborating with various Microsoft / Azure product teams.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Azure
  • Azure PaaS
  • Serverless
  • devops
  • GitHub
  • Power Apps
  • Azure Api Management
  • Azure Integration Services
  • Azure Logic Apps
  • Azure App Service

The real-time data analytics battle: Microsoft Fabric vs Azure PaaS

SaaS vs PaaS.
Microsoft Fabric vs Azure PaaS.

Since Microsoft Fabric has powerful real-time data analytics capabilities, it became a tedious task to choose the right platform to solve your stream analytics challenges.

This demo-packed session showcases the two possible options to handle millions of real-time datapoints per day and dives into the differentiators that each approach offers. You will be able to witness the differences yourself and get a lot of advise to make a profound decision.

Belgium's biggest Azure mistakes I want you to learn from!

We all mistakes, so do I! It’s what makes us human! Making a mistake is an opportunity to learn! After the success of the "My 10 biggest Azure mistakes I want you to learn from" session, I took it to the next level, by interviewing 100+ Azure professionals from Belgium.

In this session, I want to share the biggest Azure mistakes that I've captured during these interviews and most importantly: how you can avoid to make the same mistakes yourself! We'll cover a broad range of Azure services and areas.
Join me in this session if you want to learn from real stories from the field!

Automate your Azure infrastructure with Bicep and Azure DevOps!

The expectation of modern applications is that they are provisioned in a completely automated fashion. Easier said than done! In this demo-packed session, I will automate the provisioning of a web application by using Bicep and Azure DevOps. We will go together through the complete process. Throughout this session you will learn many tips and tricks and best practices to ensure that secrets are handled correctly, that the developer experience is optimized and that we have and end-to-end traceability.

Automate your Azure infrastructure with Bicep and GitHub Actions!

The expectation of modern applications is that they are provisioned in a completely automated fashion. Easier said than done! In this demo-packed session, I will automate the provisioning of a web application by using Bicep and GitHub Actions. We will go together through the complete process. Throughout this session you will learn many tips and tricks and best practices to ensure that secrets are handled correctly, that the developer experience is optimized and that we have and end-to-end traceability.

GraphQL at scale with Azure and .NET: stories from the trenches!

This is the session that I wanted to have seen, before we introduced GraphQL on a large-scale Azure IoT platform! GraphQL is an emerging and powerful API standard, but it comes with some dangerous pitfalls that I want you to be aware of.

In this demo-packed session, we will go through the roadblocks that we've encountered while implementing GraphQL at scale, by using the great Hot Chocolate .NET library and Azure API Management. Learn how we overcame scalability problems across multiple teams, reliability and performance issues, security challenges, monitoring difficulties and adoption complexity.

Join me if you want to learn from real-world experiences!

My 10 biggest Azure mistakes I want you to learn from!

We all mistakes, so do I! It’s what makes us human! Making a mistake is an opportunity to learn, so we can avoid these in the future! In this session, I want to share some of my biggest mistakes and most importantly: how this can help you to build better solutions on the Azure platform! We will take a tour through many Azure PaaS services and highlight the useful aspects that help you to avoid running into trouble. I will show you tips and tricks on security, scalability, governance, cost management, infrastructure as code, networking, etc… Join me in this session if you want to learn from real stories from the field!

My 10 favorite Azure API Management tips & tricks!

During many Azure API Management implementations, I've learned a lot. The aim of this session is to bundle that experience in a to-the-point talk, that covers many tips and tricks on monitoring, security, routing, governance and DevOps. I hope to see you there!?

Azure API Management from a developer perspective

As organizations are more and more adopting an API-first mindset, the need for a good management of your APIs grows. During many coaching sessions of developer teams, I've noticed that the concepts of (Azure) API Management are often unknown or misunderstood.

That's why I've crafted this session to explain the benefits of Azure API Management through the eyes of a developer. What's in it for the developer and how can Azure API Management help to maximize the potential and security of your APIs? Let's discover it together in this demo-packed talk!

Build a connected factory with Azure IoT Operations!

Many manufacturing companies struggle to connect their OT assets, like industrial PLCs, with the rest of the organization. Popular Industry 4.0 concepts like MQTT and Unified Namespace were not supported on the Microsoft stack before. To bridge that gap, Microsoft recently introduced Azure IoT Operations and extended Azure Event Grid into a full compatible MQTT broker.

This session gives you an in-depth tour of the key features, like edge processing, bi-directional real-time and standardized communication, asset discovery, hybrid management & monitoring and end-to-end security. Expect lots of demos!

APIOps in Azure API Management done the right way!

The beauty of a streamlined APIOps approach is enforcing standardization, best practices and security within your overall API program, without compromising on developer velocity and productivity. Easier said, than done!

In this demo-packed session, I will showcase a real-life APIOps implementation with Azure API Management, Azure API Center and GitHub. I'll focus on two perspectives: the operations team that is responsible for the overall API governance and the development teams, who want to manage their full API development lifecycle, without any roadblocks.

Expect a deep-dive into API quality assurance, the DevOps process, end-to-end security and monitoring. Azure API Management: centrally managed and offered as a value-added service towards the development teams!

Image Search with Azure AI Search and GPT-4 Vision

This session covers a real-life use case, from start to finish, detailing all the challenges we had to overcome. My customer, that creates thousands of packaging designs a year, had difficulties in finding back the appropriate design. They were looking for a solution to find the right image in a very simple way.

Our solution combines Azure AI Search and the extremely powerful GPT-4 Vision model. We experimented with hybrid and vector search and tried different reranking options. Join this session if you want to learn from our adventures.

Lessons learned from analyzing enormous real-time data streams with Azure Data Explorer

If I had seen this session two years ago, it would have saved me a ton of headaches! After several challenging IoT projects, I have some interesting learnings to share on using Azure Data Explorer (ADX) for ingesting and querying high volume data streams.

Join me in this demo-intense session in which I show how to easily ingest real-time timeseries data, how to optimize query speed by leveraging ADX-specific features and the powerful Kusto Query Language and how to interact with external systems. Real-life learnings from the trenches!

To MQTT or not to MQTT on Azure?

Finally! Since recently, our beloved Azure cloud has native support for MQTT, the emerging messaging standard that gains a lot of traction in IoT and manufacturing scenarios (e.g. Unified Namespace).

With the introduction of MQTT support within Azure Event Grid and the MQTT edge broker that is part of Azure IoT Operations, we now have a full end-to-end MQTT coverage from edge to cloud. This session gives you an in-depth tour of the key features, the different security options, the routing capabilities and how it easily integrates into the Azure eco-system. Expect lots of demos!

Toon Vanhoutte

Azure MVP | CTO @ Noest | Founder @ Your Azure Coach

Kuurne, Belgium