Keynote: 30 terrible habits of Cloud Administrators

Orin Thomas

Admin accounts with shared passwords, over privileged accounts, personal Hotmail.com accounts used as the administrator account for the company’s Azure subscription, everything in the same resource group, the same service account credentials used for every service on every IaaS VM, disabled firewalls and forgotten software updates. The first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one. In this session I will discuss 30 terrible, bad, and just plain lazy habits, the steps you can take to determine if they are present in your environment, and what you can do to get over them.

Know Your Customers, Know Your Apps!

Alex Mang

Whether you have to prioritize user stories on your backlog, learn what the best ways to monetize your applications are or simply want to find what the errors your customers are referring to, monitoring your applications is key if you want to be successful in the ISV industry.  

And yet too many applications, once deployed, remain unmonitored and thus, their developers tend to behave passive when it comes to supporting their customers. Ever heard a developer say ‘I don’t know why it doesn’t work for you. It works perfectly fine on my PC.’?   

During this session I’ll walk you through the best practices of both implementing and using Azure Application Insights so that you will be two steps ahead of your customer and eventually get to be pro-active when it comes to supporting applications deployed in the wild.  

e-conomic's path to Azure: Moving a traditional SaaS offering to the public cloud

Jesper Falkebo, Oscar Elfving

Using Machine Learning and Chatbots to handle 1st line technical support

Barbara Fusinska

Azure Functions

Magnus Mårtensson

In the age of the Cloud we have almost grown accustomed, or even weary at times, of paradigm shifting technology promising gold and green forests. And here is another one – Serverless Compute. It was in fact Amazon who coined the term for their popular Lambda service. Microsoft’s retort is that they did in fact plant the seed for the concept with “Simple Batch” aka. WebJobs. Azure has now followed suit in the Serverless wave with Azure Functions a very competent and interesting service with full hooks into the Platform and all other services that live there, such as VSTS, Logic Apps and much more. We developers, architects and DevOps can dig into the spoils of the battle of the giants and enjoy a new paradigm which will make us much more effective developers at a fraction of the cost! The Cloud breaths innovation in every breath. The advent of Serverless Compute certainly is one such energizing advance!

Scaling Docker Containers using Kubernetes and Azure Container Service

Ben Hall

The Azure Container Service offers simple deployments of Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration solution, designed to help manage running containers at scale. In this session, Ben will demonstrate the benefits of deploying Containers to Kubernetes and how to ensure your system remains reliable and scalable by building on top of the Azure Container Service.

Topics and discussion points will include:

• Introduction into Containers
• Scaling considerations
• Deploying Kubernetes
• Migrating Application to Kubernetes and Azure Container Service
• Scaling to meet application demands

By the end, attendees should understand the benefits of using a Container Orchestration system, where Kubernetes fits into the eco-system and how it can be combined with the Azure Container Service.

More information on Kubernetes and Azure can be found at https://msopentech.com/opentech-projects/kubernetes/

Secure DevOps with Azure Resource Manager

Ryan Jones

In this session, we will discuss how to integrate Azure Resource Manager templates into your DevOps workflows, but with a focus on how to enable agility while maintaining security and compliance.

Getting in cloud securely - how challenging it can be?

Viktorija Almazova

Public clouds aren't more buzzword anymore - they are reality. Companies moved or are moving their solutions into clouds for several reasons: costs, power and flexibility. Together with cloud movement DevOps culture came as main in development, which gave more freedom for developers, but at same time more responsibility. Clouds came also with security challenges for developers. How to land application securely in Azure? How to protect resources? And finally how to be complaint with all compliance like GDPR?

During session you will find out how to handle administrative control, how to protect data, how to make good perimeter security for solution in Azure, how to protect solution on application level by hardening headers, implementing WAF and how to use monitoring features from Azure to detect attacks. How to deploy securely. And finally how to be complaint with GDPR at same time! 

Building Global Scale Applications with Azure AD

Marilag Dimatulac

Who are your users and how will they sign in to your app? This is one of the first things that you need to get right when building your application. And if your app also connects to different services, such as the Microsoft Graph API or other SaaS applications, then the experience should be seamless while the implementation should be secure & simple. Global scale apps require a heavy-duty identity system. And the best ones should make life easier for developers so they can focus on features and sleep better at night.

In this session, you will understand why you need an enterprise-grade infrastructure, like Azure AD, to manage user identities. You will also learn about authentication protocols, relevant business scenarios and the libraries that you can use in your code, when integrating web & mobile apps to Azure AD.

SQL Database from A Developer’s Perspective

Alex Mang

SQL Server had, has and will certainly have a lot to offer, but the number one concern of a common developer when it comes to SQL is the management cost involved. 

This also happens to be the number one reason for why Azure SQL Database is so successful for hardcore developers who don’t want to become accidental DBAs and worry too much about the SQL production workload. The situation however is that the management-less attitude towards SQL Database made most developers miss the tips and tricks SQL Database has to offer and thus make the workload more performant. 

Throughout this session, I will walk you through the techniques you can use to make your SQL the most performant possible with the limited amount of resource you have available within the tier your database is running on and also cover the elasticity techniques available using the services and tools available today.  

The Cloud Design Patterns you didn't know you needed

Barry Luijbregts

Design patterns are best-practice solutions to common software design problems. They represent years of experience and thinking. You are probably using lots of them already, maybe without even knowing.

In this talk you'll learn a bunch of cloud design patterns, like the Valet Key Pattern, the CQRS and Event Souring Patterns and the Circuit Breaker Pattern. And you'll see how to implement them in Azure. Let the cloud design patterns inspire you to create new solutions to common problems (maybe some that you didn't even know you had).

Azure Cloud Shell: Your Admin Machine for Azure

Aleksandar Nikolic

Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, browser-based shell for managing Azure resources.
It improves productivity by enabling automatic and secure access to a preconfigured workstation on Azure.
Cloud Shell offers PowerShell and Bash experience today. You don't need to worry about installation of your tools and authentication to Azure. Microsoft maintains and updates Cloud Shell on your behalf with commonly used CLI tools. You can work in Cloud Shell from everywhere; all you need is a browser and access to Azure. Join us to learn about this new and exciting way to interact with Azure resources. Cloud Shell makes working in Azure Portal cool again.

Protecting Cloud Identities using Azure MFA and EMS

Ronni Pedersen

Azure Stack Infrastructure: Future of the Cloud Administrator and running Hybrid Workloads

Flemming Riis

This session includes a short introduction to Azure Stack Infrastructure, why it matters for trust and why it DOESN'T matter for day to day operations.

We'll talk about the role of the Cloud Administrator going forward - What should the role be transformed to when its not about micro-managing firmware and drivers.

We will also look at running Azure Stack with integration to Public Azure and servicing enterprise users.

Infrastructure-as-Code from an IT Pro point of view

Jesper Jensen

IaC is often used in DevOps scenarios, and "ops" is sometimes forgotten in those cases. Come see this session to learn how IaC has helped save me, my colleagues and our customers time. You will get insight to a world where redeploying a server is a no-brainer, and you have time for all the fun stuff you really want to do. Azure Resource Manager, PowerShell DSC and OMS is the perfect combination of tools get there. There will be code, but it's code from an IT Pro!

ARM + DSC: Build Your Azure Infrastructure like a Pro

Aleksandar Nikolic

Both ARM templates and PowerShell DSC configurations represent the declarative model where we describe what we want instead of using the "old" imperative approach. ARM templates enable idempotent deployment of Azure infrastructure resources; PowerShell DSC configurations enable idempotent configuration management of VMs. Combined, with the help of Azure DSC VM extension and Azure Automation DSC, they give us a full declarative solution to build our environment and provision our VMs. In this session, you'll learn how to provision and manage your Azure infrastructure using code.

Azure Automation - Advanced Runbook Design

Jakob Gottlieb Svendsen

Softskills: Kicking off DevOps with Cloud and bi-modual IT

Rasmus Hald

By now, most have heard about how DevOps can enable your business to become more effective in a world of Digital Tranformation. As most, you might also be scratching your head on how to get started. This talk will give you insight into how Marsk Transport & Logistics has used Cloud and bi-modual IT to enable digital projects with DevOps.

The empire strikes back! Defend your Azure Infrastructure

Johan Dahlbom, Stefan Schörling

Avoid a cloud drive-by attack! In this session you will learn how to protect, detect and respond to all types of threats in your Azure Infrastructure with help from tools and features that are already there.

Packed with demos, tips and tricks from the real world, this is a session you don't want to miss!

Practical use of Application Insights at Templafy

Thomas Jespersen

Learn how Templafy uses Azure Application Insight in combination with Azure DataLake, SalesForce and PowerBI for ultimate insight.

Break-out session

Description TBA ... more details coming.

Deep Dive into Azure Storage Services

Yves Goeleven

Ever wondered what an Azure service looks like from the inside? In this session I will take you on a deep dive into the Azure Storage Services and provide you with more insight in how this service has been built. We'll have a look at storage stamps, replication, fault-tolerance and much much more. Knowing the internals will help you make optimal use of Azure Storage Services in your designs.

Events: The secret to building large scale, distributed, cloud applications

Yves Goeleven

I've been designing large scale, distributed, cloud applications since the dawn of the Azure platform. One of the patterns that keeps recurring in many of these designs is the 'event'. In an event-driven architecture, a microservice publishes events when something notable happens, such as when it makes changes to a business object. Other microservices, potentially deployed at the other side of the planet, subscribe to those events. In response to an event the subscribed service typically updates its own state. In this session I will introduce you to the world of events and all event oriented design patterns such as event processing, event sourcing, event projection, and much more...

Azure networking with network watcher and OMS service map

Klaus Gjelstrup Nielsen

Have you ever been met by the requirement to implement microsegmentation in your azure network environment?

In this session we will look at the possibilities to troubleshoot and monitor azure networking.

AskCody's journey from IaaS to PaaS

Benjamin Hubert, Filip S. Adamsen

Somebody else's responsibility: Our journey from IaaS to PaaS

When we started using Azure at AskCody in late 2013 we hosted everything on Linux VMs. Azure VMs are great, but they are basically your responsibility: They're not maintenance-free and scaling can be tricky depending on the workloads you want to run on them.

Fortunately for us, Azure offers several services that take care of maintenance and scaling for you. Moving from IaaS to PaaS can however be difficult and we faced a number of challenges along the way, including:

- Breaking up a large monolithic platform into smaller, decoupled services

- Deploying a large Symfony PHP application to App Service

- Migrating cron jobs to Azure Scheduler and Azure WebJobs

- Moving assets to Azure Blob storage

During this session we'll talk about our journey towards using the following Azure services including our considerations, challenges and learnings:

- Azure App Service

- Azure Bot Service

- Azure Cosmos DB

- Azure Database for MySQL

- Azure SQL Database

- Azure Scheduler

- Azure Storage

- Azure WebJobs and Functions

IoT with Azure

Mark Rud Christensen

This session will cover a real world example of an IoT solution in Azure. Using services such as IoT Hubs, Stream Analytics, Azure SQL Datawarehouse, Time Series Insights and Power BI data flows from telemetry devices to the front-end.

The session begins with an illustration of the data-flow and an introduction to the services used. The session then walks the audience through a demonstration of the solution covering the major steps from source to front-end.

Azure Managed Applications

Kristian Nese

Today, Azure provides a robust Marketplace where ISVs and start ups can offer their solutions to customers around the world. Azure Marketplace is a gallery that consists of hundreds of complex, multi-resource templates from first and third-party vendors. Customers can within minutes deploy and start using PaaS and SaaS applications. Although it provides a great way to quickly deploy an offering, the customer is still responsible for maintaining and updating the solution. For vendors, there is no way to charge customers for use of an application beyond the virtual machine image billing. Furthermore, vendors have no way of preventing customers from modifying critical application resources, and no way to block access to intellectual property that makes up an application. Azure Managed Applications provides a solution for these concerns.

In this session, we’re going to create and publish a managed application, and demonstrate how you can manage, update and continuously deliver value to your customers, running your application in Azure.

Bringing the Enterprise to the Cloud

Nicolai Petri

Description TBA

Deep-Dive - Using Azure for CI/CD (Continues Integration / Continues Deployment)

Flemming Rohde

In this deep-dive session we will walk through how you can ensure stable and high quality code (PowerShell in this session) by doing proper tests. In this session we will use Azure VMs as backend testing and deploy to Azure Automation.

This session will cover:

• How to use Azure as backend for your tests
• Integrating developer tools with Azure
• Version Control
• Automatic Unit Testing in Azure
• Automatic Operation Validation Tests in Azure
• Automatic Deployments to Azure Automation

Building Hitman in the Cloud powered by Azure

Christian Corsano

Hitman, by Io-Interactive, is a game about Agent 47, the world’s greatest assassin. In March 2016 the latest version of Hitman was released in the form of the world’s first episodic AAA game. Meaning a game that will evolve over time, with features that might only be accessible if you are connected to the cloud. This session will give insights on building such a game on Azure.