Day 3 of Microsoft LEAP was just completed. It was a day packed with many interesting keynotes regarding improving the availability and recoverability of Azure applications. By now, you know the drill, check out my notes on Day 2 here.
Mark Fussell and Sudhanva Huruli co-hosted the opening keynote on the topic Open Application Model (OAM) and Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr). Mark has been with Microsoft for nearly 2 decades and is now a Principal PM Lead. Sudhanva is a Program Manager. Both of them work on the Azure Service Fabric platform.
The open application model was discussed in detail and the focus was on separating operational needs from development concerns.
Mark Fussell started by describing the topology of applications which many users utilised. He also stated that developers write each application to interact with different services. Then, Mark spoke about the reason behind the creation of Dapr. It was a designed as a solution to tackle the problems of microservice development. Dapr would allow the building of apps using any language on any framework. Microsoft is already onboard to tap into benefits which it offers. It offers the benefits of enjoying stateful microservice in any language.
Sudhanva Huruli’s speech on OAM was intriguing and revealing. According to him, the OAM was a platform agnostic specification to help define cloud native applications. Users can trust it’s quality because it was built by the largest teams at Microsoft and Ali Baba. It can be applied in a number of ways. It’s benefits include encapsulating application code, offering discretionary runtime overlays, discretionary application boundaries and defines application instances.
The program is fully managed by Azure, so that you can focus on applications.
The opening session was followed by another join session by Muzzammil Imam and Craig Wilhite who hold the positions of Senior PM and PM respectively.
This keynote was on the topic of Windows Containers on AKS and it detailed the process of converting a legacy application into a cloud application and hosting it on a Windows container on an Azure Kubernetes service.
Their presentation showed that a lot of on-premise workload is done on windows; about 72%. There seems to to be a light at the end of the tunnel as there have been numerous good reviews about the Windows Container. It’s adoption is even growing steadily and there is room for more improvement. Microsoft containers will keep getting better with continuous innovation.
Kubernetes is a great option in Azure. It’s a vanguard in the future of app development and management and it can help you ship faster, operate easily and scale confidently. Azure Kebernetes Services will help you handle all the hard parts and give room a better future.
After the coffee break, we were back for the next session conducted by Brendan Burns on Securing software from end-to-end using Kubernetes and Azure. Brendan is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. This session focussed on continuous delivery with Kubernetes. Some of the sub-themes were continuous integration with GitHub Actions, Access Control in Kubernetes, and Gatekeeper for Kubernetes.
The last session before lunch was conducted by Jeff Hollan, a Principal PM Manager for Microsoft Azure Functions. The keynote was on Serverless and Event-Driven functions for Kubernetes and beyond. To put it simply, they seem just like the features of Kubernetes.
The focus was on stateless event-driven serverless computing which is enabled by Azure functions. Many new hosting and programming models that enable new event-driven scenarios were discussed.
When used with severless, it allows developers focus on what really matters; their code. There are a variety of applications which it can be used as. Kubernetes also does well when dealing with event-driven applications
Next to speak was Kirpa Singh. He was a manager at Microservices and Performance Tuning. During his session, he spoke on what makes microservices a better option. He went on by speaking about the benefits of microservice architecture for projects. It was designed for large applications that require a high release velocity, complex applications that need to be highly scalable a, applications with rich domains or subdomains and so on. It offers users agility, focus, technology and isolation.
After lunch, we saw more of the Microsoft campus. Then it was back to the next session.
The session after the lunch break was the OSS Architecture Workshop conducted by Jeff Dailey, Patrick Flynn, and Terry Cook. One of the core themes of the workshop was Open Source stacks. They spoke about building Hybrid resilient data pipelines and infrastructure using open source. This was done through a breakout session at which the attendees were separated into groups and drafted architectures that supported both on-premise and cloud deployments.
During this session, they discussed about Open Source. But why open source? It allows easier migration, deliver poly cloud options via APIs, drives Azure consumption and so on.
Mark Brown conducted the next session on Building high-performance distributed applications using Azure Cosmos DB. He is a Principal PM in the Azure Cosmos DB Team.
The session’s key theme was building globally distributed cloud applications with high availability while ensuring extreme low latency. Many real-world demos were explored during the session and these will help us, developers, to tackle these issues in our own projects.
Hans Olav Norheim, a Principal Software Engineer, concluded the sessions for the day with a keynote on Designing for 99.999% – Lessons and stories from inside Azure SQL DB.
The session focussed on building applications with almost 100% uptime while covering design choices, principles, and lessons learned that can be used in our own projects to overcome uptime issues.
Thus were the proceedings of Day 3. I conclude my note while looking forward to the next set of sessions with the theme Design for efficiency & Operations & DevOps.
I’ll be publishing another article tomorrow.
