Category: DevOps

All good things come to an end and LEAP is no exception. It was a great week full of interesting and enlightening sessions. Day 5 was a fitting end to the week with its focus on Design with best practices.

Let’s get to the sessions; the day began with a keynote by Derek Martin on the topic Design for failure. Derek is a Principal Program Manager and spoke about what not to do when designing a product. He spoke about building Azure and how the lessons learned can be used to understand and anticipate challenges.

The focus was given to managing unexpected incidents not only in the application environment but also in the cloud as a whole.

Brian Moore took over with his keynote on Design for Idempotency – DevOps and the Ultimate ARM Template. He is a Principal Program Manager for Azure. The focus of the session was on creating reusable Azure Resource Manager Templates and language techniques to optimize deployments on Azure. The intention of these reusable templates is to introduce a “Config as code” approach to DevOps.

He took his time to explain “the Ultimate ARM Template” and other key points about the template. Brian Moore explained that the Ultimate ARM Template utilized utilised any language constructs to increase the impact of minimal code. The template simply looks to simplify all of your work. It also offers a variety of benefits for all of its users to enjoy. To guarantee the efficiency of ARM, he explained the practice to avoid. It’s a template which provides you with the best options for the most effective results and lack nothing essential.

Alexander Frankel, Joseph Chan, and Liz Kim conducted their join keynote on Architecting well-governed environment using Azure Policy and Governance after the morning coffee break.

They illustrated real-life examples of how large enterprises scale their Azure applications with Azure Governance services like Azure Policy, Blueprints, Management Groups, Resource Graph and Change History.

The next session was on Monitor & Optimize your cloud spend with Azure Cost Management and was conducted by Raphael Chacko. Raphael is a Principal Program Manager at Azure Cost Management.

The keynote’s main focus was optimizing expenditure on Azure and AWS through cost analysis, budgeting, cost allocation, optimization, and purchase recommendations. The main features of Azure Cost management were highlighted.

It was right back to business after a quick lunch break. Stephen Cohen took over with his session on Decomposing your most complex architecture problems.

Most of the session was spent on analyzing and coming up with answers to complex architecture-related problems raised by participants. It was a very practical session and addressed many commonly faced issues.

The next session was conducted by Mark Russinovich, the CTO of Microsoft Azure.

Day 5 had a shorter agenda and was concluded with Derek Martin returning for another keynote on Networking Fundamentals. Derek spoke about Azure Networking Primitives and how it can be used to leverage the networking security of any type of organization using Azure environments. Azure Networking Primitives can be used in a flexible manner so that newer modern approaches to governance and security protocols can be adopted easily.

And that was it. The completion of a great week of LEAP. I hope all of you enjoyed this series of articles and that they gave you some level of understanding about the innovations being done in the Azure ecosystem.

I just left Microsoft Headquarters after another interesting day at LEAP. Today’s topics were quite interesting, especially DevOps, because of all the innovations that are being made. I’m actually a little emotional that there’s just one more day remaining.

Jason Warner began the day’s session with his keynote on From Impossible to Possible: Modern Software Development Workflows. As the CTO of Github, Jason shared much of his experience regarding the topic.

The underlying theme of the keynote was on creating an optimal workflow that leads to the success of both the development process as well as the team. He pointed out the inevitable nature of modernization and said its important that the company does not become a mediocre or get worse.

Before he went on to the topic of the day, Jason spoke about himself. He also didn’t hesitate to share some valuable history and information about his life. Jason Warner introduced the audience to some brief insight into the capabilities of GitHub and the success they have managed to achieve so far.

According to Jason, to ensure proper modernisation must have a workflow that consists the following; automation, intelligence and open source. Next, he identified GitHub’s ability to produce the best workflows to improve company efficiency. It didn’t end there as he continued by talking about the benefits of workflow inflation

Abel Wang continued with the next session and his keynote was on Real World DevOps. Abel is a Principal Cloud Advocate for Azure.
This session was truly valuable as it covered the full process of a production SDLC and many other important areas such as infrastructure, DNS, web front ends, mobile apps, and Kubernetes API’s.

At the start of his presentation, Abel Wang introduced us to his team and gave a run down on some vital information about DevOps. Why do you need DevOps? Well, they are solution providers, support any language and boast a three-stage conversation process for results.

After a much-needed coffee break, we embarked on the next session on Visual Studio and Azure, the peanut butter and jelly of cloud app devs. The speaker, Christos Matskas is a Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft.

The session focused on explaining how well Azure and Visual Studio support development, live debugging, and zero downtime deployments. Christos also spoke about leveraging integrated Azure tools to modernize .Net applications.

The goal of those at Visual Studio are committed to providing developers with the best tools available. It supports all types of developers and redefines their coding experience. The great thing about Visual Studio is that they don’t rest on their laurels and are constantly in search of innovation. It even comes with a Visual Studio Live feature that allows developers share content with each other in real-time.

Evgeny Ternovsky, Shiva Sivakumar jointly conducted the next session on Full stack monitoring across your applications, services, and infrastructure with Azure Monitor. Many demonstrations were performed to overview the capabilities of Azure monitor.
The demos included monitoring VMs, Containers, other Azure services, and applications. In addition, setting up predictive monitoring for detecting anomalies and forecasting was also discussed.

Azure has a full set of services which it uses to oversee all your security and management needs. They have all the tools you need and are built into the platform to reduce any 3rd party integration. As if not enough, Azure managed to develop a set of newer features; partner integration, monitor containers everywhere, new pricing option, trouble shoot network issues later.

Subsequent to lunch, I joined the alternative session, which was on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The session was on the use of Azure Cognitive Services and using it with optimized scaling in order to optimize the customer care services provided organizations such as telecoms and telemarketers.
Then we were back at another joint session by Satya Srinivas Gogula and Vivek Garudi and the keynote was on the topic Secure DevOps for Apps and Infrastructure @ Microsoft Services.

The speaker spoke about the wide adoption of DevOps practices and Open Source Software (OSS) and the vulnerabilities they introduce. The latter part of the session focused on best practices for secure DevOps with Azure.

The next keynote was on Transforming IT and Business operations with real-time analytics: From Cloud to the intelligent edge. It was jointly delivered by Jean-Sébastien Brunner and Krishna Mamidipaka and focussed on the challenges faced by IT and Business teams trying to understand the behavior of applications.
The speakers explained the benefits of Azure Stream Analytics to ingest, process, and analyze streaming data in order to enable better analytics.

A good example of when Azure is at its best is that it can be used for earthquake and storm predictions.

Taylor Rockey concluded the day with his keynote on MLOps: Taking machine learning from experimentation to production. MLOps is an integration between machine language and DevOps. MLOps has proven to have numerous benefits including; scalability, monitoring, repeatability, accountability, traceability and so on. This platform had impressive features that make it a first-choice for many developers.
The problems that many organizations face is the lack of proper understanding and tooling to use Machine Learning for production applications. The session focussed on the use of Machine Learning for production applications with the use of Azure Machine Learning and Azure DevOps.

And that’s a wrap. Don’t forget to tune into tomorrow’s article.