I’m at Microsoft for LEAP and we just wrapped up another day of interesting discussions. If you missed my update regarding day 1, make sure to have a look at it here.
Today’s theme was Design for Performance and Scalability. Many legacy applications are being replaced because they are not performance-oriented and scalable at their core. This is something that has to be introduced right from the design stage. Today’s speakers covered many of the core areas which need to be optimized to enable both performance and scalability.
Vamshidhar Kommineni took us right from breakfast to using Azure storage for the data storage needs of Azure applications and how it can be used to enhance performance. Vamshidhar spoke about the innovations in the storage services layer made in the year 2019. He also shared briefly that plans for 2020.
Corey Newton-Smith was next and focused on IoT applications. Corry has been with Microsoft since 2003 and currently functions as the Principal Group PM for IoT Central. She shared the current state of IoT and Microsoft’s plans for the near future highlighting their vision.
Corey explains that Azure IoT represented a new era of digitization amongst industries. It was an innovation that allowed brands the ability to do so much more. The objective behind the production of this platform is enabling a digital feedback loop. She discussed that Microsoft had done so much to make the IoT better. Now, it was capable of bidirectional communication, can be scaled to suit enterprise of any size and provides end-to-end security. Microsoft was planning an improvement that would allow it to support scenarios that are not currently cloud feasible. What’s more? Everything can be tailored specifically to the exact solutions that you need.
The next session began after some light mingling during the coffee break. It was back to business with Jose Contreras and his keynote on decomposing Monoliths into Microservices.
Enterprise applications have made a gradual transition from being monolithic to being Microservice based. Jose explained strategies that can help with this process focussing on Memory, Computing, and Schema. He then discussed migrating existing monolith applications into Microservices without affecting ongoing operations. He focussed on the design, execution, and DevOps aspects.
Jose spoke on a number of factors to really prove the usefulness of transforming monolith to microservices. As part of his talk, he highlighted the factors to consider in making use of this service, differences between private and shared cache and considerations for using cache.
Interestingly, he moved on and started talking about Azure Compute. He listed all of their available services and gave detailed information on its hosting models, DevOps Criteria, Scalability criteria, and other criteria.
Clemens Vasters’s keynote focussed on how messaging is shaping enterprise applications. Importantly, he spoke on how Microsoft Azure could make all of it better.
He is a Product Architect at Microsoft and highlighted how open standards and messaging can be used to move applications to the cloud. Some of the areas he touched on were Event Hubs, Service Bus, Event Grid, and CNCF Cloud Events, and Relay with web sockets.
According to him, users can use a series of options to connect a range of devices. Ease of connectivity is guaranteed by the use of intelligent edge or intelligent cloud. Basically, it can be applied to varying scales and still work well with Telco 4G/5G. Despite all of this, cloud services can be applied to create automotive and smart cities, support industrial automation and speed up processes.
Clemens continued by clearing the air on the standards which the cloud service operated on. Everything is built according to standards and designed to be secure. Such was the level of quality in display.
After a quick lunch break, an alternative session was conducted for those who were already familiar with the campus. This session on Messaging Guidance was conducted by Francis Cheung and was related to session 4. However, Francis focused more on how we could assess if some of those tools were a good fit for our projects. He also touched on managing and versioning message schemas.
Next was David Barkol’s session focusing on Designing an Event-driven Architecture on Azure through a workshop approach. He challenged attendees to solve problems related to messaging in a group setting. As a Principal Technical Specialist for Azure, David used his vast experience to reinforce the existing knowledge of attendees about Azure messaging services. He really had a lot of interesting things to say.
Using a few simple statements, he was able to highlight the problems of the customer, identify their needs and how to solve them with the use of event-driven architecture. As a platform, the event-driven architecture will eliminate any bottlenecks and allow for easier transmission of information. Azure messaging services will solve all of the demands identified by the consumer. He also mentioned that Event Hubs GeoDR will also provide a backup or secondary region.
Derek Li conducted his keynote next. He focussed on Serverless platforms based on Azure Functions and Logic Apps. Derek is a Senior Program Manager. His keynote focused on how serverless technologies have impacted how applications are built. He also spoke on how Azure Functions and Logic Apps can be used to speed up delivery.
The last session was after a very welcome Cola Zero break. It refreshed us for Rahul Kalaya’s keynote on deriving insights from IoT Data with Azure Time Series Insights.
Rahul spoke about design choices, principles and lessons learned with regards to maintaining the highest possible uptime of cloud databases and servers. Many stories from his experiences with Azure SQL made the keynote even more interesting.
And that was it. The completion of a day of meaningful sessions.
I look forward to sharing my next article on Day 3: Designing for Availability and Recoverability.
