Stefan Ivemo

Stefan Ivemo is Technical Architect at Advania - Knowledge Factory focusing on Azure Infrastructure, Governance and Infrastructure-as-Code. In 2021 Stefan was awarded with his first Microsoft MVP award in the Azure category. Stefan is also a part of the Azure Bicep team as a Bicep Community Core Maintainer and is the creator of the community driven Bicep PowerShell Module. Outside of the tech world he is an awesome pizza baker and a decent golfer.

Session: Strengthen your ARM using Azure Bicep

Bicep is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for deploying Azure resources declaratively. In this demo packed session, you will learn how to quickly get started with Infrastructure-as-Code(IaC) on Azure using Bicep. Even if you are an Azure Portal lover, IaC novice, Terraform master or an ARM Template expert, Bicep will blow your mind and strengthen your ARM deployment game!

Learn how to:

• Get started with Bicep
• Work with the Bicep syntax
• Decompile ARM templates to Bicep format
• Use template functions
• Work with loops and conditionals
• Re-use code using Bicep modules
• Use the Bicep Module Registry and Template Specs in your templates
• Bicep roadmap

Chris Klug - MVP

Chris Klug is a developer-badass-as-a-service that either creates or solves problems depending on who you ask. He loves creating and building things. Whether it be a new application, a new kitchen or a new RC helicopter, you will see him building things all the time. Most of the time, that means writing code and solving problems for clients at a company called Active Solution in Stockholm though. Except for the many days he spends talking about doing things he is passionate about at conferences and usergroups, and for the days he goes mountain biking, IPSC shooting or kiteboarding. For the last 15-something years, he has been solving problems for customers, and loving it.But if he gets to choose, he'll go to the beach and kitesurf every day!

Session: Building a Better GitHub Pages Experience Using Azure Services, How Hard Can It be?

Building a Better GitHub Pages Experience Using Azure Services, How Hard Can It be? Have you ever looked at something and thought “I wonder how that works” or “I wonder how hard it would be to build that”? I think we all have! That’s why we are developers… And that’s exactly what I thought when I saw GitHub Pages! Don’t get me wrong! GitHub Pages is an awesome concept! Automatically generate a static website from your version-controlled markdown files, and host it in the cloud so that it is easily accessible. I love it! But it also got me thinking, “I wonder if I can’t build a better version of that in no time using Azure, and maybe even add some features”. So that’s what I did! In this talk, we will take a look at how easily we can build fairly complex systems using the services available to us in Azure.In this case, all I needed was a little DevOps, a container registry, some storage, a CDN, some serverless functions, a Docker container and some open source software to get it all going.And no, I didn’t spend 100 hours on it! I don’t have that much time to on stuff like this! And I’m sure you don’t either!So let me show you how you can use Azure like a set of building blocks to create weird and wonderful things in hours instead of months!And in a lot of cases, more or less for free! And who doesn’t like free stuff! ?

Barry O'Reilly - CEO/Founder at Black Tulip Technology

Barry is a CITA-P certified Architect who has held Chief Architect positions at Microsoft and and iDesign. He has also been a startup CTO, the Worldwide Lead for the Solutions Architecture Community at Microsoft, and founder of the Swedish Azure User Group. He is also a PhD candidate in software design and complexity science.

Session: Beyond Well Architected - Making Cloud Architects

This session will look at what we need to know to architect solutions in Azure - from a former Western Europe Azure Architect at Microsoft. You will learn how to combine ideas from distributed systems engineering, systems engineering, and the complexity sciences to design Azure solutions that are beyond well architected - based on cutting edge research.

Mohammed Osman - Senior software engineer

Mohammed Osman is a senior software engineer who started coding at the age of 13. Mohammed worked in various industries, including telecommunication, accounting, banking, health, and assurance. Mohammed's core skillset is a .NET ecosystem with a strong focus on C#, Azure, and Data Science. Mohammed also enjoys the soft side of software engineering and leads scrum teams. Mohammed runs a blog with the message "Making your code smart and your career smarter." He shares tips and techniques to improve your code and valuable career pieces of advice in his blog. Mohammed Osman is a Pluralsight Author, Microsoft Certified Trainer, and Writer.

Session: Applying DevOps principles on Azure Machine Learning

How can you take a machine learning experiment from a regular Jupyter notebook to a full-blown solution that applies DevOps principles using Azure? In this session, you'll learn how to take your Jupyter notebooks, refactor them to work with Azure ML. Deploy them using Azure DevOps, monitor them using Application Insights, and scale them using AKS! If you are a data scientist/DevOps engineer wondering how to productionalize your nice notebooks, this session is yours!

Mikael Sand

Mikael is an integrator at heart, as well as a tech communicator and generally happy guy. Part tech, and part business. His talks are fast, not as serious and he usually brings strange props.

Session: Beef up your APIm security

The internet is a scary place, with scare people, scary places and scary HTTP POSTs. Having Azure API manager in front of your services adds a lot of really nice security, but you can always add more. I will show you how to adhere to OWASP, have a useful firewall and scan all incoming messages using additional Azure services. The internet will still be a scary place, but you can at least handle scary HTTP POSTs.

Cecilia Wirén - Coding Security Advocate

Cecilia Wirén is a Coding Security Advocate from Active Solution. She have been selected as Microsoft MVP for several years and are frequently speaking at Conferences and for User Groups. You will often find her organizing Swenug events in Stockholm. As a senior developer she realize that the baseline for the security knowledge amongst the common developer is kind of low and decided that she needs to do something about it.When she not talk about security she loves to play board games or just hang out with her family.

Session: Managing your settings in a secure way using Azure App Configuration

No need for transforming config files at deployment and forget about ever viewing your secrets anywhere. With Azure App Configuration you can manage your apps settings in one place for all apps and all environments. Azure App Configuration is also backed by Azure KeyVault when you have the need of storing secrets as settings but still have easy access to them. And as a bonus, it also has great support for feature flags.

Maarten Balliauw - Developer Advocate at JetBrains

Maarten Balliauw loves building web and cloud apps. His main interests are in .NET web technologies, C#, Microsoft Azure and application performance. He is Developer Advocate at JetBrains, and formerly founded MyGet. He’s an ASP Insider and former Microsoft MVP. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events and organizes Azure User Group events in Belgium. In his free time, he brews his own beer.

Session: Indexing and searching NuGet.org with Azure Functions and Search

Which NuGet package was that type in again? In this session, let's build a "reverse package search" that helps finding the correct NuGet package based on a public type name.

Together, we will create a highly-scalable serverless search engine using Azure Functions and Azure Search that performs 3 tasks: listening for new packages on NuGet.org (using a custom binding), indexing packages in a distributed way, and exposing an API that accepts queries and gives our clients the best result. Expect code, insights into the service design process, and more!

Mark Brown - Principal Program Manager

Mark is an 18 year Microsoft veteran and has worked on a number of products and services including, Windows Mobile, Bing Maps, Web Platform & Tools and Azure where he worked on Web Apps Service, Redis Cache, Networking and now Cosmos DB. Prior to Microsoft, Mark worked for a number of early e-commerce and dot-com startups building distributed systems. Mark is passionate about web development, distributed cloud computing and database and growing the developer community around Azure and Cosmos DB.

Session: How to build mission critical, globally distributed applications with Azure Cosmos DB

Developing highly-available, globally distributed applications in the cloud that respond with extreme low latency while maintaining consistent views of data worldwide is a challenging problem. In this session, we explore the PACELC theorem and demonstrate the relationship between availability, latency and consistency in a distributed environment to understand the tradeoffs that must be made when architecting distributed systems and databases. This session will help you understand how to design for high-availability in Azure, and how to translate RPO and RTO to drive the design choices that must be made when building global applications in the cloud. If you build distributed applications for the cloud or advise customers how to do it, this session is for you. Packed with real-world scenarios and demos that you can take and use yourself.

Johan Hedberg - Consultant, Developer and Architect

Johan is a full stack developer with a back-end focus who thrives best in an agile team working with the Microsoft platform. He can also do design and architecture, talk to C-level execs, do presentations, hold a workshop, produce and conduct training, run a project or an agile team, work independently, juggle tasks, keep his calm under pressure and more. Some people call that an architect.

Session: Analyze and gain insights into your time series data

If you've got time series data - a sequence of events in time such as stock prices, meter readings, IoT device data, wind speeds, speedometer data, sales data, or virtually anything that represents time based events - you likely have some challenges: How do I design a data ingestion pipeline that meets my needs? How do I manage and store the data in a performant, open and accessible way? How do I query, analyze and gain insight into the meaning and importance of that data? Azure Time Series Insights helps you with these three and in this session I will show you how it can be used, how you can get started, how to tie it together with other Azure services and how it can help you solve you time series data challenges.

Rik Hepworth - Azure MVP & and IT Director at Black Marble

Rik is a Microsoft MVP for Azure and IT Director at Black Marble, a Gold partner in the north of England. His role includes delivering robust IT solutions to both his own organisation and its customers, which can take in a broad spectrum of technologies. An enthusiastic technology evangelist, Rik is a regular presenter at events around Europe. Cloudburst will be his first trip to Sweden, and he’s looking forward to it!

Session: Governance: The forgotten key to managing Cloud

We all want to use Cloud in our projects, and every customer I talk to has developers that want to pioneer their company's adoption of the latest and coolest stuff. But for every success story there is a painful admission: Crazy costs from unconstrained adoption; sensitive data suddenly stored somewhere it shouldn't be; technology gone wild as every project tries something new. The solution is governance, and making sure you, the developers and IT Pros who are advocating cloud in you organisations understand the management needed for successful adoption is key: When you convince your team to move to Azure you can get extra credit for helping your organisation move to the cloud without the pain. Whilst governance does not need tooling per se, Microsoft has a range of great tools in the Azure arsenal to help you.In this session I'll talk about the kinds of things that can go wrong, the simple things you can do to avoid them, and I'll show you the Azure tooling, some of it brand new, that will help you.

Session: Getting started with Azure Blueprints

This session will show you how to create and use Blueprints across your organisation with demonstrations of what Blueprints can do to bring consistent management to your Azure subscriptions and reduce business risk through doing so. Governance is a critical part of cloud success, and Azure has a range of tools that can be used to enforce how your services are deployed and managed. Using those tools in a consistent manner across a large estate of many subscriptions can be hard. Azure Blueprints gives you a way to templatise and standardise things like RBAC assignments and policies across many subscriptions.

Alex Mang - Microsoft RD, Azure MVP

Alex Mang is a Microsoft Regional Director and Azure Most Valuable Professional, working as a cloud architect, consultant, trainer, software developer but also regularly seen at conferences and user groups speaking mostly on cloud-computing topics. His main goal is to help developers better understand the implications of cloud-computing as a whole, from as many perspectives as possible. Alex was invited three times in a row as a featured speaker at Microsoft Ignite, the company’s largest and most important technical conference gathering nearly 35,000 attendees. Since 2011, Alex runs KeyTicket Solutions, a company focused on democratizing access control, ticketing and management solutions for every single vertical in the world. For his experience on cloud - driven solutions, his Microsoft Certified Trainer, Microsoft Certified Solution Developer(MCSD), Microsoft Certified Solution Associate(MCSA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert(MCSE) stand as proof and so do the many happy customers he had the pleasure to work with for the past many years.

Session: The Memoires Of A Windows Developer's Journey Towards Highly Scalable K8S Apps

Unless you've lived under a rock, you've heard the world talk about containers and specifically Docker and Kubernetes. And to some degree, you wanted to join the herd the people talking about these technologies, but felt overwhelmed with the new lexicon and awkward things which seemingly you have to learn.
By itself, Kubernetes is not necessarily a developer-friendly platform. Building, deploying, and testing microservice-oriented applications involves a lot of manual work and copious amounts of YAML.
Thankfully, Azure has the tools you need and makes Kubernetes approachable and productive for developers.But before using these powerful tools, you need to know how to harness them.
In this session, we’ll cover how to design and build microservice applications that can run on the Azure Kubernetes Service, including how to navigate from an app to a container to a Helm package and how to deploy into Kubernetes in a continuous way using Azure DevOps. We’ll also cover how you can use Azure Dev Spaces to develop an app that includes a couple of microservices to one which includes dozens or hundreds.

Magnus Mårtensson - Regional Director, Azure MVP and founder/CEO of Loftysoft AB

Magnus Mårtensson runs the company Loftysoft as a strategic consultant adviser, tutor, international speaker, process coach and technical lead. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional. In business as well as in life he is a true entertainer while being productive, smiles while being challenged and always gives more than is gained. He is man with a true consultant spirit and aims not to take life too seriously because he claims it’s more fun that way! Some of his passions are reaching out and connecting with audiences, engaging in community activities and organizing online and global conferences such as GlobalAzure Bootcamp and CloudBurst. Magnus focus on all things Cloudy and operates like a fighter pilot navigating cloudy skies helping clients safely harness the power and benefits the Clouds can bring. As the first Azure MVP in Scandinavia in 2012 he has been awarded MVP of the year and is now a go-to person for Microsoft in the Nordic countries regarding Enterprise Cloud Consulting. He is also a Microsoft Azure Insider and Microsoft Azure Advisor providing feedback even before early Microsoft releases to the Cloud Platform.

Session: Practical design patterns in the age of the Cloud

So many are thinking about, currently moving to, or are already in the cloud. Moving my old stuff from here to there is not all that difficult. Running a cloud-based workload, unlocking the true power of the platform, taking full advantage, saving money and creating applications that reach the globe is a little more challenging. Let's talk about the software design patterns that make sense in the age of the cloud, and let's ask the critical question - when to use which?

Karl Ots - Chief Consulting Officer & Azure MVP at Zure

Karl Ots is a cloud and cybersecurity consultant, as well as international speaker and trainer, with a broad range of deep Azure expertise. He believes that cloud technologies are the key to successful digital transformation. He applies his passion and expertise to his work as Chief Consulting Officer at Zure, the Azure-only consultancy. Karl is also an Azure MVP.<br>With professional experience in technology field since 2007, Karl has been working with Microsoft Azure since 2011 in a variety of forums ranging from deep customer engagements to speaking at largest tech conferences, such as Microsoft Ignite. Karl is a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

Session: Best practices of securing web applications running on Azure Kubernetes Service

The multitude of security controls and guidelines for both Kubernetes and Azure can be overwhelming. Based on real-life experiences from securing web applications running on Azure Kubernetes Service, Karl has compiled a list of best practices that bring these worlds together.
In this session, you will learn how to build, operate and develop secure web applications on top of Azure Kubernetes Service. After this session, you will know which security controls are available, how effective they are and what will be the cost of implementing them.

Adi Polak - Cloud Developer Advocate – Microsoft

Adi is an experienced Software Developer. You will often find her writing code, investigating software engineering problems, writing posts, speaking at conferences, and working with tech. Adi has an extensive experience in machine learning, high scale data systems, security, and JVM-based languages, including Java, Scala, and Kotlin.

Session: From desktop to the web with the cloud - cutting costs with Virtual Kublet and ACI

By running your workloads in Azure Container Instances (ACI), you can focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.
But wait! what about the cost?? When running containers in ACI, you are charged by the second for each running container.
However, with the Virtual Kubelet provider for Azure Container Instances, both Linux and Windows containers can be scheduled on a container instance as if it is a standard Kubernetes node. This configuration allows you to take advantage of both the capabilities of Kubernetes and the management value and cost benefit of container instances.
In this talk you will learn how to re: write JVM desktop app to a Web app and deploy them to ACI with Virtual Kublet for managing costs leveraging simplicity of ACI, scalability of Kubernetes and cost efficiency using Virtual kublet.

Sven Ruppert - Developer Advocate

Sven Ruppert has been coding Java since 1996 working as Developer Advocate for Vaadin and Oracle Developer Champion. He is regularly speaking at Conferences like Oracle Code/JavaOne/Jfokus/Devoxx/JavaZone/JavaLand and many more and contributes to IT periodicals, as well as tech portals.

Session: From desktop to the web with the cloud - cutting costs with Virtual Kublet and ACI

By running your workloads in Azure Container Instances (ACI), you can focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.
But wait! what about the cost?? When running containers in ACI, you are charged by the second for each running container.
However, with the Virtual Kubelet provider for Azure Container Instances, both Linux and Windows containers can be scheduled on a container instance as if it is a standard Kubernetes node. This configuration allows you to take advantage of both the capabilities of Kubernetes and the management value and cost benefit of container instances.
In this talk you will learn how to re: write JVM desktop app to a Web app and deploy them to ACI with Virtual Kublet for managing costs leveraging simplicity of ACI, scalability of Kubernetes and cost efficiency using Virtual kublet.

Alan Smith - Azure MVP

Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Microsoft Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Microsoft Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Microsoft Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Microsoft Azure.

Session: Azure Custom Vision for Developers

The Azure Custom Vision service enables users to easily train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for classification and object detection. These trained models can then be leveraged by custom vision applications as could-hosted services. The custom vision service also supports the exporting of trained models, allowing them to be used on-premise and on mobile devices for near-real time vision applications.
In this developer focused session Alan will start with the basics of neural networks and explain how they can be trained to clarify images. He will them move on to more complex convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and explain the details of object detection. TensorFlow and Keras will be used to demonstrate the training of basic image classification networks on-premise.
The use of the Azure Custom Vision service to train CNNs will be demonstrated using both classification and object detection examples with tips on techniques for training the networks effectively.The use of these trained networks will be demonstrated by calling the cloud - hosted services, as will as using and exported network model in an on-premise application for real - time object detection using a video stream.

Steef-Jan Wiggers - Azure Technology Consultant Codit

Steef-Jan is an Azure Technology Consultant for Codit in the Netherlands. He has over 20 years’ experience in a wide variety of scenarios such as custom .NET solution development, overseeing large enterprise integrations, designing and building API's and cloud solutions, managing projects, experimenting with data, mentoring, teaching and consulting. Steef-Jan loves challenges in the Microsoft playing field combining it with his domain knowledge in energy, utility, insurance, healthcare, agriculture, (local) government, bio-sciences, retail, travel, and logistics. He is very active in the community as a blogger, book author, InfoQ editor, and global public speaker. For these efforts, Microsoft has recognized him as a Microsoft MVP for the past nine years.

Session: The way of the exploding workflow – Become an Expert in an hour

“Do you want to be an awesome low-code developer?” You will become the expert, like a karateka reaching the 10th Dan after this session. Over the years you as a developer might have faced many versions of workflow like K2, SharePoint, or Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Furthermore, you might look for one in the cloud. Well, there’s some good news - the latest addition to the workflow in Azure is Logic Apps, a mature service enabling you to build business flows using a low-code approach. However, low-code you can still leverage your developer skills by integrating with Functions, leverage expressions, use inline code, fiddle around in the code-behind file of a workflow definition, and build ARM templates. Moreover, before you know it, you will many of them - performing all kinds of tasks, and integrations to support your business processes. In this session, we will go on a journey in my dojo to reach the 10th DAN using the analogy of the epic Commodore 64 game “the way of the exploding fist”!

Mike Wood - Lead Cloud Engineer

Mike builds and maintains cloud based products for a database performance company called SentryOne. He’s been obsessed with cloud computing since 2008, which has led to being awarded a Microsoft MVP in Azure each year since 2010, and the humbling opportunity to speak at conferences like this.

Session: A Tour of Azure Monitor

If an application throws exceptions and no logger is around to hear it, are you really violating your SLA? Sadly, in the rush to move to the cloud sometimes the decisions are mostly about how to get an application to live there, how to migrate existing servers, or, let's face it, what JavaScript framework to use. Only once the change is well underway does someone finally asks the question, "so, why is my app crashing?", or "what do you mean by logging ?". Azure Monitor provides a wealth of services and information about your resources without having to do much more than toggle some switches, even if the developers didn't think to include logging. Come learn about which switches you can toggle, but more importantly, about how to really leverage the wealth of data the Azure Platform can gather for you to truly support your systems.

Morten Christensen - Azure Hero at Umbraco

Morten works at Umbraco HQ where he helps build Umbraco Cloud, which is Umbraco (the CMS) as a Service. Morten is also an Azure MVP, Azure Lover and community addict. In Copenhagen he helps organize the Copenhagen .NET Usergroup, Azure Usergroup and Community focused conferences like MicroCPH and Azure Saturday. When he is not working on Azure, doing Community events you can find him either learning about new things in Azure or building LEGO sets (there should probably have been a "LEGO addict" part somewhere in this profile as well - according to his bank account statements).

Session: A practical approach to provisioning resources in Azure

Infrastructure as code is a hot topic these days, and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are terrific for creating environments with resource dependencies be it simple or complex scenarios. But sometimes you might want to take a slightly different approach and use C# rarther then Json and/or PowerShell. This is where the Azure Management Libraries come into play. In this session we will take a practical approach to creating Azure resources on-demand using the Azure Management Libraries for C#. Based on a specific use-case in Umbraco Cloud (umbraco.com/cloud) we will look at how we are creating Sql Azure databases in Elastic Database Pools on-demand through a service all C# and ARM based, and how we ensure proper utilization of the Elastic Pools. You will get insights into how we have approached provisioning resources in Azure in order to build a service that takes care of "everything", so we have less to worry about.

Alex Mang - CEO, KeyTicket Solutions

Alex Mang is a trainer, consultant, regular conference and user group speaker focusing mostly on cloud-computing topics, thus aiming to help developers better understand the implications of cloud-computing as a whole. Recently, Alex was invited as a featured speaker at Microsoft Ignite, the company’s largest and most important technical conference gathering nearly 30,000 attendees. This makes it the third year in a row when Alex is a speaker at Ignite, each time receiving overwhelming feedback for the real-world scenarios and solutions he shared. Since 2011, Alex is the KeyTicket Solutions CEO, where, besides his entrepreneurial responsibilities, his daily activities cover: project management, scrum master, senior software development for web, desktop and mobile apps and software architecture. For his experience on cloud-driven solutions, his Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD), Microsoft Certified Solution Associate (MCSA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) stand as proof and so do the many happy customers he had the pleasure to work with for the past few years.

Session: I'm Confused: Should I Orchestrate My Containers on Service Fabric or AKS

Service Fabric is terrific! Not only does it manage my cluster for my reliable services, but it also orchestrates containers. Azure Container Services is terrific! It’s the most popular orchestrator, with brilliant tooling with fabulous orchestration capabilities. So, which one is best for me? If you’ve ever wondered the same thing, this session is for you. If you want to get a browder picture on the two offerings, this session is for you. If you want to know what your life would have been life had you chosen *the other* road, this session is for you. If you want to have fun for, this session is for you. If you develop mainframe solutions based on Cobol, this session is NOT for you, but you’re more than welcome :-).

Magnus Mårtensson - Regional Director, Azure MVP and founder/CEO of Loftysoft AB

Magnus Mårtensson runs the companty Loftysoft as a strategic consultant advisor, tutor, international speaker, process coach and technical lead. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional. In business as well as in life he is a true entertainer while being productive, smiles while being challenged and always gives more than is gained. He is man with a true consultant spirit and aims not to take life too seriously because he claims it’s more fun that way! Some of his passions are reaching out and connecting with audiences, engaging in community activities and organizing online and global conferences such as GlobalAzure Bootcamp and CloudBurst. Magnus focus on all things Cloudy and operates like a fighter pilot navigating cloudy skies helping clients safely harness the power and benefits the Clouds can bring. As the first Azure MVP in Scandinavia in 2012 he has been awarded MVP of the year and is now a go-to person for Microsoft in the Nordic countries regarding Enterprise Cloud Consulting. He is also a Microsoft Azure Insider and Microsoft Azure Advisor providing feedback even before early Microsoft releases to the Cloud Platform.

Session: Handling a Global Multitenant Service

Handling, or monitoring and governing, your global service in the Cloud is not for the faint hearted. The Holy Grail is ever so elusive! Holy Grail meaning that Global Multitenant amazing Service that is going to take over the world and bring you lots of dough! Recent updates to Azure Monitoring create a clearer picture and providing for us more of a unified experience where all diagnosing, metrics, logs, alerting and more happens in one place. It’s like walking up to a “single pane of glass” where you can overview manage and act all in one place! Let us define the needs for monitoring a modern service hosted in the Cloud and walk through the landscape of services and features that makes this possible for us!

Aleksandar Nikolic - Microsoft MVP

Aleksandar Nikolic is a Microsoft Azure MVP, a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP, a co-founder of PowerShellMagazine.com, and a community manager of PowerShell.com. Aleksandar is also a Microsoft Azure Advisor. He has more than 18 years of experience as a system administrator. He also delivers Azure and PowerShell training courses around the world and is a frequent speaker at IT conferences such as MS TechDays, IT/Dev Connections, MMS, NIC, ExpertsLive, MS Sinergija, MS NTK, and PowerShell Conference Europe.

Session: Automation Tools for Azure Infrastructure

Automation is a key to fully embrace what Azure offers in a consistent and optimal manner. Various automation technologies exist to provision and manage Azure resources, but how to pick the right one? Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI 2.0? Use imperative commands or provision using the powerful, declarative ARM templates? Maybe best practice defaults with Azure Building Blocks are the right choice? Or, you would like to deploy complex topologies in an easy way with Terraform? Maybe you would prefer Ansible to automate cloud provisioning and configuration management? Join us to learn more about these automation technologies and pick your winner.

Kristof Rennen - Program Manager Azure Storage at Microsoft

Kristof Rennen is Program Manager Azure Storage at Microsoft, with over 13 years of experience in software development, architecture and design. Being in Cloud and Microsoft Azure for the past 7 years, his passion is building high quality, scalable and maintainable solutions, both on Microsoft and open source technology.

Session: Architecting Autonomous Driving Solutions on Azure

We have been seeing it in movies for years, cars that drive without any human intervention or interaction.What looks futuristic at first, is now being worked on by all car manufacturers. The ultimate goal is building a full Level 5 Autonomous Car.Though it might still take a couple of years (or decades) to achieve this, the technology investments are already happening today and the foundations are laid for these challenging projects.In order to build such cars and get these validated, massive data sets need to be processed and analyzed over an over again.The industry has set clear expectations and the validation of such "human replacement" scenarios are lengthy and very expensive.The goal is clear, build a car that can do better than a human … but can it?We will start by talking about the business side of things.What are the 5 levels of autonomous cars, where are we today and what are the (legal) requirements to bring these to market.We will also clearly sketch the challenges the industry is faced with and what they need to come up with in order to succeed over time.In the major part of the talk, we will go deeper into the architectural side of things. We will walk you through the complete end-to-end "reference" architecture of such solutions on Azure.Don't expect too many demos or code, but a true architectural talk on the challenges and solutions for massive scale.First we will explore the mass data ingestion challenge, expected to be in the PB range on a day to day basis. We will talk about the challenges around data redaction and master data management, in order to be allowed to use the data.Once these 2 pieces have been cleared out, we will go deeper on the mass compute and storage needs and the appropriate Azure architecture that can be leveraged to successfully build these kinds of solutions.To conclude, we will see a couple of these Azure services in a concrete and life scenario, like VMSS, Limitless Storage / ADLS v2, Azure Cycle and many more.

Dan Rosanova - Principal Program Manager and Product Owner at Microsoft

Dan Rosanova is the lead Program Manager and Product Owner for Microsoft Azure’s Messaging Services including Event Grid, Service Bus, Event Hubs, and Relay. He has a background as a software architect specializing in cloud computing, distributed systems, integration, and evolutionary computation. After more than a decade in technical consulting he shifted his focus to management consulting in technical fields focusing on lean principles. He is a five time Microsoft Integration MVP and author – as well as a snappy dresser.

Session: Big Data Streaming: How you can use Azure to build serverless pipelines

Azure Event Hubs is the streaming back plane of real time data in Azure, with the addition of Event Hubs for Apache Kafka™ this powerful cloud native service can provide you with the platform on which to build your streaming solutions using the same stream for real time and batch based processing. This talk will discuss how Event Hubs, Storage, Stream Analytics, Azure Container Instances, and Azure Functions can all be composed to provide robust and scalable streaming at a low cost.

Session: Azure Messaging: Why does Azure need five messaging services?

Queues, Event Grid, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Relay – yes, Azure has five different messaging services. In this session Dan will explain why Azure has all these different messaging services. The session will provide a brief introduction to the services and then discuss how they are intended to be used. It will also elaborate on the design decisions made for each service and how each has been purpose built to solve the specific challenge of its problem space. This session will answer once and for all why we need these separate services and how you should use each… as well as what will go wrong when you choose the wrong one.

Alan Smith - Azure MVP

Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Microsoft Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Microsoft Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Microsoft Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Microsoft Azure.

Session: Graph of Thrones, Cosmos DB vs. The Seven Kingdoms

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed multi-model database service. The Cosmos DB Graph API allows for the creation of sophisticated graph structures enabling the fast query and retrieval of complex hierarchical relationships. The Game of Thrones world features over 500 characters hailing from a complex web of houses, kingdoms and religions. Modelling, analysing and visualizing the complexity of the backgrounds and relations of these characters is a challenging task, and one that is well suited to a graph database model.
In this demo intensive session Alan will explain the concepts of graph databases. He will then show how a complex hierarchical dataset can be imported into Cosmos DB using the Graph API. The capabilities of the graph database can then be demonstrated, showing how queries can be executed against a graph model. The analysis of relationships will be explored, demonstrating the power of using a graph model to explore entities and the relations between them.
This session will be delivered in the common tongue and feature a large number of executions, but hopefully contain no major spoilers.

Michael Stephenson - Cloud Architect & Azure Trainer @ Connected Systems Consulting Ltd

Michael is a cloud and integration architect who is based in newcastle UK. Michael has worked with Microsoft Azure since it was first released and has delivered many projects with large customers around the world leveraging Azure. Michael has also been a Microsoft MVP for 10 years.

Session: From Small Business to World Domination with the Microsoft Cloud

The cloud, serverless and consumption based pricing has enabled small business to use the same technologies that big business is using in enterprise IT. This means that its possible for a small business with the right knowledge and skills to build solutions which take advantage of the latest technology and to pivot and react to changes in a way that gives them an advantage over larger enterprises. In this case we will look at a simulation of a retail scenario showing how you could leverage Azure to solve real world problems and create a solution which bigger competitors would be envious of.

Session: Empowering DevOps & Support Teams with Microsoft Flow

Unexpected or adhoc support processes are a pain and can drain the effectiveness of your DevOps team.. In this session Mike will show you an example of how the adoption of Microsoft Flow combined with technologies like Azure Functions and Powershell can allow the automation of some of these annoying tasks so they could be handed over to the front line support teams which frees up your team members to focus on higher value tasks. The example for this is based on a real world scenario involving Dynamics CRM in a multi-tenant multi country implementation.

Christian Weyer - Christian Weyer, CTO, Thinktecture AG

Christian Weyer is founder and CTO of Thinktecture AG. As a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional), Google GDE (Developer Expert) and independent Microsoft Regional Director for Germany, he is an engaged and passionated speaker on several software conferences and events all over the world. His heart has always been with cross-platform solutions and distributed end-to-end architectures - with his head in the Cloud since 2008.

Session: eXtreme Serverless Azure: Data, Compute, Realtime - in Action!

Whaaat? No servers? Well, yes. Serverless is all the hype these days. Let's try to sort out some of the real strengths of Serverless and see where Serverless & PaaS build a set of highly productive weapons in your Cloud arsenal. Join Christian Weyer from Thinktecture while he discusses Azure Functions, Storage, CosmosDB and SignalR Service in a holistic scenario - all by building an end-to-end solution that should 'just work' by the end of this session: creating a scalable real-time application in almost no time - really? Aaand action!

Tess Ferrandez - Principal Technical Evangelist

Tess is a developer and developer evangelist at Microsoft. She has a long background in .net development and analytics/debugging, and is equally happy developing beautiful algorithms as she is developing sweet User Interfaces. She has been blogging for the better part of her career, and spoken at lots and lots of conferences around the world.

Session: A developers guide to Machine Learning

Machine Learning is one of the fastest growing areas of computer science. Are you curious about Machine Learning, but think it just seems like too big of a mountain to climb? This talk is a beginners guide to machine learning and data science. We will cover everything from getting and massaging the data to publishing your model with Azure ML. You won't leave an expert data scientist but you will definitely be off to a running start.

Brady Gaster - Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager

Brady Gaster is a technical product marketing manager in the Developer Platform Technical Product Marketing team at Microsoft, where he aspires to excite customers by showing them how many tools and products Microsoft has to make it easy for them to party in the cloud. Brady likes to talk about his favorite technologies - Azure, Visual Studio Code extension development, ASP.NET, REST APIs, and IoT - on stage during sessions and in his blog at <a href="http://bradygaster.com/" target="_blank">bradygaster.com</a>. You can find Brady on Twitter at <a href="http://twitter.com/bradygaster/" target="_blank">@bradygaster</a> when he's not tinkering with code, or making music in his basement using various synthesizers, guitars, and turntables.

Session: Building for Azure using VS Code

With the introduction of .NET Core, many developers who have previously been married to Windows to do their .NET development are now investigating other platforms. By the same token, many non-Windows developers familiar to .NET now interested in trying it out but want tools to blur the line between local and cloud-based development. This session will target both audiences and take an intermediate-level tour of how to get started developing .NET Core applications using Visual Studio Code and a series of command-line utilities and extensions. We'll also take a look at non-.NET scenarios enabled by the variety of extensions supporting Azure developers who want to use Visual Studio Code to build other types of applications, manage their databases, and connect their devices to their machines using code. This session is a great introduction to all the great things Visual Studio Code offers Azure developers at all experience levels.

Saravana Kumar - Azure MVP and CTO of BizTalk360

Saravana Kumar is based in London and he is the founder and CTO of BizTalk360. A product focused on enhancing the administration, support, monitoring and operation side of Microsoft BizTalk Server. He got strong passion for BizTalk administration and management. He helps customer using BizTalk server to smoothly run their environments. He got over 18 years experience in IT, and over 12 years purely on Integration areas using BizTalk Server. Saravana is a frequent speaker in some of the top BizTalk groups across Europe. He is also the key person who runs the London Connected Systems user group, organising events and connecting people. He regularly writes articles in his blog at <a href="http://blogs.biztalk360.com/author/saravana/" target="_blank">http://blogs.biztalk360.com/author/saravana/</a> about topics related to integration. His blog has attracted over 11,000 daily visitors. He is the organiser of "Integration User Group" (#IntegrationMonday) along with fellow MVP (Michael Stephenson) a weekly webinar series where we bring speakers (including Microsoft product group) from all over the world to present about Integration topics. We are continuously doing this webinar since Jan 2015, crossing over 50 episodes now.

Session: Building a SaaS platform in Azure - challenges and lessons learned

Saravana has buit two SaaS products in Azure (BizTalk360 Cloud and ServiceBus360). He will speak about the challenges and technologies used in building a SaaS product in Azure.

Magnus Mårtensson - Regional Director, Azure MVP and founder/CEO of Loftysoft AB

Magnus Mårtensson runs the companty Loftysoft as a strategic consultant advisor, tutor, international speaker, process coach and technical lead. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional. In business as well as in life he is a true entertainer while being productive, smiles while being challenged and always gives more than is gained. He is man with a true consultant spirit and aims not to take life too seriously because he claims it’s more fun that way! Some of his passions are reaching out and connecting with audiences, engaging in community activities and organizing online and global conferences such as GlobalAzure Bootcamp and CloudBurst. Magnus focus on all things Cloudy and operates like a fighter pilot navigating cloudy skies helping clients safely harness the power and benefits the Clouds can bring. As the first Azure MVP in Scandinavia in 2012 he has been awarded MVP of the year and is now a go-to person for Microsoft in the Nordic countries regarding Enterprise Cloud Consulting. He is also a Microsoft Azure Insider and Microsoft Azure Advisor providing feedback even before early Microsoft releases to the Cloud Platform.

Session: ARM FTW – Azure Resource Manager For The Win

With the new model, Azure Resource Manger Microsoft are gaining the repeatability they always wanted to have for deployment to the Cloud and removing the dreary, repetitive, error prone manual deployment tasks which has always held us back! With ARM, you can create a Template for your environment and use that for deploying identical environments every time without fail! There is some news in the world of “infrastructure as code” that we need to consider while setting up our Cloud environments. The Win we get from being able to deploy our development environment or our temporary load test environment automatically and identically to our production environment cannot be understated. This is ARM from a project efficiency, development and DevOps perspective. This is what you need to know to make you much more efficient every day of development.

Session: Panel discussion!

Let's bring all the prominent speakers on stage and have a panel discussion! We will take questions from the audience and from Twitter #LIVE!

Darrel Miller - Senior Software Engineer Microsoft

Darrel is a software developer at Microsoft working for the Azure API Management team. He has been building distributed business applications on the Microsoft platform for more than 20 years. He is an active member of the .NET community and OSS contributor. He is a member of the OAI TDC, working on the next version of the OpenAPI specification and recently joined the Microsoft OneAPI Council, who are responsible for providing API design guidelines within Microsoft and to the Microsoft ecosystem. He co-authored the O'Reilly book, Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET.

Session: Azure API Management: Stories from the Road

Azure API Management launched in May 2014. It now processes more than 20 billion requests per month. Our customers range from tiny companies delivering popular mobile apps across Asia, to fortune 500 companies in traditional manufacturing industries. We have customers using API Management for many purposes. Some to protect their company’s primary product and others using it to create a fresh new interface to legacy systems. This session will present many of the lessons learned by both our team and our customers. We’ll discuss challenges our customers have faced and how they have used API management to overcome them. We will highlight real benefits experienced by our users and show many examples of how API Management can enhance your API ecosystem.

Sakari Nahi - Azure MVP

Sakari Nahi is the Coding Executive Officer and co-founder of Kompozure Ltd, a Finland-based company focusing in building challenging Microsoft Azure PaaS custom solutions since 2011. Sakari is also an Azure MVP. He is the co-host of the Finnish Microsoft-scene podcast Ikkunastudio (<a href="http://ikkunastud.io" target="_blank">http://ikkunastud.io</a>), as well as a key organizer of <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Finland-Azure-User-Group/" target="_blank">Finland Azure User Group</a>. Sakari has developed professionally since 2002 and Microsoft .NET 1.0. He identifies himself as a coder, and he is passionate about distributed PaaS solutions, emerging technologies, and synergies thereof.

Session: Barbarians as microservices inside Azure Service Fabric

In this presentation the crowd will get to play a multiplayer browser RPG game on their phones (graphics mostly imaginative though), and we'll explore Azure Service Fabric's service types, communication methods and reliable storage and transactions on the way. At the end only one microbarbarian can be victorious!

Karl Ots - Managing Consultant @ Kompozure

Mr. Karl Ots is an experienced consultant, patented inventor and international speaker with a broad range of Azure expertise. Karl has over ten years of experience in the technology field, ranging from industry-leading research to enterprise consulting. Karl has been working with Microsoft Azure since 2011 in a variety of forums ranging from customer engagements to speaking at 1:1000 events. Karl is a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and holds the MCSD and MCSE certifications. As one of the organizers of (<a href="https://www.meetup.com/preview/Finland-Azure-User-Group/" target="_blank">Finland Azure User Group</a>), Karl sparks the Azure light to the community by organizing IglooConf, meetups and the most northern Global Azure Bootcamp event.

Session: Security + DevOps + Azure = Awesomeness

In this session, I will cover the Secure DevOps Toolkit for Azure, a set of security-related tools, PowerShell modules, extensions and automations for Azure. The session is a collection of lessons learned using the Toolkit from real-life projects. After this sessions you will be able to improve the security of your Azure usage from IDE to Operations, regardless of your current state of security and level of cloud adoption.

Andrea Saltarello - Visual Studio and Development Technologies MVP, CEO @ Managed Designs

I am an entrepreneur and consultant in the Software Architecture field from Milan, Italy, serving as the CEO of Managed Designs while still being eager to write code in real projects in order to get feedback about my architectural decisions. I am the lead developer of MementoFX (<a href="https://www.nuget.org/profiles/mastreeno">https://www.nuget.org/profiles/mastreeno</a>), an event sourcing framework aimed at making the development of "time travelling software" a breeze. As a trainer and speaker, I had several speaking engagements for courses and conferences across Europe such as TechEd Europe, Codemotion and DevWeek; moreover, I taught "Operating Systems" during the "Master in Editoria Multimediale" class organized by the University "Politecnico of Milan". In 2001 I co-founded UGIdotNET(<a href="http://www.ugidotnet.org" target="_blank">http://www.ugidotnet.org</a>), the first Italian .NET User Group, of which I am the President and leader. I am passionate about music, being devoted to Depeche Mode, with whom I fell in love with since listening to Everything Counts for the first time.

Session: Azure tales: a real world CQRS and ES Deep Dive

Both CQRS and Event Sourcing are by no means the new kids on the block anymore, yet a lot can be told about how to use Azure’s PaaS to implement such patterns and unleash their power without having your costs soaring. The ingredients are: CosmosDB/MongoDB as the event storage, Service Bus as the events’ dispatcher, AppServices/Cloud Services/Service Fabric as the scalable, fault tolerant code cruncher, SQL Azure as the read model and ASP .NET Core as the application framework used to implement views and back-end services. Eager to know the recipe (and look at real code)? Don’t miss this talk then.

Alan Smith - Azure MVP

Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Microsoft Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Microsoft Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Microsoft Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Microsoft Azure.

Session: Building a Telemetry Pipeline with Azure Event Hubs, Azure Service Bus, Azure Stream Analytics and SignalR

On-line gaming, application monitoring and Internet of Things (IoT) projects often generate high volume telemetry streams. Processing these telemetry streams effectively, creating live reporting and archiving telemetry data for analysis can add great value to the solution. Microsoft Azure provides a number of highly scalable services that can be leveraged to create a scalable and highly available telemetry pipeline with minimal development and management overhead. Understanding how to work with these technologies effectively in your projects will be a valuable asset. In this demo intensive session Alan will build and demonstrate a telemetry pipeline for an on-line racing game using Azure Service Bus Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging, Azure Storage, SignalR and an Azure Web App.He will show how the services can be created, configured and integrated with each other in a matter of minutes. The telemetry pipeline will feature an archive channel to store driver telemetry data and a web based live driver tracker hosted in Azure.He will also cover the usage of this architecture for the Global Racing Game Lab that featured at the 2017 Global Azure Bootcamp showing how the services held up in a real - world high load scenario.

Elton Stoneman - Azure MVP | Pluralsight Author | Developer Advocate @Docker

I'm a Pluralsight Author, Microsoft MVP and Developer Advocate at Docker, Inc. I've been architecting and delivering successful solutions with Microsoft technologies since 2000, most recently Big Data and API implementations in Azure, and distributed applications with Docker. Currently I'm interested the evolution of the Microsoft stack, exploring the great opportunities opening up with .NET Framework apps running in Windows containers, .NET Core apps running in Linux containers, and running Docker on Azure. I'm a regular speaker at events and user groups - you'll often see me at Docker London, London DevOps and WinOps. In 2017 I've spoken at NDC London, OSCAMP, DockerCon, SDD, DevSum and NDC Oslo.

Session: Power Your Move to Azure with Docker

Docker isn't just for greenfield .NET Core apps running in Linux containers. You can take existing full .NET Framework apps and package them to run in Docker - without changing any source code. That package is called a Docker Image, and it's a portable unit that contains your whole application stack, configured and ready to run in a container. Packaging apps in Docker is a great way to make the move to Azure. You can quickly build out your components as a set of images, and run them in containers locally to verify the solution works. Then you can spin up a Docker cluster in Azure, and deploy your app using the exact same Docker artifacts that you use in dev. In this session I'll take an n-tier .NET application, write some Dockerfiles to package the components as Docker images, and a Docker Compose file which describes the whole solution. I'll run the app on my laptop, and then create a Docker Swarm in Azure and deploy the app without making any changes.

Sam Vanhoutte - Azure MVP, CTO Codit

Sam Vanhoutte is CTO and Product Manager with Codit. Based in Belgium, Sam is a 4th year Microsoft Azure MVP and frequently speaks at conferences. Next to that, he is also Azure p-seller at Microsoft and has extensive experience in building integrated enterprise, IoT and cloud based solutions. Because of the specialized focus on Azure IoT, Sam is leading the Codit Azure IoT Elite partner program with the Azure IoT Engineering team, as one of only 5 partners, world wide. Sam co-founded the BizTalk User Group in Belgium (<a href="http://www.btug.be/" target="_blank">http://www.btug.be/</a>) and is active crew member of the Azure User group (<a href="http://www.azug.be/" target="_blank">http://www.azug.be/</a>).

Session: Living on the edge; IoT scenarios with Azure IoT edge

In this session, Sam will dive deep into the new Azure IoT edge service that allows customers to build intelligent IoT solutions, combining the power of data intensive and low latency edge compute scenarios with the distributed, scalable power of the Azure cloud. Attendees will learn more about the architecture, use cases and programming possibilities of Azure IoT Edge and will understand how this technology can be applied to make modern IoT solutions in different industries. Expect a session with architecture design, scenarios and a lot of demos.

Maarten Balliauw - Microsoft

Maarten Balliauw loves building web applications developed in ASP.NET (C#) or PHP and the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Maarten also co-founded <a href="http://www.myget.org/" target="_blank">MyGet</a>, hosting private NuGet, npm and Bower feeds for teams. He's a former Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Azure. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events.

Session: Sherlock Homepage - A detective story about running large web services

The site was slow. CPU and memory usage everywhere! Some dead objects in the corner. Something terrible must have happened! We have some IIS logs. Some traces from a witness. But not enough to find out what was wrong. In this session, we’ll see how effective telemetry, a profiler or two as well as a refresher of how IIS runs our ASP.NET web applications can help solve this server murder mystery.

Anton Boyko - Azure MVP

Founder and main speaker at Ukrainian Microsoft Azure Community. Builds apps based on Microsoft Azure platform since 2011. Microsoft Azure technical expert. During free time creates new videos about Microsoft Azure for his own YouTube channel. Microsoft Azure MVP since 2014. Owner and one of the organizers of the most popular Microsoft Azure conferences in Ukraine: Azure Day and Global Azure Bootcamp.

Session: Build, deploy and manage your releases with Visual Studio Team Services

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of projects where engineers deploy their apps using "Right click -> Deploy -> Production" approach. This is sad, but true. At some point we can face this just because no one knows how to configure a build server, how to automate deployment process. And, for some reason, a lot of engineers believe that it is some super complicated stuff. During my speech I will talk about general approaches for automating build, deployments and managing releases. After short talk we will go straight to the demos. In no more than 15 minutes I will configure automated build process for my app and automated deploy to several different environments. I will wrap all of this in release management pipeline and show how to make the entire release process transparent for all team members.

Mats Iremark - Solution Architect Collector Bank

Mats is working as a Solution Architect at Collector Bank with focus on solutions in the Azure cloud. Has a special interest in everything that has do do with Devops. After studying engineering physics he went on to be a poker professional for 6 years and is one of few swedes who has won a European Poker Tour tournament. He has also worked alot with Elasticsearch, primarily when it comes to centralized logging but also visualization big data within the fintech sector.

Session: Elasticsearch in Azure – Lessons learned and tips

Mats will be telling his story about their Elasticsearch clusters in Azure. How can you secure Elastic in Azure? What special considerations when running in the Cloud? How can Elasticsearch be combined with Service Bus, Event Hub etc?

Session: Elasticsearch in Azure – Lessons learned and tips

Mats will be telling his story about their Elasticsearch clusters in Azure. How can you secure Elastic in Azure? What special considerations when running in the Cloud? How can Elasticsearch be combined with Service Bus, Event Hub etc?

Alex Mang - Azure MVP

Alex Mang is an Azure MVP and regular conference and user groups speaker focusing mostly on cloud-computing topics, thus aiming to help developers better understand the implications of cloud-computing as a whole. As an Azure Advisor, he regularly offers Azure teams in Redmond feedback on upcoming Azure features and services. Alex dedicates a lot of his time developing his ISV involved in the event management and ticketing industry and also invests lots of time teaching software architectural and cloud computing patterns at user groups, conferences and privately-owned companies around Europe. Whenever he’s not in the office, he’s either recording video tutorials with O’Reilly, giving software development trainings, writing articles or working on open-source Azure-related libraries in GitHub repos.

Session: SQL Database from A Developer’s Perspective

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.

Magnus Mårtensson - Regional Director, Azure MVP and founder/CEO of Loftysoft AB

Magnus Mårtensson runs the companty Loftysoft as a strategic consultant advisor, tutor, international speaker, process coach and technical lead. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional. In business as well as in life he is a true entertainer while being productive, smiles while being challenged and always gives more than is gained. He is man with a true consultant spirit and aims not to take life too seriously because he claims it’s more fun that way! Some of his passions are reaching out and connecting with audiences, engaging in community activities and organizing online and global conferences such as GlobalAzure Bootcamp and CloudBurst. Magnus focus on all things Cloudy and operates like a fighter pilot navigating cloudy skies helping clients safely harness the power and benefits the Clouds can bring. As the first Azure MVP in Scandinavia in 2012 he has been awarded MVP of the year and is now a go-to person for Microsoft in the Nordic countries regarding Enterprise Cloud Consulting. He is also a Microsoft Azure Insider and Microsoft Azure Advisor providing feedback even before early Microsoft releases to the Cloud Platform.

Session: Serverless Compute with Azure Functions

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 actually planted 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 are able to 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!

Mike Martin - Azure MVP. Lead Consultant & Architect @ Crosspoint Solutions

As a Microsoft Lead Consultant and Architect at Crosspoint Solutions (part of the Cronos group), a company with a strong focus on BI, Data and CRM, Mike is mainly focused on the complete Microsoft product stack and therefore very flexible to work with. He’s been active in the IT industry for over 18 years and has performed almost all types of job profiles, going from coaching and leading a team to architecting and systems design and training. Today he’s primarily into the Microsoft Cloud Platform and Application Lifecycle Management. He’s not a stranger to both dev and IT Pro topics, they even call him the perfect hybrid solution. In January 2012 he became a crew member of AZUG, the Belgian Microsoft Azure User Group. As an active member he’s both involved in giving presentations and organizing events. Mike is also a Microsoft Azure MVP (already awarded 4 times) and an Azure Advisor. Helping out in the community and introducing new & young people into the world of Microsoft and technology is also one of his passions.

Session: Micros …. err Microcosmos: the take on Azure, Nano and containers

It has evolved. We went from client to client-server to services, and with that we went from hardware to virtualization to … containerized deployments. There’s some new kids in town. The big beast of a whale called Docker (although it has a small footprint, pun intended ), a teeny tiny Microsoft solution named Nano (although that flag doesn’t completely cover the cargo container (again pun intended)). The technology that build our virtualized DC’s is now enabling us containerized deployments. Hyper-V at its core and tools that you already have make this an easy entry.

Session: Micros …. err Microcosmos: the take on Azure, Nano and containers

Microsoft Hates Open Source. No wait .. back up, erase, rewind. Microsoft Loves Open Source! And to put it even further Microsoft became open source too. This session is on how today modern open source technologies can live on Azure and can be used to get a full OSS DevOps tech strategy too. Ranging from cross platform tools to full Linux support. Deployments through Chef and Puppet up onto platforms as Docker for app deployment. It as an overview with pointers to all important pieces that you can use!

Session: March Of The Penguins: Azure, OSS and DevOps

Microsoft Hates Open Source. No wait .. back up, erase, rewind. Microsoft Loves Open Source! And to put it even further Microsoft became open source too. This session is on how today modern open source technologies can live on Azure and can be used to get a full OSS DevOps tech strategy too. Ranging from cross platform tools to full Linux support. Deployments through Chef and Puppet up onto platforms as Docker for app deployment. It as an overview with pointers to all important pieces that you can use!

Joachim Nässlander - Technical Solution Professional - Azure

Joachim Nässlander has been working with Microsoft infrastructure since Windows NT 4 was modern. Various positions has given him a perspective on all parts of the IT industry. He was awarded as an Microsoft MVP for five years and in 2009 IDG IT Business Awards awarded him “IT Consultant of the year”. You might have seen him earlier as a speaker at TechEd, The Experts Conference or TechDays. Nowadays you find him at Microsoft where he helps customers understand, design and implement solutions in Microsoft Azure.

Session: Azure ARM – Will the resource manager make my life easier?

In the beginning Azure was all about cloud services and co-admins. These days we have ARM, Azure Active Directory and a shiny new portal. We’ll take a look at the portal and go through how role based access control (RBAC) works with various roles, and how you can grant or limit access to your code or infrastructure. We’ll also look at how you can deploy brand new stuff into Azure using ARM templates, making your life a whole lot easier!

Barry O'Reilly - Chief Solutions Architect

Barry is currently Chief Solutions Architect for Microsoft Consulting Service Western Europe. He has a background in distributed systems, SOA, and IoT. At Microsoft he has served as the global lead for the Solution Architects Community, the IoT Lead for Western Europe, and was a founder of the Swedish Windows Azure User Group. He is one of nine CITA-P certified Architects in Sweden and a regular presenter at internal Microsoft events.

Session: Preparing for IoT - what Architects and Developers need to know for real world projects

Beyond the hype curves and estimating the numbers of devices in the future, real world IoT projects are steadily providing results for customers all over the world. This session aims to give an overview of what Azure Developers and Architects need to know in order to be effective and hit the ground running.

Mark Simms - Principal Group Program Manager, Azure CAT Architect, Microsoft

Mark is a Principal Group Program Manager on the AzureCAT (Azure Customer Advisory Team), working on large-scale Azure architecture and implementation. He also manages the patterns & practices team, delivering proven approach and guidance to building large scale cloud applications. Specialties: Cloud architecture and implementation, Internet of Things (IoT) back end services, real-time analytics, distributed architecture and applications, hybrid cloud applications, big data approaches.

Session: Building concurrent data pipelines in .NET

Pluggable, dynamic pipelines are a common pattern leveraged in highly scalable, responsive .NET applications and services. This talk will cover how to design, implement and monitor data pipeline patterns in .NET, with a specific eye towards handling asynchronous I/O, variable timeouts and external dependencies, concurrency, backpressure and error handling. Implementation techniques will be demonstrated with TPL Data Flow, targeting pipelines that can handle in excess of a million events per second.

Session: Instrumentation, monitoring and diagnostics at scale for .NET back-end services

Live monitoring and diagnostics is crucial for operating services at scale. Delivering an effective, integrated monitoring and diagnostics solution for .NET applications requires careful design and implementation choices to deliver the necessary insight without adversely affecting performance. This talk will dive into both the planning approach (what insight is required for monitoring and diagnostics) as well as specific techniques for delivering an end to end experience (with Serilog, AppInsights and others).

Session: Building a real-time monitoring solution via Docker with Grafana, InfluxDB, logstash, collectd and friends

Live monitoring and diagnostics is crucial for operating services at scale. By leveraging a combination of common tools for collecting data from running services (logstash, collectd, statsd, etc) together with analytics and visualization tools (graphite, grafana) an integrated monitoring experience can be quickly deployed leveraging Docker containers. This talk will dive into both planning (what insight is required for monitoring and diagnostics) and delivery (configuration, deployment and customization).

Session: Building concurrent data pipelines in .NET

Live monitoring and diagnostics is crucial for operating services at scale. By leveraging a combination of common tools for collecting data from running services (logstash, collectd, statsd, etc) together with analytics and visualization tools (graphite, grafana) an integrated monitoring experience can be quickly deployed leveraging Docker containers. This talk will dive into both planning (what insight is required for monitoring and diagnostics) and delivery (configuration, deployment and customization).

Prabhjot Singh Bakshi - Regional Director and Azure MVP

Prabhjot Singh Bakshi is From India, He is the founder director of Getwings Technologies Private Limited, He is also the Vice President -Operations at BSP IT & Communication. Since 2014, he has been extensively working with the country's top Accelerators & Incubators. He closely work with CEOs of start-ups in creating awareness & educating them on their Azure Journey starting from enrolling for Bizspark program. He has been instrumental in driving the Azure adoption in the start-up eco system. As a Microsoft certified Trainer Alumni with strong community connect, he has built a strong working relationship with Microsoft. He is imparting corporate technology training to a number of leading IT giants of India & regularly does consultancy assignment for them. For his work and contribution towards Community he has been awarded and recognized as Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional on Azure.

Session: Logic Apps and BizTalk are "Better Together"

Logic Apps lso works with Biztalk Server to form the core of our enterprise integration story, along with our API Management and Massaging service (Azure Service Bus). Making it possible to leverage current BizTalk server Investment to connect to SaaS applications.

Alan Smith - Azure MVP

Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Microsoft Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Microsoft Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Microsoft Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Microsoft Azure.

Session: Azure Service Fabric Reliable Actors

The actor model adopts the philosophy that everything is an actor. It provides a pattern for concurrent communication allowing discrete units of computation called “Actors”. Actors maintain their own private state and interact with the outside world, and other actors using messages.

Microsoft Azure Service Fabric introduces Reliable Actors, building on the Virtual Actor pattern to provide a programming model build on the scalability and reliability of the Azure Service Fabric platform.

In this session Alan will show how Service Fabric Reliable Actors can be leveraged in cloud-based applications. Starting with a detailed overview of the actor model explaining the key concepts of the actor model the session will introduce telemetry processing for a fitness application as a scenarios.The implementation of this scenario will then be demonstrated, showing how the functionality of Reliable Actors can be used to implement the concurrent processing of multiple telemetry streams.

Teemu Tapanila - Azure MVP & Lead Microsoft Developer at Magine

Teemu Tapanila is a solution-oriented technical professional with focus Azure and mobile. He believes that cloud technologies and great user experience are the keys to successful digital transformation. He applies his passion and expertise to his work at Telia Company. Teemu has been working with Microsoft Azure since 2011 in a variety of forums ranging from customer advisory to conference presentations.

Session: A/B Testing, Performance Testing and Testing in Production with Azure Web Apps

The only way to know if your system is working properly and in optimal state is to test it. However, testing is complex and time consuming especially when you want to do all different kind of testing. Come and see Teemu demonstrate the tools and techniques that are required to test your software and really leverage your Azure Web App investment.

Nuno Godinho - Azure MVP

Session: Architecture Best Practices in Microsoft Azure

When building solutions for the Cloud it is critical to understand that every architecture decision has even more impacts than before as a bad code might get you out of business. For this reason in this session we will be focusing on:

• Breaking down the baseline concepts of Cloud design
• Defining the critical considerations which we should have when designing new Cloud solutions
• Looking at Architectural Patterns which can help us succeed in this space, like Microservices, CQRS and Event Sourcing
• Looking at real life examples of Azure Cloud Architectures, the trade-offs and results
• Lessons Learned Building Azure Solutions

Rik Hepworth - Azure MVP & and IT Director at Black Marble

Rik is a Microsoft MVP for Azure and IT Director at Black Marble, a Gold partner in the north of England. His role includes delivering robust IT solutions to both his own organisation and its customers, which can take in a broad spectrum of technologies. An enthusiastic technology evangelist, Rik is a regular presenter at events around Europe. Cloudburst will be his first trip to Sweden, and he’s looking forward to it!

Session: The ART of modern Azure Deployments

Azure Resource Manager is the future of how your services are deployed within Microsoft’s public cloud. Azure Resource Templates are a powerful tool to reliably deploy entire services and essential knowledge for anyone developing Azure solutions today. In this session we’ll talk about what templates are and how they are constructed, create and deploy templates, and look at the tools for seeing what’s happening (and what’s gone wrong).

Simon Jäger - Microsoft Technical Evangelist

Simon Jäger is a part of a team (Developer Experience and Platform Evangelism) at Microsoft that builds world-class software and delivers great developer engagements - he works on helping strategic partners and customers to succeed on the Microsoft platform. As a Technical Evangelist, his role is extremely agile. His engagements are diverse, encompassing everything from architectural guidance, hands-on assistance to deep technical investments. Throughout the years he has been coding for numerous of projects for the Microsoft platform and holds a deep passion for cloud architecture and application development. His main focus is currently within cloud technologies and cloud technology oriented partners. Additionally, Simon leads talks about cloud services and application development on current mobile, computer and console devices, and the next generation of products in the connected age of technology.

Session: Identity Management as a Service (IDMaaS): Developing modern solutions with Azure Active Directory

Identity and security is becoming an increasingly important capability required by developers and organizations when building modern applications and services. In addition to that, we are expected to deliver across a large and expanding set of devices and operating systems. As developers we need tools and resources to natively address each individual platform in an effective and robust manner. With Azure Active Directory, we have access to a feature-rich platform that helps us on our journey to achieve that. In this session (intended for developers) you will learn how to use Azure Active Directory to easily secure your solutions – regardless of which platform or programming language that makes you tick!

Michele Leroux Bustamante - Regional Director, Azure MVP, CIO & Architect at Solliance

Michele Leroux Bustamante is a founder and CIO of Solliance (solliance.net), a Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft Azure MVP. Additionally she has been awarded Azure Elite and Azure Insider status as well as the ASP.NET Insider designation. Michele is a thought leader recognized in many fields including software architecture and design, identity and access management (IAM), cloud computing technologies, security and compliance, and DevOps. She shares experiences through presentations and keynotes all over the world and has been publishing regularly her entire career. Michele wrote the best-selling book ''Learning WCF'' (O'Reilly 2007) and Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions (MS Press 2015).

Session: Design Practices for a secure Azure solution

When companies endeavor to move their applications and services to the cloud, they tend to worry more about security up front. Interestingly, platforms such as Azure provide an even more secure environment than most self-managed co-location facilities can hope to offer, not to mention the plethora of features on the platform that help you secure your solutions end to end. In this session Michele will review the mini-avalanche that comprises Azure security across all features. Taking the architect's view of the platform, she’ll cover best practices for securing Azure solutions end to end and discuss the tangential benefits of moving to Azure and how it can help you with checking the boxes on those pesky security surveys.

Session: Top 6 Decisions You’ll Make on Azure

The decisions you make during the design phase of an Azure solution tend to stick with you as you gain momentum delivering features. If you have a green field application, you have the luxury of weighing those decisions up front. If you are brown field - understanding the choices may help you lead to a migration path that creates efficiencies for you later on. In this session, Michele will explore decisions related to the various PaaS and IaaS features of the platform. Why would you choose a Web App over Virtual Machines? Do you need API management? When is SQL Server or Azure SQL Database appropriate? Should you use Web Jobs or Worker Roles for async and scheduled tasks? How do you choose between Service Bus queues, topics or event hubs? Is Azure AD the right fit for your identity requirements? All this in just one session - you may need a coffee first!

Magnus Mårtensson - Regional Director, Azure MVP and founder/CEO of Loftysoft AB

Magnus Mårtensson runs Loftysoft AB as a strategic consultant advisor, tutor, international speaker, process coach and technical lead. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional. In business as well as in life he is a true entertainer while being productive, smiles while being challenged and always gives more than is gained. He is man with a true consultant spirit and aims not to take life too seriously because he claims it’s more fun that way! Some of his passions are reaching out and connecting with audiences, engaging in community activities and organizing online and global conferences such as GlobalAzure Bootcamp and CloudBurst. Magnus focus on all things Cloudy and operates like a fighter pilot navigating cloudy skies helping clients safely harness the power and benefits the Clouds can bring. As the first Azure MVP in Scandinavia in 2012 he has been awarded MVP of the year and is now a go-to person for Microsoft in the Nordic countries regarding Enterprise Cloud Consulting. He is also a Microsoft Azure Insider and Microsoft Azure Advisor providing feedback even before early Microsoft releases to the Cloud Platform.

Session: Distributed Computing made easy with Azure Service Fabric

Service Fabric is a state-of-the-art distributed system that allows developers to easily build and IT-Pros to easily manage large scale, highly resilient services for your Enterprise. We are all going through the same transition with our businesses: We want our services to be quick to build and maintain, effective to manage, preferably cheap, but also robust and resilient enough to reach Internet scale without falling apart. Microsoft has solved this challenge is now making available to everyone the Platform they built for running and hosting global services with the highest availability demands, such as Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, and Bing Cortana. This session will give an overview of Service Fabric, share some war stories from using it and show some examples which will open your eyes to a great new world of distributed, infinitely scalable services that cannot die! Platform services PaaS is the future of the Cloud!

Dan Rosanova - Senior Program Manager and Product Owner at Microsoft

Dan Rosanova is the Senior Program Manager and Product Owner for Microsoft Azure Service Bus (Messaging, Event Hubs, Relay). He has a background as a software architect specializing in cloud computing, distributed systems, integration, and greenfield development on Microsoft platforms. After more than a decade in technical consulting he shifted his focus to management consulting in technical fields focusing on lean principles. He is a five time Microsoft Integration MVP and author – as well as a snappy dresser.

Session: WTF is happening in my telemetry pipeline: how to monitor and debug your Event Hubs solutions

Event Hubs is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing services in cloud history. In six months we went from launch to a trillion messages, but delivering lots of data fast isn’t enough. When you build a solution on Event Hubs we can give you scale, but you need to be able to figure out how your solution is performing and where it is weak. This session will be a deep dive into scale and availability aspects of Event Hubs followed by an outline of what tools you can use to determine the performance of your Event Hubs based solution and see what is really happening.

Session: Available, Scalable, and Predicatble: How to Use Azure Service Bus to bring reliability to the cloud

This session will focus on best practices and new capabilities in Azure Service Bus that will enable you to build cloud solutions integrated with a powerful messaging platform. In addition to showing you how to use the service we will talk extensively about how the service works (as in why to use it in those particular ways). Topics covered will include client capabilities, temporal control, eventual vs instantaneous consistency models, transactions, and availability & redundancy and runtime aspects.

Alan Smith - Azure MVP

Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Microsoft Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Microsoft Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Microsoft Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Microsoft Azure.

Session: Going Global developing Game Services in Microsoft Azure

The Global Azure Racing Game Lab was used at the Global Azure Bootcamp by over 400 attendees at 50 locations in 30 countries. The game made use of many Microsoft Azure services including the Service Bus, Blob and Table Storage, Worker Roles and Web Apps. Alan Smith developed the lab and during the event he acted as race control, ensuring that the game was running smoothly and scaling to meet the loads that were generated during the event. This demo intensive session will demonstrate how game services can be implemented on the Azure platform. The implementation of storage strategies for non-relational Table Storage will be covered along with techniques to implement achievements, high-score tables and a cheating and banning service.

Michael Stephenson - Integration MVP

Mike Stephenson is a UK based integration and cloud specialist who has been a Microsoft MVP for 7 years and is also part of the Microsoft Advisor and Insider programmes. Mike has extensive real world experience on many Cloud projects using Microsoft Azure and is also an author for Pluralsight. Recently Mike has launched a new workshop called "From Zero to Cloud in 1 day" which is aimed at helping organisations and individuals begin their journey to the cloud using Microsoft Azure.

Session: Real world 2 speed IT - Powered by Microsoft Azure & Integration

The modern world IT is often about bigger, faster cheaper. Although we still need to support and develop traditional solutions, the modern business places demands on IT which many organisations struggle to deliver. In this session Mike will talk about some real world examples where Microsoft Azure has been used to empower IT to deliver great solutions in the sprinter side of this 2 speed IT model. Mike will also show how Azure & Minecraft was used at a UK based university to demonstrate the art of the possible when adopting the cloud.

Session: Hybrid Connectivity Options with the Microsoft Cloud

There are many ways you can connect the cloud and your on premise applications using Microsoft Azure. How do you decide which is the right one to use? In this session Michael will discuss some of the options available including Azure networking, Azure Service Bus and Azure BizTalk Hybrid Connections. We will discuss some of the pro’s and cons of each and examples of where they have been used in real world projects.

Teemu Tapanila - Azure MVP & Lead Microsoft Developer at Magine

Teemu Tapanila knows that cloud, mobile applications and new services will change this world. He speaks in usergroup meetings, conferences and events worldwide. Teemu has wide knowledge around multiple different topics related to web, mobile, cloud and scalable services. He has been chosen as Microsoft Azure MVP (Most Valuable Professional), Azure Insider and Azure Advisor

Session: Building Logical Mobile App backed by API

Azure App Service is new architecture that allows developers to build and publish Microservices to the Azure Platform. These can be used to build workflows, API's and mobile applications. This session will give an overview of all services and then focus on the integration between these services by showcasing an example implementation.

Maarten Balliauw - Microsoft Azure MVP

Maarten Balliauw is a Technical Evangelist at JetBrains. His interests are all web: ASP.NET MVC, PHP and Microsoft Azure. Maarten also co-founded MyGet, hosting private NuGet feeds for teams. He's a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Azure and an ASPInsider. He has published many articles in both PHP and .NET literature such as MSDN magazine and PHP architect. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events.

Session: Give some cash, get more than cache! The Microsoft Azure (Redis) Cache

The Microsoft Azure Redis Cache must be the fourth or fifth generation of a hosted cache service on Azure. This time, an open-source solution has been embraced: Redis. In this session, we’ll see that it’s more than just an in-memory cache system we can use in our applications. Let’s explore what Redis is, what the different data types are and why we should care. And once we grasp how Redis stores its stuff, we’ll delve into how we can use it to its fullest extent: searching the key-value store, transactions, pub/sub support and scripting.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Sergey Bykov - Principal Dev Lead with Microsoft Research leading Project "Orleans"

Sergey Bykov joined Microsoft in 2001 and worked in several product groups, such as e-Business Servers, Embedded Devices, and Online Services, before moving to Research in 2008. He’s been working on Project “Orleans” since its inception, and is leading the team that keeps innovating to bring more exciting features to the platform.

Session: Project “Orleans” -- Cultivating scalable cloud services with grains and silos

Interactive cloud services demand a stateful compute tier. The requirements of high throughput, low latency, high availability and scalability made the already challenging task of building distributed systems unattainable for the majority of developers. Project “Orleans” was conceived to address these challenges by making distributed programming qualitatively easier and providing “scalability by default”. This talk will cover the programming model of “Orleans”, the architecture of its runtime, and some of the patterns successfully implemented by major customers of “Orleans”, such as Halo.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Simon Elliston Ball - Head of the Big Data team at Red Gate

Simon is a head of the Big Data team at Red Gate, focusing on researching and building tools to interact with Big Data platforms. Previously he has worked in the data intensive worlds of hedge funds and financial trading, ERP and e-Commerce, as well as designing and running nationwide networks and websites. These days his head is in Big Data and visualisation. In the course of those roles, he’s designed and built several organisation-wide data and networking infrastructures, headed up research and development teams, and designed (and implemented) numerous digital products and high-traffic transactional websites. For a change of technical pace, he writes and produces screencasts on front-end web technologies such as ExtJS, and is an avid NodeJS programmer. In the past he has also edited novels, written screenplays, developed web sites and built a photography business.

Session: Implementing Machine Learning Without a PhD - How building SkyNet in the Cloud just got so much easier.

Machine Learning is for people with a dozen PhDs and a copy of R. Right? Wrong. Azure ML opens up machine learning to use regular folks. You'll still need to understand the basic principals, which we will cover in a quick introduction to machine learning. Then we can bring data in from across a variety of Azure services, and use some of the powerful models included with Azure ML. The models let you build a recommendation engine, calculate classification and clustering of complex data sets, and even predict the future (some caveats may apply)! We'll also look at how to build complex machine learning models with Azure ML, but more importantly, how to push those models to production and integrate them into you applications.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Scott Klein - Microsoft Azure Technical Evangelist

Scott Klein is a Microsoft Azure Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, focusing on SQL Server and Microsoft Azure data services, including Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Microsoft Azure Storage, and SQL Server in a VM. Scott has been working with SQL Server for over 20 years. Prior to Microsoft Scott was one of the first 4 SQL Azure MVPs. Scott is the author of over 1/2 dozen books, including Pro SQL Database for Windows Azure by APress. He can also be found speaking at conferences and events around the world, such as TechEd, TechDays, SQLConnections, SQL PASS, and SQL Saturdays.

Session: Pillaging and Plundering like a True Pirate with Microsoft Azure

Being a pirate on the high seas is hard work. Endless days at sea not knowing when you’ll run into a ship carrying precious bounty, keeping track of your ill-gotten booty, and then wondering what you’re going to do with all your spoils. Being a true pirate takes skill and cunning, and knowing the tools and technologies available to be able to stay ahead of your competition. It is a lot like being a developer. Endless days of coding not knowing when you’ll pop out your man-cave, keeping track of projects and deadlines, and then wondering what you’re going to do with all your old tech books. Microsoft Azure to the rescue. This session will discuss the exciting new Azure services released in the past couple of months and how these new services will help you stay ahead of your competition and reap the precious bounty you deserve! What are these services? Come to my session and find out or you’ll be walking the plank! AAAAAR!

Session: Why Azure SQL Database Matters

Microsoft is making huge investments in Azure SQL Database; their relational database service. With their recent announcement of new service tiers and new mission-critical features and enhancements to the service, Azure SQL Database is positioned as the “go-to” option for cloud-designed business applications. In this session we will highlight the new mission-critical capabilities and discuss how and when to apply them into the design of your applications to achieve the necessary business continuity and performance required in your organization.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Magnus Mårtensson - Microsoft Azure MVP

Magnus Mårtensson is a true entertainer while being productive, smiles while being challenged and always gives more than is gained. He is man with a true consultant spirit and aims not to take life too seriously because he claims it’s more fun that way! With an open mind his way is that great business must also be fun. Some of his passions are reaching out and connecting with audiences, engaging in community activities and organizing online and global conferences such as CloudBurst and Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp. Based out of Malmö Sweden he runs Martensson Consulting as a consultant, tutor, international speaker, process coach and technical lead Magnus focus on all things Cloudy. Magnus' operates like a fighter pilot navigating cloudy skies - helping clients safely harness the power and benefits the Clouds can bring. As the first Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional in Scandinavia in 2012 he has been awarded MVP of the year and is now a go-to person for Microsoft Sweden regarding Enterprise Cloud Consulting. He is a member of Microsoft Extended Experts Team (MEET) and INETA. He is also a Microsoft Azure Insider and Microsoft Azure Advisor providing feedback even before early Microsoft releases, oh and an ASP Insider too.

Session: Microsoft Azure Web Jobs - the new way to run your workloads in the Cloud

The new Web Job in the Microsoft Azure Platforms allows you to run background workloads easily and effortlessly as support for your Microsoft Azure Web Sites or other web-facing assets. The service has powerful monitoring and logging capabilities built into the Microsoft Azure Portal allowing you full control of what jobs have executed, are executing and will execute. Another very tasty fact about Web Jobs is that they may be programmed without any knowledge of the Cloud paradigm at all enabling any developer to build them in C#, PHP or as a simple command script. Deploying and monitoring Web Jobs is an operations task which allows for good separation between dev and ops. Let’s have a look at this new delicious service in Microsoft Azure which will change the way you think about Cloud based workloads.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Aleksandar Nikolic - PowerShell MVP

Aleksandar Nikolic is a Microsoft MVP for Windows PowerShell, an Azure Insider, a co-founder of PowerShellMagazine.com, and the community manager of PowerShell.com. He is very experienced presenting and speaking to Microsoft customers, and have facility for describing complex management and automation tasks even to beginning and novice users and scripters, and has more than 17 years of experience as a system administrator. He also delivers PowerShell training courses around the world. For the last two years he's been working closely with Microsoft Azure PowerShell team providing feedback and influencing design of Azure Powershell cmdlets.

Session: Manage Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services with Windows PowerShell DSC

When you need to quickly provision and reliably manage environment on Microsoft Azure nothing beats an automation. Learn how to implement dev/test environment on Microsoft Azure and prevent its configuration drift using Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration. We demonstrate how to work with the components of Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services applying DevOps principles from the beginning to the end of life of your Microsoft Azure resources.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Alan Smith - Microsoft Azure MVP

Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Microsoft Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Microsoft Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Microsoft Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Microsoft Azure.

Session: Transient Fault Handling in Microsoft Azure

Transient faults, faults that can often be corrected with a retry, are a fact of life for distributed application developers. As cloud based applications are distributed by nature, the requirement for a solid transient fault handling strategy is critical to the success of applications and services. The Windows Azure storage client API provides basic transient fault handling out-of-the-box and will automatically retry service calls when transient faults are detected. Although this default behavior may be suitable in some scenarios, there are many cases when configuration and customization of transient fault handling will be required. The Windows Azure storage client API allows for extensive customization of transient fault handling logic allowing developers to provide a quick response to user based applications, and increased reliability to asynchronous services. The Transient Fault Handling Application Block from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team provides transient fault handling capabilities for many Windows Azure services. Like the storage client API this application block will allow for customization of the transient fault detection and retry strategies, allowing application developers to tailor the behavior to suit their application. This demo intensive session will start out by explaining the theory and requirements for a transient fault handling strategy. The transient fault handling capabilities provided by Windows Azure will then be demonstrated using a range of scenarios and different Windows Azure services. The requirements and techniques for customizing transient fault handling behavior will be discussed and demonstrated.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Teemu Tapanila - Microsoft Azure MVP

Teemu Tapanila is from Finland and resident in Stockholm where he works as Windows Phone Lead Developer for Screen Interaction. His interests are mobile, HTML5, JavaScript and Microsoft Azure. He's a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Azure and Nokia Developer Champion.

Session: Real-time Push with Mobile Services and SignalR

Users want to see results, and they want them right now. As the options for real-time applications grow, so does the demand and the need for you, the developer, to understand the variety of tools available to give users the experience they expect and deserve. This session introduces you to the real-time web techniques available from Azure Mobile Services. Together the Azure Mobile Services and SignalR allow your users to have collaborative, real-time web, cloud, and distributed applications that work cohesively to offer real-time user experiences.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Sam Vanhoutte - Microsoft Azure MVP

Sam Vanhoutte is CTO and Product Manager with Codit. Based in Belgium, Sam is a Microsoft Integration MVP. Next to that, he is also BizTalk Virtual Technology Specialist and has extensive experience in building integrated enterprise, ESB and SOA solutions. Because of the specialized focus on integration on Microsoft technology, Sam is part of Microsoft's Connected Systems and Azure Advisory boards and is a Microsoft Azure Insider as well as a Belgian MEET member. Sam co-founded the BizTalk User Group in Belgium (http://www.btug.be) and is active crew member of the Microsoft Azure User group (http://www.azug.be). While managing and architecting the online integration platform "Codit Integration Cloud", Sam has been focusing on Cloud integration with the Microsoft Azure platform the last years, focusing on the Microsoft Azure Service Bus and BizTalk Services technology.

Session: Get your geek on – IoT on the Microsoft platform

Connected devices, houses, cars, sensors are becoming a daily reality and will generate a lot of new business scenarios and revenue in the coming years. In this session, Sam will discuss the new challenges that comes with this new type of connectivity. Also, various device connectivity standards will be discussed during the session. Next to that, you will learn about the different IoT integration patterns that are common in device to cloud integration: Telemetry, Inquiries, Commands, and Notifications. Various scenarios will be demonstrated using different components or frameworks, in combination with Microsoft Azure. Most of the talk will be on the cloud gateway that is needed for Device connectivity. The concept of service assisted communication will be explained and various Microsoft initiatives will be presented, such as Event Hub, Reykjavik and Intelligent Systems Service. Objectives: * Learn the new challenges that the "Internet of Things" is bringing for organizations * Understand the different patterns to communicate with things over the internet * See the value that Microsoft is bringing for IoT through the Microsoft Azure platform

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Charles Young - Senior Consultant at Solidsoft Reply

Charles is a Senior Consultant at Solidsoft Reply, Microsoft’s 2013 Cloud Partner of the Year. He specializes in on-premises and hybrid application integration and data interchange on the Microsoft platform. For the last four years, Charles has been involved in the architecture, design and implementation of Azure-based solutions, including PaaS, IaaS and hybrid integration solutions and cloud-only services. He has over a decade of experience in the design and implementation of BizTalk Server solutions. He was a BizTalk Server MVP for several years, has blogged extensively on the subject and has contributed to published books.

Session: To Serve a Continent: Designing and Implementing an Azure Solution at the European Level

Microsoft Azure is a modern, highly elastic public cloud platform. What does it really take, though, to scale to the requirements of an entire continent? This session describes the real-world issues that had to be overcome in designing and implementing an Azure solution that will track and validate 10 billion items per annum, connect several thousand manufactures and distributors across 30 markets and support over 150,000 outlets.

Session: All the speakers join in this Microsoft Azure panel discussion!

The whole speaker crew come together for a Microsoft Azure panel! We have an agenda of things to talk about but feel free to raise questions from the audience or on Twitter #CloudBurst!

Maarten Balliauw - Windows Azure MVP

Maarten Balliauw is a Technical Evangelist at JetBrains. His interests are all web: ASP.NET MVC, PHP and Windows Azure. He's a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Windows Azure and an ASPInsider. He has published many articles in both PHP and .NET literature such as MSDN magazine and PHP architect. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events such as MIX (Las Vegas), TechDays, DPC, ...

Session: How it’s made: MyGet.org

Ever wonder how some applications are built? Ever wonder how to combine components of the Windows Azure platform? Stop wondering and learn how we’ve built MyGet.org, a multi-tenant software-as-a-service. In this session we’ll discuss architecture, commands, events, access control, multi tenancy and how to mix and match those things together. Learn about the growing pains and misconceptions we had on the Windows Azure platform. The result just may be a reliable, cost-effective solution that scales.

Mark Brown - Windows Azure Community Manager

Mark has been a developer since 1991 and a web developer since 1995 building the first generation of e-commerce dot-com sites. Mark joined Microsoft in 2000 and worked across the company with a focus on web. Mark worked on web application security teaching developers to write more secure apps. On the Bing Maps team Mark helped ASP.NET developers actually enjoy writing JavaScript and create cool sites and visualize spatial data with maps. On Microsoft’s Web Platform team Mark ran the marketing for IIS and ASP.NET, launched the Web Platform Installer and WebMatrix and drove Microsoft’s outreach to the PHP community. These days Mark works on Windows Azure as its Community Manager to help grow and nurture the highly specialized group of Azure MVP’s and its larger group of Azure Insiders. Mark and also runs all of marketing for web workloads on Windows Azure where he continues to help developers build web applications for the cloud.

Session: The State of Windows Azure

Windows Azure has grown tremendously since its first release in 2009. The last 15 months especially have seen an enormous amount of activity to make available more core computing services and higher level services across the Windows Azure platform. We have also “cloud-enabled” things like Active Directory and BizTalk while simultaneously releasing updates to the entire platform on a schedule never before seen at Microsoft. In this session we will get an update to the State of Azure with the very latest releases that have come for Windows Azure as well as a look to the future for where we are headed as a cloud platform.

Andy Cross - Windows Azure MVP

Andy Cross is an author, software consultant, cloud architect and co-owner of Elastacloud. His passion for distributed computing, big data and high performance compute sees him building massively scalable system utilising the limitless potential of the cloud. Andy’s specialism in the Cloud realm is big data, computation distribution, runtime diagnostics and service elasticity. He is a Windows Azure MVP, Insider, co-founder of the UK London Windows Azure User Group and a Microsoft DevPro Community Leader.

Session: Big Data for the Win!!

Liberate yourself from the shackles of limited data processing. Embrace unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. Express your logic in best of breed technologies. Utilise thousands of cores of compute to learn how to win the Internet. Andy will explain different data structures and paradigms that can be effectively used to express them. Using Windows Azure, he will provision and interact with Hadoop, Mahout and Neo4j to mine massive data sets, learn and express meaning from them. Although embracing non-Microsoft technologies, this will be presented from a familiar place; hosted on Windows Azure and consumed with C#.

Patriek Dorp, van - Windows Azure MVP

Patriek van Dorp is a Technology Consultant for Microsoft technologies at Sogeti in The Netherlands. Over the last 5 years, he has specialized in Cloud Computing and Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform, Windows Azure. Patriek is passionate about bringing different technical communities with different skill sets together and introducing them to the Windows Azure platform. He co-founded the Dutch Windows Azure User Group this contributed to him receiving the MVP award for Windows Azure for three years in a row now.

Session: Bursting to the Cloud in 1 Hour

Because applications seldom stand on their own, developers are more often facing challenges that cover skills of both Developers and IT Pros. In order to overcome these challenges, both expertises need to evolve towards each other. DevOps are born! This session will show developers how they can extend an existing on-premises infrastructure to the Cloud to facilitate their Cloud applications. The whole process will take no longer than 1 hour and can all be done from the comfort of Visual Studio.

Bjorn Eriksen - Architect Evangelist

Björn is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Sweden. With his background as Systems Architect and developer he has a broad focus on the Microsoft platform. His specialties are Windows Azure, Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

Session: Windows Azure Store

The Windows Azure Store allows developers who are building applications using the Windows Azure open cloud platform to easily discover, purchase, and use app services and data sets which enhance their Windows Azure development experience. Find out the what, how and why in this session about Windows Azure Store.

Scott Klein - Windows Azure Technical Evangelist

Scott Klein is a Windows Azure Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, focusing on SQL Server and Windows Azure data services, including Windows Azure SQL Database, Windows Azure Storage, and SQL Server in a VM. Scott has been working with SQL Server for over 20 years. Prior to Microsoft Scott was one of the first 4 SQL Azure MVPs. Scott is the author of over 1/2 dozen books, including Pro SQL Database for Windows Azure by APress. He can also be found speaking at conferences and events around the world, such as TechEd, TechDays, SQLConnections, SQL PASS, and SQL Saturdays.

Session: Getting your Nerd on with Windows Azure data services

As cloud computing becomes more popular and cloud-based solutions the norm rather than the fringe, the need to understand the different data services that the cloud has to offer is more critical to application developers. This action-packed and demo-filled session will show you now to grab Microsoft’s different Windows Azure data services by the horns use them to build knock-your-socks-off applications and have fun while doing it!

Magnus Mårtensson - Windows Azure MVP

Magnus Martensson is the first Windows Azure MVP in Northern Europe. In his work as Technical Lead and Software Architect consultant he aids ISVs and other customers to take off and be successful in the Cloud as well as assists with project effectiveness and development process streamlining. Magnus is also a passionate international speaker and trainer and the next gig he would love to book is Yours!

Session: Cloud is the new Black... and all that Jazz!

In this session join a true Cloud enthusiast in pondering the opportunities in the Cloud. Let’s talk about what makes the Cloud unique compared to non-cloud predecessors. We will look at the nature of Cloud Computing – service oriented with a focus on statelessness, low coupling, modularity and semantic interoperability. How does this relate to the Modern App? How do I get going if I’m not a ‘Cloud enabled Developer’ today and is this urgent? We’ll talk about how to embrace the change. The session will underline the concepts with demos of services in the Windows Azure Platform.

Mike Martin - Windows Azure MVP

Mike is Microsoft Lead Consultant and Architect at Crosspoint Solutions (part of the Cronos group), a company with a strong focus on BI, Data and CRM. Mike is mainly focused on the complete Microsoft product stack and therefore very flexible to work with. He’s been active in the IT industry for over 15 years and has performed almost all types of job profiles, going from coaching and leading a team to architecting and systems design and training. Today he’s primarily into the Microsoft Cloud Platform and Application Lifecycle Management. He’s not a stranger to both dev and IT Pro topics. In January 2012 he became a crew member of AZUG, the Belgian Windows Azure User Group. As an active member he’s both involved in giving presentations and organizing events. Mike is also a Windows Azure MVP and Windows Azure Insider. Mike likes helping out in the community and introducing new & young people into the world of Microsoft and technology.

Session: Windows Azure though the eyes of an IT Pro and how to cope with Developers and Business Stakeholders

The Job of an IT Pro is changing in every aspect. Windows Azure is there as an extend to your domain. Hence Windows Azure even gives you opportunities in areas you might not even have been involved yet. In this session we hand you some practical tips for the SDLC and really focus on those areas that you need to master to better understand the people you have to work with in your everyday environment. Topics here are maintenance and deployment of applications, and the set up of environments.

David Rodriguez - Windows Azure Insider

David Rodriguez, is a happy Spanish guy living and working in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) where he was born. He is one of the lucky ones who has the opportunity to work with cutting edge technologies at DNN as the Lead Engineer on the Cloud Team. He has more than 15 years development background mostly based on Microsoft technologies, designing and architecting highly scalable systems like reservation systems for airlines companies. He has been working with Windows Azure since it was on CTP, migrating on-premise systems to the cloud. He is also the author of the DNN Azure Accelerator, an open source project available on CodePlex to deploy DNN on Azure as a cloud service. Because of all this love for web and cloud technologies he finally landed at DNN Corp. to technically lead their voyage to the cloud.

Session: DNN Cloud Services – Under the Hood

DNN’s “Evoq in the Cloud” service delivers DNN Evoq applications via Windows Azure. The service uses Windows Azure Table Storage, Message Queues and Web Worker roles to handle provisioning and maintenance of their customer sites. DNN developed a ‘Device Pool,’ where deployed devices are kept ready to be assigned to customers. Once a customer creates an account, the device is assigned to the customer and 30 seconds later, the customer has their new website or community platform, fully installed and ready to go. In this session David Rodriguez, DNN Cloud Team Lead Engineer, will share their DNN Cloud Services implementation details and how they architect the final solution on Windows Azure Platform.

Alan Smith - Windows Azure MVP

Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Windows Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Windows Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Windows Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Windows Azure.

Session: Handling Big Data in Windows Azure Storage

Windows Azure Storage provide massively scalable storage services with local and geo-redundancy. Organizations can store terabytes of data off-site and in a reliable, highly available and cost efficient manner. For those of you wishing to explore the capabilities of Windows Azure Storage there are bound to be a number of questions that will arise. Can a blob storage container really handle millions of blobs effectively? How efficient is a Table Storage query when the table contain over a billion entities? How can these data volumes be uploaded reliably and effectively? How can the usage and billing of a data intensive solution be monitored? This demo-intensive session will answer these questions and show how big data scenarios can be effectively implemented using Windows Azure Storage. The Windows Azure Storage API will be covered in depth, along with techniques to increase the speed and reduce the cost of uploading data to Windows Azure. A solution storing the 4.3 million articles that make up the English Wikipedia content and providing a simple text index search will be used as a case study.

Sam Vanhoutte - Windows Azure Insider

Sam Vanhoutte is CTO and Product Manager with Codit. Based in Belgium, Sam is a Microsoft BizTalk Virtual Technology Specialist and has extensive experience in building integrated enterprise, ESB and SOA solutions. Because of the specialized focus on integration on Microsoft technology, Sam is part of Microsoft’s Connected Systems and Azure Advisory boards and is a Windows Azure Insider. Sam is also co-founder and member of the board of the Belgian BizTalk User Group, which was founded during the summer of 2013. While managing and architecting the online integration platform “Codit Integration Cloud”, Sam has been focusing on Cloud integration with the Windows Azure platform the last years, focusing on the Windows Azure Service Bus and BizTalk Services technology.

Session: Connecting the Cloud with your local applications

In the new scenarios where cloud is getting used, integration becomes very important. Luckily, the Windows Azure platform provides a lot of different capabilities and services to make a secure link between your local systems and the Windows Azure services or machines. In this session, an overview will be give of the different technologies and the scenarios to which these technologies are best applicable. The following technologies will be demonstrated and discussed: * Connectivity on messaging level: Service Bus Messaging * Connectivity on service level: Service Bus Relay * Connectivity on data level: SQL Data Sync * Connectivity on network level: Windows Azure Virtual Networking * Connectivity on security level: Active Directory integration

Michael Wood - Windows Azure MVP

Michael Wood is a Senior Application Developer for Resurgent Capital Services. He describes himself as a problem solving, outdoorsy, user group founding, dog-loving, blog writing, solution creating, event planning, married, technology speaking, father of one kind of guy. When he's not living up to that title he's an avid reader, (horrible) violinist and gamer. Michael is one of the Founding Directors of the Cincinnati .NET User Group in the States as well as the founder of the Cincinnati Software Architecture Special Interest Group. He is also a Microsoft MVP in Windows Azure.

Session: Dependable Cloud Architecture

Felix Baumgartner jumped from over 128,000 feet to break a world record for sky diving. An image was posted to a Facebook account after his landing and in 40 minutes it had logged over 216,000 likes, 10,000 comments, and 29,000 shares. The Pottermore website, digital home to one of the world’s greatest known Wizards, saw a billion (with a “B”) page views just two weeks after it launched and was signing up new users at a rate of 25,000 per day. Whether you need this level of instant scalability, or you are simply wanting to be ready for it when your own idea takes off the cloud allows you to create solutions that can scale easily and have high availability, however, these do not come automatically. You need to know how best to leverage a cloud platform to achieve these capabilities successfully. This presentation focuses on architecture patterns and coding techniques that help provide reliable cloud solutions. While the content for this presentation can be applied to many cloud platforms the examples will be given using Windows Azure.