Category Archives: Events

Talk: Logic Apps & Functions at Granite State SharePoint Users Group

Tonight I was pleased to have the opportunity to demystify Azure Logic Apps & Functions for the Granite State SharePoint Users Group. Here is the slide deck I used to present:

Serverless Azure – Logic Apps and Functions – Granite State SharePoint Users Group – 07-Sep-2017

Speaking at the “stimulation rich” Microsoft Store — photo credit: @jfj1997 Julie Turner

By the time I turned off the Twitter => Slack Logic App, a lot of messages were posted (in the #demo channel within Boston Azure slack account – which is open – join here):

slack

I will be giving a longer and more general version of this talk at the SharePoint Saturday New England 2017 event on Sat Oct 28 in Burlington MA.

Also planning other variants of this talk in the coming weeks:

Azure Functions at Boston Azure – Thu Sep 14 in Cambridge MA (NERD)
Serverless Azure at VT Code Camp – Sat Sep 16 in Burlington Vermont
Serverless Azure at North Boston Azure – Tue Sep 26 in Burlington MA
Logic Apps Thu Oct 5 at NE Microsoft Dev Group
Serverless Azure at SharePoint Saturday NE event mentioned above Sat Oct 28 in Burlington MA

Talk: Logic Apps at Boston Azure

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Last night’s Boston Azure meetup featured two talks – No App Left Behind by Kevin Brown of SoftNAS after an opening talk on Logic Apps by me. My slides are below.

Serverless Azure – Logic Apps – Boston Azure – 06-Sep-2017

I did not have time to show it, but the Slack => Email process did succeed. I saw this later when I checked my email. Subject: bill-tux-full.png, Body: 1504739903F6YKE996C bill-tux-full.png bill-tux-full.png. And you can see the photo for yourself in the Boston Azure slack #demo channel.

If you’d like to learn more about Serverless Azure, check out these upcoming talks: Azure Functions and Logic Apps Thu Sep 7 in NH, Azure Functions Thu Sep 14 in Cambridge MA (NERD), and various playing of Serverless Azure (Azure Functions and Logic Apps) on Sat Sep 16 in Burlington Vermont, Tue Sep 26 in Burlington MA, and (if my talk is accepted for the Sharepoint event) Sat Oct 28 in Burlington MA.

As always, please let me know if you are interested in more talks at Boston Azure. 🙂

Talk: Azure Security Toolbox at Boston Azure

Talk: When NOT to use PowerShell with Azure

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Today at PowerShell in Action I spoke twice about not going TOO far in your PowerShell when managing Azure resources.

The point of the talks wasn’t really that using PowerShell is bad/wrong, more that it might not be the best tool for the job in certain scenarios. In particular, an ARM template is a powerful modeling tool in support of a “no pets” policy, which is interesting to consider as your cloud environments grow more complex while also wanting to make environments easier to manage. Another benefit stems from keeping the ARM template itself as an “infrastructure as code” artifact that can be used to document – and, more to the point, as executable documentation – for stamping out environments predictably. And still another feature: the ARM runtime handles a lot of the complex parts that could come by trying to script one resource at a time via imperative PowerShell scripts – for example, error recovery and retries.

The deck is on the event shared github repo. There are lots of otherPowerShelly resources on that repo that you may find worth checking out.

(Added 03-June) For those of you who attended my Advanced session, when I attempted to clean up at the end using Remove-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment, my PowerShell command had an error in it. Here is the correct version. In the first screen shot I show how to ascertain the correct value for the first the parameter using Get-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment.

Get-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment

Remove-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment `
-Name Microsoft.Template -ResourceGroupName k1

Once that PowerShell command executed, all 8 resources associated with that deployment were removed (deleted, and billing stopped).

Ta da!

Hope to see all you locals at Boston Azure (@bostonazure) in the future for more Azurey action.

Talk: Spy vs. Spy (SQL Server vs. SQL #Azure SQL DB) at @NorthBTownAzure

Last night I spoke at the North Boston Azure cloud group, where the topic was Azure SQL Database – not just a cloud version of SQL Server. So much of the talk was interactive — a really high-energy discussion — big thanks to Jason for hosting me and to the group for a great conversation.

Here’s the deck I used:

comparing-azure-sql-database-and-sql-server-North-Boston-Azure-28-Mar-2017-bill-wilder

And here is some of the CLI 2.0 action, including the last line to clean up a resource group:


az login
az account set --subscription MySubscriptionName
./show-resourcegroup-contents.sh nbazure
z group delete -n nbazure --no-wait

Talk: SecureWorld Boston 2017 #SWBOS17- Using Public Cloud Platforms to Increase Enterprise Security

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Spoke earlier today at SecureWorld Boston on Using Public Cloud Platforms to Increase Enterprise Security.

Deck is below:

SecureWorld Boston 2017 – Bill Wilder – Improving Enterprise Security with the Public Cloud – PUBLISHED

Talk: IoT has a dark side; #Azure DNS can help; Happy 7th Bday @BostonAzure

Boston Azure is 7 years old!

At today’s October Boston Azure meeting, we celebrated turning 7 years old, and had two talks. I presented one talk related to the Dyn DDoS outage from Friday Oct 21, which illustrated the dark side of IoT since it was used to power a huge DDoS attack on Dyn, taking down Netflix, Github, Spotify, and lots of other sites as collateral damage. In my talk I explained some of the background and how we addressed it with Azure DNS.

Here’s the deck for the “IoT has a dark side” talk:

boston-azure-iot-dyn-azure-dns-thu-27-oct-2016

Jim O’Neil provides some resource relating to his talk. There are listed AS A COMMENT on the meeting page (scroll below the meeting description page to comments – Meetup.com does not allow changing a meeting description after the meeting begins, so amendments tend to be as comments).

And here’s a photo of the evening – taken by @jimoneil (Jim), showing (L->R) Mark (@MHEisenberg), I’m in the middle (@codingoutloud), and @nazik_huq (Nazik Huq) – all who have helped @bostonazure (Boston Azure) thrive through the years. And not to forget about some others who were not present – like @georgebabey (George Babey), @haleyjason (Jason Haley), Michael Stiefel, and @squdgy (Maura Wilder) – who have all deserve credit for the success of the group through the years.

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And finally, here’s Jim, the event’s featured speaker and the photographer and tweeter of the above photo. I think this photo was taken by @nazik_huq (Nazik Huq).

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