On Tuesday evening 27-Mar-2018 I had the pleasure of speaking to the Nashville Azure group about keeping workloads safe in the Azure cloud. Was a great group with a lot of interesting questions and dialog. They even helped to answer each others’ questions when I didn’t have answers, which is the best outcome of all.
For those interested in the deck I used, please find it below.
NashvilleAzure-RunningAzureSecurely-BillWilder-2018-Mar-27-Published
Spoke today to a small crowd of hardy soles who braved the snow to make it to SQL Saturday 694 – Providence – held at nearby Bryant University in Smithfield.
My slides are included below.
Azure SQL DB – Not Just A Cloud Version of SQL Server – SQL Saturday RI – 09-Dec-2017
We first looked at how we might solve a random StackOverflow question using Azure Logic Apps, Azure Function Apps, the nifty PhantomJsCloud.com service, and a look at how a little Cognitive Service action could be woven in. A random walk around other Azure features followed. Some reactions were memorable – my favorite, because I completely agree: Why would I ever want to run my own SharePoint instance when the Office 365 service is available? And a bunch of other good questions.
Slides:
This past weekend I participated in SQL Saturday BI Boston in Burlington, MA. I spoke about Azure SQL Database, explaining why Azure SQL Database is much more than just a hosted version of SQL Server. The slides I presented are here:
If you are local, you may be interested in learning more about Azure by checking out @bostonazure and bostonazure.org. You can find me on twitter here: @codingoutloud.
Tonight I spoke at the North Boston Azure group and covering serverless concepts by looking at Logic Apps, Function Apps, and a couple of powerful/easy features of Web Apps (authentication via AAD/Twitter & CD via Github).
Before I posted the slides (see below), I needed to clean up the 1000+ emails I spammed myself with from my Logic App demo. (Doh!)
The slides are available for review here:
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:
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):
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:
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.
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. 🙂
Last night’s Boston Azure meeting featured Marija Strazdas from @AlertLogic who spoke about the Shared Security Model for security in the cloud. I also showed in more detail some of the tools that Azure provides to help customers with their side of the responsibility model including some with Azure SQL DB, Storage, KeyVault, and Azure Security Center. Here are the slides I presented (though I didn’t get through most of them).
EDIT: Here is the deck presented by Marija Strazdas from @AlertLogic who spoke about the Shared Security Model for security in the cloud:
Alert Logic Azure Security Presentation
You can find @bostonazure on twitter, and feel free to join us on slack.
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.
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.
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
Coding Out Loud 