Author: mcollier

December Holiday Party / Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

Columbus OH has 4 major User Groups focused on Microsoft technologies:

Again this year, all 4 User Groups come together for an EPIC Christmas Party!

What’s in store – Networking | Board Games | Ping Pong | Holiday Spirit. Oh, and great Food & Drinks! And what’s a Holiday Party without some great Prizes? Thanks to our sponsors, we’ll be raffling off the following:

  • Amazon Echo Plus
  • Amazon Echo Spot
  • Raspberry Pi 3
  • Phillips Hue Starter Kit

And more to come!!

Sponsors:
– Cardinal Solutions Group
– Improving

YOU MUST PURCHASE A TICKET HERE TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR THE RAFFLE!

Support Local Charities and Win a Prize!
Your $5 registration fee  earns you 1 ticket toward the prize raffle. To increase your chances of winning you can “purchase” additional tickets ($5 each) by helping us support local charities. Proceeds from the registration fees, as well as cash contributions, go to TechCorps. We would also encourage you to donate toys to OSU’s Toy Adaptation Program and food to the Mid-Ohio Food Bank. Bring your receipts for toy and food donations to exchange for raffle tickets ($5 per ticket). See the list of approved/adaptable toys below, and visit the list of suggested food donations. Let’s spread the love this Holiday Season!

You simply need to be here!

October 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the Monday, October 9th meetup, we will be joined by Ryan Miller for a discussion on building an Alexa Skill using Azure Functions. Please join us on Monday, October 9th for what is sure to be a very entertaining and information meeting.  Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps to ensure we have the right amount of food & drinks).

Abstract: I have an 11-year-old child and a 14-year-old child and I’ve discovered a real pattern with the speech of these two. Unfortunately, sometimes they aren’t around because they’re at school or maybe off at camp. In those times, I have no one around to tell me how much everything sucks. That got me thinking, “Some poor folks don’t even have a teenager in the house. How would they know that everything sucks?” With the proper skill, Alexa can help them out.

In this session, we’ll see what it takes to build an Alexa Skill called Teenage Daughter. The code is C# and the service host is Azure Functions. We’ll cover Custom Slots, Intent Schema, Utterances, and Testing; we’ll delve into Azure functions and how to create multiple environments to keep our production instance separate from development instance; and we’ll cover any other tips and tricks that I’ve learned while creating my Teenage Daughter, which can be found at https://github.com/Intranoggin/AlexaFunctions.

Presenter: Ryan Miller – Principal Consultant, Cardinal Solutions

I am a Solutions Architect with over fifteen (15) years of professional experience. I enjoy building enterprise solutions because those solutions affect change in an organization that can have a long term, positive impact on employees and customers. For the last decade of my career, I have been helping clients design and build enterprise web solutions efficiently on SharePoint and .NET. It can be a challenge to create robust solutions that seamlessly blend out-of-the-box platform capabilities with custom .NET features, and integrate them with other systems. The rapid growth in utilization of Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud (Office365 & Azure) has made these software challenges even more exciting because the available cloud resources are so diverse and extensive. I learned early on in my career that creating the right application can transform the way an enterprise works and have long lasting impacts. As an intern, I created an application for a local manufacturing company to electronically enter and track ISO 9000 & QS9000 documentation. As information became untethered from its filing cabinet, Engineers and Quality Assurance teams who once begrudgingly filled out the required paperwork and filed it, were suddenly collaborating around data that was accessible, discoverable, and pliable. Some years later, I had graduated, gotten married, moved to Boston, bought a bulldog, moved back to Columbus, and had my first child. I had transitioned through 3 different jobs in 2 states and other major life events and then found that this application was still in use and had become a key system for every product being produced out of this manufacturing facility. I was humbled by the application lifecycle and the durability of software in the enterprise. The experience underscored my belief that creating enterprise applications is an opportunity to cause long term business transformations that warrants a real investment in thought.

September 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the Monday, September 11th meetup, we will once again be joined by Neudesic’s Chad Thomas for a discussion on Service Fabric. Chad joined us in May for an introductory look at Service Fabric. This month he’ll share his guidance and experiences on building real-world solutions with Service Fabric. Please join us on Monday, September 11th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps to ensure we have the right amount of food & drinks).

The Central Ohio Azure group would like to thank Neudesic for once again sponsoring our meetup!

Abstract: Service Fabric is the foundational technology powering core Azure infrastructure as well as other Microsoft services such as Skype for Business, Dynamics 365, Cortana, Azure SQL Database, and many more.  Service Fabric solves the hard distributed systems problems such as reliability, scalability, management, and latency, so you can focus on building applications.

At the May meetup, we discussed Service Fabric’s architecture, use cases, and many of the problems it alleviates.  This month, we’ll dive a bit deeper and build a representative Service Fabric application that highlights Service Fabric’s programming models.  You will see how to use Reliable Services and Reliable Actors to build a solution. You will learn the pros and cons of each, and guidance on selecting the model for your solution.  We’ll wrap up by discussing exciting new features in Service Fabric, including using Service Fabric for hosting Docker containers on Linux or Windows and running them alongside other workloads.

Presenter: Chad Thomas – Director of Technology, Neudesic

Chad Thomas is Director of Technology for Neudesic’s Digital Platform service line, spanning mobile, web, architecture, and cloud. He and his team help companies transition from Agile to Continuous, from monoliths to microservices, and ultimately from incremental improvement to innovation at scale. Azure is a big part of Neudesic’s strategy and they are very excited about the Service Fabric.
Even when Chad is not working, technology is deeply engrained in his daily life. Currently, that manifests itself in the form of modernist cuisine, sous vide immersion cookers, and digital electric smokers. If anybody wants to start an open-source autonomous electric vehicle project, hit him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

August 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the Monday, August 14th meetup, we will be discussing one of the hottest topics in cloud computing – serverless computing.  We’ll be joined by Andrej Kyselica (Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft) and Pete Roden (Azure App Dev Black-Belt, Microsoft) as they share their insights and experiences on this fast-moving topic.  Please join us on Monday, August 14th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps us get the right amount of food & drinks)

Abstract:

In today’s cloud enabled world, businesses are solving for maximum efficiency and faster time to market, while reducing IT spend.  Over the years we have seen businesses evolve from spinning VMs to leveraging the benefits of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) cloud such as managed infrastructure, scalability, high availability, and cost.  Today, more businesses are trying to solve for what is core to their business focus – delivering services faster to their customers, while reducing IT spend significantly. The answer comes in the form of Serverless application platform.

Serverless lets businesses maximize their benefits of the PaaS cloud by offering a fully managed infrastructure, with no servers to manage, provision and patch; hence reducing management overhead significantly. The event triggered programming model, allows for continuous auto-scaling and micro billing capabilities. Event-triggered compute and event-triggered scaling allows businesses to pay only for the compute power that was used, depending on the size of the workload.

For the Microsoft Azure platform, the center of the Serverless platform is Azure Functions. Azure Functions is an event-based Serverless compute experience that helps you accelerate your development. The run time is open. Function code can be executed in a VM or somewhere else, either on-premises or in the cloud.

In this session, we’ll discuss the benefits of Serverless computing in general, and deep-dive into building solutions leveraging Azure Function. We’ll specifically focus on the following areas:

• Functions Runtime and Visual Studio tooling

• Serverless architecture patterns

• Advanced scenarios like CI/CD, proxies, monitoring

• Creative use cases like scaling compute and easily connecting components within the cloud

To wrap up the session, we’ll look at Azure Container Instances – one of the newest ways to run container-based solutions in Azure.  Which, depending on how you want to define “serverless”, containers can fit into that area as well.

Meeting Sponsor:

Thank you to Microsoft for sponsoring the August meetup!

Microsoft

Presenters:

Andrej Kyselica – Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft

Andrej works with large organizations helping them make their journey to the public cloud, focusing on applications, IOT and infrastructure. In his spare time he enjoys building things in bits and atoms . . . mostly web apps and electronics.

 

 

 

 

 

Pete Roden – Azure App Dev Black-Belt, Microsoft

Pete Roden is an Azure Solution Architect for Microsoft working side-by-side with strategic enterprise customers helping them leverage Azure to design and implement cloud-scale solution. His focus areas include Application development, Bot and Cognitive Services, as well as IoT for large-scale applications.

July 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the Monday, July 10th meetup, we will be providing a whirlwind tour of the newest and hottest new features and services in the Azure platform. Nick Martin and Vince Fabro will lead the discussions. If you have something new you would like to share, please let us know and you can do so.  Please join us on Monday, July 10th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps us get the right amount of food & drinks)

Title: What’s New in Azure Today?!

Abstract:  Innovation in the cloud happens at a lightning pace. Features available today look vastly different than a few months ago and new or updated services seem available every time you open the Azure Portal. During this session, we’ll review many of the new Microsoft Azure features since BUILD 2017, and explore some of the new functionality now available via the Azure APIs and tooling updates.

Some new items on the list to discuss include:

• Azure Managed Disks

• New features in ARM Templates

• IoT Hub Routes

• Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL

• Cosmos DB

Speaker:

Nick Martin is a principal consultant at Cardinal Solutions, with 12 years of experience developing and architecting enterprise applications. Nick is passionate about helping clients get the most out of their software development efforts through following best practices and agile processes. When not honing his craft, Nick enjoys travelling with his family, going on gastronomic adventures, and occasionally pretending he can cook.

Vince Fabro is the Practice Manager of the Enterprise Microsoft Solutions practice at Cardinal Solution’s Columbus, Ohio, branch. Vince loves building things and fixing things, and working with teams to achieve success. He’s been applying those passions to the IT industry for well over 20 years now – the past 20 as a consultant wearing many hats (developer, trainer, architect, mentor, manager). As a former certified trainer he has enjoyed training hundreds of students, and has presented technology topics at IT conferences and user groups for many years. Vince has specialized in Microsoft’s .NET technology stack for more than a decade now, and is always striving to learn more effective ways to build applications that solve challenging IT problems. For the past few years Vince has focused on cloud computing, specifically Microsoft Azure. Vince attended The Ohio State University to earn both his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and his Master of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering. He thoroughly enjoys his work, as well as hiking, bicycling, and traveling with his family.

Meeting Sponsor:

T.B.D.

June 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the June 12th meetup, we are thrilled to welcome Paul McBratney from Alert Logic as the featured speaker.  Paul will share his experiences and insights into a very common topic when it comes to cloud computing – security. Please join us on Monday, June 12th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps us get the right amount of food & drinks)

Title: Security in the Cloud, how Cloud is Changing Security

Abstract: Do you know if your workloads are secure? Do you have the same security and compliance coverage across all of the cloud platforms and datacenters running your critical applications? Are you having to design your security framework each time you deploy to a new region or datacenter? Whether you’re working exclusively on Azure or with multiple cloud environments, there are certain things you should consider when moving assets to the public cloud. As with any cloud deployment, security is a top priority, and moving your workloads to the cloud doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for the security of your operating system, applications and data. Building on the security of the Azure infrastructure, this shared security responsibility starts with making sure your Azure environment is secure.

In this session, we will discuss step-by-step what you need to do to secure access at the administrative, application and network layers. We will review:

• The Azure Shared Security Model: What security you are responsible for to protect your content, application, systems and networks

• Best practices for how to protect your Azure environment from the latest threats

• Learn how traditional security approaches may have limitations in the cloud

• How to leverage security tools and services to meet your Azure security responsibilities

Speaker: Paul is a veteran of the IT industry who started in Windows and Network administration with a background in hosting, cloud, colocation, and on premises deployments. He’s supported hotel, franchising and retail environments as well as working with hosting, cloud and security customers across many different verticals.

Meeting Sponsor

Alert Logic has more than a decade of experience pioneering and refining cloud solutions that are secure, flexible and designed to work with hosting and cloud service providers. As one of the nation’s leading cloud security providers, we have the tools and experience that set us apart from other cloud security companies. We focus on delivering a complete solution that lives in the cloud, but is rooted in real expertise.

May 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the May 8th meetup, we are thrilled to welcome Chad Thomse as the featured speaker. You may have seen Chad talk about containers earlier this month at the Global Azure Bootcamp – so you know he brings the deep technical expertise and passion! Chad is going to be sharing his insights and experiences on developoing highly scalable and reliable services using Service Fabric. Please join us on Monday, May 8th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps us get the right amount of food & drinks)

Title: Service Fabric

Abstract: Coming soon!

Speaker:  Chad Thomas is Director of Technology for Neudesic’s Digital Platform service line, spanning mobile, web, architecture and cloud. He and his team help companies transition from Agile to Continuous, from monoliths to microservices, and ultimately from incremental improvement to innovation at scale. Azure is a big part of Neudesic’s strategy and they are very excited about the Service Fabric.
Even when Chad is not working, technology is deeply engrained in his daily life. Currently, that manifests itself in the form of modernist cuisine, sous vide immersion cookers, and digital electric smokers. If anybody wants to start an open-source autonomous electric vehicle project, hit him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

April 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the April 10th meetup, we are thrilled to welcome back Brian Jackett as the featured speaker. Brian will be demonstrating how to use Microsoft PowerApps and Flow as a way to integrate a wide variety of internet connected services. Join us on Monday, April 10th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

As in past months, following Brian’s session, we will once again hold an open architecture Q&A session. This is a time set aside for the attendees to discuss ideas or questions about Azure.

Please RSVP today (helps us get the right amount of food & drinks)

Title: Integrate All the Things: PowerApps and Microsoft Flow for Developers

Abstract: PowerApps and Microsoft Flow are enterprise services that allows power users and developers to build applications that connect with numerous consumer and enterprise sources using PowerPoint and Excel-like tools.  In this session we will dive in to the integration points for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow with various sources such as Azure SQL, OneDrive, Twitter, API apps, and more.  We will also talk about the developer story for integrating with custom APIs and on-prem data sources such as SQL Server and SharePoint.  Lastly we will have an interactive demo combining multiple services to show how easily you can create and consume apps across Windows, iOS, Android, and web.  All source code is available on GitHub.

Speaker Bio: Brian T. Jackett is a Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft specializing in Office 365, Azure, SharePoint, and PowerShell for over 9 years. Brian enjoys giving back to the community through giving presentations, planning and volunteering at conferences, maintaining a SharePoint / .Net centric blog, and contributing to the SharePoint Twitterverse. He also holds several Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) for SharePoint related technologies.

March 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the March 13th meetup, we are thrilled to welcome Chris Steele as the featured speaker. Chris, along with a few of his teammates, will be sharing their experiences on a real-world Azure mobile project. They’ll share how they built a cloud-scale back-end for a new mobile application – what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons learned on the journey. This is sure to be a no-holds-barred session on what it is really like in the trenches! Join us on Monday, March 13th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

As in past months, following Chris’ session, we will once again hold an open architecture Q&A session. This is a time set aside for the attendees to discuss ideas or questions about Azure – a time to ask the “Can or How do I do X with Azure?” question.

Please RSVP today (helps us get the right amount of food & drinks)

Title: From noob to dangerous: The story of a team’s first large-scale project on Azure

Abstract: From never using Azure, to implementing a large-scale Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) and a Software as a Service (SaaS) in under a year, come listen to 3 developers reflect on their good and bad experiences. We will begin with reflecting on our decision to use Azure and end with what is next for the team. Along the way, we will also reflect on the challenges, and solutions, pertaining to security, offline data synchronization with iOS and Android, migrations, and environment management.

Speaker Bio:  Chris Steele grew up in Pataskala, OH and received his Bachelor’s in Computer Information Systems (CIS) at DeVry University and his Master’s in Information Systems Management (MISM) at Keller Graduate School of Management — all while working full-time. Now with 7 years of industry experience, Chris is a Senior Consultant for Improving Enterprises where he’s primarily a Full-Stack developer. Chris’ passions include web technologies, professional development, teaching/growing/mentoring others, fitness, and his soon to be family of 6.

February 2017 Meetup

Posted on by mcollier

For the February meetup on Monday, February 13th, we are excited to welcome once again Nick Martin back as the featured speaker. Nick will be sharing his experiences and real-world project lessons learned for bringing an IoT solution to market.  This is sure to be a great solution to get an overview of the plethora of services available in Azure to help you build amazing, scalable, and resilient cloud-powered solutions. Join us on February 13th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

As in past months, following Nick’s session, we will once again hold an open architecture Q&A session. This is a time set aside for the attendees to discuss ideas or questions about Azure – a time to ask the “Can or How do I do X with Azure?” question.

Please RSVP via Meetup.com/coazure

Title: From Inception to Market: An Azure IoT Story

Abstract: What does it take to develop and release a real Azure solution to the market? What does the Azure platform provide for things like device registration, message processing, configuration management and deployment? All these considerations can certainly make it very intimidating. Thankfully, there is at least one Azure service to handle all of these, and more!

This presentation will walk you through what it took to build and release a small business and consumer-facing IoT device that is available for purchase on Amazon today. We will examine each Azure service that was used and how it fits into the solution architecture. This will not be a technical deep-dive, but an open discussion on the lessons learned about what worked and what didn’t work in delivering a product like this. For example, you will learn how the team utilized the power of Azure Resource Manager and Visual Studio Team Services to apply DevOps practices to great effect, how Azure’s IoT Hubs simplified the solution, and some alternative approaches that might be considered

Speaker Bio: Nick is a principal consultant at Cardinal Solutions, with 12 years of experience developing and architecting enterprise applications. Nick is passionate about helping clients get the most out of their software development efforts through following best practices and agile processes. When not honing his craft, Nick enjoys travelling with his family, going on gastronomic adventures, and occasionally pretending he can cook.