For the Monday, May 14th meetup we will welcome Raymond Ullery back for a full session to provide more insights into migrating a large scale healthcare solution to Azure. You may have seen Raymond present a brief version of this at the March lightning talks. There was a lot of interest in this topic at that time, and we’re thrilled Raymond can join us in May for a more involved session.

Please RSVP at https://www.meetup.com/Central-Ohio-Azure/events/wvzvqlyxhbsb/. RSVP’ing will help us with logistics, especially getting food and drinks from our most excellent sponsors!

Location Change
The May meetup will be held at Cardinal Solution’s office located at 401 N. Front Street, Suite 210, Columbus, OH 43215.  Cardinal Solutions will offer parking vouchers in the Arena District. Please review the following important details:
1) The best (and closest) option is the Arena Crossing garage between Vine St. and Convention Center Dr. The public parking entrance in on the south side of the garage, on Convention Center drive. Get your parking ticket at the gate, then bring that to the Cardinal office, and put a voucher sticker on it.
2) The second parking option is the *public* Nationwide Insurance garage, right behind Nationwide Insurance, on Front St. Note that there are two garage entrances there. The north entrance (closest to Nationwide Blvd.) is for employees only. The south entrance is public parking — enter there. If a parking attendant says there’s a special event, and asks for money up front, just tell them you’re with Cardinal Solutions, and you need to pull a ticket that we can voucher. Bring the ticket to the office and put a voucher sticker on it.

The Cardinal office is at 401 North Front St. Cardinal’s office is on the second floor, above The Three Legged Mare and Gordon Biersch. The entrance is on the street that goes under the second floor building span, between The Three Legged Mare and Gordon Biersch. It is on the south side of the street, facing the Three Legged Mare. Cardinal will have signs out to assist you. Take the elevator to the second floor. Cardinal Solutions is Suite 210, which is just outside the elevator.

View the parking map –> Parking Map 2018.

Title:
Examination of Azure Migration and Automation Solution for a Large Security Focused and Highly Scalable Healthcare Application.

Abstract:
An in-depth review of the Azure migration strategy and automation implementation for a HIPAA-compliant healthcare broker. The company’s application is a SaaS solution that facilitates collaboration between healthcare providers and recipients. The company’s main goal was to achieve cloud agility for onboarding and scaling of both single and multi-tenant clients. We were tasked with taking the existing on-premises infrastructure and applications and migrating them to the Azure Cloud, automating infrastructure and application deployments, ensuring connectivity between on-premises shared assets as well as client connectivity, and meeting all security compliance requirements laid out by the company’s corporate security team.

Bio:
Raymond Ullery is a Senior Consultant at Cardinal Solutions. He received his B.S. degree in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Wright State University. He has been working with cloud based application deployment for the past 5 years with a focus on large scale SaaS-based applications. His experience includes cloud infrastructure and networking deployments across multiple cloud providers, using the latest automation and DevOps tool sets to enable rapid and efficient delivery. Working at IBM he was a B2B DevOps team lead with a globe-spanning team with members located in US, Ireland, Germany, and China. Most recently as a consultant at Cardinal Solutions he has been working with multiple clients across the United States to deliver cutting edge cloud solutions in Azure.

For the Monday, April 9th meetup, we will be joined Microsoft Azure MVP and Kentico Technical Evangelist, Bryan Soltis. Brian will be showing us how to leverage Azure Search to enhance our web applications.

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

Title: It’s 2018. Why aren’t you using Azure Search?

Description: Open up your website. Click Search. Tell me, do you like what you see? Are you BLOWN AWAY at the functionality? Does it return the exact results you were looking for, and let you customize what you see? I’m betting that there’s more than a little room for improvement. Don’t worry, most people are in the same boat. What if I told you could build amazing search experiences with just a little bit of code – all backed by Microsoft’s Cloud? By implementing Azure Search into your sites, you can quickly provide result faceting, inline highlighting, synonym mapping, and even customized text analyzers. My name is Bryan Soltis and I’m a technical Evangelist and Kentico and Microsoft Azure MVP. In this session, I’m going to introduce you to this often-overlooked cousin of the Azure family and show you how to build some amazing search solutions. And maybe a few Simpsons quotes along the way…

Bio: Bryan Soltis is a Technical Evangelist at Kentico and Microsoft Azure MVP. With nearly 20 years of web development experience, Bryan has completed projects for Microsoft, IMG, HP, and other Fortune 500 companies. A former Azure VTSP, Bryan has developed numerous applications with Microsoft’s cloud and Kentico, including custom software development, integrated solutions, and globally-available enterprise applications. As a Technical Evangelist, Bryan enjoys working with the development community and educating developers on best practices, new technologies, and utilizing .NET, Azure, and Kentico to their fullest potentials. And he really likes beer.

Bryan Soltis
Technical Evangelist
Microsoft Azure MVP
@bryan_soltis

For the Monday, March 12th meetup, we will be joined by experts from Cardinal Solutions as they share experiences with real-world Azure-based solutions. If you’re curious to learn how one of the top Azure partners is solving real customer problems using Azure technologies, this will be a great session.

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

Title: From the Front Lines in the Azure Cloud

Abstract: Ever wonder what other companies are doing in Azure? What business problems they’re solving, and what technologies they’re using? If so, then this session is for you! This is a series of 5 to 10-minute lightning talks covering real-world, in-progress Azure projects. Each lightning talk will cover the following:
– Who is the company and what do they do?
– What’s the biz problem?
– What staff/roles are involved?
– How is the team addressing the biz problem?
– What Azure tech is involved?
– Were there any lessons learned?

We have about a dozen lightning talks lined up, across a wide range of industries and technologies. We’ll cover as many as we can fit in 60-90 minutes. Be sure to bring your interest and your questions!

This meetup is sponsored by Cardinal Solutions.

Welcome to the first Central Ohio Azure meetup of 2018!  Finally!!!

For the Monday, February 12th meetup, we will be joined once again by Michael Meadows for what is sure to be an enlightening discussion on security and machine learning. Following Michael’s session, we’ll have an open Azure Q&A period. Bring your questions!

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

Title: Risk Adaptive Application Security Using Machine Learning

Abstract: Policy-based authorization allows developers to implement rules-based authorization that extends far beyond role validation. This pattern is an important part of an approach called Risk Adaptive Access Control (RADAC). One RADAC strategy that is enabled by policy-based authorization is leveraging machine learning to authorize actions based on behavior patterns as well as environmental factors. This allows developers to implement non-functional security features such as recognizing when critical data is being scraped by a script or a user manipulating data in a suspicious manner. In this session, we will review the concepts behind RADAC, and show real-world scenarios where it can be applied using Azure Machine Learning and policy-based authorization in ASP.Net Core MVC.

Presenter: Michael Meadows

Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for fifteen years, and a hacker for much longer. He has served as architect on multiple large-scale, cloud-based, highly regulated application and infrastructure projects. Additionally, Michael has extensive experience building high volume, processor intensive business logic applications using distributed architectures. He is a developer at PriorAuthNow, where he does cool stuff with Service Fabric.

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!

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.

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.