December 2018 Holiday Party!

It’s that time of year, again.  Time for the annual Central Ohio Azure / Microsoft user group holiday party!!!

Once again, the Central Ohio Azure user group is joining with three other Microsoft technology focused user groups in Central Ohio to host an annual holiday party.  The party is a joint effort of the Central Ohio .NET User Group, the Columbus App Dev User Group, the Buckeye SharePoint User Group, and the Central Ohio Azure user group. The event will be on Monday, December 10th from 6pm – 8pm at the Improving Enterprises office.  A $5 ticket is required for attendance.

The annual holiday party is a great way for you to network with other geeks in the Central Ohio technology community.  Plus, there will be plenty of board games, ping pong, and food!  We’ll also be raffling off a few fantastic prizes (more details on those to be announced soon).

As in year’s past, we’ll also be supporting a few local charities.  Your $5 ticket will go to support TechCorps.  Additionally, you can bring a toy (or two, or three) to support OSU’s Toy Adaption Program.  You can also bring food to donate to the Mid-Ohio Food Bank.  That’s a lot of giving!!!  Each item you donate earns you another ticket to the prize raffle.  For example, if you have a $5 + one toy + one food item, that will earn you three tickets.  The more toys and food you bring, the more tickets you earn!

Please purchase a ticket now by clicking on the “Get a Ticket” link below.  You’ll be redirected to Eventbrite.com where you can purchase your ticket, and also learn more about suggested food donations and toys for the Toy Adaption Program.  You must purchase a ticket to be eligible for the raffle, and you must be present to win.

Get a Ticket

October 2018 Meetup – Security in Azure

For the Monday, October 8th meetup we will welcome Michael Nardone to share his insights on how to effectively secure your Azure networks.  Security, especially in “the cloud”, is one of those hot button topics that gets many people excited.  Some of that excitement is based in legitimate concerns, some is based on FUD. In Michael’s session, he’ll share proven strategies and tools to help you ensure that you are covering the proper security controls when deploying your solutions to Azure.

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: Securing Your Azure Networks: Don’t be the next <insert_breach_here>!

Abstract: You’ve been tasked with creating secure compute environments using the tools available to you in the cloud.  The amount of security controls and regulatory requirements that need to be met can be overwhelming.  What are the pertinent details and key aspects of securing your workloads that are unique in Azure?  Let’s take a deep dive with a focus on network security across IaaS and PaaS services in Azure.

Bio: Michael is a Practice Manager for Applications & Infrastructure at Cardinal Solutions. He is a focused Infrastructure professional with experience leading, developing and implementing large scale on-prem and cloud based platforms. Michael is fueled by helping teams break the chains of traditional compute models and stretch to modern architectures in Azure.

September 2018 Meetup

For the Monday, September 10th meetup we will conduct our second hands-on solution architecture meetup! COAzure held it’s first hands-on solution architecture meetup in October 2016, and the feedback was very positive. A lot has changed in Azure in the last two years. So, it’s time to do it again!

The goal of this meeting’s activity will be to learn more about the various Azure services, and how to use them together to architect a solution in Azure. We’ll provide two technical case studies and application/system requirements, and then you’ll work as teams to research various Azure services and decide how to use those to propose an architecture for the system.

Each team will have a little over an hour to come up with its solution architecture, drawing them up on large sheets of paper. We’ll have experienced Azure architects available to answer questions and provide guidance. Bring your laptop so you can research the many available services. We’ll end the meeting with each team sharing its solution with the whole group, and then review the actual architecture that was implemented in Azure.

**You do not have to be experienced with all the Azure services, just interested in learning.**

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

August 2018 Meetup

For the Monday, August 13th meetup we will welcome DJ Maley to share his insights on how to effectively manage data in Azure. Data is often a key component to any system.  Nearly ever system needs “data” for something.  When it comes to building a solution in the cloud, there are a myriad of choices available.  Do you use a relational database, or a NoSQL database?  Who is responsible for managing the database platform (security, maintenance, etc.)?  How can you gain insights from the data?  There are lots of answers to all these questions.  DJ will provide some guidance on choosing the right platform, and pros/cons with some of those approaches. This is sure to be a very relevant session for many people. Should be fun!!

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: How to manage your data in the cloud (and give yourself an advantage in Fantasy Football)

Abstract:  There’s many ways to build a solution in the cloud today. Ever wondered what options Azure provides from a data management perspective? How do we deal with the upcoming challenges around size, scale, speed, and trusting the way data is stored? We’ll talk about how we can leverage some of these options around storing and processing data, the pros/cons with many of the approaches, and ultimately how we empower our data utilizing Machine Learning and AI (and how some of these tools might give you a leg up in Fantasy Football this year).

Bio:DJ manages the Columbus Data and AI Practice for Cardinal Solutions. He is a Business Intelligence professional with experience leading, developing and implementing data warehousing, big data, and data visualization projects. DJ is passionate about enabling organizations to make better decisions using good analytics.

July 2018 Meetup

For the Monday, July 9th meetup we will welcome the return of Michael Collier! Michael will share details of a new Service Fabric offering, Service Fabric Mesh! If you like Service Fabric, but dislike management of VMs, have a fondness for containers, and are curious learn more on the road ahead for Azure Service Fabric, this is a meetup you don’t want to miss!

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: Azure Service Fabric Mesh: The Road Ahead

Abstract: In this session we’ll take a look at a new offering in the Service Fabric family, Service Fabric Mesh. Service Fabric Mesh provides the same scale, reliability, and performance you’re used to with Service Fabric clusters, but without the overhead of cluster management! Additionally, Service Fabric Mesh supports both Windows and Linux containers, thus allowing you to develop in the programming language and framework of your choice. As part of this session, you will gain a better understanding of the new resource model with Service Fabric Mesh. You will also see how easy it can be to build and debug your application before publishing it to Service Fabric Mesh.

Bio: Michael is currently Senior Software Development Engineer in Microsoft’s Commercial Software Engineering (CSE) organization, where he engages deeply with select global ISVs to help them best utilize Azure’s features. Prior to joining Microsoft, Michael worked with various consulting and technology firms where he was instrumental in leading and developing solutions for a wide range of clients. He has a vast amount of experience in helping companies determine the best strategy for adopting cloud computing and providing the insight and hands-on experience to ensure they are successful. Michael is also a respected technology community leader and is often found sharing his Microsoft Azure insights and experiences at regional and national conferences. Michael is also the co-author of two published books on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure (1st and 2nd Edition). Follow Michael’s experiences with Azure on his blog at http://www.michaelscollier.com and on Twitter at @MichaelCollier.

June 2018 Meetup

For the Monday, June 11th meetup we will provide a recap of Azure-related announcements from BUILD 2018. There will be at least three lightning talks lead by Brian Sherwin, Nick Martin, and Brian Jackett covering exciting topics such as advances in AI/ML and Azure Durable Functions.

We will also have some “open mic” time to allow you to ask your burning questions. Please keep those questions to Azure . . . while these presenters are great, they don’t know all knowledge of all the things . . yet. 🙂

Please RSVP here!

May 2018 Meetup

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.

April 2018 Meetup

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

March 2018 Meetup

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.

February 2018 Meetup

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.