Azure | Mind Over Messaging

Sneak Peak: My Integrate 2020 Remote Presentation on Azure Event Grid

May 19, 2020 Leave a comment

I feel very privileged to be a speaker at INTEGRATE for the 4th year in a row. Many thanks to Saravana Kumar and Kovai for the privilege & opportunity! Of course, thanks to COVID-19 this year will be a bit different… no jet lag, no expensive bar tabs, and (sadly) no catching up with my good friends & colleagues from around the world (at least not in person anyway). But on the plus side, an online event does have the potential to reach a limitless number of integration enthusiasts. And if you think that you might be one of them, here’s a discount code for you to use!

So what will my talk be about? Well as the title suggests, you will learn about the benefits of event-based integration and how it can help modernise your applications to be reactive, scalable, and extensible. The star of the show here is Event Grid, a lynchpin capability offered as part of Azure Integration Services.

Event Grid offers a single point for managing events sourced from within and without Azure, intelligently routing them to any number of interested subscribers. It not only supports 1st class integration with a large number of built-in Azure services, but also supports custom event sources and routing to any accessible webhook. On top of that, it boasts low-latency, massive scalability, and exceptional resiliency. It even supports the Cloud Events specification for describing events, as well as your own custom schemas.

My talk will feature a demo showing how Event Grid easily enables real-time monitoring of Azure resources – but this is only one of many possible scenarios that are supported. Register for Integrate 2020 Remote so you can not only attend this session but also 40 other topics presented by 30+ integration experts from around the world! Use the discount code INT2020-SPEAKER-DAN to get 15% off any ticket price.

Filed under Azure, Events Tagged with Azure, Event Grid

New Dev SKU for Azure Integration Service Environment (ISE)

August 6, 2019 2 Comments

Last week, Microsoft responded to numerous requests from the community by announcing a new developer tier offering for Integration Service Environments (ISE). The ISE has been generally available for several weeks, but the single available SKU prior to this announcement carried a hefty price tag.

I had the great honour and privilege of speaking about ISE at the INTEGRATE 2019 conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA (USA) last month. My topic was Four Scenarios for Using an Integration Service Environment, which attempted to shed some light on what type of situations would justify using this flat-cost product as opposed to the consumption-based serverless offering of Logic Apps.

While this presentation hopefully piqued interest in the offering, one of the burning questions from the attendees was “When will a lower cost developer SKU be available so we can try it out?” All Microsoft was able to say at that point was, “Soon.” Well, at least they were right, as it is now available only a few weeks later!

Swift Service Fabric Deployments with PowerShell

March 5, 2019 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I had the great privilege of presenting a 60 minute breakout session at Microsoft Ignite | The Tour in Sydney. It was thrilling to have over 200 people registered to see my topic “Seamless Deployments with Azure Service Fabric”, especially in the massive Convention Centre.

In the session I demonstrated the self-healing capabilities of Service Fabric by introducing a bug in the code and then attempting a rolling upgrade. It was impressive to see how Service Fabric detected the bug after the first node was upgraded and then immediately started rolling it back.

As you can imagine, it took a fair amount of practice to get the demo smooth and functioning within the tight time limits of the average audience attention span. (In fact, I had to learn how to tweak both the cluster and the application health check settings to shorten the interval – perhaps the subject of another blog post!) Naturally this also entailed frequently “resetting” the environment so that I could start over when things didn’t go quite as planned, or if I wanted to reset the version number. If you’ve ever worked with Service Fabric before you would know that deployments from Visual Studio (or Azure DevOps) can take a while; and undeploying an application from Service Fabric manually in the portal is painful!

6th Annual Global Azure Bootcamp Brings Azure to Brisbane

April 27, 2018 Leave a comment

Last weekend I had the honour of both organising and speaking at the 6th annual Global Azure Bootcamp in Brisbane. This is always a large event to manage, typically sold out with a long waiting list – and this year was no exception! We had over 70 people attend this all-day Saturday deep-dive into Microsoft Azure technologies – and the response was extremely favourable by all signs.

As the name suggests, this is a global initiative which is organised by six individuals from around the world who donate a massive amount of time and effort to facilitate the launching of local community events on a specific common day. Through their website they manage to collect registrations from local organisers, disseminate information, create hands-on lab materials (e.g. racing game), obtain global sponsors (who donate free licenses and trial subscriptions of their products), set up support for sub-domains, and even help obtain local sponsorship (e.g. Microsoft providing free Subway lunches at most locations). It is a massive undertaking. This year we had 262 locations from around the world participate.

Local organisers were free to decide their own agenda in terms of content and activity. In Brisbane, we nominated to have a full day of presentations while allowing attendees to go off and work on hands-on labs whenever they wanted to. This has worked out well in the past, and this year was not exception. In this way we were able to accommodate seven presentations, from some of which you can download the content (I’ll keep updating this as they are posted, so please check back if a link isn’t available just yet):

Speaker	Title	Download
Adam Cogan	Keynote: The Nine Knights of Azure	Slides \| Video
Todd Whitehead	Azure Ninja Tips & Tricks	Slides \| Video
Adam Stephensen	Bots – The Next UI Revolution	Slides \| Video
Alessandro Cardoso	Identity Modernization with Azure	Slides \| Video
Dan Toomey	Serverless iPaaS in Azure	Slides \| Video
David Alzamendi	Ingesting, Processing & Displaying Real Time Information with Azure	Slides \| Video
Elliot Munro	Automate Office 365 administration with Azure Functions and PowerShell	Slides \| Video

One challenge this year was finding a venue after a building-wide power outage at Microsoft was scheduled at the last minute. Fortunately, The Precinct was available and was generous in lending us their Staircase Stadium. What an interesting space! It came with an excellent A/V package, free wi-fi, and a kitchen that was well suited to the catering. Although it did not offer the luxuriant comfortable seating one might prefer for an all day event, the attendees nevertheless seemed to agree that it was a good venue.

Lunch was provided by Subway through the generous sponsorship of Microsoft. We also were served an excellent morning and afternoon tea by Art of Catering.

At the end of the day, we were able to raffle off some excellent prizes to six lucky winners thanks to the generous donations of both the global and local sponsors.

There are several people and organisations I’d like to thank for their contributions to this event:

All of the global sponsors for their generous prize donations
Our local sponsors including Mexia, Microsoft, TechSmith, Aspose, and WardyIT
SSW TV for recording the entire event (keep an eye on their site for postings!)
The Precinct for providing a venue at the last minute
Damien Berry for assistance (who is also my co-organiser of the Brisbane Azure User Group)
All of the speakers
All of the dedicated Microsoft Azure enthusiasts who gave up half their weekend to attend this event
All of the global organisers who created and implemented the Global Azure Bootcamp concept!

Looking forward to next year!

Filed under Azure, Events Tagged with Azure, iPaaS, webcast

2nd Annual Global Integration Bootcamp a Success!

March 30, 2018 1 Comment

Last Saturday I had the great privilege of organising and hosting the 2nd annual Global Integration Bootcamp in Brisbane. This was a free event hosted by 15 communities around the globe, including four in Australia and one in New Zealand!

It’s a lot of work to put on these events, but it’s worth it when you see a whole bunch of dedicated professionals give up part of their weekend because they are enthusiastic to learn about Microsoft’s awesome integration capabilities.

The day’s agenda concentrated on Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) offerings in Microsoft Azure. It was a packed schedule with both presentations and hands-on labs:

Time Slot	Topic	Speaker
08:30 – 08:45	Arrival & Check-In
08:45 – 09:00	Introduction & Welcome	Dan Toomey
09:00 – 09:45	Serverless Computing with Logic Apps, Functions & Event Grid	Dan Toomey
09:45 – 10:45	Building a Smart Solution with Azure Storage, Event Grid, Functions, Logic Apps & the Computer Vision API	(Hands-On Lab)
10:45 – 11:30	Microsoft Flow, LUIS and Bots	Susie Moore, Dan Toomey
11:30 – 13:00	Creating a Smart Expense Claims Bot using Flow & Bizzy	(Hands-On Lab)
13:00 – 13:30	Cognitive Services	Adam Finster
13:30 – 15:00	Recognising People with Cognitive Services Face API	(Hands-On Lab)
15:00 – 15:30	Azure API Management	Dan Toomey
15:30 – 16:30	API Management Tutorials	(Hands-On Lab)
16:30 – 17:00	Integration Design	Lee Simpson

It wasn’t all work… we had some delicious morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea catered by Artisan’s Café & Catering, and there was a bit of swag to give away as well thanks to Microsoft and also Mexia (who generously sponsored the event).

Overall, feedback was good and most attendees were appreciative of what they learned. The slide decks for most of the presentations are available online and linked above, and the labs are available here if you would like to have a go.

I’d like to thank my colleagues Susie, Lee and Adam for stepping up into the speaker slots and giving me a couple of much needed breaks! I’d also like to thank Joern Staby for helping out with the lab proctoring and also writing an excellent post-event article.

Finally, I be remiss in not mentioning the global sponsors who were responsible for getting this world-wide event off of the ground and providing the lab materials:

Martin Abbott
Glenn Colpaert
Steef-Jan Wiggers
Tomasso Groenendijk
Eldert Grootenboer
Sven Van den brande
Gijs in ‘t Veld
Rob Fox

Really looking forward to next year’s event!

Filed under Azure, Events Tagged with APIM, Azure, Azure Functions, Event Grid, iPaaS, Logic Apps, user group

Great Experience at INTEGRATE 2017 in London!

July 6, 2017 Leave a comment

Last week I had the privilege not only of attending the INTEGRATE 2017 conference in London, but presenting as well. A huge thanks to Saravana Kumar and BizTalk360 for inviting me as a speaker – what a tremendous honour and thrill to stand in front of nearly 400 integration enthusiasts from around the world and talk about Hybrid Connectivity! Also, a big thanks to Mexia for generously funding my trip.

With 380+ attendees from 52 countries around the globe, this is by far the biggest Microsoft integration event of the year. Of those 380, only four of us that I know of came from APAC: fellow MVP speakers Martin Abbott from Perth and Wagner Silveira from Auckland NZ, as well as Cameron Shackell from Brisbane who manned his ActiveADAPTER sponsor stand. Wagner would have to take the prize for the furthest travelled with his 30+ hour journey!

After publishing one blog post summarising my take on the messages delivered by Microsoft (which accounted for half of the sessions at the event), I followed on shortly after with another similar post highlighting the MVP community presentations. In addition to BizTalk Server, Logic Apps, and other traditional integration topics these also spanned into the new areas of Bots, IoT and PowerApps.

Aside from the main event, Saravana and his team also arranged for a few social events as well, including networking drinks after the first day, a dinner at Nando’s for the speakers, and another social evening for the BizTalk360 partners. They also presented each of the BizTalk360 product specialists with a beautiful award – an unexpected treat!

You have to hand it to Saravana and his team – everything went like clockwork, even keeping the speakers on schedule. And I thought it was a really nice touch that each speaker was introduced by a BizTalk360 team member. Not only did it make the speakers feel special, but it provided an opportunity to highlight the people behind the scenes who not only work to make BizTalk360 a great product but also ensure events like these come off. I hope all of them had a good rest this week!

As with all of these events, one of the things I treasure the most is the opportunity to catch up with my friends from around the globe who share my passion for integration, as well as meeting new friends. In my talk, I commented about how strong our community is, and that we not only integrate as professionals but integrate well as people too.

Arriving a day and a half before the three day event, I had hoped to conquer most of the jet-lag early on. But alas, the proximity to the solstice in a country so far North meant the sun didn’t set until past 10:30pm while rising just before 4:30am – which is the time I would involuntarily wake up each day no matter how late I stayed up the night before! Still, adrenalin kept me going and the engaging content kept me awake for every session.

And no matter what.., there was always time for a beer or two! Smile

I look forward to the next time I get to meet up with my integration friends! If you missed the event in London, you’ll have a second chance at INTEGRATE 2017 USA which will be held in Redmond on October 25-27. And of course, if you keep your eyes on the website, the videos and slides should be published soon.

(Photos by Nick Hauenstein, Dan Toomey, Mikael Sand, and Tom Canter)

Filed under Azure, BizTalk, Events Tagged with Azure, BizTalk 2016, BizTalk360, Hybrid Connections, MVP

Microsoft MVP – It’s All About Community

April 7, 2017 1 Comment

(This post was originally published on Mexia’s blog on 07 April 2017)

Last weekend I had the great privilege of attending my first Microsoft MVP event – the MVP Community Connection held in Sydney. This was an invitation to all Australian MVPs to come together over two days to network, receive central communication from the program managers, and learn some best practices in how we can better serve the community.

MVP_Logo_Secondary_Blue286_RGB_72ppi First I should explain what an MVP is. The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award is presented to recognised experts in the technical community who regularly and voluntarily share their passion and knowledge with others, including Microsoft itself. The award celebrates an individual’s deep commitment to serving the community and promoting awareness of Microsoft’s great products through a variety of channels – be it running user groups, speaking at events, blogging, mentoring, answering questions on forums, creating and sharing free software, etc. Aside from recognition, the award includes a number of benefits and privileges, including direct access to the Microsoft product teams via email distribution lists and Yammer, invitations to early previews and Product Group Interaction (PGI) meetings, exam vouchers, free software and subscriptions, and more. In return, Microsoft expects us to use these benefits and privileges to facilitate our continued involvement in the community and also to provide valuable feedback to Microsoft to help them design and build better products. The award lasts for one year, after which it may be renewed if the candidate has continued to demonstrate exemplary commitment and service.

Azure Exam Talk at User Group

December 18, 2016 Leave a comment

The other night I had the privilege of presenting to the Brisbane Azure User Group at our last meeting of the year. My topic was about certification exams in Microsoft Azure, and aimed to address two relatively new changes in the certification program:

New Certification Path – Microsoft recently announced changes in their certification program designed to streamline the certification path. Although they are retiring the Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD): Azure Solutions Architect as of 31st March 2017, the three exams mentioned below that made up this certification are still relevant and will now earn the title of Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE): Cloud Platform and Infrastructure.
Refreshed Exams – All three exams have been refreshed as of 23 November 2016, now including new content specifically around the PaaS capabilities in Azure (App Service, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, API Management, Service Fabric, etc), Azure Resource Manager (ARM), and extended identity management capabilities (e.g. Azure Active Directory B2B and B2C). They have also removed Cloud Services from the syllabus.

The three exams that all this relates to are:

The recording of this talk (which also discussed preparation tips & techniques) can be found here, whilst the slides are available here.

Filed under Azure, Events Tagged with Azure, certification, user group, webcast

Busy Times…Again

December 6, 2016 Leave a comment

You may have noticed that I haven’t been too active on the social media / blogging front of late. It certainly isn’t because there isn’t much to write about…especially when you consider the release of BizTalk Server 2016 (including the Logic Apps Adapter), the General Availability of Azure Functions, and many other integration events leading up to these! And for those on the certification path, there’s news of the refresh of the Azure exams as well.

In fact, it is that very last item that accounts for a good deal of my scarcity in the blogging world of late. My employer is keen for as many of us as possible to earn the Microsoft Certified Solution Expert (MCSE) accreditation in Azure. I’ve already passed first of three required exams, MS 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions after several weeks of after hours study (hours that might have been spent blogging). That accomplishment has earned me this nice little badge:

I’m now currently studying for the next exam, MS 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions. Passing this exam will earn me a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) qualification in Cloud Platform. However, it won’t stop there as I’ll need to pass one more exam – MS 70-534 Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions in order to attain the coveted MCSE in Cloud Platform and Infrastructure. All I can say is that I’ll be doing a lot of studying over the Christmas holidays…

Aside from studying for exams, I’ve also been heavily tasked at work as Mexia has had a profoundly successful sales year in 2016 – which translates into an overload of work! No wonder we’re heavily recruiting right now, looking for those “unicorns” that can help us remain as the best integration consultancy in Australia. There has been a fair amount of travel lately, and as Mexia’s only Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) I will continuing to deliver courses in BizTalk Server Development, BizTalk Server Administration, BizTalk360, and Azure Readiness. That means many more hours preparing all of that content.

But it hasn’t stopped me from speaking, at least not entirely. Aside from regular presentations at the Brisbane Azure User Group (including this one on Microsoft Flow), I’ve also been a guest presenter at Xamarin Dev Days in Brisbane where I talked about Connected and Disconnected Apps with Azure Mobile Apps.

Looking forward to writing posts more regularly again after this exam crunch is over. There’s a lot of exciting things happening in the integration world right now!

Filed under Azure Tagged with Azure, certification, webcast

Integrate 2016 – What an Event!

May 21, 2016 Leave a comment

Last week I had the privilege of attending the world’s largest integration event this year, Integrate 2016 in London. A big thanks to my employer Mexia for sending me. As is typical for events organised by BizTalk360, it was on an especially grand scale (27 sessions with 25+ speakers) and did not disappoint in the content presented by members of the Microsoft product team and the MVP community.

Day 1 of the three day event featured a number of announcements from Microsoft that clarified their vision and direction for integration, even more so than the Integration Roadmap delivered at the end of last year. Showing their commitment to BizTalk Server as the on-premises integration platform and Logic Apps as the cloud platform provided some much-needed reassurance and comfort to the community. “BizTalk and Logic Apps better together” is the mantra underpinned by the addition of a Logic Apps adapter in the upcoming BizTalk 2016 CTP2 release and the new BizTalk Connector soon to be introduced in Logic Apps.

Without explicitly stating it, it also became rather apparent as to what is “on the outs” in the integration space:

- Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services (MABS) is likely to be deprecated as both the VETER pipelines and the EDI/B2B functionality moves into Logic Apps by way of the Enterprise Integration Pack;
- Azure Stack is no longer being touted as the on-premises integration platform; rather BizTalk Server will continue to be king of that domain.

I’ve already posted an article on Mexia’s blog giving my rundown on all the sessions presented by Microsoft and the significant announcements. Soon after I followed up with a summary of the many MVP sessions that rounded out the conference. In addition, there are plenty of other blog posts from the community giving their thoughts and recaps of the event; here are just a few:

Besides Microsoft’s clear roadmap message and the excellent presentations, perhaps the best thing about this conference was the opportunity to catch up with colleagues and friends from around the world – and meet new ones as well!

(photo by Thomas Canter)

(photo courtesy of BizTalk360)

(photo by Tara Motevalli)

(photo by Steef-Jan Wiggers)

Kudos again to Saravana Kumar, BizTalk360, Microsoft and all the sponsors for making this such an outstanding event! Looking forward to Integrate 2017!

Filed under Azure, BizTalk, Events Tagged with Azure, BizTalk, BizTalk Summit, BizTalk360

← Older posts

Mind Over Messaging

Sneak Peak: My Integrate 2020 Remote Presentation on Azure Event Grid

New Dev SKU for Azure Integration Service Environment (ISE)

Swift Service Fabric Deployments with PowerShell

6th Annual Global Azure Bootcamp Brings Azure to Brisbane

2nd Annual Global Integration Bootcamp a Success!

Great Experience at INTEGRATE 2017 in London!

Microsoft MVP – It’s All About Community

Azure Exam Talk at User Group

Busy Times…Again

Integrate 2016 – What an Event!

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