Event Grid | 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

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

Integration Down Under… is UP & RUNNING!

January 29, 2018 Leave a comment

For years now Integration Monday has been faithfully giving us webinars almost every week. There have been some outstanding sessions from international leaders in the integration space including MVPs, members of the Microsoft product team, and other community members. For the Asia Pacific community, however, it has always been a challenge to participate in the live sessions due to the unfriendly time zone. (I certainly know what a struggle it was to present my own session last October at 4:30am!) Even from the listener’s perspective, it is usually nicer to be able to join a live webinar and ask questions rather than to consume the recordings afterwards.

Thanks to the initiative of veteran MVP Bill Chesnut (aka “BizTalk Bill”) and the sponsorship of his employer SixPivot, we now have a brand new webinar series starting up in a friendlier time slot for our APAC community! Integration Down Under is launching its inaugural webinar session on Thursday, 8th February at 7:00pm AEST. You can register for this free event here.

This initial session will introduce the leaders and allow each of us to present as very short talk on a chosen topic:

Bill Chesnut – API Management REST to SOAP
Martin Abbott – Azure Data Factory v2
Wagner Silveira – Azure Functions Proxy
Dan Toomey – Serverless Eventing with Azure Event Grid
Rene Brauwers – A Reactive Integration Primer

There are already more than twenty registrations even though the link has been live for only a few days. I hope that this is a good sign of the interest within the community!

Feeling really fortunate to be part of this initiative, and looking forward to delivering my intro to Event Grid talk! It will be a slightly scaled down version of what I presented at the Sydney Tech Summit back in November. Hope to see you there!

Filed under Azure, BizTalk, Events Tagged with Event Grid, user group, webcast

Speaking on Azure Event Grid at the Microsoft Tech Summit in Sydney

November 12, 2017 Leave a comment

I’m really excited about the opportunity to speak at the Microsoft Tech Summit in Sydney this week! This free two-day event is a technical learning opportunity with a focus on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365. There are some great sessions lined up with mostly Microsoft speakers, and although my partner slot is only 15 minutes, I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts on Azure Event Grid with the community:

Unfortunately with such a short time frame, there won’t be the opportunity to share and demonstrate the scenario which I’ve blogged about here, but I hopefully will have time to do a very short demo of the blob storage integration. In my preparation, I’ve been able to whittle down the execution time to less than three minutes, which includes:

Showing a pre-created Azure blob storage account with a single empty container
Provisioning an Event Grid subscription to blob creation events from within this storage account
Targeting the subscription at a URL from Request Bin
Uploading a file to the blob container using Azure Storage Explorer
Observing the event message displayed in Request Bin

Mister Maker

Right now, the preview version only accepts a limited number of publishers and subscribers from Azure, but these options will expand over the coming months:

And with support for custom topics and WebHook subscriptions, Event Grid is capable of handling events from anywhere today that can publish a properly formatted message to a URL and provide the necessary SAS token!

Amplify 1

9:15am on Thursday

Filed under Azure, Events Tagged with Event Grid, Serverless, Service Bus

Serverless Logging & Alerting with Service Fabric & Azure Event Grid

September 3, 2017 2 Comments

(This post was originally published on Mexia’s blog on 1st September 2017)

Microsoft recently released the public preview of Azure Event Grid – a hyper-scalable serverless platform for routing events with intelligent filtering. No more polling for events – Event Grid is a reactive programming platform for pushing events out to interested subscribers. This is an extremely significant innovation, for as veteran MVP Steef-Jan Wiggers points out in his blog post, it completes the existing serverless messaging capability in Azure:

Azure Functions – Serverless compute
Logic Apps – Serverless connectivity and workflows
Service Bus – Serverless messaging
Event Grid – Serverless Events

And as Tord Glad Nordahl says in his post From chaos to control in Azure, “With dynamic scale and consistent performance Azure Event grid lets you focus on your app logic rather than the infrastructure around it."

The preview version not only comes with several supported publishers and subscribers out of the box, but also supports customer publishers and (via WebHooks) custom subscribers:

In this blog post, I’ll describe the experience in building a sample logging mechanism for a service hosted in Azure Service Fabric. The solution not only logs all events to table storage, but also sends alert emails for any error events:

Mind Over Messaging

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

2nd Annual Global Integration Bootcamp a Success!

Integration Down Under… is UP & RUNNING!

Speaking on Azure Event Grid at the Microsoft Tech Summit in Sydney

Serverless Logging & Alerting with Service Fabric & Azure Event Grid

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