Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

I’m that kind of person that it is not impressed easily by a product or a software solution. However, I need to confess that this week, I was amazed when somebody shares with a solution that implemented to prepare for ‘AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate’. mIRC and Trivia Do you remember the old game Trivia? If you were born before 1990, I’m 99.99% sure that a part of your life was burned on IRC (mIRC), playing Trivia. If it was a great way to meet new people, but also to learn some history, geography and even match. Smart technology  This guy had a brilliant idea to combine Microsoft Azure SQL and Cognitive Services to create a bot that can be used to play Trivia. Using LUIS, he developed a bot for Skype that it is using the Azure SQL to fetch question-related to AWS Certified Solutions Architect from the database. With the power of LUIS (Language Understanding), that it is built on top of a leaning machine system, you can build a bot that can understand the n...

Working with Durable Functions inside Azure Functions, it’s a great experience and enable us to achieve things that were not possible to achieve until now. For patterns where you need fan out/fan in, durable functions made our life more simple but allowing us to run multiple functions in parallel at collecting the data at the end. When we use HTTP(s) trigger, you can receive a clear status of your current execution over a webhook. A similar approach can be achieved if you monitor the status from another function at a specific time interval. But when you are using event triggers, the rules of the game are changing.  Problem to solve From a Web Application we want to trigger a Durable Function using Azure Service Bus and have the ability to check the function status to be able to know when the function had finished. Matching the instance ID The problem appears when you use Azure Service Bus as a trigger or any other type of event trigger. In these situations, the instan...

What a great way to finish this week. This week was awesome because ITCamp Conference took place in Cluj-Napoca. 2 days with amazing technical content delivered by speakers from all around the globe. Two things impress me every year at ITCamp Conference. The first one is the quality of content that is kept at high standards every year. The second one is from the logistic part - the kind of event that is well organised and everything goes super smooth. Congratulations for ITCamp team. From the number perspective, ITCamp 2019 looks like this: 500+ participants, 5 tracks, 35+ speakers and more than 45 sessions delivered. This year I had the fantastic opportunity to deliver two sessions. The first one was about how we can combine serverless and microservices to solve business problems. Being able to run Azure Functions inside Kubernestess cluster is a game changer for portability and how we design DEV and TEST environments. The most challenging session was the second one. It was the ...

I had the fantastic opportunity to be invited as a speaker at Bucharest edition of DevTalks (2019 edition) . Because it was overlapping with another conference that I'm joining in Cluj-Napoca, ITCamp , I was not able to attend DevTalks conference more than a few hours. Even so, I was impressed by the event size. With more than 2500 people attending the event, 7 different tracks and more than 100 speakers, the conference brings closer to the attendees the technologies trends of the IT world. My today session was about DevOps, focusing on the culture and how we shall behave to support the DevOps culture in combination with the powerful tooling that Microsoft is offering for us - Azure DevOps. Besides this, attendees were able to find information related to what are the 2020 trends from a DevOps perspective and what Romanian market understand by DevOps. It was a great experience, and DevTalks team was hugely supported and well organised. See you next time! My session slides ca...

Where do you store the configuration part of your application? In the JSON file? Inside a NoSQL or relational database? Are you using an external solution for this layer? How do you do versioning and feature managing? There are no wrong answers to these questions, and I’m sure that at least one time in your life you deployed an application with the wrong configuration. In this post, we will talk about the Azure App Configuration. A new service provided by Azure that enables us to store and manage the configuration of our applications. What is Azure App Configuration Service The Azure App Configuration Service can be used in combination with any other Azure Services. You can use this service to store your application configuration written in Java and hosted inside AKS or an Azure VM. From this perspective, it is service agnostic and comes with powerful libraries to access the service directly from Java Spring, .NET Core and .NET. At this moment in time, the only thing that it ...