Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

We are living in a world where technology innovation is something usual. People are less impressed when they see a phone with better performance or a tablet with another great feature. Living in this world, which is interconnected makes us asking ourselves how all this devices communicate. Worldwide, there are hundreds of protocols used by different providers. Some of them are worldwide known like MQTT (Multi-Client Publish/Subscribe Messaging) or CoAP that is a lightweight version of HTTP protocol. Each protocol has a special purpose and was designed for specific use cases. DDS – design for Device To Device, used with success to communicate between machines over a very fast bus MQTT - design for Device To Server, used to collect data (especially telemetric data) from devices and sending them to a server XMPP – design for Device To Server, used when collected data needs to be interpreted by people (is based on XML) AMQP  – design for Server To Server, a protocol design to...

This week I had the opportunity to participate at Cluj Innovation Days. This two day conference is organized by ClujIT and every year it seems that is bigger and bigger. I was impressed that this year more than 400 people attended this conference. The list of speakers was pretty impressive, a lot of big names from IT industry (especially from Google, Oracle). I had the great opportunity to have also a session at this event where I talk about Azure IoT Services. Below you can find my slides from this event and some pictures. Title : IoT from an Azure Developer perspective Abstract : A few years ago 1.000 devices was a big number, two years ago 10.000 devices was an in interesting number, now 100.000 devices is a piece of cake. In the last few months, Microsoft Azure released a lot of services and features to support the Internet Of Things. As a developer we need to keep up with all this new features and know how to combine them in a final product. This session is dedicated to yo...

In one of my latest post I talk about Azure Service Bus and Active/Passive mechanism that works great when you need  fail-over mechanism. Using this mechanism the system can use a secondary channel to send messages in case of the connectivity or reliability problems with the first resources (in our case with our Active namespace). The Passive resource it is recommended to be placed in another region (data-center). In this way there is better protection in a case of a fail-over. The downside of Active/Passive Mechanism is the risk of losing messages that were send with success on the channel. There is a risk of loosing messages when the Active resource goes down. If the system that sends messages over the wire is not capable to send again the lost messages than you could have an issues. This use case it is important only for use cases when it is not acceptable to lose messages. For example in the above example (from the Active/Passive post, when backed send messages to the ca...

Yesterday evening iQuest had organized an IT event in Cluj-Napoca - Keyboard & Mice. Almost 100 people participate to this event. There were 5 speakers that are working (or used to work) in iQuest. The session were very interesting and presented IT industry from different perspective. In this kind of events you realise that IT is more than 'code'. Below you can find the event schedule: Welcome speech – Mihai Barabas, Head of PMO, iQuest Group How to crunch 1M messages per second in 4 easy steps – Radu Vunvulea, Technical Lead, iQuest Group You don’t have a [brilliant] future as a developer if … – Andrei Olar, Developer Highly secured cloud-based reporting and analytics platform – Mihai Josan, Senior Software Engineer Mobile Already Is the Future – Andrei Hegedus, Technical Lead, iQuest Group At the end of this post you will be able to find the slides from my presentation.  After the event we had a special contest called "Drunk Programing Contest". Th...

A messaging system like Azure Service Bus is great for scenarios when you need to have a reliable communication channel between different components. There are cases when even the SLA offered by a cloud provider it is not enough. For example in the case of Azure Service Bus is 99.9% uptime. In this scenarios we need a failover mechanism that will offer us better reliability. Imagine a system where Service Bus Queue is used to transmit commands from backend to cars. The backend can order to the car to open/close doors or to start the engine. In this scenarios you cannot be out of order for 1h or 2h because the client will not be very happy. You don't want to stay in the front of the car for 2h until the doors will open. What should we do in this cases? A solution to this problem is to look at a failover mechanism like Active-Active or Active-Passive. In this post we will talk about Active-Passive and tomorrow we will talk about the Active-Active. An Active-Passive solution...

When the size of an IT company change, the people expectation are changing. They usually expect more benefits from the company and many more. In the same time the company expectation increase - higher level skills, higher commitment and so on. You know the story. On the same page, for a company it is more important to deliver and to achieve annual targets than the vision for next 3-5 years. This targets can be expressed in number of employees, number of projects, revenue, new clients or other metrics. In small company we are oriented to people. Giving our best to keep people happy. Having happy employees, a company can go even on the Moon. People will feel that they are part of the company, they are part of the company dream. In this way a company will have a great success. For such a company, the journey is the most important thing. It is not so important if the target was reached, the journey was the most important thing for company and people. When a company grows, things are s...

ITCamp is back. Yes, the largest community conference for IT professionals in Transylvania will be organized for the 5th time. For 2 days, more than 30 well-known speakers from all over the world will sustain more than 40 sessions. This year we will have 3 technical tracks and a separate track for business. Why you should join ITCamp? • Be up to date with the latest IT technologies • Get the chance to interact with highly skilled professionals • See how technology helps you re-imagine your business • Learn about latest best practices and tools for application development • Enjoy presentations held by experienced and influential speakers • Discover how to get the most out of your existing IT solutions • Expand your customer or collaborator/partner portfolio • Take smart business decisions and build relevant strategies When? May 21-22, 2015, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Where? At Grand Hotel Italia, Cluj-Napoca Past events 2014 - http://2014.itcamp.ro 2013 -...

Today was the last day of Azure DevCamps events. In the last 4 weeks community leaders from Romania in collaboration with Microsoft Romania were in a roadshow. We were in cities like Bucharest, Oradea, Timisoara, Cluj, Sibiu, Brasov and we talk about Azure, Microsoft and tools that can make our life easier. A special ‘Thank you’ to Microsoft (because they sustain this evens and made them possible) and to all community leaders that were involved: Adrian Stoian Alex Mag Ciprian Jichici Cosmin Tataru Florin Loghiade Mihai Tătăran Radu Vunvulea Razvan Rusu Silviu Niculita Tudor Damina (Tudy) More than 200 people attended to this evens and discovered Azure world. At this events I talk about Azure features that are interesting for enterprise. Below you can find the abstract of the session and slides. Title :       What's new in Azure from an enterprise perspective Abstract:   Azure, like other cloud providers became a collections of more and more servi...

Cluj Innovation Days , organized by Cluj IT Cluster, is an annual regional forum aimed to consolidate the IT community and to facilitate the interaction with business partners as well as the public sector. The first edition was described as a collusion that brought together private and public entities from the IT sector and other industries to express the need of a common agenda and present innovative ideas, develop business relations with international partners and strengthen the local IT community. 400+ participants: representatives of the Romanian Government and the local public institutions, members from the Academia, as well as delegates from foreign Embassies and international business networks. The third edition of Cluj Innovation Days will take place on the 19th and 20th of March and its main purpose is to continue the journey that we started two years ago, by deepening the idea evolving around innovation. The event will take place at Grand Hotel Napoca. I received 4 tic...

Part 2:  How to open a RDP connection to a device that doesn't has direct access to internet using Azure Service Bus Relay http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2015/04/how-to-open-rdp-connection-to-device.html The problem We started to work on a project where we need to be able to offer a reliable solution for Remote Screen Sharing - RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). Luckily, all devices are running Windows operating system and we can use with success the support from Windows. Because all the devices are spreaded world wide we need a tunneling solution. All the content that is send over the wire needs to be encrypted. In theory we would need some relays servers that would be ‘the man on the middle’ between devices and people that would like to access that device - tunneling. There are some solutions on the market for Relay Servers and Tunneling. Some of them are open source and free, others are expensive and very exotic. Our solution would run on Azure, because of this, we want to ...