Image courtesy of CloudBrew
Where Are We, and What's Next?
Sakari Nahi’s keynote provided a retrospective glance at recent technical developments while highlighting the current slowdown in growth among major tech players. Nahi urged businesses to prepare for upcoming uncertainties in 2024. Notably, he compared the rise of Artificial Intelligence technologies with previous ‘hypes,’ emphasizing AI’s unique potential for everyone.
A Teacher, an Economist, and a Developer Walk into a Bar
Adele Carpenter, a software engineer at TriFork, shared valuable insights for software developers using practical examples and heuristics, and delivered examples on how a person working in Software can use these to their advantage. She discussed:
- Opportunity cost: the principle that you should always consider the total cost of making a decision. For example, when you decide to rewrite an application versus gradually improving it, the total cost of rewriting should be weighed against the cost of a gradual improvement track. This is while also being able to add new features to the application.
- Sunk cost fallacy: also known as “Escalation of Commitment”, this principle describes the very human tendency to continue an endeavor or project once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. In a perfect world, a project stops the moment its goals are no longer feasible but in reality, as humans, we don’t want ‘give up’. Adele urges everyone to rationalize these decisions as much as possible and to avoid too much emotion.
- Consistency over perfection: in line with the Agile Manifesto, this principle urges you to deliver value to your customers as soon as possible, if only to gather feedback. As software developers, we are often caught in the ‘perfection trap’, unwilling to complete a project until it is 100% perfect, but Adele tells us it’s better to deliver value quickly and make adjustments based on feedback when needed, rather than lock yourself up for a long time, or deliver something that doesn’t align with the needs of the customer.
- Relationships first: This principle tells you that our best work is built on strong relationships, whether in your team or others, or with the clients. Adele illustrates this as follows: “If you can’t connect with them, you can’t rely on them”.
- ANCA: Finally, Adele spoke on the ANCA method (Aviate, Navigate, Communicate, Administrate), a principle that originated in the aerospace industry, but which can also be used in the software industry. It tells us to use these 4 ‘stages’ when solving a problem, or creating something in general:
- Aviate: Whatever happens, make sure that the business keeps running and that the impact on the users is as minimal as possible.
- Navigate: Investigate the problem, using all available resources and metrics.
- Communicate: Make sure that everyone involved is kept informed at all times.
- Administrate: Define the actions to fix the problem.
The following example was used by Adele in the case of a hypothetical problem within a software application:
From Closed Platform to Landing Zone with Azure Policy
David de Hoop, Software Architect at Team Rockstars IT, discussed setting up the Landing Zone as a foundation for Azure applications. He explored the balance between developer freedom and security/networking needs, with a focus on Azure Policy. The session provided insights into enforcing security features and automatically auditing and reporting configuration deviations.
Designing your Landing Zones, the Cloud Adoption Way
Philip Van de Vyver, Cloud Solutions Architect at Arxus, discussed designing Landing Zones using the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. He highlighted the framework’s best practices, documentation, and tools for achieving cloud adoption goals, emphasizing the distinction between the “Platform” and “Application” parts of a Landing Zone.
Capturing Large Volumes of IoT Data with IoT Edge
Codit’s own Steven De Lausnay provided a technical deep dive into a project involving capturing high volumes of IoT data using IoT Edge. The session covered the use of OPC UA, blob storage, and custom modules to streamline data into the cloud. Steven also shared a solution for capturing BI parameters without incurring high data costs. In the example, the client also wished to capture all data and send it to their Business Intelligence solution, in addition to the actual telemetry data. To accomplish this without mounting cloud costs, Steven outlined a solution where two data streams were set up on IoT Edge itself. This split the data stream into a ‘real-time’ telemetry stream, and a ‘batch’ stream in which the BI parameters were collected and sent to the client platform in batch, thereby avoiding high data costs.
Using Azure Digital Twin in Manufacturing
In another session, Steven explored a hands-on demo of Azure Digital Twin in a manufacturing context. He outlined a project where a client gained insights into their manufacturing process by building a Digital Twin. Steven dove into the ISA95 manufacturing standard and showed how it can be configured and extended to represent your factory configuration. He then showed how this structure can also be automatically ingested into the Digital Twin and how it can be combined with real-time sensor data.
Conclusion
Cloudbrew 2024 provided a wealth of insights into the current state of technology and offered practical guidance for navigating the challenges ahead. From software development heuristics to Azure applications, Power Platform monitoring, and innovative projects in IoT and Azure Digital Twin, the conference showcased the diverse and dynamic landscape of the tech industry.
As we move forward, these insights will undoubtedly shape the strategies and approaches of businesses and developers alike.
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