ITPROceed is a new free annual event in Belgium that is “the technology geek fest for IT Professionals on Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms and services” as they like to call it. Its goal: fill the TechDays void in the ITPro landscape.

It is heavily supported by Microsoft Belux but organised by all the ITPro user groups in Belgium – Azug, Pro-Exchange, SQL Server UG, System Center UG & Win-Talks!

Some Codit employees were present at the event and here is their feedback and review of the sessions;

Hybrid Cloud with SQL Server 2014 by Pieter Vanhove

Pieter Vanhove has done a nice job showing us an overview of the new Microsoft Azure features that are available in SQL Server 2014.

The main focus in his session was about how you can create a hybrid cloud solution. (Hybrid = hosting a part in the almighty Azure cloud and a part in your own datacenter). 

Here are some interesting topics:

Backup to the cloud:

• Built-in in SQL server 2012 – 2014.
• Tool available for earlier versions. (“We are already using this in production”)
• New feature is the Smart Admin backup to Azure, definitely interesting for smaller organisations!

Migrating databases to Azure:

• SQL 2014 has only made it more easy to migrate your databases! A couple of clicks in the Management studio and you are good to go.

Microsoft has definitely made moving from on premise to Azure a lot easier! The other way takes more work. But why would you want to go back? 🙂

What is happening in a Windows Azure DC and how do they achieve running with 99.95% SLA? by Panagiotis Kefalidis

I was immediately impressed by the knowledge, enthusiasm and pace of the speaker. You could easily see he would be able to go on for hours about his passion: Microsoft Azure. 

He explained how the Windows Azure’s Fabric Controller and the infrastructure around him do their magic like a fine tuned orchestra and keep your machines running and self-healing when things go bad.

After this session I understand how they can guarantee this high SLA. You can’t imagine what happens behind the screens when you for example create a new virtual machine. And that’s maybe the nicest thing about Azure, you don’t have to worry about it!

IT Pros: Meet Azure… again! by Mike Martin & Kristof Rennen

Mike & Kristof kicked off their session with a global overview of the Microsoft Azure landscape from an IaaS perspective.
The rest of their talk was focused on some announcements and new features during this month, they even had to leave some out of it due to time constraints.

Here are some topics they covered – 
– Managebility with Puppet & Chef
– New ‘Ibiza’ portal
– VM Extensions f.e. anti-virus
– Disaster recovery with Site Recovery
– ExpressRoute
– Azure Files
– RemoteApp
– … 

This was a really great session to get a great overview of the recent changes & new features and what they are capable of.
Even I as a developer was amused about the content 🙂 

– Tom

Deep Dive into Microsoft Azure Storage Services by Yves Goeleven (slides)

I’ve heard a lot about this session and his precious level 666 and attended with big expectations, Yves has analysed the official white paper and explained the whole architecture of how Microsoft Azure Storage works behind the scene.
It is not just a simple set of disks but uses different layers to achieve this, and so on and on.

A heavy session but I was able to follow the big picture and also learned about some important effects f.e. when you’re using geo-replication this will not be done at runtime but in a bulk asynchronously.
Next to the main architecture we saw some small but important parts about the supporting previous versions of the API – Depending on the x-ms-version in the HTTP request the services knows what API you are using to route it to the corresponding service, …

Very interesting session! 

– Tom

Deep dive into Windows Azure Pack by Alexandre Verkinderen & Christopher Keyaert

In this session they did a deep dive into the Windows Azure Pack and demonstrate all the benefits that you could get from it. For those who don’t know what’s the Azure pack: it’s running your private cloud using the Microsoft Azure technology.

The session was good, it was nice to see the possibilities, but for me personal this was a less interesting session, as I don’t see myself using this in the daily job.

Azure Integration Patterns with Windows Azure by Sam Vanhoutte (slides)

Last but not least, Sam was on stage to talk about integration patterns in the cloud and how you can bring the cloud to your enterprise where he gave a short overview of several architectural & operational challenges.

He proceeded with three main topics – Network integration, Data integration and Application integration.

• Network integration was a short overview on how you can connect on protocol/network level by using virtual networking, ExpressRoute & hybrid connections as we saw in Mike & Kristof’s talk.
• Data integration covered how we can use Azure Storage & Azure SQL bases and how we can sync that on-prem, also as we saw in Yves’s session
• Application integration was the main topic of his talk where he introduced us to the Service Bus landscape and compared Service Bus Relay, BizTalk Services Hybrid Connections & BizTalk Services with some nice demos that illustrate the benefit of each seperate feature.

Nice comparison session that enlighten the power of each seperate feature and what to use in specific scenarios.

– Tom

ITPROceed was a very good replacement for TechDays with great content, great speakers and lovely catering and that for a free event!
This event once again proved that the community can be very powerful, interesting and fun!

I suggest that ITPros mark their calendar for next years event on 11th of June!

Thanks for reading,

Brecht & Tom.