Can you feel the excitement growing? Yes it's right, Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Ignite the Tour are going to start soon.

Microsoft Ignite

Ignite is going to take place at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando FL from November 4th to 8th. It is the largest Microsoft conference. It will also be the first time that I attend this show. It's also sold out, which means multiple tens of thousands of attendees will converge to Orlando soon...

To be honest I am a little worried to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the event. But on the other hand it will be a great occasion to see all my friends and to make new ones :)

I will be quite active at Ignite and I am really excited about showing the sessions that we have been working on since, in some cases, August. It took a long time to prepare those sessions and polish them, and to prepare train-the-trainer packages (more about that later).

At Ignite, you will see me on stage at 3 occasions, and a whole lot of other occasions to connect with me:

MOD20 - Moving Your Database to Azure

In this session, I will show you how to migrate on-premises databses (MongoDB and SQL Server) to Azure (CosmosDB and Azure SQL Database). We will talk about our data offering, see how the Database Migratin Service assists you in the migration.

Agenda link

Date and time: Nov 6th, 11:45AM - 12:30PM

Here is the abstract:

Northwind kept the bulk of its data in an on-premises data center, which hosted servers running both SQL Server and MongoDB. After the acquisition, Tailwind Traders worked with the Northwind team to move their data center to Azure. In this session, youâ€™ll see how to migrate an on-premises MongoDB database to Azure Cosmos DB and SQL Server database to an Azure SQL Server. From there, youâ€™ll walk through performing the migration and ensuring minimal downtime while you switch over to the cloud-hosted providers.

MOD40 - Debugging and interacting with production applications

Here we will see multiple tools to monitor, debug and update web applications in production. This includes powerful tools like Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics. We will also see how the Snapshot debugger can provide even more information about an issue. Finally we'll talk about one of my favorite features of App Services: Deployment slots. We'll see how these can be used to deploy new features safely, as well as perform A/B testing.

Agenda link

Date and time: Nov 6th, 2:15PM - 3:00PM

And for the abstract:

Now that Tailwind Traders is running fully on Azure, the developers must find ways to debug and interact with the production applications with minimal impact and maximal efficiency. Azure comes with a full set of tools and utilities that can be used to manage and monitor your applications. In this session, we will see how Streaming logs work to monitor the production application in live time. We will also talk about Deployment slots that enable easy A/B testing of new features and show how Snapshot Debugging can be used to live debug applications. We'll also see how other tools can be used to manage your websites and containers live.

MOD41 - Deploying and A/B testing without risks with Deployment Slots

This session is a short 20 minutes theater session allowing us to deep dive into my favorite feature of the App Services on Azure, the Deployment slots. It's a deeper dive into one of the demos of MOD40 above. It will allow us to be more complete about safe feature deployment, where we use a staging slot as the target. Seeing how easily we can swap production and staging slots gives us great confidence, because in the worst case scenario, if an untested bug surfaces after the swap, we can easily swap back to the previous state, and take our time to fix the issue. We will also see how we can randomly redirect some of the traffic to a new slot for A/B testing. It means that some of the users will randomly see the new features, while others will still see the previous version of the site.

Agenda link

Date and time: Nov 6th, 4:20PM - 4:40PM

Here is the abstract for this theater session:

Who hasnâ€™t been very scared when deploying a new feature to a website? Sometimes we feel that we will break everything, and the stress level is just not something we want to experience ever again. That's why the Deployment Slots feature of Azure App Services is such a nice experience. With Deployment Slots, you can deploy to a safe slot in the same conditions than your production environment. You can test in isolation, without risking breaking something. Then you can gradually route some of the traffic to the new features, for example to perform A/B testing. When you are satisfied with the results, you can simply switch the whole traffic to the new site. But don't fret, if something goes wrong, the old, safe site is just one mouse click away.

Debug bar

In addition to these sessions, I will often be available at the Debug bar. This is a place in the Development and Architecture Center where you can connect to Microsoft employees, MVPs and other partners, and talk about the topics that you love. I hope to be able to help for some issues but also to hear what you use our services for, and what you think can be improved (features, documentations, etc). Here is my schedule. I will make sure to update it if something changes, so make sure to bookmark this page!

Monday Nov 4th, 7:30AM - 11:00AM

Tuesday Nov 5th, 11AM - 1PM

Thursday Nov 7th, 3PM - 5:15PM

I am really looking forward to attend Ignite and to see you all there. Since I missed Build this year in Seattle, I didn't have my "fix" of first party conferences since Microsoft Ignite the Tour 2018 - 2019 ended in May. Ignite should be awesome :)

(and Ignite the Tour 2019 - 2020 starts soon, more in a future blog post soon :) )

Happy coding

Laurent