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by Seven Peaks on Aug 11, 2022 11:36:00 AM
First time in Thailand, the Microsoft Azure Sprint took place at the Microsoft Thailand office and the Seven Peaks Software office, in conjunction with Aware Group. The workshop was under the name Azure Sprints with main focus on an AKS + DevOps.
Participants from different industries such as healthcare, finance, energy, etc. were able to grasp practical tech knowledge following challenges during the sprint. This expertly designed program seeks to increase participants’ tech skills to solve problems and to fulfill the sprint goals using the latest Azure technologies. Together, they are to facilitate communication between technical employees and the Account Team Unit (ATU) and to foster direct relationships of trust among them.
About Microsoft Azure Sprint Workshop
Microsoft Azure Sprint workshop is an intensive, two-day labs that simulate the Scrum / Agile process based on ‘Sprint’ with main focus on ‘Azure’. Challenges are set up in a Microsoft Azure environment for participants to work through.
The participants were put into teams and given the tools they needed to do sprints and run through challenges.
Coaching by Seven Peaks Software
A team of coaches from Seven Peaks Software were in responsible to run the whole event. They are from the company that Microsoft and Aware Group regard as their premier technology partner and who are particularly well-versed in Cloud services. Additionally, Microsoft recognizes them as a Gold Application Integration, Gold Application Development, and Silver Cloud Platform partner.
Throughout the period of the event, the experienced coach helped participants understand best-practice applications and gain access to all relevant services and resources. Consequently, this allows participants to tackle a series of problems/challenges in a customized Microsoft Azure environment.
“The coaches did a great job balancing helping us, and letting us figure things out for ourselves” – participant
What the coaches provided
With strong background in digital transformation and end-to-end application service, Seven Peaks Software as a Microsoft Gold partner committed to support all participants with best guidance as following:
- Best practice guidance on Azure technologies
- Deep knowledge of Challenge content
- Broad knowledge of full suite of Azure technologies
- Ability for attendees to build up problem-solving skill as a team
- Timely assistance to teams as required
- An opportunity to build rapport and trust with customers to unlock project opportunities
“The coaches have high degree of knowledge and passion” – participant
Custom-made content packs by Aware Group
The specially created material for various Azure technologies consists of: MLOps, DevOps, AKS + Containers, DevOps + Github, MDW +Synapse, Databricks + Cosmos + ML, AL for agriculture, and AI for Gaming.
Aware Group provided each piece of content for a particular target audience. As an example, MLOps enables data science teams to concentrate on developing and refining ML models using Azure. For MDW + Synapse, the goal is to give architect or data analyst teams more ways to use Azure data services for advanced analytics.
Considering Seven Peaks Software part, the experts relied on the DevOps in Azure + Kubernetes (AKS).
Azure DevOps
Giorgio Desideri, Tech Lead Cloud Solution of Seven Peaks Software, identified that DevOps is a set of practices that combine Software Development (Dev) and Information-technology operations (Ops). The goal of DevOps is to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery of high-quality software.
How about Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps provides developer services for allowing teams to organize their tasks, work together on coding projects, and create and deliver applications. Developers, project managers, and other contributors may work together in an open and supportive environment. Thanks to the culture and methods fostered by Azure DevOps. As a result, businesses may develop and enhance their products far more quickly than they could before with more conventional techniques to create software.
Following are a few independent services based on company requirements:
- Azure Repos is a collection of version control tools for managing your code. It provides two versions: Git repositories or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC).
- Azure Pipelines combines continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to test and build your code before delivering it to any destination.
- Azure Boards provides a collection of Agile tools for planning and managing work, code bugs, and issues utilizing Kanban and Scrum methodologies.
- Azure Test Plans provides numerous testing methods, including manual/exploratory testing and continuous testing, for testing your applications.
- Azure Artifacts enables teams to exchange packages from public and private sources, including Maven, npm, NuGet, and more, and integrate package sharing into workflows.
AKS : Azure Kubernetes service
The trend toward containerization in app development means more work for us in terms of resource management. Then it became the era of ‘Kubernetes.’
The term Kubernetes is of Greek origin and means captain or pilot. It is an open-source, portable platform that enables declarative setup and automation for managing containerized workloads and services. Looking into its core, the infrastructure components comprise control plane, nodes, and node pools.
For Azure, as a hosted Kubernetes service, AKS reduces the complexity of setting up a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure by handling the administrative burden. Developers can create an AKS cluster using:
- The Azure CLI
- The Azure portal
- Azure PowerShell
- Or template-driven deployment options, such as Azure Resource Manager templates, Bicep, and Terraform, are also available.
The Kubernetes master and all nodes are set up and deployed when developers launch an AKS cluster. During deployment, settings for advanced networking, integrating with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), and monitoring can be adjusted as needed.
A range of Azure technologies by Microsoft
Thanks to Azure technologies developed by Microsoft, this public cloud computing platform provides solutions comprising SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and Paas (Platform as a Service). As a result, services like virtual computing, analytics, storage, networking, etc. can benefit from these solutions. On top of that, it can give you a limitless potential for your business.
What can Microsoft Azure technology do for your business?
Azure is the best public cloud service on the market today because of its pricing and capabilities. So what can it actually do?
Backup and disaster recovery dream tool
With Azure, you can back up your data in any language, on any platform, and from anywhere in the world. And as a bonus, you can set the frequency and duration of your backup schedule (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.).
Plus, there’s no need to worry about data loss with Azure backup because it stores three copies of your data across three different data centers, as well as an additional three copies in an offsite Azure data center.
For tape backup, Its backup and disaster recovery capabilities are limited. However, Azure site recovery can enhance it with these services: remote offsite replication, retention of data for up to ninety-nine years, and onsite maintenance.
Moving toward IoT solutions
Microsoft Azure’s scalability, flexibility, and security make it ideal for enterprises looking to implement Internet of Things applications. Because you will be able to start gathering fresh information about your business with the help of technologies that interact with your current infrastructure.
With the Azure IoT Hub, you can keep track of and manage billions of devices while gaining insights that can help you improve customer experiences, simplify processes, save costs, and accelerate development.
Web/mobile app hosting and development
Patch management, AutoScale, and Integration for on-premises apps are all features of Azure that may help your app hosting and development become self-sufficient and adaptive.
You will be able to devote more of your attention to enhancing your applications and spend less time managing your infrastructure if your virtual machines are equipped with automatic patch management. In addition, Azure provides support for continuous deployment, which enables you to simplify the process of continuously updating code.
As a last bonus, Azure Web Apps has a feature called AutoScale. It is a built-in feature that dynamically changes your resources based on customer web traffic so that you have the resources you need during peak traffic times and save money when traffic is low.
Microsoft Azure Sprint held the key to the IT industry
There is a need for this kind of support in every sector of the economy because technological advancements have been occurring at such a rapid pace. It’s great that Microsoft and the Aware group are holding these sessions that will help the whole business. Thanks again to Microsoft Azure Sprint workshop!
In addition, we appreciate the opportunity to put our vision into reality as the true tech partners for individuals looking for assistance to help them make the transition into the digital age. We want to extend this accomplishment to future digital products as we are growing stronger both in size and experience. Gratefully, we owe to success stories and the trust of our dear clientele.