Agile is all around us. We see agile in small and large software teams. We see groups holding standups, using Kanban boards, and conducting retrospectives. IT and business teams are asked to do more with less and get it done quicker…and agile is the answer to all of that. Is it really the silver bullet? Will we get to our goals if we adopt agile practices? Do we know if we're doing things in a way that will help us?

An agile implementation based on incomplete or erroneous information may be creating as many issues as it solves. We may be doing twice the work to "transform" to agile without seeing any tangible benefits. In the end, we fail in our goals and we're ready to go back to what we know best.

But what if it isn't that hard? What if we just need a bit of core knowledge, a chance to practice, and a safe environment where we can ask the questions that will move the needle?

The team leading this workshop organizes Lincoln's agileLNK Meetup group (https://www.meetup.com/agileLNK/). At this workshop, we will demonstrate several agile techniques, explain when to use them (and when not to), and discuss the foundational agile principals behind each one. Every team uses standup meetings, right? What if not everyone is in the same time zone…or hemisphere? You will learn how to use familiar agile activities, but also why to use them and what alternatives fit better in different situations.

Common agile topics we will cover during the session: * Sprints/iterations * Standups * Backlogs * Retrospectives * Metrics * Self-organizing teams * Kanban * Scrum

We will have plenty of informal interaction time as well. Have a tough question or need advice? No problem. We're here to help!

Attendees will learn how to shift from doing ad-hoc deployments of web applications to Azure App Service to doing fully Terraformed, CI/CD pipeline deployments to Azure Kubernetes Services. I'll to cover how this shift occurred for our organization and how we handled it with the developers and business.

The end-result of this move was to bring us from doing periodic night-time deployments to zero-downtime continuous deployments. I'll show how we were able to make this happen within a matter of just a few months.

Tools you'll learn about: * Docker * Terraform / Terragrunt * AKS * Azure DevOps Pipelines * Azure Container Registry

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a way to describe architecture components textually using executable software code that is managed in version control. Being executable means it can be fed through an execution engine to generate infrastructure in a consistent and repeatable manner. Being written in human consumable form and stored in a version control system just like any other piece of software enables teams to collaborate on the evolution of their architecture's infrastructure reviewing and approving changes alleviating the knowledge silos of traditional provisioning methods.

Several implementations of IaC have been introduced such as Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, and Chef and most have grown to significant popularity due to their ability to capture the benefits described earlier. A consistent challenge of the previously mentioned IaC technologies is the need to learn a domain specific language which to various extents are generally restrictive to declarative configuration style syntax. However, there has been an emergent technology called Cloud Development Kit (CDK) offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) which has shown significant promise extending the benefits of IaC.

AWS CDK empowers developers to use one of several familiar programming languages like Typescript, Python, Java, and C# along with powerful Object-Oriented Programming paradigms and patterns. Together the use of these familiar high-level programming languages and patterns allow for composing reusable and extendable constructs that produce enterprise level cloud architecture with surprisingly small amounts of well-crafted CDK IaC code utilizing opinionated defaults ensuring security and consistent provisioning.

In this talk we’ll explore the key concepts of AWS CDK focusing on the abstractions and patterns it utilizes to go beyond the standard benefits of IaC to provide a highly productive framework for provisioning robust and scalable cloud architectures.

During this all day workshop we will demonstrate how to plan for and manage the full lifecycle of a modern application using the latest Microsoft Azure resources and tooling. We will start with a high level overview of a wide variety of architectural and Cloud-based considerations and we will then work our way down through a complete setup of a basic application all the way from a clean Azure DevOps and GIT repo setup, through bootstrapping an empty UI in Angular and a robust API using .NET Core/C#. We will demonstrate how to fully automate the deployment and development lifecycle of these application components up to Azure. We will ultimately take the same Azure configuration and convert it to a full “infrastructure as code” setup using Terraform.

We will also discuss how to efficiently and cost-effectively make use of Azure resources by demonstrating various best practices for choosing the right components and proactively monitoring utilization and costs of your applications.

If you want an example of a very robust and “real world” Cloud-based architecture targeted to Microsoft Azure then this 8 hour workshop will be something you do not want to miss.

Agenda:

Architectures in Azure Framework choices from .NET Core to NodeJS to Mobile GIT Best Practices for Branching and Versioning Database Options and Implications Azure DevOps Pipelines Azure Planning and Pricing Containerization Ongoing Monitoring and Support

As one of the most important principles of DevOps, treating configuration and infrastructure as code is critical to the success of high performing organizations. Without accelerating the ability of teams to manage systems the same way developers manage application code, infrastructure becomes a bottleneck preventing stable, agile, and high performing systems from becoming a reality. This session will review what different solutions for configuration management and infrastructure as code are available to teams entering this space. Learn how to use these platforms together to maximize your ability to churn out systems and services as quickly as committing code to source control. We will introduce the basics of solutions like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Terraform to provide a rubric for demystifying your path to quickly provisioning cloud infrastructure.

Attendees will understand the benefits of creating their own extended version of the Amazon Cloud Development Kit. They will see how defining rules and setting up standards around CDK can enable better, safer and more maintainable infrastructure as code.

As infrastructure stacks grow increasingly more complex and involve an ever-growing number of services and systems there are a lot of opportunities for error and misconfiguration. To provide more system stability teams have looked to abstract configuration to its own layer of code. This concept of configuring infrastructure as code is gaining traction throughout the industry for a variety of reasons. It's fast, consistent, reduces errors, self-documentation, and did I mention it's fast? Tools such as Terraform from HashiCorp have emerged as one of the leading ways to declaratively configure technology stacks.

In this talk you'll gain an understanding of the benefits of Infrastructure as Code in general, and of using Terraform specifically. You'll be introduced to how Terraform works, what the code looks like, and how to get started.

It's cheap to get started in the cloud and start sandboxing. Soon after, there's a production environment and more infrastructure is being stood up in the cloud. Then the bill comes and it seems cloud costs are uncontrollable.

This presentation is designed to provide high level strategies and concepts to control cloud costs. We will also go over how DevOps automation plays a big role in how you can control your cloud costs. No matter which cloud provider you use, this presentation will help you have a path forward on starting cost control measures.