Sessions 📅

We are very happy to be able to offer you once again an exciting lineup including many new speakers, both from the local and international community, consisting of MVPs, Microsoft employees and industry leads, who will speak about specific use cases in the industry as well as the latest developments around services in Azure. Be it real life use cases from Axpo, Zurich Insurance, REGA, Swisscom and BKW, a kickstart with Kubernetes or Quarkus in Azure or deep dives on Azure AD Applications and network security - these sessions will provide you with insights around Azure and the opportunity to connect with peers and speakers.

⭐️ AZURE @ REGA #

Everybody is familiar with Rega, the Swiss Air Rescue Service. They offer 24/7 air assistance in medical emergencies and operate 17'000 missions every year.In this session, Georg, who is responsible all the applications related to helicopter rescue operations, their mission control system and the Rega-App, shows us what their journey into the cloud looks like. He will shed some light on their decision making processes. Why cloud? And why Azure? And what is their vision? He got answers. Stephan and his company GrabX support Rega on their way to the Azure Cloud. He will provide us with some insights related to their steps into the public cloud and show us what they are currently working on.
🙂 STEPHAN GRABER ⚡️ Partner @ GrabX Solutions
🙂 GEORG HAUZENBERGER ⚡️ Agile Transformation and Project Manager @ Rega

⭐️ AZURE SWITZERLAND – STATUS UPDATE #

In this session, Primo Amrein, the “Mr. Swiss Azure Datacenters” will give an overview about the current state of the Swiss Azure Datacenters.
🙂 PRIMO AMREIN ⚡️ Cloud Lead @ Microsoft

⭐️ RUNNING AZURE FUNCTIONS @ BKW #

Consider the cloud being nothing but the perfect runtime environment for running functions and services of any size. BKW is using Azure Functions extensively in order to integrate systems and components in the cloud and on-premise. This approach replaces the usage of large middleware systems completely. BKW benefits in many ways: cost reduction, flexibility and stability. How are we doing it?
🙂 MAURICE BACHOR ⚡️ Senior Solution Architect @ BKW

⭐️ QUARKUS SERVERLESS WITH AZURE FUNCTIONS & ARO AZURE RED HAT OPENSHIFT #

QUARKUS is one of the hottest new open source projects, promising to extend Java’s dominance of enterprise software development well into the future of container-based and serverless and enhanced applications. At a session, we will give an overview of how you can use it in Azure. ARO OpenShift Container Platform is a Hybrid platform, jointly managed by Microsoft and Red on Azure. In this presentation, we will give you an overview of what it is and how it works.
🙂 KEVIN LAPAGNA ⚡️ Solution Architect @ Red Hat
🙂 ALEXEY LOUBYANSKY ⚡️ Quarkus Developer @ Red Hat

⭐️ INTRODUCTION TO AZURE MONITORING #

In this session I am going to provide an overview of the Azure Monitor(ing) options. We will learn from where you can get your telemetry data and how you can analyse it with queries and display options as well as how you can react on it, tangible with examples in a demo.
🙂 THOMAS HAFERMALZ ⚡️ Azure Solution Architect @ Trivadis

⭐️ MONTE CARLO MARKET RISK PROCESSING AND ANALYTICS WITH AZURE DATABRICKS @ ZURICH INSURANCE #

At Zurich Insurance’s Investment Management, we moved the processing of the market risk models and the risk analytics to Azure Databricks. This session gives an overview of the solution and the lessons learned from implementation and operations.
🙂 VALERIO BÜRKER ⚡️ Program Manager for Investment Information Solutions @ Zurich Insurance

⭐️ I’VE BEEN PWNED - BUT I DON’T CARE #

Everyone talks about safeguarding identities in the cloud. But what does that actually mean? Are you confused about terms like MFA,ATP,CASB,PIM,Tokens? The session will be practical and demo heavy, showing value and usage scenarios every Azure AD admin would want to know about!
🙂 MICHAEL RÜEFLI ⚡️ Managing Partner and Solutions Architect @ scopewyse

⭐️ GETTING STARTED WITH KUBERNETES IN AZURE #

Container orchestration is like any hot topic: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it. In this session, I will help you start your container orchestration journey with Kubernetes, the de-facto orchestrator.After this session, you will know how to create a Kubernetes cluster in Azure and how to deploy, scale and update containerized application there.
🙂 ANNIE TALVASTO ⚡️ Sr. Product Marketing Manager @ Camunda | CNCF Ambassador | Azure MVP

⭐️ MORE EFFICIENT HYDROPOWER PLANTS WITH AZURE @ AXPO #

Fewer routine operations, less administration, fewer errors. These are some of the benefits of the digital hydropower plant that Axpo is currently piloting at the Sarganserland power plants. Plant operations and maintenance are becoming more efficient thanks to digital technologies. Sensor data and status reports from several Swiss hydropower plants can be used to better determine the condition of the plants using machine learning models. Axpo also uses this data to further develop intelligent maintenance, asset management and power plant deployment.In this session, we will present the technical solution, its benefits and its architecture. Involved technologies are IoT Egde, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure SQL Server Serverless, Python, Flask and Azure Web Apps.
🙂 MEINRAD WEISS ⚡️ Senior Cloud Solution Architect @ Microsoft
🙂 MATHIAS PAWLOWSKY ⚡️ Head Data Science @ Axpo Group

⭐️ UNDERSTANDING AZURE SENTINEL #

Microsoft Sentinel is your birds-eye view across the enterprise. Put the cloud and large-scale intelligence from decades of Microsoft security experience to work. Make your threat detection and response smarter and faster with artificial intelligence (AI). See Sentinel in Action with Sentinel2Go and see, how easy you can get started with you cloud based security information event management system.
🙂 MATTHIAS GESSENAY ⚡️ Azure Architect & Co-CEO @ Corporate Software | Azure MVP

⭐️ CHALLENGES WITH INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE AND AZURE APP SERVICE #

Our team is building a platform for Mobiliar’s hundreds of frontend apps on Azure. The large scale, enterprise setting and zero-downtime requirement led us to some unique challenges that we would like to share with you!
🙂 Christof Leuenberger ⚡️ IT Architect and Product Owner @ Die Mobiliar
🙂 Matthias Junker ⚡️ Freelance Full Stack Software Architect / Engineer @ Software Catering

⭐️ UNLOCKING THE VALUE OF AZURE IOT AND DATA ANALYTICS #

Leveraging 5G connectivity and Microsoft Azure ecosystems for IoT and data analytics services is an effective means to solve business requirements. By collecting, storing, and processing data at the edge and in the cloud, companies also become more innovative and transform toward a data driven business. Customers like Rhomberg Sersa Rail Group showcase just that and more, when they embarked with us on the journey of digitizing their railway infrastructure construction sites. With that, their benefits became measurable: from increased employee safety, to reduced CO2 emissions, to financial advantages. In this session, we will take a closer look at this particular and other projects to show you how we leveraged Azure services such as IoT Edge, Stream Analytics, SQL database, Logic Apps, Service Bus and more to collect, store and process data in real-time or batch. We will also address some of our lessons learned and take a look at what the future may bring in this area.
🙂 ABDUXUKUR ABDURIXIT ⚡️ Senior Cloud Architect @ Swisscom

⭐️ YOUR ZERO TRUST GAMEPLAN FOR 2022 #

Recent incidents have shown: An on-premises attack can affect your cloud environment too. But you still want/need to manage security for the whole picture (on-premises/Cloud/Multicloud). And if you have attended any security webinars in the last two years, it would be hard not to hear about zero trust. The fancy high-level marketing slides gave us all a nice introduction into the topic and into the Zero Trust Deployment model. You may also have heard that Zero Trust is a journey and you need to start somewhere and somehow. But where and how? None of these sessions actually provide concrete answers to these questions.This session “tries” to be different. Martin will provide a gameplan for a Zero Trust implementation. It’s time to cut some (synced) cords from onprem to make your Azure environment more secure, using divided management accounts and Microsoft security services. This session is focused on Azure Active Directory/Microsoft Security/windows-based enterprise environments.
🙂 MARTIN MEYER ⚡️ Senior Cloud Engineer @ scopewyse

⭐️ EVENT-DRIVEN APPLICATIONS IN AZURE #

Using Azure, it is easier than ever to build event-driven web applications, for example using Azure Functions and the Azure SignalR service. Laurent Bugnion will show you how he implemented such a solution to solve a real-world problem. This presentation will dive into a production application called Timekeeper, that Microsoft uses to run some of its live TV shows such as the Hello World daily show.
🙂 LAURENT BUGNION ⚡️ Senior Cloud Developer Advocate @ Microsoft

⭐️ DEMYSTIFYING AZURE AD APPLICATIONS #

Did you ever wonder what Application Registrations and Enterprise Applications in Azure AD are used for and how they work? And what the many settings are used for? No worries, these rocket-science-like objects will be discussed and explained in this session by Microsoft Regional Director and Azure MVP Marcel Zehner. He will reveal what you wanted to understand for a long time already…
🙂 MARCEL ZEHNER ⚡️ Microsoft Cloud Champion @ SoftwareOne | Microsoft Regional Director | Azure MVP
🙂 MARTIN EHRNST ⚡️ Lead Architect @ Vipps | Azure MVP

⭐️ PRIVATE NETWORKING WITH KUBERNETES - WHY? HOW? #

Based on real-world experiences - Hear about building K8s clusters with secure azure private networking. Learn how to overcome challenges around private networking in Azure, how DNS works in such a scenario and what this means to your current and future deployments. After the session, we happily deploy some beer to the attendees at the itnetX booth 😉!
🙂 ANDREW CRAIG ⚡️Azure Azure @ itnetX
🙂 PASCAL ZANITTI ⚡️ Cloud Developer @ itnetX

⭐️ AUTOMATING MULTI STAGE AZURE PIPELINES #

Engineering Teams experience toil in repeating the setup of DevOps pipelines every time a new project kicks-off within their organization. Setting up these pipelines, involve creating build definitions, release definitions, branch policies, control gates, infra as code (ARM templates), just to name a few. Imagine doing this repeatedly for every app being built within an organization. This is considerable effort spent over days. What if this piece of development effort can be automated? How about the first push into the repository publishes an event that sets off a series of steps, constructing the total development street for your repository. This allows the developers to see their changes in minutes without looking at the nuances of setting up DevOps pipelines for creating dev, test and production infrastructure in azure. Next to that, the engineering team can focus on topics that creates direct value for their end users. In this talk we learn how to take advantage of Azure DevOps RESTful APIs to automate the provisioning and updating of multistage Pipelines for every repository created within an Azure DevOps Project.
🙂 RAJKUMAR BALAKRISHNAN ⚡️ Customer Success Manager @ Microsoft

⭐️ HIRING TALENTS AND IMPACTING LIVES #

Hiring talents is getting harder day by day, by 2028 the ICT industry in Switzerland will lack the expected demand for 117’000 ICT specialists. It is also estimated that there will be over 1.5 million vacant ICT jobs in the EU by 2025, which is a major market failure that will affect the economy of the region as a whole. In addition, the COVID-19 crisis has both accelerated this digitalization trend and opened up new opportunities in the field of remote working.At the same time, the lack of economic opportunities is one of many reasons for forced displacement. Vulnerable groups (mainly local youth, women, refugees, and migrants) in the MENA Region face high levels of unemployment even if they are qualified for digital jobs. As a consequence they leave their countries to secure jobs which leads to brain drain and is a hindrance to the growth of the digital economies in those countries. Remotecoders is a Swiss non-profit association. It was initiated as a spin-off of Powercoders. Through this project, Remotecoders aims to address these challenges with a complementary problem: the shortage of ICT talent across Europe.
🙂 HUSSAM ALLAHAM ⚡️ Co-Founder and Integration Lead @ Remotecoders