Two sessions presented.

From Spaghetti to Microservices architecture

Hopefully, far has gone the time when systems were built like monolith and integrated with point-to-point connection… right? More likely, though, still many software applications are developed with a convoluted design that, eventually, will hit the wall of maintainability and scalability. In this context, how can a microservice-based architecture help organisations focus on building features that add business value to their applications, without the overhead of designing and writing additional code to deal with issues of reliability, scalability, or latency in the underlying infrastructure?

This session explores the agility of architecting fine-grained microservice applications that benefit of continuous integration and development practices, and accelerated delivery of new functions into production, with the help of Azure Service Fabric. It also presents the Publish-Subscribe design pattern of an enterprise-level service bus built on Azure Service Bus, which guarantees message queueing and delivery, on-premises and in the Cloud.

Targeted at software architects and developers, during this session, a significant emphasis is posed on demoing the ESB capability available in Azure, how to avoid spaghetti-like intricate architecture designs, and how to design for microservices and API-based applications.

Scaling applications with Azure Redis Cache and Machine Learning

In a multi-tier application, bottlenecks may occur at any of the connection points between two tiers: business logic and data access layers, client and service layers, presentation and storage layers, etc. Large-scale applications benefit of various levels of caching of information for improving performance and increasing scalability. Caching can be configured in memory or on some more permanent form of storage, in different size and in diverse geographic locations. The open source Redis engine, as implemented in Azure, allows for an intuitive configuration of management of all these aspects, and utilisation from a variety of programming languages.

At EF Education, our applications are used by hundreds of thousands of students and staff members daily in 150+ locations world-wide. How do we scale to this mass? How do we optimise performance across regions? This session presents design best practices and code examples for implementing the Azure Redis Cache and tuning the performance of ASP.NET MVC applications, optimising cache hit ratio and reducing “miss rate” with smart algorithms processed by Machine Learning, and for automating and monitoring the deployment of the Redis cache across different tiers, persistence layers and replicated nodes.