Must Attend DevOps Sessions at Ignite

After my initial post “The Ultimate And Totally Biased Ignite Session List For DevOps Aficionados” I realized that there is some room for improvement. Not everyone is so (overly?) excited about the topic that he or she would spend all of the week of Ignite and only attend DevOps sessions. That said, out of all the great sessions from my previous post, this is the must-attend list for DevOps. I’ve tried VERY hard to keep it to just 10 sessions + pre-day but encourage everyone reading this to check out the full list of my suggestions!

At the time of writing, the schedule builder is not up and I do not yet know if some of the sessions may overlap. I will update as soon as we find out.

Must Attend DevOps Sessions

Title	Level	Abstract
Pre-Day:DevOps Hackathon Sunday, May, 39:00 AM - 5:00 PM	300	The cloud-targeted app is failing in production. Competitive time to market advantage is at risk, the business is at an inflection point. "It worked fine in testing!" says the Development Team. "We had no visibility to production infrastructure needs until a week ago!" says the Operations Team.Does any of this sound familiar? Learn firsthand how to embrace a DevOps mindset, evolve your traditional ALM approach regarding people, process and tools, and help your business accelerate its journey to a cloud-first approach!Join us for the DevOps Hackathon where you will team up with fellow attendees from developer and operations roles to apply DevOps practices to a real world challenge.(This pre-day seminar is cross-audience. Dev and Ops are encouraged to attend!)
A Practical View of Release Management for Your DevOps Mindset Wednesday, May, 69:00 AM - 10:15 AM	200	This session demos using Desired State Configuration (DSC) with Release Management for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 to tackle real-world deployment challenges. We start by presenting an overview of the key concepts, architecture, and configuration of the various components. We discuss the out-of-the box deployment actions available to compose automations for common deployment scenarios and how to use extensibility to cover the not-so-common scenarios. In more detail, we discuss adding custom DSC resources, how to trigger release as part of a build and how to leverage logs to diagnose failed releases. These are presented through specific scenarios encountered in the field.
Automating Operational and Management Tasks Using Azure Automation Thursday, May, 710:45 AM - 12:00 PM	300	With Azure Automation, customers have a powerful new tool to manage their Microsoft Azure resources and external systems. In this session, we cover best practices for authoring runbooks using the Azure portal UI or Windows PowerShell ISE. This includes defining runbook input/output, global assets, managing integration modules, and nested runbooks.
Datacenter Integration Using Automation in Microsoft System Center Orchestrator Wednesday, May, 610:45 AM - 12:00 PM	300	As we integrate the Windows Azure Pack into the Cloud Platform to provide end-to-end delivery and management of these new services, this session covers Service Management Automation (SMA) features of Orchestrator in R2 and shows how you can integrate existing Orchestrator runbooks with the new SMA feature.
Implementing Desired State Configuration in Windows Server 2012 R2Implementing Desired State Configuration in Windows Server 2012 R2 Friday, May, 810:45 AM - 12:00 PM	300	In this lab, learn how Desired State Configuration in Windows PowerShell 4.0 allows you to deploy, maintain, and remediate to the desired state.
Managing Linux and Windows on Microsoft Azure with Chef Thursday, May, 79:00 AM - 10:15 AM	300	More and More Windows Administrators are being called upon to extend themselves into the world of managing Linux based systems. This talk will focus on how Chef, a popular open source framework, can make managing both windows and Linux workloads on Azure easy. This will cover the basic paradigms of Chef, launching VM instances and deploying applications to these instances.
Managing Linux Workloads in Windows Server, Microsoft System Center and Windows Azure Pack Thursday, May, 71:30 PM - 2:45 PM	300	Are you interested in consolidating your hypervisors and management tools for both Windows and Linux workloads? Get an overview of Microsoft solutions for Linux in the private and hybrid cloud. Learn about Linux on Hyper-V and the Linux management capabilities in the Windows Azure Pack, Configuration Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and Operations Manager.
Microsoft's New Windows Server Containers Wednesday, May, 61:30 PM - 2:45 PM	200	In this session, we cover what containers are, what makes them such an exciting technology, how they will work in Windows Server, and how Docker will integrate with them.
Modernizing Your Development Cycle: Tip and Tricks for Agile Development on Microsoft Azure Monday, May, 43:15 PM - 4:30 PM	300	Learn how Azure Websites makes it easy to comply with all the Best Practices for Continuous Integration and Agile Software development. Leverage Azure Websites features like Kudu, TiP, Sticky Config, and Authorization/Authentication to set up an easy-to-manage CI environment in the cloud.
Rapid Enterprise Development with Azure Microservices Hmm, nowhere to be found anymore	300	Azure Microservices introduces a powerful platform and ecosystem for consuming, building, administering, and monetizing web components. We start off building a web app to see how public and organizational component galleries, combined with built-in platform services spanning authentication, single sign on, logging and governance, significantly reduce the amount of code you need to write. We then dig in architecting your apps in the microservices style to improve agility, versioning, scaling, and separation of concerns. We publish web components to the gallery and see how they are distributed to millions of both pro developers and business users in tools including Visual Studio, Mobile Services, Workflow, and Siena.
Understanding the IT Pro's dynamic operations role within DevOps Wednesday, May, 69:00 AM - 10:15 AM	300	This session focuses on the Plan, Develop and Release phases in the Microsoft DevOps framework. We explore the integration requirements and processes between Microsoft System Center and Visual Studio—resulting in agile infrastructure deployment, monitoring, and agile application development.