Anglebrackets 2018, MGM Grand, Las Vegas – Day 1

So, finally, time for AngleBrackets in Las Vegas again. The schedule looks very interesting and unfortunately many sessions seem to be on the same time slot. It does, however, last for a very good week!

Sunday – Workshop Day 1

Today, the conference began with the first part of Michele Leroux Bustamante’s 2-day workshop “STEP UP YOUR MICROSERVICES GAME WITH ASPNETCORE, DOCKER AND AZURE”.
Much of today’s content was a little repetition of the workshop I went on last time I was at Anglebrackets. On the other hand, it was good with a little revival around Docker and Docker-Compose and how to structure image definitions today. This workshop goes through many different parts in brief, which I think is good for getting a sense of how everything is connected. She mentions that their company works mostly with asp.net core that runs in linux containers, just because they are so fast. I find it exciting, but have at the same time, read some of the issues it may cause when troubleshooting memory leaks and such (https://www.hanselman.com/blog/CustomerNotesDiagnosingIssuesUnderLoadOfWebAPIAppMigratedToASPNETCoreOnLinux.aspx).
A very interesting thing, on the other hand, is that they have had a lot of success with lift & shift, that is, taking an “old” .NET 4. * application, baked it in a windows container and deployed it. Everything must not be rebuilt and migrated to run as containers, which I knew already, but fun that it seems so incredibly easy!

Tomorrow, the workshop will continue focusing on Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), which is one of various orchestration platforms available for containers. Very exciting that it’s about AKS as it is the platform that feels most natural to us when (I choose not to write ‘if’ consciously) we can start using containers.
She also briefly explored how to create a pipeline in Azure DevOps to build, package and push images to Azure Container Registry, where an App Service picked up the new image and spun it up. It could be an intermediate step in the solution we have now, as you can prepare your containers to run in a cluster while retaining all the infrastructure we are building our services at right now.

Saturday – Enjoying Vegas

Me, Gustav and Sonny decided to try and get a rental car for a small trip. The world’s most narrow Ford Fiesta became ours for a day and we aimed at Hoover Dam! It didn’t begin well when the co-driver (could be me…) tried to navigate the directions on Interstate 15, 215, 515, 11 etc. It’s a bit different signage here but in the end we ended up on the correct route and arrived at this incredible, crazy big and incredibly impressive construction. Very difficult to capture this on picture but I think the panorama picture makes it quite fair. On the way back we also parked the car and went for a walk on the bridge as you can see from the pictures. You could say that you walk a bit extra softly with your feet to avoid causing the bridge to crack and fall down…

A visit to Chipotle and yummy tacos, a disappointing visit to the Las Vegas South Premium Outlet (just the word Premium took away the meaning of outlet, nothing was cheap). We passed the famous Vegas sign, traveled the entire ‘The Strip’ by car, visited a baseball shop and overfueled the car at the cas station. In addition, we saw very interesting scenery and other cities a bit outside of Vegas. As Sonny said in the car, one would really like to knock at someone’s home to see what it looks like there.

A real, really good decision to rent a car. And for those who know my latest misery with rental cars and bad companies, I think it went better this time!