Here are the goods for my 3 sessions presented at Cloud Connections LV a few weeks ago.
The Cloud, the SLA and the Business
You may at times think that the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is just a piece of paper that promises some abstract level of system reliability but it is much more than that to the internal business. Building an SLA is a very important process that when executed helps the entire company including the IT operations and developer teams understand and implement best practices for monitoring, diagnostics, reporting and maintaining a reliable and scalable application. It is also a document that inspires customer confidence in your system and services, though sometimes the internal SLA is much more detailed than the one shared with customers. In this session we will review how to build a solid SLA, how to use it for internal good and to ensure success, touch on the developer and IT contributions necessary and discuss the kinds of reporting that support SLA for customer validation.
Why YOU Need AppFabric Access Control
AppFabric Access Control is an essential feature of the Windows Azure platform. It is now a protocol hub in the cloud that allows you to manage trust relationships with partners and other application domains so that your application can focus on one thing: authorizing access for the already authenticated user. No need to implement your own custom Security Token Service to handle these relationships - just move it to the cloud and BAM! Federation bliss. This session will walk you through some killer scenarios related to authenticating to your favorite identity provider such as Windows Live, Yahoo, Google or Facebook; configuring Access Control with policy to extend trust from your application to these identity providers; implementing both passive (ASP.NET) and active (WCF) federation scenarios; and achieving it all with as little code as possible!
See Access Control samples here: Same As Dev Connections Session
Identity Federation 1-2-3
Identity federation makes it possible for applications to extend trust to business partners, other corporate domains, and really to users that belong to any trusted domain. It also facilitates the Single Sign-On (SSO) experience for browser-based applications. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) simplifies the developer experience by supplying protocol support and some tooling to get you started. Still, we can make this even easier. Developers new to identity may not know all the necessary steps beyond the template. This can be simplified with the help of some boilerplate templates and some tools that really hide the complexity of WIF configuration so that developers can plug in a go in just a few steps plus with a simple set of configuration settings choose from the most common configuration scenarios to enable federation. Come to this session to see it in action and make your life in identity as easy as 1-2-3!
See identity federation samples here: FederatedIdentitySamples.zip
I delivered 3 sessions at Dev Connections in Orlando and it seems my blog post sat in my “not approved” area and had not gone live yet…here it is!!! Below are the sessions and relevant links to code, etc.
ETW: Learn it, know it, love it!
Every enterprise system has server-side functionality in the form of web applications like ASP.NET or web services like those built with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). A common pain point for server-side functionality is lack of visibility into application processing when trying to trouble-shoot errors, diagnose issues, or even collect statistics on runtime functionality. Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) is not new, but it is still elusive to most developers and really it is a staple that should be included in every server application and any components you develop for distribution. This session will teach you what you need to know about ETW, make you immediately productive in handling exceptions and tracing within your application, and provide you with some useful tools and tips to help you on your way!
Why YOU Need AppFabric Access Control
AppFabric Access Control is an essential feature of the Windows Azure platform. It is now a protocol hub in the cloud that allows you to manage trust relationships with partners and other application domains so that your application can focus on one thing: authorizing access for the already authenticated user. No need to implement your own custom Security Token Service to handle these relationships - just move it to the cloud and BAM! Federation bliss. This session will walk you through some killer scenarios related to authenticating to your favorite identity provider such as Windows Live, Yahoo, Google or Facebook; configuring Access Control with policy to extend trust from your application to these identity providers; implementing both passive (ASP.NET) and active (WCF) federation scenarios; and achieving it all with as little code as possible!
See the Access Control samples here: AccessControlSamples.zip
NOTE: You can expect a refresh of these samples for the release of V2 which was POST Dev Connections. I will notify on this page of that update.
Identity in Windows Azure
Identity federation is pervasive these days for the benefits to delegation of user authentication to their own domain; extending trust to partners, other business domains and to other application users; Single Sign-On experiences; and support for claims-based authorization. This need doesn't change when we move applications to the cloud - in fact it is even more relevant in that space. This session will focus on bringing identity to your Windows Azure applications. First, we'll review common architectural configurations including web SSO, scenarios that use AppFabric Access Control, and even discuss scenarios that require reaching into corporate directories behind firewalls. Then, we'll dig in to the setup with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) including how to overcome challenges related to certificates. You'll even see some Azure templates that automate your initial cloud application setup to make life easy!
See Identity samples here: FederatedIdentitySamples.zip
See Azure samples here: windowsazureessentialslaunch042010.zip