Azure Thursdays

Join us for the next Azure Thursdays meetup.
On November 5 we are welcomed by Proact NL at their office in Hoofddorp.
Confirmed speakers:

• Take Bakker (Proact NL)
• Brian Veldman (Fellowmind)

Program:
17:30 ~ 18:00 Walk-in
18:00 ~ 18:45 Dinner
18:45 ~ 19:30 First session by Take - AVM Is Great. Here's Why We Wrap It Anyway
19:45 ~ 20:30 Second session by Brian - Azure Virtual Desktop Session Host Configuration
20:30 ~ 21:00 Drinks & wrap-up

Session 1:
Speaker: Take Bakker
Title: AVM Is Great. Here's Why We Wrap It Anyway
Azure Verified Modules are genuinely good. Microsoft-backed and community-maintained, best practices baked in, consistent interfaces. What's not to like?
Turns out: quite a bit. When you're managing Azure environments at scale, the cracks start showing fast. Most modules are still pre-1.0, so breaking changes are fair game. The provider is mid-migration from AzureRM to AzApi. And the opinionated defaults? Sometimes they're just not your opinions. Multiply that across dozens of environments and suddenly "community-maintained" starts to feel like a liability.
So we wrapped it. Every AVM module we use sits behind our own wrapper: pinned versions, standardised naming, locked defaults. Boring? A little. Production-stable? Very.
We'll cover:

- Why pre-1.0 semver and the AzureRM to AzApi migration matter more than you'd think
- The wrapper pattern: what it solves, what it doesn't, and whether you should steal it
- Scaling the pattern: using AI to create new wrappers fast without cutting corners on your own standards

Session 2:
Speaker: Brian Veldman
Title: Azure Virtual Desktop Session Host Configuration
In this session, we’ll explore how Azure Virtual Desktop Session Host Configuration changes the way we deploy and manage session hosts. Instead of treating every VM as something that needs to be manually maintained, we’ll define the desired configuration once and let Azure handle the provisioning and lifecycle. We’ll look at what’s inside a Session Host Configuration, including the image, VM size, networking, identity, security and disk configuration. We’ll also explore how ephemeral OS disks can help build truly stateless session hosts.