I’m thrilled to be organizing and speaking at Chicago Global Azure 2026 on Friday, April 17, 2026 — a free, full-day community conference at the Microsoft Chicago office in downtown Chicago. This is our local contribution to Global Azure, the annual worldwide event organized by the Microsoft Azure community.

Event Details

Date: Friday, April 17, 2026
Time: 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM (Lunch provided around noon)
Location: Microsoft Chicago Office, 200 E Randolph St, Chicago, IL 60601
Admission: Free

Register here: Chicago Global Azure 2026 on Eventbrite

Space is limited. If you plan to attend, please register — and if your plans change, please cancel so someone else can take your spot.

Sessions & Schedule

Azure Is Now Old Enough to Drive

Eric Boyd 9:00 AM - 9:50 AM

Sixteen years ago, Microsoft introduced “Windows Azure”. What started as hopes and dreams of cloud computing has grown into one of the most trusted and transformative platforms in the world. Today, Microsoft Azure powers mission-critical applications, global enterprises, AI breakthroughs, and the digital transformation of every industry.

Join Eric D. Boyd as he takes us on a journey through the history of Azure, from its earliest days to the innovations shaping it right now. And you’ll get a preview of the innovations shaping the cloud’s future. Along the way, you’ll see how Azure has evolved to meet the needs of developers, IT professionals, data experts, security teams, and business leaders alike.

Zero-Friction Cloud-Native: Building and Deploying Portable Microservices with Dapr

Phanindra Gangina 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM

As organizations modernize applications with microservices and Kubernetes, they often run into the same friction points: inconsistent service-to-service communication, complex integrations, uneven developer environments, and cloud-specific deployment differences that slow delivery and increase operational risk. Cloud-native promises portability and scale—but without the right patterns, teams end up rebuilding plumbing instead of delivering business value.

This session explores a pragmatic approach to building scalable, cloud-native microservices using Dapr as the distributed application runtime, combined with developer-friendly workflows like GitHub Codespaces to standardize environments and accelerate onboarding. We’ll start by framing the business case: how Dapr reduces “undifferentiated heavy lifting” (retries, service discovery patterns, pub/sub, secrets, state management) so teams can ship features faster while improving reliability and maintainability.

Drawing from hands-on implementation patterns, we’ll walk through an end-to-end reference architecture: decomposing services, introducing sidecar-based building blocks, enabling event-driven integration with pub/sub, and standardizing secure configuration and secrets across environments. We’ll then connect the developer experience to production by showing how a consistent Codespaces-based setup supports local development, CI pipelines, and repeatable deployments.

Finally, we’ll focus on multi-cloud portability: how to deploy the same application with minimal changes to AKS, EKS, or GKE, using Kubernetes-native manifests, consistent observability, and platform-agnostic runtime patterns. Real-world lessons learned will highlight common pitfalls (over-coupling, mis-scoped state, unclear boundaries, operational gaps) and how to avoid them.

This session is designed for architects, platform engineers, and senior developers. Attendees will leave with a clear blueprint for building scalable microservices with Dapr, improving developer productivity with Codespaces, and deploying confidently across major Kubernetes platforms with minimal effort.

Quantum Optimization for Distributed Systems on Azure

Rakesh Chowdary Ganta 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

As distributed systems scale across cloud environments, optimizing resource allocation, load balancing, and system resilience becomes increasingly complex. This session explores how hybrid quantum-classical approaches can enhance optimization in cloud-native architectures using Azure. Attendees will learn how Azure Quantum enables experimentation with algorithms such as QAOA and VQE, while integrating with Azure services for real-world distributed workloads.

We’ll examine how quantum-inspired and hybrid techniques can improve resource allocation, optimize service mesh configurations, and enhance traffic routing in microservices-based systems deployed on Azure Kubernetes Service. The session also highlights practical patterns for combining classical cloud compute with quantum subroutines to address latency and communication challenges in large-scale systems.

Participants will gain a foundational understanding of how to leverage Azure Quantum and cloud-native services to design more efficient, scalable, and resilient distributed systems, along with actionable insights for adopting hybrid optimization strategies.

DevOps with GitHub Copilot

Pete Rodriguez 12:15 PM - 12:50 PM

Navigating Cloudy Horizons with Azure Monitor and Application Insights

David Giard 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM

Azure Monitoring is a comprehensive cloud-based service that allows users to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from various Azure resources, services and applications. It provides visibility into the health, performance, and availability of resources, enabling proactive monitoring and troubleshooting for enhanced operational efficiency.

In this session, you will learn the concepts important to monitoring applications and how to configure Azure Monitor and Application Insights to collect relevant data, alert you when potential problems occur, and report on that data in near real time.

AgentOps for Real: Evals, Tracing, and Regression Tests for AI Agents on Azure

Brian Haydin 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM

It’s easy to build an AI agent demo in Azure. It’s much harder to build one that stays reliable after prompt changes, model swaps, tool failures, and real user behavior start hitting it in production.

In this session, I’ll show a practical AgentOps approach for Azure-based agents using evaluation datasets, golden tasks, tracing, telemetry, and regression testing. We’ll walk through how to instrument an agent with observability using OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, and Application Insights - how to score responses with both rules and model-based judges, and how to catch regressions before they quietly torch trust in production. We’ll also look at common failure modes in multi-step agent flows: tool misuse, hallucinated handoffs, brittle prompts, and silent drift after updates.

Built on Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft Agent Framework, and Azure Monitor, this session gives you a concrete playbook for moving from “cool prototype” to “production system people can actually depend on.”

Closing Q&A Panel

3:00 PM - 3:40 PM

Event Highlights

• A full day of sessions from local Azure experts, Microsoft MVPs, Microsoft Regional Directors, and Chicago tech community members
• Practical, real-world Azure guidance across the full modern app development stack
• Lunch provided — stay connected with fellow practitioners throughout the day
• A free, community-driven event as part of the Global Azure initiative
• Network and collaborate with the Chicago Azure community

About Global Azure

Global Azure is an annual community event organized by the Microsoft Azure community worldwide. Each year, cities around the world host their own local events on the same weekend, giving local communities a chance to learn together, share expertise, and celebrate Azure. Chicago Global Azure is organized by the Chicago Cloud Computing Meetup.