Belfast Azure - Welcome back!

This will be a hybrid event. You can sign up on [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/Azure-User-Group-Belfast/) to come along in person (!) for pizza and friendly chat, or subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch the live stream and ask questions, or the recording will be available for a few days afterwards (assuming the technology works 🤞).

Doors open at 18:00 and pizza will arrive shortly afterwards. At 18:30 we'll close the door again, start the stream and have two talks - James Woods will tell us about Azure SQL Database Ledger, which sounds like a way to get most of the benefits of blockchain without most of the drawbacks, and Mark Allan will tell us about Azure Container Apps, which sounds like a way to get most of the benefits of Kubernetes without most of the drawbacks. Full details below.

IMPORTANT - We only have a meetup for as long as we have speakers! If you'd like to give a talk at a future meetup and show us a bit of what you and/or your company are building then please fill in the form on our Sessionize page. Or nudge a colleague to do the same.

Azure SQL Database Ledger - James Woods (Deloitte)

Azure SQL Database Ledger (currently in public preview in Azure SQL and coming to SQL Server 2022) provides a method of creating a history of changes to data in a table similar to what has been done using triggers since forever and more recently using temporal tables. However, it brings one new key feature - the history can be independently verified to show it has not been tampered with. This makes it suitable for use in low trust environments. In this awareness session, James will talk through how to configure it, how to use it and finally how it verify it.

Azure Container Apps - Mark Allan (Freelance)

K8s without the H8s :) Kubernetes is powerful and flexible, but it's not famously easy to look after. Serverless functions have a low barrier of entry, but you have to work within the constraints of your chosen platform.

So what if there was a fully managed application-centric platform that's easy to configure yet can host any code regardless of runtime or programming model and comes with baked-in features for running modern serverless and distributed services? And doesn't even lock you in?

Join us to learn about Azure Container Apps, bringing Kubernetes and serverless computing to the masses. Then watch as we discover how easy it is to put together a modern serverless event-driven application with a distributed state store. In Fortran.