I recently had the opportunity to catch up with two very good friends, Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin on their show .NET Rocks to talk about... well a lot about Azure. What it was, how it grew up, and what it is now. Of course I also got to mention Global Auzre, which is always nice and the right thing to do when you have a BIG audience.

It's 2024, how is Azure doing? (Listen to the episode here.)

It is pretty amazing how much Azure has grown over the years. It is now an unruly teenager which we all depend on to help get our job done! OH MY! ;~) Starting out from only eight data centers globally, Azure today is – nobody knows exactly how many. The number of services in the platform has sky rocketed from a handful to hundreds. I can only immagine what it must feel like to see Azure for the first time today. My perspective is long but it can never be seen with fresh eyes. Azure is a wonderous place, and also something that needs to evolve much further in some cases. AI will do an interesting number on Azure services for sure. Also, we discuss how a few get the cloud wrong, and decide – sometimes publicly – to back out of the cloud again. Experto crede; they’re not doing their part of the job, and they are not doing it right, with the wrong in-house skills, and not the right strategy, if they cannot make Azure work. It is a shared responsibility, and by (publicly) failing at it, they have declared they did not do their homework!

In the episode we covered a lot of ground, including but not limited to: Azure Migrate, Azure Advisor, and Azure Monitor.

It is truly a fine honor to travel around the world to speak at conferences. As an international speaker it is especially exciting to travel from Sweden to Sydney as an invited speaker.

NDC Sydney https://ndcsydney.com/ is a conference from the company NDC conferences, and that means a grand event with a top-tier of international speakers, a fine venue stocked with food, drink, and with a strong sponsor lineup. This is a learning experience to be reckoned with, that stands out among conferences around the world.

I will strongly recommend it is a good investment in personal development to attend one of these conferences, should you have the opportunity to do so.

“NDC Sydney 2024 will be an in-person event, held 12-16 February 2024 at Hilton Sydney. It's a five-day event comprised of 2-days deep-dive workshops, followed by 3 conference days with multiple simultaneous tracks.”

At NDC Sydney, I will speak, be interviewed, and I will interview none other than Mads Torgersen on my talk-show #TheCloudShow. Hope to see you all there! Below my session topic for the event.

Cheers,

Magnus

I will speak about how “Dev & Test Environments in Azure finally fast, cheap, and somewhat easy”!

This is a talk I really like, because I know very well how difficult it is to grasp and adopt environment automation in the cloud. I work with a lot of highly skilled and experienced IT-Pros and Devs, but maybe they have not got all that mileage in cloud yet, and with that comes a lerning curve for working with temporary environments in the cloud. When you need to do some testing for instance, you want to deploy the costly infrastructure to the cloud just-in-time and you want to remove it just after you finish your tests. At the same time you must know for sure that the environment you test on is configured exactly the same as the production target environment, otherwise what good is the test. Well, with automated testing (and development) environments, you can do all that. This is what my session explains and examplifies.

Here is my session description:

“If you are not using the cloud for Development and Test you are missing out – not really doing it right! Not all workloads belong in the cloud, but all development and test does for sure! While the cloud is becoming ever more empowering and capable, at the same time it can feel too advanced and too far away when you are developing and testing. Self-reported numbers put cloud resource consumption waste at so much as a third (1/3) of the monthly bill! Much of this waste may be attributed to failure to automate and to not optimizing working environments in the cloud.

Microsoft works diligently to make your Azure ascent exceedingly easy. With initiatives such as Azure Deployment Environments and Azure Developer CLI you the cloud user can enter one or a few commands on the line and hey-presto: You have a development environment running in the real Azure Cloud, just for you!
In this session we will look at two options from Microsoft in the paradigm of hands-free development and test environments as-a-service. Automation with Infrastructure as Code, extreme ease of use, built in compliance and security, and of course financial optimization are topics covered.
As a forward-thinking efficient developer, you need to be empowered with knowledge how to set up work in the Cloud, how to do your great job there, and how to optimize the spend your resource usage incurs! This session clears things up so that you can see the cloud despite all the fog. I also share my installation guide with links, including of course VS Code and Windows Terminal customization guidance. Enjoy!”

I am delighted to share that I will deliver the keynote at Software Architecture Conference 2023 (virtual conference) on Friday August 25. The conference has a great lineup of sorftware architects that will share their experience, their tips and tricks and their passion!

I will talk about the responsibility of being a software architect and that the software architect is the most passionate and the person in the company who cares the most – the keeper of the flame, who shows the direction of the company tech.

See you there!

Thank you C# Corner for having me – I feel honoured!

https://twitter.com/CSharpDotTV/status/1694217088804561243

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/csharpcorner_software-architecture-conference-august-activity-7099983238932103168-Jlt4

https://www.facebook.com/CsharpCorner/posts/pfbid02AuekE9UcMKU3mvajsC6KnYBKja7X1htcfRK7wc8i6Lhmbd3FqjzxUg5Bnvkg87WMl

This week on The Cloud Show our guest star Alex Mang and I discuss Cloud Native Development (taa-daa). What is that, and how is that any different from that we have been doing in development before we started using a cloud platform?

Alex Mang is exceptionally experienced with leading teams that develop applicaions, outside and for the cloud. I can think of few others that could shed a more precice spotlight onthis topic than him.

VIEW THE EPISODE here below and follow the show for more!

ABOUT THE SHOW

The Cloud Show is the weekly show for leaders are impacted by cloud projects. Through short interviews with insightful guest Stars we penetrate important topics about cloud and leadership in cloud contexts. We know this show will help listeners potentially avoid some of the challenges that we have faced, or at least be better equipped to face the ardious journey that is the path to a successful cloud for your business!

Reach out to me if YOU want to be a gues on the Cloud Show, or if you know someone who would make a great guest star!

About the Show Star

Alex Mang is a Microsoft Regional Director, Azure Most Valuable Professional, working as a cloud architect, consultant, trainer, software developer but also regularly seen at conferences and user groups speaking mostly on cloud-computing topics. His main goal is to help developers better understand the implications of cloud-computing as a whole, from as many perspectives as possible. Alex was invited three times in a row as a featured speaker at Microsoft Ignite, the company’s largest and most important technical conference gathering nearly 35,000 attendees.
Since 2011, Alex runs KeyTicket Solutions, a company focused on democratizing access control, ticketing and management solutions for every single vertical in the world.
For his experience on cloud-driven solutions, his Microsoft Certified Trainer, Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD), Microsoft Certified Solution Associate (MCSA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) stand as proof and so do the many happy customers he had the pleasure to work with for the past many years.

A great conference is coming up on May 14-16; it’s the European Cloud Summit 2024 in Wiesbaden, Germany.

“The European Cloud Summit is a premier event in Europe for Microsoft Azure and Cloud Technologies. It gathers Microsoft Azure executives and engineers, top speakers, industry professionals, large clients, and thousands of attendees for networking. The summit provides cutting-edge content in both business and technology, offering a great learning and professional opportunity.”

Thrilled to be a featured speaker alongside such a superb lineup of fellow speaker experts:

I will speak about my “Five best Azure Access Control practices” It is a serious challenge to master Access Control and Identity in the Cloud. With experience from over ten years as an Azure MVP, and in my role as CEO of Loftysoft, I know most companies fail this challenge completely. Focus on Zero-Trust with the quintessential principles of just-in-time access and least-privilege! My session will banish Azure ghost and zombies from Azure. We will obliterate connection strings forever. We will see magical secrets that will never expire. That and more in this fast paced, demo heavy Azure enablement session which will make you a great Azure access hero.