I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining my community brothers and sisters for the most excellent CloudBrew 2023 conference in Mechelen, on December 7-8, 2023. The event is organized by AZUG, the Belgium Microsoft Azure User Group – my very good friends in the community! #CloudBrew

Those who kow me are well aware that I live my professional life deeply into developer communities with the passion of my peers who cannot help but to share their tech-excitement. This conference is exactly that – community driven, knowledge sharing, deep geekery, and PASSION! I can stronly recommend attending this conference to learn, laugh and live the community high life!

My session will be the important topic of Turning Azure Platform recommendations into gold, which essentially reads “your cloud – only better”!

The journey toward the cloud never ends – because clouds are always in motion – and you need to constantly tune financial optimization, compliance , security and other knobs in the cloud. The data and services for you to optimise are already there, it’s just that I see a lot of cloud customers are not taking enough advantage. Bottom line is the difference between good and excellent, and that spells a-c-c-o-u-n-t-a-b-i-l-i-t-y! In my session I will walk through the data points provided by Azure, describe the posture we must take to drive success, and map out the targets ahead to a successful Cloud journey!

This week on The Cloud Show our guest star Lenn Pryor we cover a hugely important topic – leadership during the business ciritical and often times quite disruptive company cloud transformation.

Moving to the cloud can have no more cricical component than a steady crew steering the right way on the journey. At the helm, the corporate leaders, need to instill a sense of direction and collaboration, even duringt these times of great change. This is a difficiult and challenge of paramount importance to the success of the cloud initiative. Listen to Lenn dive into how to remain calm facing the storm!

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

Lenn Pryor is an excecutive coach and owner of Lagom Leadership. He is a long time team leader and coach with experience from a long row of major companies including but not limited to Microsoft, eBay and Skype.

This week on The Cloud Show the guest star is Mustafa Toroman.

Few Cloud experts I know are as knowledgeable and profound as my friend Mustafa. A Cloud veteran, and with multiple books published on cloud topics. Mustafa is an expert in a great many cloud areas, and today we cover one of his favorite topics security in the cloud!

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

Mustafa Toroman is a technology professional and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at run.events, a company that provides a platform for organizing and managing events. He has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has held various technical and leadership positions in companies around the world.
Toroman has a deep understanding of software development, cloud computing, and IT infrastructure management. He has expertise in building scalable and resilient systems that can handle large amounts of data and traffic. He is also a strong advocate for DevOps and believes in continuous improvement and learning.
Toroman is a Microsoft Azure MVP (Most Valuable Professional), a frequent speaker at technology conferences and events, and also and a community leader organizing meetups and events. He is also a published author and has written several books on Microsoft technologies and cloud computing.

The best conferences are usually created by speakers and community heroes. This is a line I have been using for years. While it is likely that some of the best conferences are indeed set up this way, of course that does not mean other conferences can’t also be excellent. Speakers know first-hand that if you make the speakers feel very well received, they bring their absolute A-game, and that – in turn – makes everyone happy; sponsors and attendees.

Azure Lowlands is an excellent community conference organized by speakers and community leaders. The setup is at the excellent location DeFabrique which has such amazing ambiance and feeling. The BBQ party dinner is legend. The crew is always happy and accommodating. All good things that are the hallmark of a great show! Utrecht is also such a cozy and beautiful town with all those canals and quaint houses.

My session is a very important topic that aims to make people more aware on where to focus to make their Azure better – the Azure Platform collects all the data you need to optimise for cost control, compliance and security. Yet I see so often at customers that the data and the services that is already there for us to use is undervalued and often just neglected. I showed some real screen caps from – how bad it can get – of course scrubbing out the names of the company. The answer to the question “what to do about it” lies in digging in and learn about the services. The obvious place to start is https://learn.microsoft.com!

Here are a few shots from my session “Turning Azure platform recommendations into gold”.

I had a blast and I am very happy to have been there as part of the show! Strong recommendation to look up this conference next time if you have a chance! Thank you Azure Lowlands and hope to see you again some other year!

This week on The Cloud Show #theCloudShow I interview a very good friend and Azure Architect extraordinaire Rik Hepworth @rikhepworth of Blackmarble. See him turn the table around on me to begin to ask ME questions! ;)

[Follow the show]

We spent the episode partially reminiscing about how the cloud started and grew, but more importantly we talk about how organizations should think when strategically deliberating how to approach the cloud. That and more on The Cloud Show!

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

By the way, I particularly like this frame from the show:

About the Show Star Rik Hepworth: Rik is a Chief Consulting Officer at Black Marble, He helps organizations large and small use Cloud better. Whether that is a new adoption where governance and management are key or an application modernization project where technology choice and team knowledge are important factors in success. Through his public speaking and community involvement, He is a recipient of the Microsoft MVP Programme award for his work with Azure. He is also proud to be a member of the Microsoft Regional Director Programme. As an event organiser, speaker, and lapsed blogger, he is keen to share his knowledge with the community and encourage & support others as they do the same. His grey hair is an indication of how long he has worked in IT, and in that time he's done most things you'd expect of an IT Pro: From crawling under floors pulling cables, to managing large-scale automated OS rollouts, to architecting solutions for on-premises and cloud. Now he spends more time working with his customers' management, sharing that breadth of experience and learning.