One of the greatest cities in Europe is Prague. I am so pleased to go back there for a conference event. I will be speaking at Update Conference Prague 2023. “Update Conference Prague is the biggest developer conference in the Czech Republic, offering sessions delivered by the top experts from all around the world. In addition to that, we also organize a few smaller events every year, each of them focusing on a specific topic.”

Flattered and joyful to be a featured speaker:

My session will be about managing environments in the cloud for developement and testing, and optimizing time spent in setting them up and tearing them down. “Dev and Test Environments in Azure finally fast, cheap, and somewhat easy” This is a great area for any company to focus on to get full control of what the heck you spend your time and money on in the cloud!

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.

Going back to India! My favourite home away from home, where the weather is warm, and the people are tremendous. What I love the most about India – it’s gracious and wonderful people! Oh, and the food too of course.

I will be at the C# Corner Conference 2023 in the Delhi area on October 9-14. There will be four College/University events where I will have the privilege to adress the young students:

• IPEC, Sahibabad
• SRM IST, Delhi NCR Campus, Ghaziabad
• I.T.S Engineering College, Greater Noida
• Sharda University

On the Saturday will be the important annual C# Corner MVP day at Hotel Radisson Blu, Kaushambi, Delhi/NCR.

I am very glad to be giving a keynote adress this year, and of course happy to share knowledge and cloud experience.

If you are in India or nearby, you should consider coming to attend this excellent conference!

Good to Great Cloud  - IaaS to Azure PaaS

For my main presentation to the students, I will talk about a future career opportunity in the cloud. Microsoft announced their cloud platform, back then called “Windows Azure” in 2008. It was a platform service where you could host a web front-end and a compute backend, as well as store files and use a database. This platform was positioned as “a new service in the cloud at the web tier of computing”. This was at the beginning a Platform as a Service offering. There was no Virtual Machine (VM) offering, or IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service, available at all. That came later, because the market needs that too. Today, so many years later, the move toward the cloud-PaaS-dream continues. The main challenge to achieve this freedom and success in the cloud is that there is not enough people in the market with the right skills to understand how to take full advantage of PaaS. Slowly but surely business moves in this direction, and there is a very long way to go still! Where some people there is opportunity for the one who can take charge and embrase the new!

Young peope I meet who are about to enter the job market, commonly ask me for career advice. I am very glad to honestly be able to give the advice that they should do what I do. I love what I do and it is a most rewarding professional life. I am a cloud expert. I know how, and care deeply for, the Azure platform works. My value to customers is to make their cloud better so that they can get more and better business value out of using the cloud.

Career Advice from a Cloud Expert

You should consider learning as much as you can about a cloud platform! Honestly I don’t care which one though my favourite one is Azure. Become very skilled in how to use platform services that eliminate the need for virtual machines, and learn how to migrate from a pre-cloud VM-based architecture to a PaaS based offering. Here are skill areas to focus on:

• Cloud Platform understanding.
• Cloud Cost Management
• Application Monitoring in the Cloud
• Auto Scaling
• Compliance with Policies
• Security Monitoring and Operations
• Access Control with just-in-time activation, such as PIM
• PaaS service offerings
• Migration from IaaS to PaaS
• … (the list goes on, there is lots)
• DevOps
• Continous Integration
• Continous Delivery
• Infrastructure as Code with automated deployments
• Cloud Architecture
• Organisational change and skills aquisition for Cloud.

There is a lot to choose from in the above list. Generally I say – get good at Cloud and Cloud-related concerns and you will have a great professional and respected career ahead of you that is most rewarding and enjoyable!

Here are the learning links that accompany my talk

I made a collection of some great Microsoft Learn material that you can dive into. If you go through all of this, you already have an advantage over many pre-cloud experts that have not used the cloud yet.

START TO FOCUS HERE => https://bit.ly/FundamentallyUnderstandAzure

Article by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich 2016 “Cloud innovation for the year ahead: From infrastructure to innovation” bit.ly/InfrastructureToInnovation

The following resources are HUGE and more challenging to penetrate.

• Azure Architecture Center
• Azure Well-Architected Framework
• Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

Some certifications you can later target:

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Network Engineer Associate
  
  
• Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
  
  

Link to here:

[bit.ly/CloudExpertCareerAdvice]

It gives me great joy and some pride to announce my participation in the ESPC 2023 conference, a conference for Microsoft 365 & Azure. This year the event will be held in the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre.

I am excited about all the sessions, but there is no use denying that my true passion lies in the Azure part of the program. Together with my good friend and co-programme chair Maarten Eekels we have the great joy of leading the shape and content of the sessions you will attend at ESPC23. Thank you so much to our team members Luise Freese, Paolo Pialorsi, and Merethe Stave.

I KNOW the #azure cloud content at ESPC23 will be stellar (above cloud), because I was there to select it! Thank you so much to all the fantastic session submissions that made it a terrible joy to select only the ones that would fit our agenda.

My session will be “Dev & Test Environments in Azure Finally Fast, Cheap, and Somewhat Easy”. This is a passion of mine, environment automation. There is a self reported rate of waste in cloud spend of about 1/3 (a third). Not all, but certainly a great portion of this waste, comes from companies not following through on the promise of agility in the cloud. The tendency is to treat the new cloud in the old on-premises way. You only pay for Azure resources when you use them. Why would you ever pay for development and test resources over the holidays, over the weekend, even over night, when few or no-one is in fact using them? How fast can you set up an exact replica of production resources? If you don’t know, or if you do know but haven’t yet been able to take full advantage of cloud speed resources, this is the session for you!

See you in Amsterdam friends! It will be a BLAST and you should not miss it for the world!

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.