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!
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! ;)
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.
You can just “lay down your credit card” and start consuming Azure for your business. No problem, right? No, that’s not entirely right. It matters how you purchase Azure, and there are several options, but it matters more how you follow up on cost.
This question in the Cloud Clinic is one that will inevitably “hit” your company when the initial party mood can turn into a hangover. Hopefully, before it does, you have learned to reign in, control, and master cost management in the cloud. Who am I kidding, evidence, unfortunately, speaks to the contrary.
I have seen multiple companies take to the cloud in maybe ambitious strides, not really knowing exactly how to measure business value (yet), and then later realize that they have been haemorrhaging money too much for too long because of uncontrolled costs and a general free for all attitudes in the company.
Read on below and find out in this week’s episode!
The Cloud Clinic is a series on the #AzureEnablementShow where we focus on answering caller questions about using the cloud. It is difficult to start out right, and it is difficult to stay on an optimal path in the cloud journey. "I thought the cloud would be better than this, but I have some questions!" This is the show where you can have Your question answered! Please reach out to me on social channels, or comment here, or on YouTube, and we might be answering Your Cloud Clinic Question next!
How can you tell if your cloud investment is a good one?
Oh that’s “simple”, you measure! If it truly was simple, then everyone would do it. The baseline is that you must have tags for cost management on your cost consuming Azure Resources. If not initially, then certainly later, you will want to be enabled to slice and dice various costs. How much are we spending on our production environments versus our test? The increase in cost over time, how much of it is accrued due to rising development costs? Could it be that we maybe are not cleaning up old development and test resources that we are no longer using? It that’s true you certainly would not be the first. It is important, over time, to have a check on which cost is what, and use those checks to work toward an automated and clean development and test landscape. It is also important to measure production cost versus revenue from those resources over time. Is there something that needs to be revisited in our architecture after we gained all these paying customers? Is the rising cost realistic compared to our growing revenue? What may be reviewed and optimized?
How can you associate the cost of a resource with a person or team?
Again, with the tags! It is a fundamental function of Azure to put metadata keys and values “tags” on all your resources. You can enforce this by policy and make sure it always happens. Azure is just now releasing the feature that allows you to easily and powerfully “Group and allocate costs using tag inheritance”. That is certainly worth looking at.
How does using Azure budgets add accountability?
When a system accountable person (or team) is assigned a budget for their Azure spend, their mindset shifts. I have seen so many cases where budgets are not used, and much later a very sour conversation about “how could it have cost this much” happens. In one case an Azure Enterprise Agreement of $1M was supposed to last for a year. After seven months, that money was all gone. The conversations that followed were not entirely friendly. That company did not use tagging the right way, and they did not use budgets. Internal post-mortem reviews revealed that technical employees felt outside of the business goals and that nobody listened to them. They in turn did not feel trusted and therefore not accountable. That cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in this case. They are most certainly not alone.
Remember, a budget does not have to be spot on correct to begin with. Just make sure to set one up, for example for a subscription, and then follow up on the cost. Is the cost reasonable? Does the budget need to be higher, or is there room to optimize and automize and reduce the budget?
Use tags and budgets and work to make technical ownership inclusive in the business, so that those that spend feel they are accountable for spend, and potentially rewarded for not overspending!
Some conferences are special – the good Eurpean kind of special. DevSum falls in that category. I suppose a large part of the reason is that it is on home turf, in Stockholm, Sweden.
This year the conference content committee saw fit to select my talk on Four pre-flight checks for Azure Cloud. This is a particularly important topic these these days, and the audience frequently comment a lot of recognition. The fourth thing in my talk is “references”, but three large areas of items to cover _BEFORE_ you start are ensuring you have a good strategy, which leads to a good plan, and then to also ensure you empower and arrange your company organisation around cloud.
Technology may be advanced, but is frequently rather straigth forward. Humans, on the other hand, are _NEVER_ straight forward.
We tend to talk about and work on the tech, because that feels safe and usually not so contentious. As an industry we must talk a lot more about these other things, because that’s where the real cost of cloud hides, and this is where a quite signifficant portion of project time is spent!
In my talk I share a lot of real project stories (names have been changed to protect the victims), and a lot of personal experiences and tips earned in the trenches of cloud projects since the very dawn of the cloud!
Also at the conference, I met up with a ton of great friends and I saw multiple great talks delivered by some of those friends. Always phenominal to catch up both socially, and also professionally at conferences!
Thank you a lot DevSum for having me over – I appreciated this a lot! Hope to see you again next time! <3
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