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!