Michael Durkan
Microsoft Azure MVP - Azure Cloud Architect
Dublin, Ireland
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Michael is a Microsoft Azure MVP with over 20 years experience in both On-premises , Hybrid and Cloud environments with a particular focus on giving customers trusted advice in their Cloud Migration strategy.
Michael has spoken at both user groups and in-person conferences covering topics across the entire Azure platform from Azure Core Compute to Azure PaaS services. He has published LinkedIn Learning courses on the AZ-801 exam objectives, and regularly blogs at michaeldurkan.com. He contributes regularly to the Microsoft Q&A platform as an Azure Community Champion.
He works for Avanade Ireland as their Azure Practice Lead.
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Maximizing Cloud Efficiency and Cost Savings with Azure FinOps
As cloud adoption continues to grow, organizations face the challenge of managing and optimizing cloud costs.
Azure FinOps provides a framework that aligns finance, operations, and technology teams to achieve better financial control over Azure resources.
This blog post will explore the tools and best practices within Azure to help you drive cost efficiency.
I'll dive into key FinOps tools, including Azure Cost Management + Billing, Azure Advisor, Azure Reservations, and Azure Policy, showcasing how these tools enable you to monitor and reduce expenses.
Azure VMware Solution - is it the right choice for your Azure workloads?
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) allows organizations to run their VMware workloads natively on Azure, providing seamless integration, scalability, and operational consistency.
In this session, I'll provide a high level overview of AVS, cover a typical migration, the pros and cons, and compare an AVS Migration with modernizing environments using both traditional IaaS and Cloud Native Azure services.
Getting to know Microsoft's Connected Ecosystem
The wide depth and breadth of learning and career paths available when pursuing a career using Microsoft technologies can be daunting. Which path to choose? Security? Azure? M365? Power Platform? Data?
One of the most important things to be aware of is that in the Microsoft world, its all connected to some degree. Services that sit in some learning and career paths overlap with others, and its important to be aware of these - whether you are using Cloud only, Hybrid or On-Premises deployments!
Hopefully I'll be able to unlock these complexities and remove some of the boundaries while giving some real world examples!
50 Ways to Secure Your Azure
Paul Simon once famously proclaimed in song that "There must be 50 ways to leave your lover". Its one of the most iconic and best recognised songs of the last century and one that we all hum along to for days after it comes on the radio.
I'm not sure if Paul ever gave us 50 ways, but it got me thinking - there must be 50 ways to secure your Azure?
Join me in this session where I guide you through the (approximately) 50 different ways you can secure your Azure Tenants and Subscriptions!
The A-Z of Azure Policy!
Blog Post with an A-Z of Azure Policy, with explanations, screenshots and examples
Using Microsoft 365 licensing to drive your Azure Migration Strategy
When Microsoft released BPOS as its first hosted offering back in early 2008, people didn't realize at the time was that this was the start of the Cloud Computing revolution.
Over the next 15 years, multiple customers would bin their on-premises Exchange Servers and move to what became Office 365 and now Microsoft 365 to avail of secure hosted Exchange email and collaboration tools such as SharePoint and Teams. But that's where some companies stopped their cloud migrations.
In this session, I'll run through
- How it all started for Office 365 and Azure.
- How a typical company's tech stack is structured.
- How companies began their cloud migration journey with Email migrations.
- Why they stopped their cloud migration journey with Email migrations!
- The different license plans available in Office 365 and Microsoft 365.
- How these license plans can align to Azure services and opportunities for migration.
- The importance of Landing Zones and Cloud Adoption Framework.
- How Azure Virtual Desktop can help migrations for both Remote Users and from a Security standpoint.
- Azure Migration Tools and how they work.
- Why we need to stop using 25 year old technology and make the jump to cloud!
By the end of this session, you'll have a clear understanding of how Microsoft 365 license plans can help drive your migration strategy, and why you need to take advantage of it!
Azure Virtual Desktop - Design Tips, Tricks and Insights
Azure Virtual Desktop is one of the go-to technologies in the market at the minute from both a remote work and security perspective, but it can get expensive if costs are not controlled.
In this session, I'll discuss
- what is Azure Virtual Desktop.
- how to properly design and size your AVD solution.
- AVD Host Pool Settings and Configuration.
- Identity options for both AD DS and Azure AD
- Network Security and Isolation.
- Profile Management with FSLogix
- how existing M365 licensing provides AVD entitlements.
- entitlements for external and guest users.
- how implementing Scaling Plans can help control and keep your AVD costs down.
- options for OS Image, Application and Vulnerability Management.
- deciding if AVD is the right solution for your needs, and what are the alternatives?
By the end of this session, you'll have the knowledge on how to design your own Azure Virtual Desktop solution
Does your Azure App have Scaling Bottlenecks? Azure Load Testing can help!
The move away from the traditional model of hosting our tiered applications on VMs to a more Serverless/Cloud Native posture means less admin overhead when it comes to maintaining the underlying Infra and we just need to pick the correct SKU and set up scaling ….
Or does it? Scaling isn't linear across all Azure PAAS Services, so we need to ensure that we have the correct SKU's and baselines defined for each of those services based on the expected load.
In this session, I'll look at how scaling times can differ across services, getting those auto-scaling rules right, and how Azure Load Testing can help set that baseline.
- Overview of standard Azure PAAS Services and what they do
- Example of an application using multiple PAAS Services
- How these services scale? Auto Scaling?
- Can the services scale in time to keep your application alive?
- How can you know if you have the correct SKU
- Overview of Azure Load Testing
○ JMeter Files
○ Test Engines
§ Client Metrics
○ Load
○ Parameters
○ Criteria
○ Pricing
§ Virtual User Hours
○ RBAC Roles
- Azure Load Test
○ Dashboards
○ Endpoints
§ Server Metrics
□ Goes to Azure Monitor
○ Identifying Bottlenecks
○ Automate Load tests using CI/CD with Azure DevOps
○ Integrate with Azure Key Vault
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Michael Durkan
Microsoft Azure MVP - Azure Cloud Architect
Dublin, Ireland
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