Mike Nelson

The Easy Peasy of Troubleshooting Azure

Along with all of the cool features, infrastructure, and platforms available in Azure, there are also a vast amount of troubleshooting tools at your disposal. There are tools that cover connectivity, networks, storage, compute, analytics, and compliance. Let's take a look at some of the awesome tools available to you in your quest to be proactive and prepared for any Azure issue.

The Evolution of a Geek - Becoming an IT Architect

Contrary to what some Analysts and IT Recruiters preach, moving, or better yet “evolving’ into a role as an Architect in IT is not something that can be done when your fresh off the books from college, or even if you have been in the technology field for many years. Besides the wealth of knowledge and years of hands-on practical experience that is inherently required, it also takes certain characteristics of personality and behavior to be successful in this role. Come join Mike as he discusses his long professional career journey into Architecture, with stories of fun, success, and failure along the way. If you aspire to test the waters in the Architect role, or want to make it your retirement legacy, join us for some open and frank discussion on what it means to evolve as an IT Architect.

Making the Most Out of the Azure Dev/Test Labs

One of the best lesser known features of Azure are the Dev/Test Labs. The Dev/Test Labs are just what it's name implies - a place in the cloud where you can develop and test your code and applications, and have a bit of fun playing with new technology as well. The advantage of using this service is all of the options that are given to you and all of the possibilities of it's use, some of which are still to be discovered. Mixed team development, QA testing across the globe, or just a sandbox for you to play around in - it's all here. in this session we will take a walk-through of the Labs and do some demo's around setting it up, setting up multiple labs, configuring them, and assigning users, as well as other options.

Practical uses for the WSL

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now embedded as part of the OS in Windows 10 and Server 2019. For those of us that were raised on the CLI in the *nix world, this is an awesome feature addition. But for those that haven't been exposed to that CLI ro the WSL, now is the time to check it out. We'll step through some practical real life examples and use cases showing how the WSL can make your admin life just a bit easier.

Some Really Way Cool Things You Can Do In Azure

Azure has incredible growth on a constant basis, especially in the features and tools that are made available in the interface and beyond. Did you know that Microsoft added more than 300 different features and options to Azure last year, and most of the time you don't even know it happened? That is truly amazing and mind blowing at the same time! We'll take a look at what the realm of possibilities are inside of Azure, through the eyes of the administrator as well as the user. We embark on a showing of some of the just some of coolest things you can create and do with the tool sets and features that you have at your fingertips. Come along and check out what the Microsoft Cloud can rock for you!

Storms in the Cloud - Disaster Recovery in Azure

DR planning isn't just for on-premises anymore. Transforming your current DR strategy for the hybrid and public cloud is something many IT people put off until it is too late. Let's take a look at how you could craft solutions to provide resiliency and recovery in the cloud. We will look at "Born In Azure" ASR and other tools, as well as some really innovative 3rd party tools that will make the journey to almost instant RPO's a reality.

Managing Azure for Citrix Admins - Part 2

Building off of the wildly popular Part 1 of this series by Mike, he will go further into the rabbit hole of Azure management and deeper into monitoring of your Azure infrastructure.

Managing Azure for Citrix Admins

"Citrix has gone "Cloud-First" with their product philosophies and embraced Microsoft's Azure Cloud. But, some Citrix Administrators are feeling a bit left out and in the dark around how to actually use and manage environments in Azure since some have little to no experience in the cloud space. This webinar will try to help overcome the fears of managing Azure and expose how to do it in "Admin-Speak". We will cover the portal and how things are organized and managed, the many features and options available for your use, as well as how to connect and manage from PowerShell. Grab a free Azure subscription if you don't have one already and follow along!"

Managing in Azure - The Portal, The Shell, The API, & the CLI

Often times I am asked how I manage my IaaS and PaaS infrastructure in Azure. Do I use the Portal? How about CLI? Oh, wait, your a PowerShell guy, right? Well, to be honest, I use all of them. I manage around 30 tenant clients in Azure and not one solution fits all. In this session, we will take a look at all of them, break them down, and do some sample management to show you what works, what kinda works, and what just doesn't work.

Follow the Breadcrumbs! Azure Security Center in-Depth

Cyberthreats are everywhere today. Your presence in the cloud is is really a good easy target for them and has probably been approached or even attacked at some point already. The Security Center and related services goal is provide a central point where you can manage, monitor, alert, and be advised on all your resources in Azure, as well as on your connected devices. We will take a live look at the Security Center and it's related services, highlight some attack scenarios, and show you how to "read the breadcrumbs" when researching your own breaches.

Terraform and Pulumi - Comparisons, Differences, & Demo's

Terraform has been around a bit longer than Pulumi, and they come from very different backgrounds. These Infrastructure as Code (IaaC) tools provide a safe and repeatable build and configuration solution for not only IaaS, but for a whole lot more. We will take a look at both of them, do some comparisons between them, break out some differences and the possible impacts of those, & finally, show some side-by-side demos on how they are each configured to build environments. We will also discuss how both can be used together to provide a solution that raises the bar for everything IaaC.

Terraform & Pulumi are exceptionally great IaaC tools for creating & maintaining infrastructure. Let's take a look at both offerings & do a bit of comparisons, talk about some differences, and show them side-by-side, & together, providing robust solutions for IaaS and much more.

Kicking the Tires of Azure Arc

Microsoft has crossed the multi-cloud on-prem, hybrid, and public cloud management barriers with an offering announced at last years Ignite conference called Azure Arc. This new solution extends Azure Resource Manager to proactively manage, scale, and deploy distributed workloads, servers, and containers from a single management point in Azure. We will take a look at what Arc is and the preview offerings today, how it works with servers, and run through some demo's using various scenarios and examples. Join me to take the new Azure Arc for a test drive!