Four pre-flight checks for Azure Cloud

So, your company is going to the Azure Cloud. Wonderful! How will you do it? There’s more to it than most know, and most are not really equipped for the flight to the Azure Cloud when it is time to taxi onto the runway.
Fuel for your journey are the business goals, which you must use to navigate when it begins to get cloudy. Your teams of ground staff, tower operators, flight crew and pilots must be organized in a purposeful way so that everyone is ready for great time in the skies. Pre-flight check is your tactical planning that gives you a practical mapping between strategy, organization, and cloud.
In this session I will discuss the exceptionally important steps of Strategy, Organization and Planning to get Ready for the Cloud. I will add my own experience as an Azure MVP, Lead Cloud Architect, and a Chief Product Officer at Cloudeon by Devoteam.

Five best Azure Access Control practices

It is a serious challenge to master Access Control and Identity in the Cloud. With experience from over ten years as an Azure MVP, and in my role as Chief Product Officer at Cloudeon by Devoteam, I know most companies fail this challenge completely. Focus on Zero-Trust with the quintessential principles of just-in-time access and least-privilege! You can master the challenges of...
• Granting Users Access the better way via AAD Security Groups.
• Non-permanent PIM access for humans.
• Granting machines access via Managed Identities.
• Setting up automated Continuous Deployment.
• Self-rotating secrets.
We will banish Azure ghost and zombies. We will obliterate connection strings forever. We will see magical secrets that will never expire. That and more in this fast paced, demo heavy Azure enablement session which will make you a great Azure access hero.

Turning Azure Platform recommendations into gold

Going to the Cloud is hard. The realization is that the journey toward the cloud never ends – because clouds are always in motion.
* Financial optimization is critical and as your user base changes optimizations must change.
* Compliance in the cloud is like catching a fast-moving cloud with a hand net. We need to be compliant, but how is that supposed to be possible?
* Security is also ever evolving with new threats to relate to and protect against.
Good news is that most all the data you need to keep tabs on these cloud challenges is available from your cloud provider Azure. It is not very difficult to collect the data you need to create actions that need to be taken to decrease cost, manage compliance, and strengthen security.
Reality is that very often organizations are challenged to have the right responsibilities assigned to the right people or teams so that people are empowered to be accountable for these required continuous improvements. On top of that, it is additionally challenging for any organization to allocate enough time and budget to keep up with these illusive challenges.
In this session we 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!

Dev & Test Environments in Azure finally fast, cheap, and somewhat easy

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.
Microsoft works diligently to make your Azure ascent exceedingly easy. With initiatives such as Azure Deployment Environments and Azure Developer CLI you the cloud user can enter one or a few commands on the line and hey-presto: You have a development environment running in the real Azure Cloud, just for you!
In this session we will look at two options from Microsoft in the paradigm of hands-free development and test environments as-a-service. Automation with Infrastructure as Code, extreme ease of use, built in compliance and security, and of course financial optimization are topics covered.
As a forward-thinking efficient developer, you need to be empowered with knowledge how to set up work in the Cloud, how to do your great job there, and how to optimize the spend your resource usage incurs! This session clears things up so that you can see the cloud despite all the fog. I also share my installation guide with links, including of course VS Code and Windows Terminal customization guidance. Enjoy!

This is about Microsoft Azure Development Environment and the Microsoft Azure Developer Command Line azd. It will bring a TON of value to any organisation that can go all the way to fully automated development and test environment management!

Tech person – your physical body exists

This is a wellness story along my road from tech-geek to a fit-tech-geek. What “works for me”, my advice and guidance, is intended to inspire and amuse. I learned about my body – physiologically, metabolically, and I learned how to work out. No need to feel like I did, like a fool when I stumbled into a gym. You can get past that, and I am here to show you how!
As a tech-geek I have a busy life full of work, family, friends, and community. Fortunately, many of my priorities overlap, but they also share a negative common trait. I can do most of these things from the comfort of my home office desk, never moving one step. That just isn’t healthy.
My personal wellness journey started a few years ago when I noted my pants size was slowly but steadily increasing, my wardrobe felt ever tighter, and if I saw a photo of myself, I’d think – well that could look better. I did not feel strong, alert, or satisfied with my appearance. Something had to change. They say, “you must make time for health, or you will make time for sickness”.
The promise I made to myself is to love myself by making my physical body a first-class member of the tools of life. Physical activity is a natural part of my routine, and I am no longer satisfied if I am forced to skip training. In addition to physical wellness, this has increased my mental strength, my endurance, and my emotional wellbeing. All these gains are beneficial not only to me but to my loved ones too.
Anyone can start to make this change. You can commit to include health in your life too! In fact, every day is a good day to start working out. I’m going to the gym today – want to come along?

Lessons learned from public sector cloud implementations

It is time to talk about the specific challenges on the cloudy road ahead! It may feel intimidating, daunting, with a real risk of missing the target or not gaining the full benefit of the cloud-move. The cloud promises; Agile/fast, secure, compliant, and pay-per-use. Not to mention all those new AI services – they are all in the cloud. No cloud, no AI!

Right now, the Swedish public sector is in fact moving to the cloud. For many years, the situation was rather locked by compliance, security, and data sovereignty matters.

Over a decade after the introduction of cloud computing, the public sector in Sweden is finally beginning to migrate services that contain citizen data and/or are classified as nationally critical infrastructure to the cloud.

Among the challenges associated with adopting a cloud approach are governance, managing partner and supplier relationships, ensuring security and compliance, transitioning skills, planning for change, and developing a proper strategy. Attend this session for a run-down of the bold steps that will set you on a straighter path directly to the cloud!

Advanced Azure Architecture

This session aims to enhance your comprehension of the principles and practices necessary to fully realize the potential of cloud computing. The cloud offers numerous advantages, including pay-per-use, business agility, resiliency with geo fail-over, self-healing, and improved security. However, it is often challenging for application teams to meet these responsibilities. This session will put you on the path to achieving more of that potential.

We will cover aspects of architecting for the cloud and the approach to solutions that embrace cloud excellence! Architectural design principles covered include high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, observability, and security. We will look at external communication, scaling strategies, caching strategies, security best practices, microservices architecture, message brokers, and observability and monitoring. The examples given will be using a range of services native to the Azure Platform. By the end of this session, you will have a broader understanding of advanced Azure architecture and design principles that fulfil the promises of cloud computing.

This session is presented by an Architect who has been with the Cloud since the dawn of the cloud and who has helped his customers make their cloud better for countless teams and applications.

This is a session summary from the material of my tutorial with the same name. The content is based on experience in the filed helping customers realize the promises of the cloud - since the cloud was created. I _know_ what the problems are and the pinch-points that keep companies from cloud mastery.

Cloud native monitoring

Managing the cloud application that is the backbone of your business can be quite the challenge. Ensuring successful monitoring in the cloud requires not only preparing your application's code but also understanding the diagnostic settings of all the resources you utilize. This includes not just your app hosting resources but also cloud platform services like file storage, databases, secrets vaults, message brokers, and more – each needing proper configuration. Your application can often feel like a jigsaw puzzle, making it confusing to monitor, manage, and maintain.

Moreover, you must keep an eye on regional outages and data centre issues that might impact your application's service health – all happening somewhere in the cloud. You need to know when something goes awry with your application, sometimes taking automated actions, and other times being alerted into action. The latest advances in Azure Monitoring are making significant strides towards the dream of a simplified, streamlined, and synchronized Azure experience. Application-centric observability is crucial for applications that auto-scale or failover to different geographic regions and for those that are cost-efficient relative to their usage.´

In this session, you will learn how to transform your application from being cloud-blinded to having hawk-like vision!

The root cause of so many broken cloud dreams is the fact that neither application developers nor operations engineers have enough cloud understanding. They are good people, they just don't know how to keep the promises of the cloud! I have been there since the cloud was founded and I have seen this in detail. It is my mission to help companies soar in the cloud!

Advanced Azure Architecture (tutorial)

This tutorial aims to enhance your comprehension of the principles and practices necessary to fully realize the potential of cloud computing. The cloud offers numerous advantages, including pay-per-use, business agility, resiliency with geo fail-over, self-healing, and improved security. However, it is often challenging for application teams to meet these responsibilities. This tutorial is designed to help you achieve that potential.

As a software architect, you aspire to broaden your architectural expertise and leverage the cloud's capabilities without encountering significant risks. This tutorial assumes a foundational knowledge of Azure and software patterns and aims to enhance your skills in key areas critical for achieving cloud excellence.

The tutorial is structured into the following modules:
1. Azure Architecture Introduction: An overview of Azure's global infrastructure and architectural building blocks. It delves into the complexity of Azure's region pairs, availability zones, and the architectural design principles that ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.
2. External Communication: This module covers options for managing external communication, including API Gateway, API Management, Azure Front Door, and the use of webhooks for integrating with external systems.
3. Scaling Strategies: Explores various scaling strategies for applications and databases, including app service plan scaling, orchestrators, and techniques for scaling databases to meet demand.
4. Caching Strategies: This module discusses various caching strategies to improve the performance and reliability of applications, including caching patterns, Azure Redis Cache, and Content Delivery Network (CDN).
5. Security Best Practices: An intro to advanced security architectures, including Zero Trust, data encryption, and threat protection. Topics include Azure Key Vault, Private Endpoints, Azure Firewall, and using Azure Sentinel for comprehensive threat detection and response.
6. Microservices Architecture: Focuses on designing, deploying, and managing microservices on Azure, covering the use of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), service mesh technologies, and best practices for microservices architecture.
7. Message Brokers: Advanced concepts and use cases associated with Azure Service Bus and Azure Event Grid, including handling large message volumes, advanced routing, message deduplication, handling message failures, and integrating third-party services.
8. Observability and Monitoring: Emphasizes the importance of observability and monitoring in Azure, covering how to set up autoscaling and diagnose application performance with Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have a comprehensive understanding of advanced Azure architecture and be equipped with the skills to design, implement, and manage complex cloud solutions that fulfil the promises of cloud computing.