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.

Useful and Practical Azure Tips and Tricks

Doing Azure, are you? That’s great. Welcome to the Cloud! This session is about the “little known features” and “poorly kept secrets” in the Azure Platform which will make your work so much easier and more convenient! Let’s talk about practical RBAC, tagging, naming conventions and more. To be fair the last one perhaps doesn’t sound like a hidden Azure feature, just common sense! So, why does hardly anyone use them, and how can a good naming convention help you? To continue… Policies, Alerting, Auto Scaling and similar great things might come up in this fast-paced fact-packed session. There sure is no shortage of cool ways to make your day flying above the Clouds even brighter! Join a guy who has bet his company on helping others to build their wings and fly!

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!

Application Centric Observability in the Cloud

In your cloudy world, the great application you built in Azure is “one thing” that you maybe bet your business on. It has not always felt easy and effective to manage your cloud application, but now you can elevate to new heights! With new powers of application centric observability your Azure-life just became much more simplified, streamlined, and synchronized.

What you would have wanted to do was, not only view your application using custom dashboards, but also control it by having it clearly defined as one thing that you can make actionable. Instead, all your many resources in Azure have felt disjointed and confusing to monitor, manage and maintain.
Today marks a new day when you started seeing your application like a single castle and not like a big bag of bricks.

Practical and Effective Access Control in Azure

You will learn why and how to practically set up automation for responsible access to your business-critical Azure resources. Demos use best-of-the-best practices, empowered by the latest-and-greatest features of Entra ID, such as PIM and Access Reviews.

It is unfortunately almost always the rule with access control in Azure that too many people have too much access to the wrong things all the time. This puts your application security at risk, and you can forget about compliance, and it leads to very expensive problems, such as human errors, hunting the ghost of environment drift, wasteful behaviour with rampant costs. It can even lead to dangerous risk of industrial espionage. Most of this can be thwarted and swatted out by the practical guidance you are about to see. This session can make your Azure access automation the exception to the rule!

Fully automated setup of environments ready to go with:
• Security Groups in Entra ID.
• RBAC to Azure configured with PIM.
• Access Owners defined for delegated responsibility.
• Access Reviews (optional).
• Custom roles (optional).

Take control of access control in Azure to secure your service after this session!

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?