Beyond quick and dirty cloud to agile, cheap, and fast

Cloud applications that are “good-but-not-great” are not quite representative of the promise the cloud made. We were promised pay-per-use, compliance, resiliency, business agility, security, and more. Turns out the responsibility to be leaders in the cloud and to reach cloud excellence rests with us.

Evidence and experiences show that running business critical solutions in the cloud often has the long-term outcome of “sort of okay – it runs”! But we were really shooting for “meh” or for GREAT? Why is it so difficult to challenge our cloud status quo?

They say talk about what you love and about what you do - and if you are lucky, those are the same things. The speaker is thirteen years an Azure MVP and helps public sector and global brands make their Cloud better.

This session is about defining a golden standard for corporate cloud quality and for making certain those who have responsibility for the cloud estate are not only held accountable but are also empowered to show true cloud leadership and move the needle on required continuous cloud application improvement.

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.

Workload Observability in the Cloud

Managing your business’ cloud application estate can be quite the challenge. In a flattering morning light, some apps seem to run well – or OK at least. The truth is most of our applications can probably run a lot better, and we know it, but it is challenging to full ascend into cloud excellence.

This session is about declaring your cloud application as ONE cohesive thing, even though it may comprise of many cloud resources, and then about setting up the mission critical monitoring in the cloud it. Doing this requires not only preparing your application's code, but also understanding diagnostic settings of all resources you utilize. Not only does your app compute resources need this, but so does your different cloud platform services, like file storage, databases, secrets vaults, message brokers, and more. Each have their own proper configuration to be part of your whole.

The next piece of the puzzle is to keep an eye on potential regional outages and data centre issues among the services you use, that might impact your application's service health. It is important to be alerted and to set up automated action for when something suddenly failed outside of your own control.

Finally, I will tie all this together into the notion of “Workload Observability” and close with how this empowers your organization and your services in the cloud. In this session, you will learn how to transform your organization from being blinded by the cloud fog, to having hawk-like vision!

Advanced Azure Architecture workshop

It is challenging to host in the cloud and live up to your part of the “shared responsibilities” of the platform. This workshop puts you on the path to achieve that potential!
Learn about cloud-made promises: including improved security, business agility, resiliency with geo fail-over, self-healing applications, and pay-per-use consumption. It is on you to keep those promises!
You have a foundational knowledge of software patterns and of using the cloud, and you aim to enhance your skills in key areas critical for achieving cloud excellence.
The workshop is modularized for your future reference and study:

1. Azure Architecture Introduction: The cloud promises, and the stance required to work toward keeping them.
2. Observability and Monitoring: Making your application optimal requires making it observable.
3. External Communication: The challenge of communication with other APIs using Gateway, API Management, and Azure Front Door.
4. Scaling Strategies: Auto scaling for applications and databases to meet demand.
5. Caching Strategies: Improve performance and reliability with caching patterns and caching services.
6. Security Best Practices: Zero Trust, data encryption, and threat protection and services for secure applications, threat detection, and response.
7. Microservices Architecture: Designing, deploying, and managing microservices, and best practices.
8. Message Brokers: Decoupling with messaging as a service is a key skill cloud architecture.