Community Let’s start in 2021 with a blast. I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at Nordic Virtual Summit in February.
If you are interested in Endpoint Management, Azure, or Security and compliance.
Nordic Virtual Summit has some great content for you!
DevOps Around ten years ago, traditional IT-professionals started to talk about losing their jobs due to the public cloud.
It’s no secret that people actually have lost their job in the last years. But I’m pretty confident those who managed to make some changes kept their job or got a better position in another company.
In my job, working for a service provider, I have seen the change from many angles. Ten years ago, we helped companies with traditional IT infrastructure. Smaller companies running physical servers On-Premises, or larger companies with an ESX stack in their office. They were all managed by our specialists. Specialists on network devices knew everything about the hardware, and how to place them in the racks.
The server team was Windows Server specialists, but also knew ‘everything’ about storage. Disks, SAN, etc.
Many companies hire new people to handle the infrastructure on Azure or other public and private clouds. But I think that is a bad idea. Investment in making cultural changes should be the main priority. Moving to Azure introduces a new platform and products to your ecosystem, but the knowledge from traditional infrastructure is still very valid. Subnetting and firewalls still exist, as do operating system patches and failed backups. Your existing team already knows your infrastructure, making them the best fit to manage it on Azure as well.
Moving to Azure or any other cloud will require a code-first approach to manage and deploy the infrastructure. Git, Pipelines and pull requests is now as normal as calculating subnets.
The team required to move your infrastructure, and successfully manage it should be familiar with the DevOps methodology, and how to define the infrastructure in code.
Another thing to keep in mind is that platform knowledge is very important for everyone managing the workloads running in Azure and other cloud platforms.
Let’s take a look at monitoring. In order to have a good monitoring platform, you require a few basics like alerting. Alerting is built into every monitoring platform out there, and is the foundation of monitoring. But alerts need to be handled. Hopefully, you have killed email alerts already, and you have other routines in place, like an ITSM platform or maybe your alert remediation is a PowerShell script.
To have an alert automatically remediated in Azure Monitor, you will need to learn a new product like Azure Functions to run your PowerShell script.
PS: Microsoft replaced SCOM for Azure monitor, driven by cultural changes and DevOps
At its core, IT hasn’t changed that much. It is still zero’s and one’s. The cultural changes and the desire to learn new technology and work methodology is, in my opinion, the biggest challenge.
The amount of pressure to adopt a new way of work and to learn new technology is not a joke.
If you can call your self a modern IT pro, you deserve many high fives, and you can be very proud of what you have achieved.
Azure Lighthouse Behind door number four of the Azure Advent Calendar 2019, we find Azure Lighthouse. Lighthouse provides simplified resource management in Azure cross tenants.
This makes it very interesting for larger enterprises, who often separate their user directory from the services. And for managed service providers, who deliver services to multiple customers, seeking the utopia of single-pane management.
You can find my video here, and all other contributions on the YouTube channel.
If you want to read more about Azure Lighthouse and it’s capabilities, I recommend the official documentation and the official GitHub repository
For more community-related content, I suggest you check Wesley Haakmans blog.
Azure Advent Calendar is such a great initiative from Gregor Suttie and Richard Hooper. I really dig how the Azure community put together all this content- thank you.
I am sure it will be a great success and hopefully continue in the years to come.
Thank you for having me on.
Azure It is Monday morning and Ignite announcements are coming in fast. The releases itself aren’t that groundbreaking as previous years, but looking at them from 10.000 feet they represent something very interesting in my opinion.
At Microsoft Ignite in 2015, we were pitched that everyone should run in the public cloud only.
Over the years, Microsoft has invested heavily in the hybrid scenario, introducing Azure stack and other services. With the announcements from Ignite 2019, I feel like we are completing the circle. Azure Arc lets us manage on-premises as we do with Azure, using ARM. Azure Functions are getting more hybrid/local benefits, and the same goes for many of the other services.
Below you can find what I find particularly interesting. Expect this list to evolve and change throughout the week.
For all announcements from Ignite 2019 read the Microsoft Ignite Book of news
If you think Microsoft all over your infrastructure already. Azure Arc extends Azure management to any cloud and on-premises. I am really looking forward to testing this out! ARM templates on-premises?
Azure monitor itself doesn’t get any new features. But all other services get better integration with Azure Monitor. Prometheus support is GA, and hybrid monitoring for containers (kubernetes) is announced as a preview.
As with the announcement of Azure Arc. Support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud continues to evolve with Azure Functions. Premium support is now GA, as well as PowerShell. With Powershell support in functions, and Premium plan with hybrid support. I am keen to hear about the future of Azure Monitor.
Finally. If you know the struggle you are probably as excited as I am, that Azure Cost Management now is available for CSP subscriptions. This means that we can provide cost management seamlessly across all subscription models, and leverage the same APIs
A long-awaited feature. The ability to add tags to subscriptions is finally available.
Azure Ignite 2019 is just around the corner, and we have a lot to look forward to. According to the session builder, there are almost 2000 sessions to choose from. Even Monday has 321!
In this post, I will share what I think you should look out for and what sessions to attend.
First things first. Monday is packed with keynotes. Satya Nadella’s vision keynote will tell us how Microsoft sees the future and sets the mood for the coming week. We can also expect a few announcements coming as well.
After the vision keynote, each product team has their own technology keynote. These are usually really good and packed with demos.
For Ignite 2019 I am not sure which I will attend. But it will be one of these two:
One hot tip that I have, is the ability to chose a learning path. This lets you add all breakout sessions within the learning path, and with that have consistency in your sessions. If you’re going à la carte, I think these sessions look interesting.
Ignite 2019 have a great option called Expert Connect. Here you can schedule to meet subject matter experts and discuss your real-world challenges.
Personally, I have cut down on the number of sessions that I attend each day. And instead, I am prioritizing side meetings and the occasional “hallway session”.
Most of the breakout sessions are available on-demand when you get home.
If you want to meet, let me know!