Architecting Azure

I recently rejoined Microsoft, this time as an architect on the Industry Experiences team. Our charter is to help companies implement solutions on Azure. We work with specific industry verticals like manufacturing (IoT), healthcare, insurance, financial services, etc. We provide several services including writing very specific industry use cases of Azure within the industries and helping them by attending architecture design sessions when appropriate. We also evangelize at conferences, etc.

A hearty, “Thank you,” to Paul Maher, my GM, and Scott Seely, another architect on the team I have known for years and one smart dude. Both took a bet on me and I appreciate it.

For now, my position has a lot of writing and learning in it because as readers of this blog may know, I’ve spent the last 3-5 years training various topics in technology, most recently serving as the Director of Technical Learning at GoDaddy. I spent a lot of time on agile transformation and the technical classes I taught were mostly things like application-level patterns, Node.js, and React.js. I am used to working on an internal cloud, but not an external one like Azure.

“So, why in the world would they hire you?” you are probably asking. Good question. I wondered myself .

1. As I serve in my role to write use cases, papers, etc., I will be learning Azure along the way.
2. I will be writing blog posts here on Elegant Code about the technologies I learn as I go about learning different services in Azure. Hopefully theses will benefit the community.
3. Moving skillsets between cloud providers (even internal cloud to external if it’s PaaS), is not a far leap. Many of the technologies in Azure have parity with open source systems I’ve been using, like OpenStack vs. Azure IaaS services. With Azure embracing more and more open source technologies, by open source systems knowledge is suddenly more relevant!

The posts I’ll make here about Azure may sometimes be at the code level, but more often at the logical architecture level. We’ll see how it goes. I’m writing a lot of code to better understand these services and I’m sure that will find its way to the blog, just like this recent article on CRUD operations with Cosmos DB.

I look forward to bringing you Azure content on a regular basis and bringing you along for my ride in learning more about the systems and services in Azure.