Glasgow Azure Users Group August 2017
On Wednesday 23rd August 2017 the second Glasgow Azure Users Group meeting organised by Sarah Lean and Tom Cox happened. It was a great start to the user group.
My Azure knowledge is near zero. I know it’s on my horizon at work, so I am keen to learn about it. I attended knowing the first half would be for beginners, and the second half was about serverless in Azure.
Obviously I was very keen to hear from Dave Samuelson (Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect) on the basics of Azure. He asked the room who was familiar with Azure already and everyone apart from me and one other person out their hand up. However I think people familiar with Azure got something from the talk. Dave covered the Azure data centers, regions, DR, the Azure Resource Manager, Azure CLI, PowerShell, and eventually spinning up some VM’s, functions, Twitter and PowerBI to show what can be done very quickly. I found it useful to see Azure in the flesh and what it can do seemingly easily.
Finally he recommended just diving in. He told us that you can get a free $200 credit and 30 days of usage for free at this link. You do need to put in a credit card, but it will not be charged. I fully intend to take advantage of this.
There was then free beers and pizza courtesy of Hays Recruitment who also provided the venue. Thanks Kenny and Justin! It was great to chat to John Gallacher where we talked VMware, PowerShell, careers, community and missed opportunities.
Second half was a talk on serverless in Azure from Christos Matskas (Microsoft Premier Field Engineer). It was quite Developer related and a lot of it went over my head but I did get from it how easy it is for non Dev’s do some pretty powerful things in Azure without resorting to code.
In summary it was a very worthwhile way to spend an evening. As with the Scottish VMUG the most valuable thing I got from it was talking to fellow IT Professionals. As the lone Server Administrator in my company it was good to speak to others in my area. The talk from Dave was great too and definitely has be fired up to delve into Azure.
The next meeting will be on the 25th October and if you want to attend please sign up to the mailing list for notifications. Again thanks to Sarah, Tom, Dave, Christos and the guys at Hayes for putting on the event. Looking forward to the next one!