Cloud Simplified: A practical webcast to demystify Azure features

Premier

May 28th, 2018

This post is provided by Ryan Berry, a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) at Microsoft. In many of our strategic accounts, CSAs play a key role in the success of customers making a transition to the cloud and work closely with your Microsoft account team and App Dev Manager.

The cloud is becoming increasingly important to business-critical workloads our customers run as evidenced by Azure’s explosive growth. Add to this analysts predicting continued growth over $200 billion through 2020 and it’s clear the market is speaking on the importance of cloud computing. Computing in the cloud is different when you’re not responsible for the physical aspects of managing internal and external workloads which is why the CloudSimplified webcast was started…bringing forward real-world technical concepts in Azure and outlining how customers have applied them to solve the needs of their business.

So why another YouTube channel on Azure? Knowing that many other avenues exist to outline specific features of Azure, we decided to take a different approach — focusing on _how_ to use these features to practically! If you’re interested in product/feature specific content be sure to check out some the Microsoft Mechanics and the Microsoft Azure YouTube channels!

In our role at Microsoft as Cloud Solution Architects (CSA) serving customers all across the US, we have a unique perspective on what customers need to accomplish in the cloud and we work to help them complete their journey successfully meeting their performance, budgetary and reliability requirements. We decided to take that tribal knowledge and provide meaningful content to the community on how we addressed specific requirements to bring workloads to the cloud after all, Knowledge is Power!

Our focus is to distill down complex topics into bite sized chunks to make it easy for you to quickly leverage these features to address similar requirements you may have for moving something into Azure.

Episode Guide

1. Storage In the Enterprise – Part 1/Part 2 – ShowNotes: We walk through the basics of storage followed by how the cloud solution architect team helped a customer overcome some challenges for moving data around to different engineering sites around the globe.

2. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Part 1: With special guest and data scientist Laura Edell, we walk through machine learning and simplify the theory and math behind it that allows computers to use existing data to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends. Throughout the segment, we highlight capabilities in Azure to facilitate some of these functions and will walk through a real-world scenario in the next edition!

3. Isolating Environments in Azure: Link: In this episode we bring in Brian Harrison to discuss some considerations and features of Azure available to secure and protect workloads. Join us to hear how we’ve helped customers address some of these concerns and learn about how Azure can help!

4. Averting a Disaster with Azure: Link: In this episode we talk with Richard Timmering to walk through how he was able to use Azure during a crises situation for his customer where their primary datacenter supporting government services such as 911 dispatch was impacted by a wildfire. We also highlight how Azure could be used as a failover site for the customer’s environment in the future!

5. Building an Elastic DataWarehouse: Link: In this episode we talk with data-scientist Pankaj Satyaketu to simplify the plethora of options available for consuming and reporting on data and how Azure’s elasticity can provide scalable compute power to make sense out of the largest datasets.

Premier Support for Developers partners with CSAs in many of our strategic account to provide technology guidance, critical support coverage, and a range of essential services to help teams optimize development lifecycles and improve software quality. Contact your Application Development Manager (ADM) or email us to learn more about what we can do for you.