Microsoft Azure is Awesome....

I have just done a fantastic knowledge refresh of my Azure knowledge and just passed the latest Azure Fundamentals course.  You can check it out by clicking the image below:

Most of the course is theoretical, with a little hands-on practice.  But what happens if you want to get down and dirty, with the platform.   Never fear, I run a course with ALC Training that covers all things technical.  It's an Azure 1 Day Technical Quickstart, where you will be spinning up virtual machines, storage and networking, like there is no tommorrow.  

You won't get through all the lab exercises, but you can finish them off at your leisure, either in the same week, when you're back at home or work, or you can save them for a rainy day.  I guarantee that you will be a lot more confident with spinning up the resources in Azure.  Click on the picture below for more information:

So what did I learn?  I refreshed my memory and skills on spinning up a number of compute, storage and networking resources, which I did outside of the tutorial with our Microsof Partner credits.  I also explored a number of awesome features, that are geared towards regulated and large corporate entitites.  Entities like government, banking, defence, healthcare, manufacturing to name a few.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Azure Security Centre - understand, see and manage your security across all your Azure resources.  Very useful when dealing with a critical security incident in your organisation.
• Azure Advanced Threat Protection - Protect your assets from all kinds of threats, both inside and outside your organisation, using AI and smart analytics.
• Azure Policy - Enforce rules across how and where your Azure resources are deployed.  Need to only deploy in Australia, no problem, set up a policy that only allows services to be run from Australia.
• Azure Blueprints - Setup standard collections of resources, pre-approved by your security and governance functions that allow fast deployment of business solutions.
• Azure Monitor - Monitor the health of all the resources you have created and have control over.
• Azure Service Health - Monitor the health of all the resources that Microsoft controls.
• Azure Advisor - Makes intelligent recommendations covering Availability, Security, Performance, and Cost.

The possibilities are endless with Azure, as there are a range of standard reference architectures, that you can use to help solve business problems and run your services on.  Click on my favourite architecture below which will take you to the Microsoft Architecture Centre:

It's my favourite, because I really love solving business problems using Artificial Intelligence.  This particular solution above, shows how you can classify images, using machine learning.  The use case for this could be for facial recognition, to detect and diagnose disease or simply to help classify patterns in your business or social media data.  The possibilities are endless.

I'm going to end with a final diagram that shows the breadth of Azure services available.  Click on the diagram to take you to the Azure Solutions site: