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Day 2 of Cloud Field Day kicked off at Dell’s offices here in Santa Clara, which is a very nice Executive Briefing Center. It’s been a while since I’ve seen some Dell hardware, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get behind the glass to give these guys a hug. Dell started their presentation with Prateesh Sharma laying the groundwork for multi-cloud, and the important of a universal storage layer for companies who are trying to manage and operate across multiple environments.

You’ve likely heard stories and whispers of “on-prem” being sexy again, not that it ever wasn’t, right? But public cloud had a lot of promises, some of which it lives up to, some of which it doesn’t, and some of which it does but it’s just painfully expensive. If you’re considering a refresh of your on-prem solution, or are looking to move some or all workloads back to a solution you manage, its a great opportunity to revisit your requirements, and look at implementing an actual private cloud, rather than just a virtualisation platform which oh so many of us have seen and managed.

Cloud Field Day #19 kicked off with NeuroBlade, and I’m glad I had a coffee before hand, as data analytics is not my expertise, but I learned a lot in the session thanks to NeuroBlade and other delegates. “Revolutionizing Big Data Analytis with NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit” NeuroBlade were founded in 2018, have over 120 employees, and $100m+ in capital funding. A key line they used during their funding round is they “Want to be the NVIDIA of Data Analytics”.

Most kubernetes clusters are running at 30% or less utilisation, which means there’s a lot of resource wastage out there in the wild, which translates to dollars being spent for no value. Platform9 want to help you save some money by tweaking the way you run your EKS clusters, and this same pattern could make its way to other managed kubernetes solutions in the future. Platform9 were founded in 2013 with a relatively clear mission: Democratize cloud computing.

Azure bicep: Zero to Hero Course As a shameless plug, if you like the content you see here on Azure Bicep and are looking to further expand your skills, I’ve create an Azure Bicep: Zero to Hero course, which can be found here. If you prefer to consume video content, similar content that is in this blog post is in the video below. If you prefer to read, please skip past the video and read on!

This is a really quick post to let followers / subscribers of the blog know that I have recently launched a newsletter. It’s been 2.5 years since I’ve posted here (oops!) and in that time, I’ve been working as an Azure DevOps Engineer. In my role I gain invaluable insights and knowledge that I’m eager to share with you. Through the newsletter, we’ll explore the latest trends, keep you updated on community happenings, and offer career tips to help you thrive in the cloud industry.

TL;DR - In the last few days (start of 2021), the “Shields Up” feature in the Brave web browser seems to be flagging a JSON file as a cross-site tracker when creating a resource in Azure, causing the blade to not load. To work around this, you can go “shields down” for portal.azure.com. I logged on to my machine yesterday, same as any other day, and went to start deploying some resources to Azure via the Azure Portal for a customer, nothing out of the ordinary.

I’m really happy to anounce that another course I’ve created for Pluralsight has gone live in their library today. This one has a wordy title, being Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect: Implement a Workload Management Strategy, and this is a part of the Azure AZ 303 Solutions Architect focused exam path. This year Pluralsight have been putting a very specific focus on creating Microsoft Azure content spificially targetted at helping learners learn exam objectives and pass the exam to achieve a certification, rather than going deep in to skill building of all of the solutions that are covered in an exam.

New Pluralsight Course: Formatting Data in PowerShell I’m a bit late to the party with this post, as this course went live around the 27th of October, 2020, but I’m happy to say I’ve had my second course at Pluralsight recently go live! This course is another PowerShell based course in the PowerShell 7 fundamentals track at Pluralsight, titled Formatting Data in PowerShell. This course is aimed to help you understand the PowerShell formatting system and why results are formatted the way they are by default, and then how to override that formatting to get the data in the format you need it in.

First things first, if you prefer to consume video content, the same content that is in this blog post is in the video below. If you prefer to read, please skip past the video and read on! Secrets Management Microsoft have recently released an update to a PowerShell module they’ve been working on for a short while now which is everything to do with management of secrets. Version 3 of the Secret Management PowerShell module was released last week and it is a decent update from version 2, so much so that it includes breaking changes, as can be expected with preview releases.