Level Up Azure for IT Pros ... And SharePoint Too!

p>Hope that everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday in the US and getting ready for the holiday season around the world. I have been enjoying time with my family in New York including giving my niece and nephew a brand new Xbox One. They have been filling their free time since with many waves of Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Even I am getting into it now. I am guessing there will be many multiplayer games on Xbox Live with them. Oh darn!

One of the things I forgot to blog about earlier is one of the best events online for IT Pros. The Azure IaaS for IT Pros Online Event that has been hosted by Rick Claus is giving IT Professionals some great information about Azure and specifically the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. Azure keeps adding incredible services for Azure users including some recent additions: 

• D-Series VMs with more memory and dedicated Intel CPU Cores 
• G-Series (aka Godzilla-Series) with even more memory and dedicated Intel CPU Cores 
• Premium Storage on SSD for Standard D-Series and G-Series servers that will offer 4,000 IOPs per VHD (Standard storage offers 500 IOPs per VHD).

Getting an opportunity to play with these services has excited me to what Azure can offer IT Professionals. One of the best uses of Azure for IT Pros is making "proof of concept" environments. You can prove how technologies work while not taking any of your current on-prem hardware. Another easy use is running development or QA testing environments. In both of these cases, you can turn on and off the environment while you need it and only be billed for the environment while it is on.

But I have buried the lead here folks. On Thursday, at 12:00 Pacific time, I will be talking about SharePoint on Azure. Yup, that's right … I will be talking about how to run SharePoint on Azure. There are some tweaks and best practices I will be talking about with SharePoint on Azure IaaS. I will also go over the new Cloud App Model (CAM) and how you can use Azure with it. Lastly, there's a few other things Azure can help with around SharePoint. I am including my introduction video here:

I recommend you heading over to http://aka.ms/levelupazure to watch the recorded sessions and to see me live tomorrow. If you can't see me live, you can always catch up on the recordings.

SharePoint Saturday Redmond Presentation

I got a lucky offer from Karuana Gatimu to help Carrie Doring present her presentation at SharePoint Saturday in Redmond. She was supposed to speak on "The Future of the Social Collaboration Experience - A platform and community overview for beginners". I have been working on finding ways to speak and present more and had some recent opportunities with the MS IT Institute and MS IT Showcase teams. This was a different opportunity for me.

Luckily, much of what Carrie and I were going to talk about was what we were actually using to manage our preparation for the presentation. Karuana sent us a copy of the deck. I stored that copy on my OneDrive for Business and shared it out to Carrie. She and I had a couple of chats on Lync to sync up on preparation. We met together to work on it in the web version of PowerPoint so we both could make updates at the same time. It was great to use this as an example as we walked through our presentation.

The audience was awesome and had some great questions. They were quite open to the information including the community involvement information I gave them. I was able to squeeze in a plug for #TheKrewe of TechEd when I was talking about community. After the presentation was over, I even got to spend some time personally with a couple of the audience members to talk specifics to their situation.

I had a blast and had to be ushered out by the following presenter a bit. I think that I will be doing more of this. To quote the old Life commercials ... "I think he likes it!"

By the way, here is a link to the deck as a PDF file that can be downloaded by anyone.