You might get amazed, finding out I managed to publish yet another book, where the previous one Efficiently Migrating your workloads to Azure only got published around Christmas.
However, this new one was a “longer work in progress”, and not something I could spew out in just a few weeks.
Several months ago, I got approached by Packt Publishing, asking me to “write a quick note on how I look at Azure strategic implementation and migration”. Which was initially sized at max. 20 pages. However, it became clear, this quick writing gig would end up becoming a lot larger, and eventually involve multiple authors, to cover the full Azure platform spectrum.
Things are going fast in the Azure world, and apparently exams are more and more following that pace. Before you start screaming and worrying, as you might be preparing for a current exam, let me share a bit about several steps happening before an exam becomes available.
Exam Objectives (OD) For a long time, Microsoft Learning has based exams on “exam objectives”, which is typically a list of “services, features, activities” anyone taking the exam, should master. An easy example from the Exchange Server 2007 time frame could have been:
I’m excited about this next project that finally got live, thanks to a bit of quiet time during the Holidays. While it is not up to the full 100% of what I had in mind, I didn’t want to hold back the content any longer, since Azure is moving already that fast…
The original idea of this material was based on a workshop I created for Microsoft Internal (Azure Developer Series) in Sept 2018 as a contractor, which was a combination of slides, videos and lab guides. The workshop existed in both in-person and virtual delivery format. At that time, the sample application was rather basic. Early July 2019, I got asked to work on an update of the content, and extend it with Azure DevOps, which was well-adopted in the market already, but still unknown to a lot. Instead of just working on “updates”, I decided to start from scratch, and work towards a more “business ready” application, using SimplCommerce, an Open Sourced E-commerce platform application, built in .NET / .NET Core, and supporting different database back-ends.
Earlier this week, I discovered "[Azure Mystery Mansion]https://www.microsoft.com/mysterymansion", published by the Microsoft Azure marketing team. As an Azure enthusiast, I wanted to find out about this mystery ;), actually being really excited about it, as it is primarily focused around giving you an easy, fun, yet interesting learning experience.
What is it? It heavily reminded me of several PC games I played as a teenager (yes, early ’90s), where you could move around a game, and even deciding on the flow and ending, by clicking keywords. Behind every phrase was a new adventure, and it often felt like you really owned the game, or had a conversation with the characters.
As I got asked so many times what Azure learning resources are available, I thought this could make up an excellent blog post :) - This is actually based on a summary slide I have added to my in-person and online Azure training workshops closing deck, but updated where needed. Below order is a random listing of resources, not forcing any priority or preference:
Microsoft Learn
Microsoft Hands-on Labs
Azure Docs
Hey,
As most of you probably know in meantime, I joined Microsoft as a full-time employee mid September this year, in the prestigious Azure Technical Trainer team - EMEA. This team is part of the WorldWide Learning (WWL) organization, and working on the Enterprise Skills Initiative (ESI) program.
As the name says, as Azure Technical Trainer, my role is to provide training to larger Microsoft Partners and customers in EMEA, helping them in being successful in using Azure, and mainly focusing on skilling up the IT teams (sysadmins, developers, solution architects). While the training starts from the Microsoft Official Courseware (MOC), we are not bound to only using that material. Which was a huge plus to me, knowing I built and delivered most of the workshops using my own content (or vendor content I was involved in building) before.
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