Benko Blog

This week in Las Vegas at the Agile DevOps West conference I'm presenting the session Permit to Cloud - Land with Confidence in Azure!

We'll talk about a lot fo things, but the goal is to provide an introduction to how to get started with Azure in a way that will help ensure continued success in taking advantage of the promises the cloud offers. For the code and demos I've published them to https://github.com/benkotips/askdad - Check it out!

Guess What? In person events are a thing again,  and I'm back on the road. It's great to be back to St. Louis, this week I'm delivering sessions at DevUp on how to work with Azure and Infrastructure as Code topics. 

• Permit to Cloud : Land with Confidence in Azure
• Cosmos DB Performance Tuning
• Infrastructure as Code Bake-off : Comparing ARM, Bicep, Terraform and Pulumi

The link to the code is on GitHub at https://github.com/mbenko/du22-ptc - Check it out!

Thinking about going to Cloud? I've been consulting around Azure for the last 8 years since I left Microsoft where I helped launch it in 2009. I want to offer my support, so I'm starting a thing called Azure Office Hours on Fridays, where anyone can block out 15 minutes to chat about anything Azure.

1. Find a time that works - https://bit.ly/BnkAzHrs 
2. Let me know what you want to talk about
3. Let's chat! 

I speak at conferences and have LinkedIn learning courses on Azure and DevOps including templating, compute, storage, messaging, networking and governance topics.

My calendar is open. Let's connect!

Have you thought of using new/different technologies to explore the impact of using new tools? I'm presenting a new session at Minnesota Developer Conference on Tuesday 5/4/2021 (Star Wars day) that will explore the technology and implementation details to make this type of implementation work.

Check it out!

Cosmos Tools for the Relational Developer

Tuesday 5/4 at 11:00 am - MDC 2021 | Minnesota Developers Conference (mndevconf.com)

Understanding how your data works is crucial to taking advantage of the capabilities and power of Cosmos DB, from setting up and migrating data, to querying to understanding performance consequences of data manipulation. These tasks become easier thanks to a growing ecosystem of tools around the Cosmos DB platform. In this session we'll look at how Cosmos DB tools available from Microsoft and 3rd parties make it easy to make the transition from the relational to Cosmos.

The topics we'll cover include:

• Why Azure Cosmos DB
• Provisioning a Cosmos DB from the Azure Portal
• Code patterns for working with Cosmos
• Data Migration
• Data Modeling and strategies for performance and cost optimization

Some reference links:

• Alpaqa Studio - https://alpaqastudio.com 
• Thomas Weiss - (MSFT Docs) Model and partition data on Azure Cosmos DB with a real-world example
• Jeff Widmer - GitHub: AzureCosmosDbBlogExample
• Nikisha Reyes-Grange - (Cosmos Blog) Data modeling, partitioning, and pricing in 2 minutes
• Deborah Chen - (Cosmos Blog) Run C# notebooks with Azure Cosmos DB
• Brian Chavez - GitHub : Bogus Mock Data Generator

Enjoy!

I'm working thru an idea for a video series that I call "5 Minutes to Code", where I would record some short videos that show how to accomplish a concept, procedure or task related to working with code. The goal is to deliver on a regular cadence some content that developers can use to learn how to do something. Lately I've been working with Azure as a cloud engineer working on infrastructure (like ARM and Terraform), delivery (like Azure DevOps and from developer tools), and coding (like .NET Core and web development). I have created a new page on my site where I'll publish a list of links to these, and this will give me the chance to work on my html and JavaScript skills.

Enjoy!

I’m pleased to say that I’ve been included in a list of the top MVPs to follow on Twitter!

Following my renewal as a Microsoft MVP earlier this month, I’ve been given a shout out on Nigel Frank’s Microsoft MVP Class of 2019 roundup, which shines a light on MVPs from across the community who’re doing great things online. 

I feature alongside some fantastic fellow MVPs, so check out the post and check out some of the fine people working to make the Microsoft ecosystem a smarter, more exciting place!

https://www.nigelfrank.com/blog/class-of-2019-25-microsoft-mvps-you-should-be-following/ 

Since Visual Studio launched 22 years ago it has evolved to become a favorite IDE of the casual to professional developer. With the launch of Visual Studio 2019 Microsoft again steps up their game with improvements to make it easier to work and debug Cloud, Mobile and Web, as well as bring the developer a number of productivity improvements.

Join us for a chance to participate in the launch with a live viewing party at the Microsoft Office in Edina. It's a chance to be a part of the next generation of developer tools and you get to see all the compelling new features and capabilities of Visual Studio! Join us in Edina on April 2 - http://bit.ly/vs19msp - to join the live streamed event and share the fun!