It has been a few years since I have blogged actively, and I’ve not had much to share with the community during that time. In these recent years I have turned my focus from SQL and PowerShell (which are still awesome together of course) toward the clouds, specifically Azure and AWS (and soon perhaps GCP.)
Some day perhaps I would like to write about that learning process, as I transitioned from one narrow focus on a few technologies to such a broad technology scope as the cloud. It definitely requires time, patience, a passion to learn and share, and continually building connections between what is already known and newly acquired knowledge.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is acknowledging I’ll never know enough to really feel as confident as I did back in the day when I could learn a tool like SQL Server that only changed every two years. Now the things I learn and teach about in the cloud can change any time, without notice, and often in the middle of my work with it!
So going all in on the cloud involves being comfortable with being uncomfortable, with always learning. The good news is, though there’s a lot we don’t know, we can serve others by sharing what we do know.
I have found that the cloud shell, specifically PowerShell and command line interface (CLI), in Azure and AWS, are a great way to leverage what I already know to learning new things the cloud, and I suspect this will be a lever many others can benefit from. So the shell has been my way to learn, to relate what I know to what I’m learning in the cloud.
The shell has also been the way I’ve shared knowledge back to the community. I spoke last year at South Florida Code Camp 2019 on AWS Command Line, and will speak at South Florida Software Developer Conference (formerly South Florida CodeCamp) this Saturday Feb 29 2020 on Azure PowerShell.
But the thing I’m most excited about today feels very ‘big time’ to me. I’ve had the pleasure of learning about Azure DevOps these last two months from Mike Pfeiffer’s Azure DevOps Training Certification Bootcamp. Mike has a great grasp of the breadth and depth of DevOps with the Azure DevOps toolset, and is able to relate the content clearly in an engaging way to students of varied technical backgrounds.
Mike also challenges his students to be a part of his CloudSkills community, to help each other learn, and to build and share their own content with the world. This community inspired me to create this tutorial to Deploy a Serverless ASP.NET App to Azure Container Instances from Cloud Shell.
I am beyond excited to see this tutorial go out there, and hope it helps people learn the cloud, to learn Azure and potential of Azure Cloud Shell, and inspires people with excitement to learn and build in the cloud.
Please reach out if you found it useful or have a suggestion. I hope this will be the first of many such posts in the future.