Midlands Azure User Group #4

19/09/2019 AlphaWorks, Birmingham

Last night we held the fourth meeting of the Midlands Azure User Group. The group meets every six weeks or so at AlphaWorks in the centre of Birmingham.   Last night's meeting was the first time we have had a partner present, and it was only right that that honour went to our friends and sponsors from Sol-Tec. 

CTO Paul Collins provided an overview of how Sol-Tec transformed from a hosting and managed service company to an Azure Partner, described their Velocity Landing Zone proposition and then handed over to Ryan Williams who presented a summary of the work to secure Azure storage with DEPLOYIFNOTEXISTS Azure Policy at a large government customer in the midlands.

Beer and Pizza was followed by a great session by my colleague and the midlands own Paul Grimley on the Cloud Adoption Framework. Paul is a member of the CAF v-Team, and communicated clearly and concisely how the CAF can help all of our customers regardless of where they are on their cloud journey.  It was very well received, and there were several requests for access to his materials and follow-up, and we know that it is going to be discussed at a couple of large organisations today as a direct result of Paul's presentation.

Slides from Paul's session are available on the LinkedIn group

Finally we wrapped up with a trademark Kahoot Azure Quiz developed and presented by Phil, which was very enjoyable, but is also a great way to emphasise key developments in Azure such a Private Link (which enables you to access Azure PaaS Services over a Private Endpoint in your virtual network)! 

After the recent change of venue, and summer holidays we were back up to around 30 attendees which was good to see, but probably even better was that this was the first time the user group felt relaxed and more like a meeting of friends.

We are currently collecting results from a customer survey for the group and have received a good number of responses, so I'm beginning to trust that it may be representative.

We're pretty happy with that, but the group is a long way from our vision of it being run and contributed to by the members themselves, with mini-hacks, panel discussions and architecture sessions, and there is a lot more work to do.  

We've also published the next dates for the next two sessions (30th October and 11th December), so hopefully people can plan ahead, and we'll get more attendees. We'll work to publish the agenda for these sessions as soon as we can. We hope to see you there!

Nick and Phil