Best Practices For Cloud-Based Testing

Cloud computing provides “computing” as a service, transforming IT services. Both the software and hardware landscape have rapidly changed in recent years based on the requirements of cloud infrastructure and its increasing popularity. Cloud computing can offer more agility for both software applications and hardware infrastructure.

Performance testing, load testing, tuning and monitoring in the cloud has undoubtedly generated a lot of new demands for the IT staff. When it comes to the cloud, the term “performance” refers in general to an application’s response time, throughput and resource utilization, among many others.

The single most important benefit of cloud computing is the scalability of the application: applications deployed in a cloud environment can harness the power of thousands of computers whenever needed. As a result, the performance of the application can increase significantly. This means more customer loyalty and higher revenue.

To ensure that the testing program is comprehensive, consider these seven best practices strategies:

Best Practice #1: Measure Performance from the User’s Perspective, not the Server's

Performance is not merely a question of load times and application responsiveness. The more important question is: how satisfied are my users? Performance may mean one thing to you but another thing to your user. If you are simply measuring load times, you're missing the big picture. Your users are waiting for the app to do something useful rather than waiting for pages to load with stopwatches in hand.

So how quickly can users get to useful data? To find out, you need to include client processing time in your measure of load times. It is easy to cheat on a performance test by pushing processing work from the server to the client. From the server standpoint, this makes pages appear to load more quickly. However, forcing the client to do extra processing may actually make the load time longer for users.

Best Practice #2: Make Performance Testing a Part of Agile Development

All too often, performance testing is isolated and left until the end of a development project. At that point, it's probably too late to fix issues easily. Any problems discovered are likely to significantly delay your project by throwing development into fire-fighting mode.

To avoid this problem, performance testing should be made part of the Agile development process. That way you can find problems and fix them quickly.

Specifically, testing must be integrated into development, which means performance engineering should be represented in scrum meetings on a daily basis and tasked with the responsibilities of measuring and tracking performance as the code is developed within the same development cycle. Leaving testing for the end of the development process is too late.

Best Practice #3: Make Performance Tests Realistic

Throwing thousands or even millions of clients at a server cluster may stress-test your environment, but it is not going to accurately measure how your application or site performs in a real-world scenario. There are two major issues you need to consider when setting up your testing environment.

First, the scenarios must reflect the variety of devices and client environments being used to access the system. Traffic is likely to arrive from hundreds of different types of mobile devices, web browsers and operating systems, and the test load needs to account for that.

Also, this load is far from predictable, so the test needs to be built with randomness and variability in mind, mixing up the device and client environment load on the fly. By continuously varying the environment and the type of data that is passed, the development organization faces fewer surprises down the road after the application is put into production.

Second, the simulation can't start from a zero-load situation. Many test plans start from a base, boot-up situation, then begin adding clients slowly until the desired load is reached. This simply isn't realistic and provides the testing engineer an inaccurate picture of system load. As applications are updated and rolled out, the systems they're running on will already be under load. That load may change over time, but it won't fall to zero and slowly build back up.

Best Practice #4: Develop Performance Tests Specifically for Mobile Applications

The increasing adoption of smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices has fueled the growth of mobile applications in recent years. Mobile devices have become the primary medium of interaction for consumers as well as businesses worldwide, and mobile applications are driving these interactions. To a large extent, mobile applications have put business operations in the hands of the consumers, and they are literally running businesses and influencing business decisions. However, the big question is: what makes a mobile application compelling enough to influence consumer behaviors and make them engage with your brand and products? Of course, a strong mobile application development strategy is the foundation of any successful mobile application, but there’s one key component in its development that ensures your mobile application meets customer expectations and business goals – the mobile application testing strategy. Mobile application testing is the quality test your mobile apps have to pass before they reach their target mobile devices or app stores and become available to public.

Best Practice #5: Develop Test Environment Setup Procedures

When the cache and cookies are not clean while recording a user scenario, the web browser uses cached data and cookies to process client requests instead of sending data to and receiving responses from the server. With that said, it is very important to clear browser cache and cookies before recording traffic.

Start recording a new scenario from the web browser’s start. If you start recording a scenario after you connect to the tested web server and open a few web pages, the playback of the scenario will fail. This will happen because the recorded traffic will not reproduce the authentication procedure, and the tested web server will ignore the simulated requests.

Parameterize scenarios to simulate more realistic loads on the server. Scenarios can be parameterized by replacing recorded parameters in the HTTP requests with variable values, which lets virtual users send user-specific data to the server. This lets you add dynamic behaviors to your scenarios as if they were run by a group of unique human users. Note: Before you parameterize a scenario, carefully explore its HTTP requests and HTTP responses to better understand what data is being transferred to and received from the server.

Verify user scenarios. Before creating tests on the basis of a recorded scenario, make sure that the scenario is executed successfully for one virtual user. This can help you identify bottlenecks of the scenario and eliminate problems that are unrelated to the number of virtual users and additional testing conditions.

Best Practice #6: Accurately Monitor and Analyze Test Results

Add validation logic to the script to make sure the results you get under load are consistent, valid and expected. You can validate that a request has completed correctly based on many things, including page (HTML) content, content size, page title and end page time, among others. Make sure you test the application in a production-like environment, including factors like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), single sign-on (SSO), load balancing and firewalls. This is essential for simulating accurate end-to-end behavior.

Avoid the temptation to extrapolate results – one server with 100 users may not run like two servers with 200 users. Test the equivalent of your full production stack. Collect statistics from your back-end environment, including web, application and database servers, to diagnose load impact on all applications tiers. Analyze server-side statistics side-by-side with client-side statistics and look for any discrepancies that might indicate a problem. To communicate test results effectively, generate reports for each team member in their preferred format.

Best Practice #7: Schedule Test Scenarios Periodically

Test often. After completing the initial load test, use the results as a baseline and look for regression in performance – a seemingly insignificant change can cause unexpected performance issues. The easiest way to do this is through automation. It’s important to check all of the application parameters, including the number of connections, response time, transaction times and throughput. There are many reasons why an application can break under load and the actual culprit is not always easy to predict.

In conclusion, while the above list is not intended to be exhaustive of all cloud-testing activities, it does serve as a viable starting point for all IT staff personnel considering how to successfully test real-world applications and services deployed to the cloud.

What are the most important books for startup founders to read?

Reading has always been vitally important for me. Most founders don’t read enough — and as a result, they miss out on a lot of accumulated wisdom and make a lot of avoidable mistakes.

 

It’s helpful to have variety. As a CEO you need to know 1) what your company should do and 2) how to get the company to do it. These are very different things.

 

Here are some of my favorites:

 

What the company should do (strategy):

• Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin
• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
• Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen and Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

How to run the company effectively:

• High Output Management by Andy Grove (my favorite book on management)
• The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

It also helps to get a sense of the adventure and chaos that come with starting a company:

• Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Finally, I’ve found it helpful to look beyond tech and business. Many startup or business challenges are really universal human challenges:

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger
• The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-important-books-for-startup-founders-to-read/answer/Drew-Houston

Are there IT jobs in cloud capacity management?

If a company moves only 30% of workloads from its data center to the public cloud, that will reduce IT ops demand. Is there still a role for the ops engineer?

A role is evolving in the IT space for cloud capacity management, wherein an IT professional steers the high-level cloud strategy of the business, said Kurt Marko, technology analyst at MarkoInsights. Another option is to gain skills on a specific public cloud platform for a cloud operations engineer job.

Cloud capacity management jobs require an ability to choose cloud consumption strategies and set allocations, then calculate actual use and reconcile the numbers. In contrast, a cloud operations engineer will execute cloud migrations, scale resources up and down, deploy patches and updates and complete related tasks. Businesses refer to these jobs as cloud consumption, procurement or capacity manager positions.

Adding cloud capacity planning to the overall IT mission is worth it, especially when companies unknowingly misuse resources. "Cloud makes it very easy for people to spend a lot of money without realizing it," Marko said.

IT operations management skills pay off on public cloud

Configuration automation and orchestration lets organizations get the most out of available cloud services -- the trends drive each other.

"When we can express an environment in a configuration file or database -- some consistent configuration object, that can be versioned -- that opens up [the possibility to use] containers and AWS database as a service instead of running a whole operating system to run a database," said Matt Sprague, manager of infrastructure services at CDI Managed Services, a Roswell, Ga.-based managed technologies offering of CDI LLC. To ramp up automation, the IT organization needs a configuration management database to map the infrastructure supporting applications.

"Ideally, you build [business intelligence] into your automation framework and put business rules in ... and tie it to a CMDB [configuration management database]," Sprague said. Rather than blindly deploy to the cloud or hold delay projects for review, cloud operations engineers set up this automation framework to make decisions based on these inputs. The cloud advisor who crafted this setup can then continuously review the results against corporate strategy, and tweak the rules as needed.

A cloud capacity manager is not necessarily worried about the day-to-day operations of which application uses which AWS EC2 instances and which S3 storage, Marko said. Instead, the cloud consumption manager ensures that the business allocates what it needs on one or several cloud providers to size the deployment correctly, or -- if necessary -- suggests keeping the workload on premises. They have some help from the major public cloud vendors.

Microsoft's Azure Resource Manager tool sets up roles in the cloud platform for a person to control what the enterprise uses and how employees access those resources, among other service delivery decisions, Marko noted. AWS also does this to a lesser degree, he added -- AWS Management Console, for example, shows monthly spending and security settings.

source:  http://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/

Enterprises likely won't reach 100% public cloud operations, so consider cloud capacity management skills an addition to or evolution of -- but not replacement for -- IT operations capabilities.

Small business planning for 2017

If you are a small business leader then hopefully you are planning for at least a few days to unwind as you end 2016 and begin an exciting 2017.  Thinking about January and 2017 will surely make you revisit if there are changes that you can apply to your small business that will make it more profitable and successful.

If you do not have a plan in place for how you manage, or even an approach to consider, cloud services then you should make it a priority for 2017.  The Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business can be your guide to break down the planning elements that your small business needs to maximize its investments.

Ideally, all of your planning will be based upon your business strategy.  What are the drivers for your business?  What are the external stimuli or pressures that can force your business to react in order to stay competitive and current?

The Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business provides small business leaders with a simple and easy to follow model that can be applied to help guide your approach to strategy creation and then identifying and aligning the activities that should be in place to execute upon your business strategy.

In 2017, you will want to ensure that your decisions are based on information.  That sounds obvious but you will want to make informed decisions based upon insight to the data, processes, services and applications that represent your business operations.  The people of your small business and their skills, knowledge and attitudes will shape how your small business operates.  Therefore, you will need to account for how cloud can impact their day to day role and anticipate what changes must be considered in order to get the most of any cloud planning.

What are your small business goals for 2017 and what changes are you considering?

If you are looking for more cloud advice for your small business in 2017 then be sure to review the Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business which is available for download at Amazon.

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Cloud migration planning for small business

Cloud migration presents unforeseen challenges for those that fail to prepare. In hindsight, companies often realize that preparation for cloud migration is more of a strategic endeavor that allows organizations of all sizes and verticals to adopt their approach and mindset in a way that best suits their unique requirements. Following are five cloud migration strategy tips your organization should follow:

Cloud Migration Strategy Tip 1 – Develop a Realistic Plan

The migration team and the vendors must discuss all the possible details regarding the legacy system. This will help to minimize the unknown variables that may exist and uncover issues that may emerge in the future. This approach will allow your organization to create, keep, migrate or remove different aspects.

During this phase you should define a realistic scope of your migration plan by explaining your definition of success. Do you want everything to be functioning exactly the way it did or does your legacy system need enhancements? Do you need a specific process or application to run first?
A good definition of success will help you narrow the scope of the project, allowing you to create a realistic migration plan that works well the first time.

Cloud Migration Strategy Tip 2 – Manage Timelines & Deliverables

Time is money. Effective time management of all the resources of the project will help you control the budget and reduce overheads. Review and confirm your time and scope estimations for all tasks and activities defined in the project structure. Test network speeds to estimate data transfer time and allow plenty of time for testing and validation.

Cloud Migration Strategy Tip 3 – Minimize Security Risks

To minimize security risks and avoid breaches to sensitive information you should review compliance requirements, firewall policies, and add multiple layers of security such as intrusion detection systems, web-application firewalls and logs. This is especially important considering a recent White Hat Security report, which suggests 85 percent of all websites have at least one serious vulnerability, and most of the time, more than one.

Cloud Migration Strategy Tip 4 – Test, Validate and Test Again

Allow enough time for testing, especially before the final cutover approaches. You should run your test plan multiple times throughout the different phases of the project, before cutover and post-cutover.

Cloud Migration Strategy Tip 5 – Communicate Expectations

The most common mistake in migrations is lack of communication that results in unmet expectations. Oftentimes, the client may expect the migration team to do everything with almost no involvement on their part or perhaps the migration team assumes that the client knows exactly their role in the project.

Make sure all parties the details that can change the approach of how the data is migrated, such as, cutover expectations, allowable downtime, length of windows and specific deadlines. Other important factors for consideration include the assignment of roles and responsibilities, approval of maintenance windows, communication with end users during outages and execution/assignment details of test plans.

Successful cloud migration is inherently dependent upon your risk assessment, cloud migration strategy, and the ability and time to address technical or business challenges that may arise. This can be achieved with proper planning, sufficient time for multiple tests in throughout the project and most importantly, an effective communication between all members of the migration team, where expectations between each other are thoroughly addressed.

Learn Spanish for free - Medical Spanish for Healthcare Providers

Medical Spanish for Healthcare Providers

This site is presented as a free medical Spanish immersion, with vocabulary including greetings, history, examination, and everyday speech, all with translation and audio. It is designed to be helpful for a variety of medical personnel. In addition to introducing Spanish medical terms, this site will hopefully improve fluency and even cultural competency.

This Month's Featured Medical Spanish Dialogue

(See more dialogues in the Archive.)

Each dialogue consists of a few statements from the patient, the patient's family, and healthcare providers, including physicians, nurses, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and medical students. Click to hear my voice and pronunciation. Then, repeat aloud everything you hear. When listening to Spanish medical phrases, feel free to use the pause button, and, of course, replay the recordings when needed.

Click here LEARN SPANISH BASICS if you would like to review introductory material.

Click on anatomy to learn names of parts of the body and face.

Learn fundamentals with Spanish grammar and exercises.

The medical Spanish videos page simply adds some variety.

Healthcare Professionals includes phrases for the medical interview and important medical Spanish terminology, including descriptions of diagnostic studies and how to explain prescriptions. There are also helpful categories for receptionists, social workers, missionaries, and pharmacists.

For fun, listen to accents and folksongs, and explore geography and travel. (These will hopefully add another dimension to your study of medical Spanish.)

Free Small Business Workshops - Marketing your small business

These online workshops can help you with nearly everything you need to know about starting a small business, including how to market and manage it. They present real-world business strategies from successful entrepreneurs as well as case studies and forms designed to help you develop your own strategies. You can access the workshops free of charge online at any time, day or night. In addition, you can take advantage of"Find a Mentor"*, sponsored by SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives Association) with a resource of 11,200 counselors available to assist you.

Marketing Your Business

Personalization Strategies to Attract and Retain Customers
Watch Video | Worksheet

Identifying Your Sales Strategy
Watch Video

Building Your Brand
Watch Video | Worksheet

Promoting Your Business
Watch Video | Worksheet

Advertising Your Business
Watch Video | Worksheet

Building a Web Site
Watch Video

Free Small Business Workshops - Managing your small business finances

These online workshops can help you with nearly everything you need to know about starting a small business, including how to market and manage it. They present real-world business strategies from successful entrepreneurs as well as case studies and forms designed to help you develop your own strategies. You can access the workshops free of charge online at any time, day or night. In addition, you can take advantage of"Find a Mentor"*, sponsored by SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives Association) with a resource of 11,200 counselors available to assist you.

Managing Your Finances

Preparing a Balance Sheet
Watch Video | Worksheet

Managing Your Cash Flow
Watch Video | Worksheet 

Running a Profitable Company
Watch Video | Worksheet

Creating a Profit and Loss Statement
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Preparing a Cash Budget
Watch Video | Worksheet

Analyzing Your Financial Ratios
Watch Video | Worksheet

Assessing Your Company's Financial Needs
Watch Video

Partners and Investors
Watch Video | Worksheet

Valuing a Business
Watch Video | Worksheet

Free Small Business Workshops - Starting your small business

These online workshops can help you with nearly everything you need to know about starting a small business, including how to market and manage it. They present real-world business strategies from successful entrepreneurs as well as case studies and forms designed to help you develop your own strategies. You can access the workshops free of charge online at any time, day or night. In addition, you can take advantage of"Find a Mentor"*, sponsored by SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives Association) with a resource of 11,200 counselors available to assist you.

Starting Your Business

Conducting a Market Analysis
Watch Video | Worksheet

Developing a Business Plan
Watch Video | Worksheet

Targeting Your Market
Watch Video | Worksheet

Maintaining an Agile Company
Watch Video | Worksheet

Creating a Strategic Plan
Watch Video

Analyzing Your Competition
Watch Video | Worksheet

Creating a Competitive Advantage
Watch Video | Worksheet

Pricing Your Products and Services
Watch Video | Worksheet

Determining Your Company's Legal Structure
Watch Video | Worksheet

Protecting Your Business with Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks
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Crucial Skills for Microsoft Azure Cloud: Interview with a Microsoft cloud architect

April 5, 2016 by Paul Carlstroem

Azure is an open platform – it isn’t just a cloud platform for Microsoft technologies like Windows or .NET.

I put some questions to a top Microsoft Azure Cloud Solutions Architect because it is hard to know where to start with a platform as big as Microsoft Azure. 

I met Michael Collier through a presentation at the Microsoft Reactor Space in San Francisco, California. He works for Microsoft and is unbelievably enthusiastic about their cloud products and services. He is extremely accomplished with Microsoft Azure, and as Cloud Academy grows their Azure learning paths and educational offerings, I wanted to view the Azure experience from a Microsoft Azure Cloud Solutions Architect’s point of view.

Michael conveys Azure’s fantastic potential and dives into some practical examples and advice.

That is what we have below. His opinions are strong and his admiration for Microsoft Azure come through.

Michael, you are a Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft. You are also an Azure MVP. Could you explain what that is?

When I joined Microsoft as a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) in January 2015, I gave up my status as a Microsoft MVP.

Microsoft employees are not eligible to receive the MVP award. The MicrosoftMVP award is for exceptional technical community leaders that contribute product feedback, advocate various Microsoft products and/or contribute to the open source community.

As a Cloud Solution Architect, my job is to help a select group of Azure customers achieve more with Azure. CSA’s provide deep architectural advice to help customers determine the best approach to utilize the many services available within the Azure platform. This can include help with basic Architecture Design Sessions, conducting proof-of-concept projects, providing education on how to use specific features, serving as a liaison with Azure product teams (as necessary), etc.

I work closely with a limited number of Azure customers in order to get to know them – their business and technical goals and challenges – in order to help them be as successful as possible with their Azure projects.

Microsoft Azure is growing rapidly right now. What features do you see attracting new users?

There are many areas of Azure that are especially exciting right now. Azure is an open platform – it isn’t just a cloud platform for Microsoft technologies like Windows or .NET.

Technologies that people may not initially think to be supported like Linux, Java, and Docker are all very well supported within the Azure platform. The breadth of technologies available in Azure should serve as an attraction for those that haven’t looked at the platform in a while. Plus, there are many areas that are especially “hot” right now that I think people will find exciting.

The whole ‘big data’ and IoT space is getting a lot of attention with services such as Data Lake, HDInsight, the new IoT Suite, Azure Machine Learning, Stream Analytics, Event Hubs, etc.  Depending on what you want to accomplish, there are services available to meet those goals. It can be fun to put the right pieces together.

Another exciting area is microservices. Azure App Service can play a role in this area – there is a wealth of features there; much more than I think many people realize.

Azure App Service is a power-packed offering. And then we have the newest player in the space, with Azure Service Fabric, which enables you to build and operate highly scalable, highly available, distributed applications. Service Fabric is the same technology that powers some of Microsoft’s and Azure’s own high-scale services such as Azure SQL Database, DocumentDB, Intune, and Skype for Business.

Last, but certainly not least, is containerization. Microservices and containerization certainly are related. The Azure platform enables you to run a myriad of popular platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere DCOS, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. With the new Azure Container Service, you can deploy and manage containers using the familiar tools you already know and love.

There is certainly a lot happening in Azure today. It is without a doubt a very fast moving platform! While it can be a bit challenging to keep up, it is also a lot of fun.

You co-authored a book on Microsoft Azure, Fundamentals of Azurewith Robin Shahan. Could you share which tools you use in continuously improving your Azure skills besides your own book? 

I use many different resources to stay current in Azure. Azure is a fast moving platform – there is always something new and exciting to learn! A few of my personal favorites include:

• The documentation and learning paths at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/ often help, as I can walk through various scenarios applicable to what I want to learn.
• The Azure blog at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ and service update page at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/ are often a good first stop to see what is new with the platform.
• Training sites such as Microsoft Virtual Academy and CloudAcademy, can also be extremely helpful in diving deep into specific topics.
• I attend a lot of regional technology conferences such as CodeMash, StirTrek, and CloudDevelop (which I help to run). I find the community led conferences extremely valuable because you can get “real world” users to talk about what they did and how they did it – the good and the bad. It’s not a lot of marketing hype.

You mention a few distance learning sites such as Microsoft Virtual Academy and CloudAcademy. Do you see the flexibility as and focus as compliments to books like yours, and if so why?

I view online learning and book based learning as complimentary functions. Typically, online training courses can update faster than printed media. Going by my own experiences in writing a book on Azure, the process can take several months before the book is published. Once that book is in print, it is obviously pretty hard to update. Online learning has an advantage in the speed at which the content can be updated. The public cloud moves at an incredibly fast pace, and being able to have relatively current content can certainly be helpful. On the other hand, there is something about having a book to read, jot notes in, and quickly reference later that is appealing to many people, including myself. I value what books, online courses, and the broader technical community can all bring to the table.

Some people argue that certifications are critical for job seekers. What is your view on this?

My personal opinion is that certifications are helpful, but not critical. Allow me to explain that rationale. If the job seeker is relatively new to the field (i.e. fresh out of college, changing careers, etc.), then without a doubt seek certifications. They can help you learn the technologies and provide some evidence that you know a bit about what you’re talking about. On the other hand, for those individuals who have a good amount of experience already with the technologies, I don’t see the certifications as being critical. They’re something that is nice to have, though.

Where do you see the entry points for people wanting to work in the Azure ecosystem?

That’s an interesting questions. My answer from a few years ago would probably be different than what I say today. Today, I view the cloud – regardless of platform – as the platform for new applications. It’s just the way things are done.  I would strive to understand that cloud computing is really distributed computing, and there are a slew of challenges (latency, high availability, consistency, performance, etc.) that come along for the ride. Additionally, it’s a DevOps world today. Rarely are developers only writing code, and then tossing it over a wall for somebody else to deploy to some unknown environment. It’s much more of a mixed bag today.

Experiment with the products. Some of the easiest services to get started within Azure are Azure App Service and Azure Virtual Machines. If you want to host a web app, deploy an Azure Web App with Azure App Service. Or, if you want to have full control, go with an Azure VM – either Windows or Linux. If you don’t have an Azure subscription yet, you can get a free Azure account with $200 in credit.

Do you see training as useful for Microsoft Azure users? 

Training is certainly useful for Microsoft Azure users!

As we’ve mentioned previously, the services in the Azure platform move fast. There is always something to learn.

(Cloud Academy offers a growing selection of Azure courses)

Could you point out some areas you think Microsoft Azure beats the competition? 

In my opinion, I think Microsoft Azure really excels at providing an enterprise-class Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, and also at providing technologies to enable a hybrid cloud. 

On the PaaS side, features such as Azure App Service and Cloud Services enable developers to deliver production services incredibly fast, without the need to worry about building the supporting infrastructure.

Microsoft’s leadership in this space is recognized for the third year in a row byGartner.

Additionally, on the hybrid topic, what Microsoft is doing with Azure and Azure Stack is really exciting. With Azure Stack, you can get the power of the public cloud, and still maintain control within your own data center. Having one API and approach with Azure Resource Manager, for both on-premises with Azure Stack and the public cloud with Azure, is really exciting. Historically, Microsoft has done very well in the on-premises enterprise space. Not everything can, or should, move to the public cloud. Being able to have a cohesive story and approach for on-premises and cloud, is something I don’t think anyone else can fully realize.

If you could go back in time and offer some advice to a younger you about learning and careers, what would that be?

Oh wow . . . that’s a good question. There are a few things I would tell myself:

• Have a good mentor. A mentor can be extremely helpful in guiding you in the right direction, helping you to focus on the right things, and shorten the path to learning. A mentor is a truly invaluable resource.
• Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is how we learn. It is OK to try something. Try it. Learn it.
• Consume it all. Try something new. Try something outside of the technology stack your most comfortable with using. If Windows and .NET is the most comfortable platform, try some PHP and/or some Linux. It’s OK. Broaden your experiences.

Michael Collier is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, where he engages deeply with select accounts to help them best utilize Azure’s features. Michael is also a former five-time Azure MVP. He has over 13 years of experience with various consulting and technology firms where he was instrumental in leading and developing solutions for a wide range of clients. He has a vast amount of experience in helping companies determine the best strategy for adopting cloud computing, and providing the insight and hands-on experience to ensure they are successful. Michael is also a respected technology community leader, and is often found sharing his Microsoft Azure insights and experiences at regional and national conferences. 

source:  http://cloudacademy.com/blog/crucial-skills-for-microsoft-azure-cloud-words-with-michael-collier/

Free kindle ebook Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business

Free Kindle ebook

Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business

Are you a small business owner trying to understand cloud but uncertain about the technical language, marketing hype or just simply where to start?

How will cloud computing help your Business meet its goals?

Cloud Computing requires a new approach to how IT services are designed, delivered and maintained. Most importantly is the fact that cloud dictates substantial change for your Business.

Not having a strategy for cloud will lead to false starts and mistakes that slow your cloud transformation, introducing competitive risks and diminished credibility for your business. Cloud computing is another transformation agent that small business leaders must understand in order to effectively control its influence of change toward thier business.

The Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business offers structure to help business leaders correctly plan their cloud adoption journey. Small business leaders can leverage either the complete framework or elements of the framework as a reference guide. Its main purpose is to make the transition toward cloud services easier to understand and more manageable.

48 hrs To Better Manage Cloud For Your Business will provide you with a practical and easy to follow approach for managing cloud that can be learned in a weekend.

The Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business accelerates your cloud journey with an actionable path to success.

48 hrs To Better Manage Cloud For Your Business is built upon the Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business which places priority on the people, process and tools that are required for any business to succeed. It will help your business understand your state of readiness to move to a cloud model, the challenges, implications, and benefits.

Almost a decade has passed since cloud was presented as the news highlight for business to discuss. Have you developed a strategy for cloud during that time? If not, then this ebook was written for you.

Section 1: Strategy

This domain involves setting the direction and scope of your business over the long-term. It achieves advantage for the business through its configuration of resources to meet the needs of the business related to customers, partners, staff and to fulfill your business stakeholder expectations.

Section 2: Action

This domain involves defining a course of action or planning to deliver upon the vision identified for your business. It links the Strategy of your business to the required work items to move your business toward its journey.

Section 3: Decisions

This domain provides your business with several of the key decision points that will define the decisions for selecting cloud services. The level of risk that is acceptable to your business, the costs and lifecycle of a business will be core elements of this domain.

Section 4: People

Cloud more than just a technology change and it impacts the ways in which the workforce of your business operates. This domain will look at the new and changing roles that can transform your workforce, and how Business and IT are managed.

Section 5: Financial

This domain will focus upon how cloud impacts your business model creates new financial considerations for the operating model of your business.

Section 6: Results

This domain reinforces the need to identify what represents success for your business and approaches to monitor and report upon progress of your Strategy and Actions. 

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Each section provides its own analysis and recommendations for business leaders to follow. It is recommended to start with foundational content that explains cloud computing and then progress to the section on Strategy, which is the first pillar of the Cloud Adoption Framework for Small Business, and progress through each section in order - Strategy-Action-Decisions-People-Financial-Results. However you can select any section and follow it depending upon your previous knowledge and experience with the identified concepts.