Adam will share what you need to know to become a NASA rocket scientist…. Sorry, Azure Architect.
It is easy to sign into the Azure portal, click around and create a bunch of services. The aim is to avoid ClickOps wherever possible.
Developers love to follow best practices that help them build great enterprise software. As Cloud Architects working with Azure, we should include practices for how to design enterprise solutions well, choose the right services and be cognizant of your cloud spend.
Adam Cogan will walk through the 10 things you need to know to become a great Azure Cloud Architect.
Check out more of our featured speakers and talks at https://www.ndcconferences.com https://ndcmelbourne.com/
Alright, let's kick this baby off. Did you have a good keynote? Good to be here in person, in real life. I know your lockdown here has been worse than ours in Sydney, but it was bad for us, so even worse for you guys. I love the keynote myself. The highlight, seeing friends and learning what AI was. What was it? A collaborative, encompassing term for stuff that isn't really working right. Okay, I thought that was quite good. And I love this demo. All right. So good to see Melbourne. Very beautiful. Last time I was here, didn't see this beautiful building. A 108 really stands out. Should be famous. So we saw the booth last night getting put together. That was great. We have the Sswtv guys around recording and we went out, had a bit of fun in the city. It's been awesome. There's a lot of QR codes in Melbourne, a lot more than we have up in Sydney. Are you sick of them? Yes. All right, awesome. So the TV guys are here. If you want to have a little five minute recording with them of some tip you have, hang out and I'll do that for you. All right, so today's session, we're going to be talking about ten tips to Rocking as an Azure architect. A lot of us are doing cloud all the time, but there is like, a number of things that I often talk to with the SSWs about the next steps, what you should be doing. So I'm just going to be going through some of those tips. All right, so I want to talk about the Architecture Center. I want to talk about saving dollars. When you're dealing with Azure, usually comes from the early conversations. Automating stuff is part of your job to be coaching others and a whole lot of other rules about Azure. This is me. I'm the chief architect of SSW. I'm Microsoft regional director and I'm a Scrum master. And we have a new office, I thought I'd tell you. We have Sydney. Mel, brisbane. We now have Newcastle all up in Ukrainian lights. Very nice. All right. And we have also done a rebrand from that to that, we went dark mode. There's a lot of arguments over that one, but we did it. All right. If you want to win some prizes over at the booth, you can scan this QR code, earn some points on the app, do some other crazy things, throw some things, get a tattoo, earn some points. And there's lots of things. I've won a few bands myself, so have some fun. One more QR code. Can everyone scan this, please? This is going to be part of the session. You're going to be answering some questions. All right. This is my first experience in China, because in China, everything many years ago was QR code based. Before we got covered, we probably wouldn't be using QR codes, but they were using it for everything with WeChat. All right, so here's the first question. Do you primarily regard yourself already as a cloud architect? Or would you say you're a developer on cloud, or a developer mainly on prem? We all do lots of things. Or you're technical, but not a developer. Or if you're none of those. All right, so you'll see, we are primarily, at this point in time, mostly developers doing cloud stuff. Okay, there we go. All right, keep on going. So the next question I have for you is how many years have you been doing Azure? Are you a newbie on your first year? Been doing it up to five years or up to ten years? Or are you really old like Andrew Coates? When did you start using Azure? 2008. All right. That was before I was born, but that was a long, long time ago. In fact, does anyone actually remember the term Red Dog? Oh, only two really oldies. That was before Azure. And good. I just put this other question in here about AWS and GCP just to check we had no spies in the room. Okay, that's good. Look, Azure is a beast. There's a lot of services there. There's hundreds of services. It's, in fact, hard to keep track of how much is in there. There's essentially 200 really fantastic, important services. But when it all comes down to like 80% of it is in the top ten or 15 services. So there is a session that we do, and it's actually online. You could watch it. It's where I go through the top nine services of Azure. It's called the Nine Nights of Azure. We also have a day where we go through this on Azure Superpowers. It's a couple of $100 for the day. There's a few of the cloud architects that do that SSW, and it's a good day. So basically, we just go through the computing services, data services, security stuff, logic apps, bots, and containers. All right, so I would like to ask you how many people here have actually used the Azure Architecture Center? All right, so open your app. This is not interactive. We don't put out our hands anymore. That's old school. Okay. We open up our app and we look at the screen and, oh, look at this. All right, this is definitely worth talking now because we're going to skip over this as everybody had already used it. Great. So I'll wait for a couple more answers. All right. Okay. All right, so most of you have not heard of it. Well, it's already worth coming to the session then, if that's the case. So you are sitting down. You've talked to the customer about the new requirements, how you're going to do this. You spec out what's going to be done. Now, most people will do a document or some type of long email or whatever's going on, documenting what's going on in our company in that meeting, we always include a diagram, okay? Because pictures are worth a thousand words, as you would know. And to make your own diagram, we have this rule here. You can have a look at it, but how to make your own diagram. All right, now, it's basically you think ahead what you're going to be using, and then you will do a bit of a graph or diagram like this. You Draw IO is kind of the best one out there. And we have one of these for every single solution we have. Now to get going on that because many of these are complicated. You're trying to work things out. You might not know what to do. Okay, but Microsoft have this azure architecture center. And I'll just quickly show you this. But if you jump into here and you browse Azure architectures, you can come in here and we'll search for health in this case, all right? So let's just say we're doing a health solution. You could come in here and look here and be reading the common services you could be using, how you could set this up. If it's just an hour meeting, you might want to say, all right, so I broadly understand what we should do for the next meeting. You could take this, but most of the time you're spending some days kind of fleshing this out. And this is where you might start. So you might start add one of these diagrams, go to Draw IO, follow some of these patterns, and start putting in the specific customer requirements for that. All right? So I will just also just go back because that Azure Architecture Center is pretty awesome. There's a lot of stuff on here. So I'll just go back one more step here. There's a bunch of stuff here. So you can look through here. And this site should be your first stop. You come in here, you can see designing for the cloud, optimizing your workload, choosing the right tech, a whole bunch of scenarios. So, for example, if your customer says, all right, I'm really worried about we've had a lot of load problems in the past. At 09:00 in the morning, every kid from the schools all logs on at that time. How are you going to handle that? Well, you don't need to invent anything. All this has all been done. It's just about knowing what to do. You could come down here to say, application design patterns. You can look through, learn a whole lot of patterns. Obviously, if you know the right one, you go to it and you read about it. If you don't know, you kind of try to work it out. We're going to be using CQRS in this solution. We'll be using Event sourcing. We'll be using querybased load leveling. Okay, that sounds close. We'll come in here and we'll read about the problem, seeing if this is close to what the customer is asking for. You'll see a little diagram here. You could take it as is or modify it. We got our task. They're going through the message to the service. Look closely at the little diagrams underneath where it says requests received at a variable rate. See how is that what they're describing, that they come in like this, but we want it smoothed out, messages processed at a more consistent rate. There is a mass of content on here, nicely, well organized, and you end up being pointed to the right bits in Docs Microsoft. So I think that you should like that. All right, so let's go back. Hopefully you can see that the Architecture Center is bloody important. It comes with lots of diagrams and a variety of scenarios. It does not include your arm JSON or your arm Bicep. Hopefully Microsoft will include that one day because that will take us to the next step. It has all those cloud patterns that I just described and you can learn more about it on that rule if you want it. Alright, let's talk about the next one. Bicep. Have you used bicep before? Open that phone. Tell us if you think it's awesome because you have or that you have looked at it, but you prefer one of the other solutions. You've looked at it, but you're not interested or you haven't heard of it. Okay. All right, so there's plenty of people that have not heard of it, which is good, and there's plenty of people that have heard of it and are already interested in it via the description. All right, so this is infrastructure as code. Really, really important. We have a rule on this. I actually have nothing to do on the weekend, so I just write rules. And this is the common problem. You start looking at what you need to do in A, and this is normal. You start clicking through, working out. Basically they refer to this as going through, as exploring or click ups. So we are just creating all the resources manually. What you can do from that point, you should not pass Go. From that point you should open it up and save that JSON into a folder. Now, those templates are very verbose. They will get you up and running, but they are not good at making changes quickly beyond that, all right, you can but there's a better way. All right? So what you can do is author your own Arm templates. You can author your own Arm templates, save it in a folder, do it like that. Or you can use a tool like Pharma. Okay? And pharma is an f sharp tool. It's a lot more readable, but there is a better tool than that, and that is Bicep. Okay? So Bicep is what we recommend, it's what we use on our projects. It's free. So that's good. It's a really nice way of basically describing out your Azure application and having all those resources created for you. Now, be aware there are other ones like polume. Anyone using plumbing? No one? Okay. That is also a popular one. And TerraForm. Any TerraForm. Guys. Way more. So it's like quarter of the room. Okay. And how many people are using Bicep or planning to use Bicep? Okay, so it's about the same. All right, cool. Yes. Now, TerraForm is also awesome. So if you've got TerraForm that's good, it is more pricey because it's not free, but it goes across cloud. So if you're going to switch to cloud, it might be a good reason to use it. All right, so you can grab that Bicep extension. It is certainly whatever solution you choose, it's going to be better than the Arm JSON. Now, all these Bicep files are kind of like modules and you can chain them together, you can link them. I'll just show you a little example. So this is an example from William Lindenberg. He did a talk at NBC Sydney. You can watch the whole thing just on Bicep the whole time. But he put up all his code here. If you go into demos and we'll go into registries and what has he got here? He's got the full stack web app. So he's put the entire web app there. But the guts of it is how he's put his infrastructure as code. So he's put each one separately. So he's made his key vault Bicep file there. He's got his SQL database as a separate file. He's got his storage and web app, so they're all separate. Now, if we were to look in the key vault file here he comes through, he sets up his key vault here, he defines it all and he's good to go. All right, so that is the better way of doing it. Completely reproducible. And if we go into, say, the main guy that calls all the other ones here's, this full stack webapp Bicep, if we look in here, we should be able to find where's his key vault here we go. Okay, so there's his reference to calling that and that's. So you can just chain them together. It's quite a nice way of modularizing that together. All right, now if you think about when you're doing net code and you've got newgate, you can just instantiate a newget package. You don't have to actually know the file location. All same, same thing here. You know, he's bicep resources there and he's calling it. Okay, so all pretty nice. I think you'll be impressed when you use Bicep. It works well. Alright, let's talk about the next one. The next one is Bill Shock. Has anyone here experienced an unexpected bill in the cloud before? The reasons might be yes, I was not monitoring my costs, or yes, the resources being used were more expected than I had expected? They were or three. Yes, I've been hit by a denial of wallet attack, which is when a rogue actor decides that they will attack a company they don't like and basically use their resources making their bill go up without their sales going up. We don't mind if our cloud bills go up. If we see a spike in invoices and sales, that's great, but not without it. Or my favorite one, which I hear from a lot of customers. Yes, someone added an extra resource without getting approval. Rogue developers who's experienced that? Now, who has been that developer that did it and got in trouble? There he is. What's your name, sir? You're not meant to tell me. Don't worry. All right, let's talk about this monthly spend. So this monthly spend, so you've got a web app, database reports. It usually starts with you start using services and you worry about the bill later. So it's often about not planning ahead. Now, how many people here have used the Azure Calculator before? Oh, that is awesome. Okay, so I reckon we've got 70% of the room using the Azure Calculator. And I am going to just go through it and kind of go through some of the thinking that goes on. So you've got all your resources that you can pick from and go shopping, essentially. And down here, I don't know why they've got this is, I think it's called a skeleton layout, but it's meant to do this while it's loading. So I'm just going to hang here and wait for it to load. But it never will. So let's ignore that UI and let's pretend that we're having a conversation. We're saying, all right, so how should we do this new one? We all do it the conventional way. We're going to use an app service and a SQL database and get this thing done and dusted. Alright, I guess we could do a static site with something else, but I think let's go with what we know. So we'll go with an app service. We'll click that. What happened? Oh, scroll down. It's down here. They need a little animation, don't they? So we come down here and it's $54 a month. Whoops. It's in West US. I have chosen Australia 1000 times and Asia has never remembered that. I want Australia now. I want Melbourne Southeast. And it's $70. It's reasonable, isn't it? We'll get approval for that. Oops, no, we don't want to use Windows. We want it to be cheaper. We'll choose Linux. Seventy bucks to thirteen bucks. That's much more reasonable. Wow. But we better not deploy on Basic, I don't think. Do you think? What do you think? If we deploy on Basic, we won't get lots of benefits, like auto scale, blah, blah, blah. So you don't want to do that. We want to pay. We'll go standard. So we'll go from thirteen dollars to ninety bucks. Oh, well, we need that. You really shouldn't deploy live production. Two gig of ram. You need at least four, right? Like at least. So I think we better go to four gig of Ram and that will be from ninety dollars to one hundred and seventy dollars. It's getting more expensive. You know what they should have here because you think you've gone to a much better machine, but it should have a warning here. Warning. Your own old spindle disk. You need SSDs. So if they put that there, they'll sell more. But so if you want that, you go from standard to premium V two. And we're going to go from $175. Oh, you get cheaper for going better. Give me an analogy for that. I don't even have one. All right, so we just got throwing in SSDs. I wish my wife could go shopping as efficiently as I go shopping. All right, I just got better for cheaper. All right, so $90, pretty good. All right, so what else? You know, you could go up to V three, which would give me more than four giga ram. What's? It going to go from $90 to all 130. You reckon you can get approval for that? It's not too much more? It's a lot better. But you want to know what you should be doing? Always having the conversation. How many years are we going to commit to this app? Oh, I'm not really sure. Well, but we can commit to a year, can't we? Oh, definitely for a year. All right, so let's go there and commit to a year. And we're down to $80. All right, so they're kind of the common conversations you would have. You now have a beefy instance and it's cheap. Great. Awesome. I'm very happy with that. Well, it's actually only the app service. We need a database. So we'll go and choose SQL. What happened? Oh, that's right. I go down here. So we have our app service for $85. We got our SQL Server. That's right. I have to tell Microsoft that I would like to be in Melbourne. Imagine adding up the hourly rate of every developer in Australia for this one. Okay, now what's going on? Oops one, $600. This app is not feasible. We'll have to park this one. Oh, I just realized Vcore. Okay, we don't need dedicated instance. We'll use what we use. Right. Data transaction unit for SQL. Oh, that's much better. Much, much better. Okay, now we will need to so $5 for the database is a pretty good deal. We should go standard because we're going to deploy this for real. And there we are. So $20. If we look at this, we have just oh, look around. $100 even. Sounds nice. Tell the boss. So that is kind of going through. But of course, when you do this type of stuff, you should go conventional. Mainstream app, mainstream app service. And there we are. Good to go. All right, now you should do your comparison. And we're going to do our comparison. Let's do it like with a modern site. If almost all the recent sites we've done have been stag sites, this site, let's assume that it's not relational. We could use Cosmos if we wanted to. There's a good reason to use Cosmos because you got planet scale. We will go static. Let's have a look. Static web apps. Who's used static web apps? Okay. Alright. Less than 20% of you. It is definitely the way to go. Steak web apps. We can't, we shouldn't. Well, we could go on free. It's cheap, but you need auth and you need durable functions, most solutions. So you're going to go with standard. And it goes to $9. $9. All right. That would get you a couple of coffees in Sydney. Okay. Alright, so that's pretty good. Is that all I've got to do? Oh, that's all I've got to do. Great. All right, what else? That's it. I will need a database. So let's get rid of this and let's come in here and go to Azure Cosmos. Oh, go down. And here we go. Azure Cosmos, pay as you go, $23. Wow. And that's all I really have to do. And this is a lot easier, choosing all this stuff. And I'm just going to put in here cool stage web app. Compare whether I want to go like I didn't have to select where I was and all those things because it has front door, it caches, it everywhere. This is going to be blazingly fast and cheaper. So why wouldn't you choose it? All right. All cool. Great. So you start off your project and you look at the costs and you give them those costs and you give them a comparison, giving them a choice of A and B. But you can see the modern services are nicer to use. So I did this before, about a month or so ago. And look at the prices. They were 146 versus 50. So you can see that the prices are actually coming down. Okay, the only thing in Covert that's coming down, so I went from 146 to 100 because I just did it with you. And was it 20 something? It was 50. Okay, so just delay your Azure decisions and eventually it will come down to basically nothing. All right? Now the major tip is make your customers make that decision. Because if you don't, you're wasting money. Lots of money. All right, now look, I did give you a contrived example. A more realistic enterprise data warehouse example might have synapse in it, and analytics services and power bi embedded and stuff. And you're up for a couple of grand per month, et cetera, depending on the size of your organization. What you need right now, the next thing is monitoring your dollars. Okay? Monitoring those dollars. Devs and architects aren't that good at this. Where do you go? You go into cost management. You click on cost analysis and you see how that bill is growing. And you check that that's growing with usage versus sales versus everything else. So that is an app growing. It's a real example. But I want you to understand about burning dollars. Burning dollars is dangerous. So on the left hand side, you choose budgets. And the way that I usually tell people to go through is add the budgets. So for example, it is always the sum of the parts. You should have budgets per application in your company or per department in your company, how you ever slice it. But then you have an overall one as well. So an overall one which is groups or more. Now when you hit those milestones or those limits, it won't turn off, okay. It's going to run away. So you've got to be monitoring those alerts. And so it's all well and good to set up a budget, but you've got to set up your alerts. Okay? So you set up your budget and then you come in here and you set up your alerts. On the left hand side, you click on Cost alerts and you set that up. All right? All righty. So let's move on to number four. And this is a common problem in large organizations that have on prem. They will discuss using some of Azure, but they don't really want to because that's additional monthly cost, because if we put it on premise stuff, that's not going to cost us anything, right? You have these conversations, okay. Now I was really happy when this little tool came out from Microsoft because it's hard to tell them the cost. I had this experience where we got rid of one of the stands in SSW and I didn't understand how massively the air conditioner bill would come down. So this cost is nearly $100,000 a year, and we're a small company with a body air conditioner. So what's the cost? Most people don't know. And you come in here and they have this beautiful calculator here for your company. So you tell them what workloads, what servers you have, what operating systems, how big is the CPU, what databases, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot. And once you tell it the story of your onpremise workloads, you will get a cost. And it's pretty good. I haven't had customers be able to dispute it. Okay, azure takes fairly conservative estimates with this. So I put through here an example of a couple of customers blended together, okay, with It departments of about 20 and substantial businesses. But you go through, you enter their service, you enter their databases, their storage. You come through, adjust any assumptions if you want to, because they got Windows assurance and stuff like that. SQL service software assurance. You come through into the well, it's already set up for you with the electricity costs, the storage cost, the It labor cost. Look at the bottom here. Like hourly rate for It administrator, $32 an hour. Okay, more than conservative, right? And that was a million dollars for their set up. And they said, sure, yeah, it's not right. And then they came back and they couldn't dispute any of that and it was probably in the ballpark. Okay, so this is helpful if you have that problem, your on premise stuff, I know it's a sunk cost, but it's a real cost and it's continuing and continuing and continuing. You need to get off that. So that is the difference, just graphically, that is that cost and that is the same services on cloud. Now that strikes you as way different because cloud can be expensive too, right? But in some big companies, cloud is crazy cheap. Like they're nuts to be wasting this much money every year. In this specific example, which is real, real world is 1.1 million and $60,000. Of course they've got to pay for a lot of software to be fixed up and deployed and stuff, but it's where they should go very quickly. And here's the breakdown. So that site gives you a breakdown of graphically of all the different costs on premise versus what the costs are going to be in the cloud. Okay. And for the accountants, there you go. And yeah, it's definitely something you should be doing. Let's talk about learning. Okay. Do we need much more than Docs Microsoft? That is an incredibly successful site. They've done a magical job with Docs Microsoft. Now the problem with Docs Microsoft is this just like JavaScript, the definitive guide, and the other book, JavaScript the Good parts, you only really want the good parts. Right? There's too much stuff. So how many people have read the Azure Developer's Guide? 140 pages. Okay, give this man a star. Okay. I'll get your free tattoo in the booth. All right, so let's come in here. I'm just going to click on this and this is a PDF. Microsoft make it every year. PDFs, aren't they old school? Okay. Now it goes through everything and this is a good way to get familiar with all the lingo. It goes to PowerApps, Andrew Coast, this would be your favorite bit. Yeah. So you click on it and of course they all point off to Microsoft Docs. Not all of them, but yes, there we go. So the bits and pieces. Now I've just gone to one random bit, but this is a substantial document. It's good to flick through, get a bit of a handle on this. It's a monster, 140 pages, but it's not as bad as you think it is. Now this thing is refreshed every year. It mainly covers building cloud nave apps with Visual Studio and Azure DevOps and GitHub. Right. They're the guts of what we need to know and it links off to there's a lot more stuff than that, but that's the guts of it. Now not everybody learns by reading a PDF, right? So you've got to work out what your budget is. But most people are either deciding depending on whether the company is paying or they're paying or whatever, $35 a month. So I'll talk an annual. Amount $500 a year or $100 a year, or they just don't want to spend anything on this. What are your choices? You got pluralsight, which is now lecture based, and then they have a tutorial, right? And you got LinkedIn learning. You got Udemy and you got YouTube. Good old YouTube has everything. Anyway, alright, so but there is one problem with all of this. You need to have your Azure instance. I'm going to call it. Bring your own azure. Okay. Is that a term? Yeah. Okay. I just invented it. All right, so bring your own Azure. So you have to have that story sorted out. Or you can use Microsoft Learn who's already using Microsoft Learn. Oh, a third of you. Okay, that's very sad. Microsoft Learn. Microsoft has spent a fortune in this. And when you go through this, it automatically gives you an Azure instance for say, a day. It does die off. But you get that instance that you can muck around, do your tutorial. It's everything you want. Microsoft should charge for this. Like this is worth serious dollars out of a training budget. They don't because they want to get you educated on Azure. Okay? So they give it to you and you're crazy not to use it. Okay? This is a great way of learning. So make sure this is what you're getting your developers to be using. So once you've got them a bit educated, you now need to work with your developers to make sure the next step is automation. So we go from education to automation. There's plenty of stuff on Microsoft Learn as well, but you want to be looking out for clickops. Okay? You want to be looking out when you see them do stuff like, you know, go the Azure Portal Resource Group app service. Advanced tools. Browsing to WWE, drag and dropping artifacts. Windows Explorer or finder oh gosh. I have to now cater for Apple. Yes. My goodness. I got problems in too. Many of our developers are choosing these new Macs with M One chips giving out sysadmins headaches. Oh my goodness. Anyway, that's clickops. So what you want to do is go and help them. Give them a little bit of love. Get them to install the Vs code Azure extension pack. Okay, who's already done this? Step two, people. What? Okay, so once you've done this and they're in Vs code, you can organize your work. In this case. Here's an example. App service functions, resource groups. So much nicer. Make your changes and deploy all within the one environment. So this is great. It's great for POCs. It's just an extension, right? Click, deploy. Grab that little nugget. It's awesome. They're coding and deploying from the same place. They will thank you for it. So then you make your change. You deploy to your app service or your function or your stake web app or whatever. Warning. This is for quick proof of concept situations. This is not long term, of course, you should be getting them set up with nice pipelines with Azure DevOps or GitHub actions. That is what you do once it's really in production or before it gets to production. Okay, but that's very handy. And don't forget, same story. You've got Visual Studio. You've got the Cloud Explorer. It's similar. Now, I want to talk to you about the Azure Tips and Tricks site. Anyone already know the site? One? Okay, well, this is useful. Okay, so we'll click on this. Once you've looked through this, I think you'll be liking what's here. Basically, it's a Microsoft employee that started and wrote about 50 rules. Well, I shouldn't call them rules, but they're kind of like our rules. 50 tips. 50 tips and tricks. I think he should have simplified this. Azure Tips would have been better. And so he's got lots of them. You can see we're up to 371. There's a bunch of people now contributing. They're all good. I would come in here. I will search scale. So you come here and you can how to run jobs at scale? No, I just want to how to automatically scale Azure App services. Oh, that looks helpful. I will jump into there. What have I got? Okay. How to automatically scale App services. The elastic cloud where I need scaling. All right, so I come down here. Now I click on this one. Okay. Then I click on custom auto scale. So they all are in this step by step way. What to do, what to look at, what to do, what to look at. It's really useful. And there's obviously hundreds, in fact, 300 of them. And if we want to look at the containers here, okay, we can click on containers. We've got lots and lots of stuff here about containers. So that's all good. So you can find lots of it's all nice to be categorized. Or we can go to George, our Melbourne, with a Brazilian accent. He is the Microsoft Cloud Advocate. All questions to do with Kubernetes or container apps. You're the man, are you? He answers every question for free. All right, so there you go. Get his mobile number and just harass him. That's his job. All right. Okay. And all things open source, right? Yes. There we go. All right, number nine. We had enough. Now. You want a couple more? Two more. Okay, more. Okay. This is probably the most important one of all. You've got a site and you've deployed it, and you aren't caching it. You're not an architect. Your site isn't as fast as it should be, so you should be using Azure front door. It is the most modern CDN in the world. It gives you global scale. It's got built in thread detection. Or you could use Cloudflare, which went down yesterday. Oh, sorry. Shouldn't mention that. Okay. All right. Okay, who's using cloudflare? Three of you? All right, now, will you three commit to switching to front door. No? Okay, no worries. Okay, so I'm going to give you another tip. I think this is kind of the only tip you really need to run away with if you want to make your projects better. So, you know, you have your projects. You want to make a project run smoothly, you get a Scrum Master, right? You break your work down, you get a solid, hardcore Scrum Master, beats up the product owner, which causes most of the problems usually. And you have nice performing sprints. You're getting stuff done. Yes. Who's doing scrum. All right, everyone who's not doing Scrum, who you work for? The ATO? Almost. Okay, get on to scrum. But when you have a team, even a little baby team with just a couple what the hell? Broken link. I'm going to blame cloudflare. Okay, there we go. I'm a fixer. I fix things. All right, so we've got a video here. William Lilmberg does a bit of a talk about why you need a cloud architect on your team, even if it's small. So let's just imagine you got a couple of great devs. You got a solution architect and a software developer on a team. You've got no Cloud Architect. You really want to bump up that team, just like you'd bump up a team with a Scrum Master. You want to have a couple of strong devs with a Cloud Architect, even if you can only have that cloud architect on the team one day a week or one day a fortnight or one day a month, whatever you can do, you have to allocate a cloud architect. That person should then be in charge of load, load testing, bend ups, which is always looking at the costs and the security. If you don't, you say, who's in charge of bad stuff? They say, oh, we all are, which basically means no one. When everyone's in charge of something, no one's in charge of anything. So make sure that Cloud Architect is there so that the changes are being made. The right tech is being used, DevOps is being done correctly. They got a good data story all about the compute model and of course, their load testing before the customers load test for you. All right, I've got a couple of bonus ones, which is checking the latency between data centers. This is a nice site that you can do just to quickly check the latency between data centers, which is handy. There is also another site here which is more advanced. It's got every setting under the sun. You can try everything. It's got some ads annoying me anyway. But yes, these are substantially good sites that you can use to help you do that. And the other one I'm going to mention to you is the Azure update site. The services you cannot keep up with. You don't know where they're at. But this site is awesome. So you can come through here and you could look, you could go Cosmos and you've got all these services. You could say what's in preview? Or I only want to see what is now available. I'm not interested in the stuff that's in preview. And you can click that and it will filter down, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a helpful site. All right, so you can scan this QR code and you'll get points because you've now watched the talk, I think you get a few hundred points. So scan that with our great new app. Let's have a look. I'm just looking at the summary of the results. Most people are developers. I think you can all change your title to Cloud Architect now on LinkedIn and put me as a reference. Nobody ever checks them anyway. Okay, one to five years experience. All right, so this has probably added another ten years of experience onto that Azure Architecture Center. Well, you've all heard of this now, so there you go. Add that on as well. Use that. That's wonderful. So most of you had not heard of Bicep. You have now. That's awesome. And, oh, look at this. You weren't monitoring your costs before. Now go back, make sure you have a budget and make sure you have alerts. There's no forgiving for that. And I had one of our devs. I'm sure it happened to everyone. I decided to test a whole lot of instances and left it on for the weekend. And there we're down a few thousand dollars. That was fantastic. So hopefully you've learned a few bits and pieces here. We went through the Architecture Center, we went through some DevOps topics. We talked about dollars, we talked about performance and what else? Education. Lots of cool stuff. So hopefully that was useful. Now, I want you to know that I have all these rules on rules about Azure. So I have heaps and heaps of rules here. These are kind of the things that we go through a lot in our company with the devs. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff which exams are important? The nine important parts of Azure, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot. And if you come up to SSW rules here, there's 2700 of them. Now, I have a problem. I think it's starting to get a bit much. You can see the most recent ones that have been changed. You can make a pull request yourself. Instead of emailing me or tweeting me, you just go in. We move them all over to GitHub. So, for example, here is a rule. Click on Edit, jump over to GitHub, make your pull request, make your change, and we'll accept it if it's good. And there you go, you'll be contributing to the community. We're all learning and all getting better like that. Look at that beautiful editor. Look how good. Even better than Michael Docs. Mr. Coast, don't you think? I think that was a yes. I'm going to quote it okay. Alright, thank you very much. Oh, there's questions. Oh, wow, this gets better. Now, how do I get to the questions? Let's see, what's that thing called? Slido. Slido. All right, Piers, read me one. Microsoft Learn has a lot of certifications attached to it. Any recommendations for which ones do Microsoft Learn has a lot of certifications attached. Which one should you do? Well, certifications is an important topic. I would say one of the things I would say that it's very important to do your certifications. I wouldn't make that the bee's knees of where you're going. So before I got into certifications, I'd try to get a broad understanding and learning by doing. And then once you've got a bit of a handle on that, microsoft in the certifications will often teach you about all the things to get you certified. But they're also doing a bit of advertising of all the features, so you're learning all that stuff. So certifications are the second thing. The first thing I'd be saying is microsoft learned to go through and do the hands on experience through the Azure instances. They give you a really broad all right, yeah, good suggestion. I've been using Arm templates for the last three years. All right. I've been using Arm templates for three years. Should I be moving to Bicep? As a priority? I would say as a priority, I'd say it's a very important thing to do and I know it's work. But when you think about any software that you do, you design software ready for change. Software generally doesn't die. Software stays alive while you've got a budget and while it's useful. The difference between a beginner developer and an experienced developer is they make it always ready to change. And so that's the same thing. Infrastructure as code is very important. Bicep makes it more maintainable, so it's a lot easier to change. Any comment on it? Yeah, that's an excellent tip. What's your name? Randy. So Randy gave us an excellent tip. Basically there is a converter. Like all converters, they're not perfect, but they're useful. Okay. I generally would start a new project on Bicep, get used to it and then you know what you're doing rather than going to an old project and trying to migrate it. Because it's much easier to migrate when you know what you're meant to get to. What do you attribute to a beautiful appearance? Well, yeah, that's a very good question. I don't know. I'd say sitting on the weekend writing rules has really helped me a lot. Very good for you. Well, I hate making random decisions or making decisions and having it lost and not being able to back it up. It really sucks when you look at a project and developers leave and change, developers forget things. You go onto a project and you go, why are we doing it like this? And there's no document. I will tell you that there is a rule on rules on SSW rules, that is about do you have the seven important documents in a project which describe stuff to the business, to the developers, how to get up and running the F Five experience, the deployment experience, et cetera? Any other substantial questions there? Pierce? How do I understand all the technical jargon in the Agile pricing calculator? For example, DTUs and RSU. Oh, DTUs and RSU's. Well, I would tell you if you had of gone to that PDF and just flicked through and started just learning broadly about this stuff, all the lingo is there, and you pick it up as you go. And then we go to the pricing calculator. You've already seen all that, so it makes sense. But broadly, like, you saw the pricing. I know it kind of looked a bit hairy, but it is hairy on the older stuff. But those transaction units are for SQL Server. When you're talking Cosmos, they give you this data transmission unit, and the transmission unit is a blended cost between CPU IO memory. Like, they blend it together and charge you for that unit. Basically, when you see that, it's generally good because you're paying what you're using rather than just paying for a dedicated instance, which most companies, even big companies, don't generally need. Okay? Usage is the better way. It's always cheaper, as you saw in the calculator. So it's easy to make it wrong. Yes. Pierce? Well, what do you say to a client that doesn't want to commit to one year? Well, what you do is you anchor them at three years. You tell them, can you commit to three years? And they go, oh, three years. It's so much cheaper. We can also get a big discount for one year. Oh, yeah, I'll do one year, easy. Done. What's next? Last question. All done. Any other questions, guys? All right, have a good conference and tell the NDC organizer thank you for coming from Norway and giving us such a good conference, because it's good to be back and seeing you guys. I spoke at NDC on I spoke at NDC Oslo during lockdown. Aren't I clever? I sat there in front of a camera talking, and I didn't even know if anyone was watching. It was very sad. I sat there. It was at midnight. I had to stay up, so I had to do it on Norway friendly time, and it was very sad experience. This is awesome. I think Lockdown has made me much more grateful to hang around with geeks. We're all awesome. Okay?