On August 17, 2017 I presented on the topic of Azure: What to use When? To the Nashville Microsoft Azure Users Group. For those of you who know me you know that I founded this group four years ago with four members and, as of today, we are at 621. You also may know that I have been working with Azure since before it was called Azure. Although I would like to claim all of the credit for this recent growth I do have to credit the tremendous success of Azure over that time. 
In any case, this is a blog post about that presentation.
In IT things are clearly moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model where the focus is shifting from internal data center and hosted applications into the Cloud with its consumption based pricing model. The lure of pay-as-you go pricing is attractive; but it does carry with it some risk. If you choose the wrong applications to move into the cloud it could wind up costing you more than running them locally or at a hosting provider. It also requires increased discipline related to allocation and deallocation of Cloud resources.
In the presentation, we started off with a discussion of these considerations, and then explored the features supported by Microsoft Azure.
The presentation included an architectural overview of the Azure platform, its features and services. Since Azure is a very broad offering, we focused on the question of what the Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) features are, and when they should be used to solve specific business and technical problems.
This presentation was targeted at new Azure user as well as existing users that might not be conversant with all of its recent enhancements. We covered the entire platform with a comprehensive overview, not too deep but deep enough, to understand what to use when.
Agenda
• What is Azure?
• Why adopt it?
• Azure Resource Management
• Compute Options
• Azure Storage
• Databases
• Business Continuity (Backup and Disaster Recovery)
• Networking
• Security
• Virtual Desktop
• IoT & Analytics
• The Future of Azure
Bill Zack August 22nd, 2017
Cloudy In Nashville 