As some of you may know I am a Cloud Solutions Architect specializing in Microsoft Azure here in Nashville.

That is my “day-job”. What some of you may not know is that I am also the Founder and current President of the Nashville Microsoft Azure Users Group. This group has grown from 4 members to over 900 in the space of five years. Although I would like to claim credit for that the meteoric rise of Azure has had a lot to do with it.

In the group we try to mix up the technical level of our presentations, having introductory talks for those new to Azure and deep-dives for the more experienced members of the group.

In May we did an introductory Azure Platform Technical Overview.

In June we had Microsoft MVP and Pluralsight author Tim Warner presenting an Azure Networking Deep-Dive.

At the July meeting we did an updated version of the May talk titled New to Azure for those new to the platform.

In August we will have Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect Brett Hacker presenting an Azure Active Directory Deep Dive.

If you are interested in our meeting schedule, and/or to find out more about the group, we invite you to visit the group’s MeetUp site.

What follows is a summary of our July meeting: New to Azure.

As usual we started our meeting with ½ hour of networking and refreshments. After that we presented a brief presentation about the group for new members. In addition to covering the Mission and Structure of the group, the Board of Directors, and our Sponsors we next covered recent Azure announcements that we felt were extremely important. (Obviously we could not cover all of the Azure announcements since last month; since that would take the whole meeting, or more. )

Those announcements were:

• Microsoft acquiring GitHub
• Azure Virtual WAN and Azure Firewall (Preview)
• Soft Delete for Azure Storage Blobs (Preview)
• Blob Storage Lifecycle (Preview)
• Tamper-proof Azure Immutable Blob Storage services (Preview)
• Azure Backup for SQL Server (Preview)
• Disaster Recovery for IaaS VMs without requiring additional infrastructure (Preview)
• Security Center protection of Azure, On-Premises and Hybrid resources
• Azure File Sync (Preview)
• SQL Server 2008/2008R2 Free Extended Security Updates in Azure

Following that, we launched into the main topic, presenting a fairly complete overview of Azure for new members. That presentation outline is listed in detail here and the presentation slides can be downloaded from here.

If you are located in the Nashville Area, or any of the surrounding areas, we invite to you become a member of the group and to attend future meetings. All are welcome, and meetings are always free.

Bill Zack, President

The Nashville Microsoft Azure Users Group