Microsoft’s cloud is expanding at an remarkable rate. While Amazon AWS remains untouched the biggest public cloud provider, Azure seems to be focusing on small and midsize businesses. Additionally to that, MS Azure is the first cloud provider to receive joint approval from the European Union’s data protection authorities. And Microsoft was the first major cloud provider to adopt the new international standard for cloud privacy, ISO 27018. What does it mean to us? An uncomfortable question about security and sensitive data in the cloud be finally answered.
As mass adoption continues to accelerate, so to does the demand for cloud professionals. That demand is only set to accelerate with the inevitable End of Support for Windows Server 2003. Above all else, Microsoft’s creation of the MCSD: Azure Solutions Architect pathway is a defining indicator of demand. As is the way in IT, the tech comes first closely followed by the demand for those who can demonstrate the skills to best utilize the technology.
My Azure experience started in 2013, when I got a free one-month trial. One year later I became BizSpark member with 120 Eur monthly credits of Azure. I played a lot with websites, storage, databases and virtual machines. That’s where I put my first start-up Share2Taste. In 2015, my company started looking at Big Data and Hadoop vendors. Instead of quickly buying on-premise machine from Cloudera, we decided to build a proof of concept using available technologies in Azure. I started investigating Azure Big Data capabilities including different options of HDInsight, Data Factory and Machine Learning.
The services I have tried so far are just the tip of the iceberg. Azure is much broader than that and I can’t wait until I learn it all. There’s nothing like an additional motivator - scheduled the 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions exam.
Check out Chris Pietschmann’s post about study materials: http://pietschsoft.com/post/2015/06/06/How-I-passed-the-70-532-Developing-Microsoft-Azure-Solutions-certification-exam