Delivering My First “Cloud Mechanix” Azure Training Course Today

I’m in London right now, preparing to deliver my first Azure training course by my very own company (co-owned/run with my wife, Nicole), Cloud Mechanix. I actually wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it for release, because I predicted that I’d be busy.

The class is sold out, 20 people from around the world are attending, from the UK, continental Europe, and from as far away as Canada! I’m blown away that our first course sold like this. I have 2 days to teach as much Azure infrastructure as I can. The goal is to give people the foundations and best practices for building, securing, managing, and protecting stable and well performing systems in the cloud. There’s lots of tips in the class, and I’ve build a set of hands-on exercises so there’s a practical side to the theory – the attendees will build a sample reference architecture for VM-based solution.

I can’t teach everything in two days, but I can teach what you need to know, so learning more is easy. As I’ve found with a different Azure VM class that I developed & teach for my employer in Dublin, this class is a foundation for Azure. Once you know this material, you have the bits to move on to other hybrid or PaaS-based solutions in Microsoft’s cloud.

I’m so excited! A certain friend of mine who retired recently has been telling me to do this for the last 5 years. Last year, Nicole told me I needed to do this. I made the decision to start writing the course. If I was up early with our youngest daughter, I’d sit down in the office once she fell back asleep and I’d write. Or when I brought my eldest daughter to gymnastics class, I’d wait outside in the car, writing. Pretty much every free moment of the last month went into updating the content – and I’ll probably still do an update or two (on managed disks) early on Thursday morning. So here I am (or will be) in London, counting down the minutes until the attendees walk in the door, we make introductions, and we sit down to start a learning experience together.

London is sold out, but we have another class running in Amsterdam on April 19-20. The venue is a hotel near Schiphol airport, making it very easy to get to – it’s not too central in Amsterdam, and Schiphol is one of the best connected airports in Europe. Half of the seats are already gone so, if you are interested, you will need to move quick.