I am happy to announce that our Cloud Mechanix venture is bringing my custom-written Starting Azure Infrastructure course to Amsterdam on April 19-20.
This course is intended for IT professionals and developers that wish to start working with or improve their knowledge of Azure virtual machines. The course starts at the very beginning, explaining what Azure is (and isn’t), administrative concepts, and then works through the fundamentals of virtual machines before looking at more advanced topics such as security, high availability, storage engineering, backup, disaster recovery, management/alerting, and automation. The frequently updated content is focused on real world applications, with a focus on best practices, security, stability, control, and uptime. I’ve also added lots of useful links to additional reading & how-to’s, as well as my own tips and tricks.
Cloud Mechanix has gotten off to a great start. We quickly sold 11 of 10 (!) seats in London for Feb 22-23. The room we booked actually can hold 24 people in classroom format. So we expanded that to 20 seats, and 19 of those seats were booked by early January – one seat is still available. That gave me some confidence to expand our operations, especially with some of the market knowledge I have about Azure’s success in Europe. So the next stop is Amsterdam!
The Location
Why Amsterdam? Obviously, the Netherlands is a big economy, but Amsterdam is one of Europe’s hubs – you can get to Amsterdam with a direct & cheap flight from almost every major city in Europe, and it’s easily driven to from a large part of western Europe.
The venue is the Radisson Blu hotel at Schiphol. This hotel:
- Is on public transport.
- Has a car park, an we are covering 25% of the day rate.
- Is accessible by direct flights from large parts of Europe (and the World) thanks to being near Schiphol Airport – 866 NOK return from Oslo, 589 DKK from Copenhagen, £105 from London City, €150 from Rome.
- Is just 9 minutes by taxi.
- Provides a hotel shuttle from to/from the airport.
- If you wish to stay in the hotel, check for prices on 3rd party sites, for as low as €114 per night.
All travel & accommodation prices were searched for on Jan 20th for the dates of Apr 18-20 using Skyscanner and Trivago.
The Class Agenda
This course spans two days, running on April 19-20, 2018. The agenda is below.
Day 1 (09:30 – 17:00):
- Introducing Azure
- Tenants & subscriptions
- Azure administration
- Admin tools
- Intro to IaaS
- Storage
- Networking basics
Day 2 (09:30 – 16:00):
- Virtual machines
- Advanced networking
- Backup
- Disaster recovery
- JSON
- Diagnostics
- Monitoring & alerting
- Security Center
By the end of this course you should have new/additional knowledge to help you deploy business services using Azure virtual machines, with best practices on performance, security, and availability … in the real world.
Past Feedback
Here are some recent comments from courses that I have written and delivered:
“Aidan covers all the information and workarounds so that you know what not to do, rather than having to learn the hard way from your mistakes. Also happy to answer question and off-topic questions.”
“I found it very useful for my job. I especially liked that we covered aspects that weren’t in the course but provided useful context, e.g. applying learnings like MS Flow and MigAz. I learned a lot about networking – not just the tools but the aspects that the tools are applied to.”
“Excellent as always.”
Costs & Registration

You can read all about the course, venue, terms & conditions, and register here.
Further Dates & Private Training
Future dates will be announced in the EU. I’m investigating running training in the USA – accounting/tax is the challenge there! If you want private runs of this training, then please contact me.