Iain Foulds on Learning Azure - Episode 78

Today’s guest is Iain Foulds — a Senior Content Developer at Microsoft, focused on Azure technologies. He has spent more than a decade in the field as an engineer building and running virtualization environments, including Cloud solutions. Since 2014 at Microsoft, Iain has been supporting and enabling customers to successfully run workloads in Azure. He is also the author of the book, Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, which gets readers up and running quickly by teaching them the most important tasks and concepts and tasks about Azure in 21 practical bite-sized lessons.   In this episode, Iain takes listeners through the basics of learning Azure and some of the fantastic content in his book, Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, which is now on its second edition. Iain highlights some of the key decision points, clears up common misunderstandings, gives actionable tips, and provides further recommendations on where to learn more. Tune in to get up to date on learning Azure!   Topics of Discussion: [:38] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes. [:47] About today’s guest, Iain Foulds. [1:29] Jeffrey welcomes Iain to the podcast! [1:39] Iain speaks about his career journey and how he has ended up in his current role at Microsoft. [3:23] Iain speaks about the genesis of his book, Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, and gives an overview of what it covers. [5:14] Part 4 of Iain’s book is titled “The Cool Stuff” — what is the cool stuff? [6:41] Under Part 4, one of the chapters is on Azure automation. What are the cliff notes? [8:35] Iain gives the taxonomy of the terms playbook and runbook, and explains how they relate to each other. [16:41] Iain speaks about the decision points on where to store a credential in relation to securing information with Azure Key Vault. [19:01] Iain gives his thought process on the team workflow of Azure Key Vault vs. things like LastPass. [20:32] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast’s sponsor: Clear Measure. [20:58] Jeffrey gives some quick announcements. [22:47] Iain clears up some common misunderstandings and misconceptions about Azure networking basics. [25:46] How does Iain advise people on making decisions around resource governance? [28:44] Are there downsides to the side of the spectrum where you have a lot of subscriptions but only one or two resource groups per subscription? [30:25] Iain speaks about the changes that are coming to the second edition of his book, Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches! [31:49] Iain speaks about the content he develops at Microsoft. [33:05] Iain gives his recommendations on further learning about Azure. [34:36] About the early access program for his book on Manning Publications. [36:01] Does Iain have any go-to methods or recommendations for clearing out his subscriptions? [38:23] Jeffrey thanks Iain for joining this week’s episode!   Mentioned in this Episode: Azure DevOps Clear Measure (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook! bit.ly/dotnetdevopsbookforcommunity — Visit to get your hands on two free books to give away at conferences or events! Jeffrey Palermo’s Youtube Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! [email protected] — Email Jeffrey for a free 30-point DevOps inspection (regularly priced at $5000!) — Spaces are limited! Iain Foulds’ Twitter @Fouldsy Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, by Iain Foulds Azure Key Vault LastPassDocs.Microsoft.com  Microsoft Learn   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.