Going to VMworld!

Last minute decision – waited for stars to come together… But they never did… 

Anyway – going to VMworld for Sunday (August 27, 2017) - Tuesday (August 29, 2017) and look forward to re-connect to as many folks as possible – please reach out to me if you’re going to be there. 

Please ping me via LinkedIn or VMworld application if you'd like to meet!

On another note – my last post on fast route of learningGCP, Kubernetes and Docker just went live on Packet Pusher’s community blog!

My new blog on PacketPusher's web-site

After working on my own projects for a couple of months - I started helping some of my friends in exchange for income.... 

• I'm doing consulting for a manufacturing company that I'm very familiar with and they suddenly had their IT Director resigned. They need my help to find a new head of IT - not an easy task - but it's definitely great opportunity to meet new people and see why IT Execs want to change and how different skillets can be presented during interviews
• Also another sudden resignation of IT Security analyst at one of Canadian universities provided me with a part-time opportunity to get up to speed with the most recent tools, attack patters and mitigation techniques. 

Doing all these things put me out of "retired" category to "semi-retired" pool. In meantime I'm still working on my own public cloud research projects, considering to attend a couple of upcoming conferences and workshops. And also looking for a dream job that needs to focus on exciting technology not on past IT which is everywhere and touching it doesn't excite me at all.

While I keep posting here for my research articles there is a new venue - I'm glad to announce that

Packet Pushers have accepted my application as community blogger that I hope provides be with bigger audience and most importantly feedback on the industry landscape.

My first blog is published here and inspired my work on Security tools with my new client.

Learning Azure and Office 365

Looking at the customer base demand in terms what public cloud seems to be the more popular – it becomes obvious that Microsoft Enterprise Agreement include a lot of cloud credits and allow straightforward decision on public cloud technology to be used by Microsoft's customers base.

Most time of the last week and a little bit this week I was getting up to speed with Microsoft Public Cloud Offerings.

Here is the summary of the resources I used so far:

•       Interactive overview of Azure Datacenter – a bit too much marketing but you can find number of valuable points around building datacenter 
•       If you’d like to get certified on Office 365 or/and Azure – the details of certification exams required can be found here
•           Significant number of free interactive classes can be found here 
•           Personally I took “Microsoft Azure for AWS Experts” (AZURE213x) which has awesome 5 series videos that can be accessed directly from MS Blog 
•          There is a lot of paid classes offered however "99995MOD: First Look Clinic: Microsoft Azure (On Demand)" is offered for free and a little bit above Level 100 (Sometime 200-300) which makes it really useful – allow around 8 hours to complete it. 
•          I started looking at Office 365 – which seems to be the most widely implemented part of Azure – there is number of video training here (a bit outdated but still relevant) on Virtual Academy (but the instructors are brilliant!)
•          Also for Enterprises – you can try Office 365for free 
•      Azure offers $250 Credit, however you have 30 days to spend it…. 

Hopefully it’s helpful list of resources. On another note I’m continue enjoying summer and working part time on short-term contract as a Principal Security Consultant for one of Vancouver local businesses. I expect it will help me with sharpening my Python scripting skills as SEIM, IDS/IPS and other technologies that I’ve not touched recently.