Speaking for the Azure Kenya User Group on AKS

🌟I am excited to announce I will be speaking at an Exciting Event this week! 🌟I will be Speaking for the Azure Kenya User Group on AKS.

I will be covering “Chaos Studio with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)”. Here is the info for this user group meeting:


🗣️ Speaker: Steve Buchanan
🕒 Date & Time: February 22, 2024, at 8:15 PM EAT
📍 Register: https://www.meetup.com/azure-kenya-user-group/events/299210961


What to Expect:
A comprehensive exploration of Kubernetes, including architecture, best practices, practical demonstrations of AKS deployment and management, insights into optimizing containerized applications, and valuable networking opportunities with industry professionals.

Who should attend:
Whether you’re a developer, IT professional, Azure enthusiast, student, or learner, this event is designed for you.

Mark your calendars and RSVP now! See you there! 🚀

https://www.meetup.com/azure-kenya-user-group/events/299210961

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Career in Cloud Panel – Azure Community Enthusiasts UG

💡 Starting the new year with another event! We kicked things off with a “Career in Cloud Panel” hosted by the Azure Community Enthusiasts (ACE) user group. Based in the UK, ACE brings together passionate individuals diving into the world of Azure.

This user group aims to create a community of enthusiasts and professionals passionate about learning Microsoft Azure. Their meetups are both online AND in-person (London or Birmingham). ACE can be found on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/AzureCommUG

on LinkedIn here:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/azurecommug

and on Meetup.com here:

https://www.meetup.com/azure-community-enthusiasts

I had a blast being part of this Career in Cloud Panel with fellow panelist and long time friend Sam Ernskine (@samerskine) from the UK! Big shoutout to the hosts, friend and Microsoft MVP Kevin Greene (@kgreeneit) from Ireland, and the up and coming Nicholas Chang(@nick_cloudops), also an MVP from the UK. 👩‍💻👩🏿‍💻 It felt like a tech reunion! 🎉

We dove into some cool topics such as: what got us hooked on tech, the building blocks of tech skills throughout our careers, staying flexible by not tying the knot with one technology, whether cloud certifications are the golden ticket to landing a job, and more. Being on this panel was a total blast – a mix of fun and insightful vibes! 🌐

For those who missed it, you can catch the recording here:

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Twitter space – Navigating Platform Engineering Emerging Practices

To kick off the new year I am trying something new. For the 1st time I will be speaking on a Twitter space. This Twitter space is about Platform Engineering. It was hosted by cloud native and open source champion SAIM SAFDAR (@cloudnativeboy).

On this twitter space we talked about how to prepare your journey of learning and navigating the Platform Engineering (PE) landscape, my latest PE course, the PE guide from Microsoft and emerging best practices, and taking question’s from folks on the space.

We even had special guest Kubernetes and Platform Engineering expert Michael Levan (@TheNJDevOpsGuy) show up on the space! He shared some great insight on PE as well.

If you missed the space you can watch a recording of the space here:

https://twitter.com/cloudnativeboy/status/1742960501490081846

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Cloud Strategy Guide

✨️ I am thrilled to be one of the experts in Pluralsight‘s Cloud Transformation Strategy Guide! The strategy guide is a series of video sessions with various cloud experts. In the guide cloud experts at AWS, Microsoft, and more share their insights to help you build a cloud strategy, close the cloud skills gap, and upgrade your people and processes for the long haul.


It was an honor to join David Tucker in the ☁ “Exploring multicloud: Strategies, pitfalls, and real-world insights” session!


💡In this session we talked about how to thrive in a multicloud environment, develop a multicloud strategy, and navigate the challenges of managing multiple cloud providers. You can watch it here:

In the cloud strategy guide, you’ll learn how to use cloud technology to push your organization forward.

You can check out the full strategy guide here 👇:

https://www.pluralsight.com/resource-center/cloud-transformation-strategy-guide

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Platform Engineering at Microsoft

For a while, I have been hearing chatter around “What is Microsoft doing in the Platform Engineering space?” and “What is Microsoft’s stance on Platform Engineering?”. Well, today is the first day of Microsoft Ignite 2024 and I am happy to say Microsoft has officially released a Platform engineering guide. It can be found here: https://aka.ms/plat-eng-learn

It is broken down into the following sections: Overview, Concept, How-To Guide, and Architecture!

Working through this guide will help you discover how platform engineering teams can leverage technologies from Microsoft and other vendors/providers to craft highly personalized, optimized, and secure developer experiences.

This guide essentially gives you the scoop on Microsoft’s perspective when it comes to Platform Engineering. It can be used to help you along your Platform Engineering journey!

Shout out to the core team that built this! DevDiv: Mark Weitzel, Chuck Lantz, Russell Conard and AKS Engineering: Daniel Sol.

I was honored and happy to be one of the reviewers of this guide! Also, it was a nice surprise to find a reference to one of my past Azure Architecture center articles “CI/CD for AKS apps with GitHub Actions and GitFlow (GitOps)” in the Platform Engineering guide here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/platform-engineering/engineering-systems#enable-automatic-application-infrastructure-provisioning-during-continuous-delivery.

Released today also is a blog post from Amanda Silver Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division on Building Paved Paths in Platform Engineering. In this blog post, she talks about the new PE guide, what PE is, Microsoft’s learnings in PE, developer happiness, and Microsoft’s overall perspective on Platform Engineering. Check it out here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/building-paved-paths-the-journey-to-platform-engineering/

Another nice surprise today upon checking out Amanda’s Twitter profile is I discovered she is following me!

In addition to this new guide, there are a number of sessions at Ignite around Platform Engineering.

I will list them here with their links so you can watch them:

-Keynote by Amanda Silver: Productive and secure end-to-end developer experiences powered by AI

-Session by Mark Weitzel Principal Architect, DevDiv, and Dan Sol AKS Program Manager Breakout: Master Platform Engineering: Architecting Scalable & Resilient Systems

Discussion: Platform engineering Q&A with the Microsoft platform engineering team

Another cool thing launched today is Microsoft’s Platform Engineering Interest Group.

At Microsoft, we want to hear about your challenges with Platform Engineering and provide opportunities to connect with other teams, at Microsoft and at other companies, who are working together to build solutions in the Platform Engineering space. Joining this group will let you get exclusive early access to new tools and services from Microsoft. Sign up here:

https://aka.ms/plat-eng-signup

The last thing I want to mention in this post is a new open-source product from Microsoft named Radius. Radius is a single tool to describe, deploy, and manage your entire application. Radius is dedicated to addressing the platform engineering challenges associated with facilitating application deployments across on-premises infrastructure and major cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Radius is not an IDP. It’s an optional part of an IDP focused on the applications that provides infrastructure Recipes, simplifying the platform configurations like permissions, connection strings, and more to manage the application and its resources.

Radius empowers developers to comprehend their applications, recognizing that an application extends beyond Kubernetes alone. Radius assists developers in visualizing all the components that form their application. More about Radius here: radapp.io

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Learn Live: Building Resilient Intelligent AI Apps On AKS

This week I will be co-hosting another Microsoft Learn Live session. This one is “Learn Live: Building Resilient Intelligent Apps On AKS” in the Intelligent apps series. It is going to be action-packed full of several Microsoft technologies, AI, and AKS.

It is a part of Microsoft Reactor.

Microsoft Reactor provides events, training, and community resources to help startups, entrepreneurs, and developers. More on Reactor here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/reactor.

In this Learn Live, I will be co-hosting as Cloud Native Developer Advocate Paul Yu will be leading us through a workshop.

The workshop is an interactive tutorial, showing you how to automate testing for cloud-native intelligent apps using the Microsoft sample app the AKS Store, creating performance tests using Azure Load Testing, UI tests with Playwright, resilience tests with Azure Chaos Studio, and getting them running with GitHub Actions. The workshop can be found here: Creating Resilience for Intelligent Apps on AKS.

This Learn Live will be live streamed on Reactor on 26 October, 2023 | 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Central Time (US & Canada). Dont miss it!

Register here:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/reactor/events/20955/

—————–UPDATE————————

If you missed the session no worries. It was recorded. You can watch the recording of it here:

All of the recordings from this “Build Intelligent Apps on AKS” series can be found here:

https://azure.github.io/Cloud-Native/Build-IA/LearnLive/

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Learn How to Build a Web App with JavaScript

This week my 21st course published. In this course I take you on a journey to build a web app in JavaScript. JavaScript is the top web programming language today with 12+ million active developers and 97% of all websites using it. It is a great language used to build dynamic and interactive web apps given its flexibility, frameworks, and modules.

The course is titled “Building a Web Application with JavaScript“. It is a part of the new “JavaScript 2022 Path” on Pluralsight. This is my 2nd course in this path. My 1st course was “Building a REST API in JavaScript with Express“. Be sure to check out my REST API course as well!

JavaScript is a must-have skill in your toolbelt when building web apps. In this course, Building a Web Application with JavaScript, you’ll learn to build a dynamic and interactive web app.

First, you’ll plan and set up your web app project. Next, you’ll discover how to build the layout, style, and CRUD for your app with HTML and CSS. Finally, you’ll learn how to code your app’s dynamic functionality in JavaScript and publish the app when done.

When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge for planning, building, styling, and publishing a web app in JavaScript needed to go from an idea to a fully functioning web app in JavaScript.

Check out the “Building a Web Application with JavaScript“ course here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/javascript-building-web-application

I hope you find value in this new JavaScript course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses

Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow me:

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/steve-buchanan

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New AKS Community

There is some exciting news for AKS. Brian Redmond a PM with the AKS team has worked to get the External AKS Community up and running again. This community will have monthly meetings and recorded content.

The AKS Community Meetings will be live-streamed on YouTube and will cover interesting technical content on AKS related topics “Ask me anything” sessions and more. Here is a recording of the inaugural meeting for the AKS Community. https://www.youtube.com/live/1_ukekQEzBw?feature=share&t=32

If you miss the old ‘AKS Office Hours’, you definitely need to check out this new AKS community. Looking forward to seeing this community grow!

To make sure you’re always in the loop and never miss a beat, follow the official PG on various social media sites. Stay informed about upcoming meetings, exclusive content drops, and other exciting AKS-related news: 

Twitter – https://twitter.com/theakscommunity 
YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/@theakscommunity 
Threads – https://www.threads.net/@theakscommunity 
Github – https://github.com/theakscommunity/aks-community-meetings

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Azure Friday: Exploring Automated Deployments for AKS with Steve Buchanan and Scott Hanselman

Hey everyone, today I’m super excited to tell you about a recent episode of Azure Friday that I was lucky enough to be a guest on.

Azure Friday is a weekly video series hosted by the legendary Scott Hanselman, where he interviews experts and developers on various Azure-related topics. In this episode, we talked about Automated Deployments for AKS, a new feature that makes it super easy to deploy your apps to Azure Kubernetes Service.

If you’re not familiar with AKS, it’s a managed Kubernetes service that lets you run containerized applications on Azure without having to worry about the complexity of managing the cluster. It’s a great way to scale your apps and take advantage of the benefits of Kubernetes, such as high availability, load balancing, and service discovery.

But what if you’re not familiar with containers or Kubernetes? What if you just have some code in a GitHub repo and you want to run it on AKS? That’s where Automated Deployments for AKS come in. It’s a feature that simplifies the Kubernetes development process by taking care of the tedious work of containerization for you. It uses a tool called Draft, which automatically detects the language and framework of your app, creates a Dockerfile and a Helm chart for you, builds and pushes the image to Azure Container Registry, and deploys the app to AKS. All with just a few clicks in the Azure Portal.

Sounds amazing, right? Well, that’s what I wanted to show Scott in this episode. I had an app hosted in a GitHub repo that I wanted to run on AKS. The app was a simple web app that displayed some data from a database. I had already created a few resources in Azure, such as a resource group, an Azure Container Registry, and an AKS cluster. All I needed to do was use Automated Deployments for AKS to get this app from code to running on a cluster.

So how did it go? Well, you’ll have to watch the episode to find out. But spoiler alert: it was super easy and fast. In just a few commands, I went from code to an app running on AKS. Scott was impressed and so was I. We had a great time chatting about how Automated Deployments for AKS works under the hood, some of the benefits and limitations of using it, and how it can help developers get started with containers and Kubernetes.

Check out the episode here:

https://aka.ms/azfr/749

With Automated Deployments, Microsoft is opening up new avenues for developers to embrace the power of containers and AKS, enabling them to effortlessly build scalable and robust applications.

If you’re interested in learning more about Automated Deployments for AKS, you can check out the documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/automated-deployments. It’s available today in public preview, so you can try it out for yourself and see how easy it is to run your apps on AKS.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoy this episode of Azure Friday as much as I did. It was an honor and a pleasure to be a guest on Scott’s show and talk about one of my favorite topics: Azure Kubernetes Service. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me on Twitter at @Buchatech. Thanks for reading and happy coding!

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Pluralsight Spotlight: Steve Buchanan on Upskilling, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud, & Impostor Syndrome

I recently had the honor to film an episode of Spotlight at the Pluralsight headquarters.

It was an awesome experience and fun talking with Adam Gunn.

In the episode, we talked about:

Tech skills you need to master for the future, including hybrid and multi-cloud, Kubernetes, AI, and more. We also touched on how I landed in tech and how to overcome impostor syndrome to become a successful professional.

You can check out the episode here:

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