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Join us on July 31 with Sam Cogan on Rockin' The Code World with dotNetDave - a weekly show to learn & live Q&A on .NET and other programming technologies.
AGENDA
• Introduction
• Azure
• Infrastructure as Code (ARM, Bicep, Terraform Pulumi)
• DevOps in the cloud
• Wrap up
GUEST SPEAKER
Sam Cogan is a Solution Architect and a Microsoft Azure MVP focused on delivering applications into the cloud using IaaS, PaaS, Serverless, Containers, and Kubernetes.
Sam is particularly focused on automation and DevOps in the cloud, including Infrastructure as Code, configuration.
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0:00
Thank you
0:29
Thank you
0:59
Thank you
1:29
Thank you
1:59
Welcome, geeks, to another episode of Rockin' the Code World with Donet Dave
2:09
I'm David McCarter, a.k.a. Donet Dave, and I'm glad you're here. Sorry, we had to take a sick day last Saturday
2:18
I wasn't doing well, and I had to take the day off doing the show at the last minute
2:25
So I apologize for that, but we're back. and it seems like it's been a long time for me at least
2:31
But anyway, I'm glad you're here and I have a great show today
2:36
I have Sam Kogan who I've been communicating with back and forth through email for years now
2:42
but this is the first time I'm going to be able to talk to him in person virtually and I'm excited about that
2:51
And he's a solution architect at Microsoft Azure MVP, which is Azure MVP is one of the things I want to get into someday
2:58
If I can find a company that uses Azure, it would really help out
3:03
But anyway, that's the way it is in Southern California. Most people use AWS, not Azure
3:09
So, oh, well. So anyway, let's get going. You know, unfortunately, I just talked to Simon and, you know
3:19
the COVID is still not going well in India. Simon told me that in his city of 100,000 people
3:28
They only get like 100 vaccinations a day And that is just not sustainable
3:34
It's going to take decades for everybody in India to get vaccinated And so I hope you will join me in my challenge
3:42
I started a couple months ago Please go to that link and donate
3:47
Or at least match my donation of $100 So all the developers in the world
3:52
except for India, of course, please go to this link and donate $100 or more and tweet about it
3:59
Let me know if you've done that. We can afford it here in other countries like Europe and America
4:06
and we can afford $100. It's not hard for a software engineer to afford that. So please
4:13
please meet my challenge so we can help the people in India. They're having, of course
4:17
a really bad time. You know, we're having a, we're going into another bad time here in America
4:23
because of the Delta variant. And some cities are already shutting down again. So those of you in
4:30
America, at least, you know, if you haven't got your shot, please get your shot so we can kind of
4:36
get back to normal. Because, you know, people, you know, we all live in the same planet. And unless
4:42
this whole planet gets to herd immunity, we're not going to get over this. And so just go get
4:48
the shot. You're pretty much guaranteed not to be seriously going to the hospital under a
4:57
ventilator and almost, almost guaranteed you won't die from COVID. So I think that outweighs any
5:06
you know, any hesitation on taking the vaccine, of course. Of course, I'm not talking about people
5:15
who have serious medical issues, but everybody else, we can get it. So please go get it
5:21
If you're in India, of course, try to get it as soon as you can. I'm not sure how all that works
5:26
there. But please, please get your vaccination, no matter where you are in the world, as soon
5:31
you can get it so we can get over this. And I want to go back to concerts
5:35
That's what I want to do. And so we all have to fix this together
5:41
So please, please donate at least $100 or more to this fund
5:44
so we can help people in India. I want to plug the Azure Summit
5:51
which just went to 10 straight days of conference. I can't believe there's actual conference that's 10 days long
5:59
I don't know how Simon my producer is going to get through those 10 days
6:05
but anyway it's going to be a great time they've announced some of the speakers
6:10
and they're some of the first speakers that have been announced I'm up there I think I'm going to be doing a panel
6:17
I'm not sure what else but we're going to have a lot of great speakers speaking at this conference so I hope you will join us
6:24
I'll definitely be watching for sure because Azure for me is the future of computing
6:30
And so I want to learn as much as I can. I want to plug again
6:38
I'm going to plug this every week until my domain name expires in October
6:43
Is another effort I've been doing to help the kids in India in the slums
6:48
is I'm trying to create a cookbook of food, not code recipes, but food recipes
6:54
because some of us, some geeks out there, I know you are. Well, I know you are if you're one of my friends
7:01
I know you can cook. And so I know you have recipes you can submit to this book
7:07
So please go to helloworldcookbook.com, submit your food recipe. I don't care what kind of food it can be for drinks too
7:14
It doesn't matter to me. I need recipes for the book so I can release this
7:19
If I get enough recipes by October, I can put the book together
7:24
and try to get it out at least by the beginning of next year I wanted it to get out the beginning of this year but that didn happen And this isn gonna happen unless I get your support in this
7:36
I don't think I've gotten a recipe since April. So as soon as the show's over
7:42
please go to helloworldcookbook.com and submit your food recipe. I will appreciate it
7:48
but most of all the kids in the slums in Delhi, India will appreciate it even more
7:54
and that's who I'm trying to support because 100% of the proceeds of this
7:59
goes to the voice of slum in India and if you don't cook, you can still help out
8:05
I need editors, I need graphic artists and I need unit testers to test the food
8:10
because I eat gluten-free I can't test all the recipes myself so I need other people to test the recipes for me
8:17
so please go to, you can sign up to do any of that
8:21
on the helloworldcookbook.com So I hope you'll do that. I really want to take a moment and thank my follower, Shusmita
8:37
I probably mispronounced your name. If you're on the call, I'm really sorry
8:43
Most of you know I don't pronounce names very well. But a number of months ago, she painted me this painting
8:51
which finally got here because we had lots of shipping delays because of COVID in India
8:57
And thankfully, Simon was able to step in and get this shipped to me
9:02
And she did this custom painting of me and a really nice thank you note in the package too
9:13
And I just want to say to her, thank you so much for doing this
9:16
You're an awesome artist. And this, this, you don't know how much this means to me that some one of my followers took time out of their day or days to to paint a painting for me. And I really, really appreciate it. And, and so I've got to say thank you from my heart to yours. That this, this is really cool. And if any of you follow me, especially on Facebook, she also sends me songs
9:46
like on my birthday and holidays and things like that. She sings and she sends to me through Facebook
9:53
And that too really, really makes me feel good. I have followers out there that I guess like me
10:01
So thanks again. And if you go to my personal website, I'm actually selling a painting of hers on top of this one
10:12
to help raise money for her and her family. So if you go to davidmccarter.net, you can go and purchase that painting
10:20
So thanks again. I could spend 10 more minutes thanking you, but I think you get the point
10:27
And I hope you're online and watching right now, because I told her I was going to talk about it at the beginning of the show
10:36
I'm also releasing a bunch of articles about code performance on my blog, too
10:42
So if you go to that URL right there, I'm actually posting a lot of articles
10:47
from my Code Performance book. And I'm working on new information too right now
10:54
I'm going to publish before the next version of the book comes out. So if you want the latest Code Performance information
11:02
that I'm doing for .NET 5 and .NET 6, I hope you'll check out this site
11:06
Right now, the site mostly focuses on .NET Framework and .NET Core, but the new articles will all focus on .NET 5 and .NET 6 because that's really all I use nowadays
11:19
So please go there, and I appreciate it. And I'm also looking for ideas on what do you want me to talk about on C Sharp Corner
11:29
So do you have a burning question or a burning thing you need to know about .NET or programming or speaking or interviewing
11:38
You know, all the things that, you know, I seem to write about. Please, please, please email me at rocketecodeworld at csharpcorner.com
11:47
I checked today. I still, since Simon set this email up, I've only gotten one email
11:52
So come on. Send me an email. Let me know what you want me to write next
11:58
I'm already writing an article I'm going to release in September, but I need some more ideas
12:03
I've kind of run out currently because I haven't been working. So anyway, please send me your ideas
12:11
All right. With that, I want to introduce Sam Kogan. Sam is a solution architect at Microsoft Azure MVP focused on delivering applications in the cloud using IAS, PAS, serverless containers, and Kubernetes
12:25
Sam is primarily focused on automation and DevOps in the cloud, including infrastructure as code, configuration management, automation tooling, scripting, and CICD tooling
12:37
Welcome, Sam. Hi, David. Hey, how's it going? It's good, thanks. Good
12:44
And I want to say publicly, thanks so much for helping me with those articles you did a couple of years ago
12:50
So I really appreciate, you know, fellow MVP, you know, heeding the call and helping me, you know, understand some things when I was kind of learning some of the cloud stuff on Azure
13:05
So thanks. Thanks for that. No problem. Always happy to help. So how are you doing
13:10
Yeah, not too bad. Thanks. Not too bad. Yeah. Where do you live
13:14
So I'm in the UK. I'm on the east coast of the UK. Oh, really? So it's quite nice weather at the minute, having a nice summer
13:20
So it's good. Yeah. I think we're going to have an okay day here
13:26
Our weather's been really weird lately. One day it's like hot and muggy, which it's probably going to get hot and muggy today
13:33
And then the next day it's kind of cold. Fortunately, it doesn't get too hot here because we don't have any air conditioning
13:42
Yeah. Yeah. I don't either where I live because I live about a mile from the beach
13:45
and so you know the this whole place was built without air conditioning so yeah i don't have
13:51
any either so um and and i hardly even need my heating either so i my my utility bill is so low
13:59
i i don't tell people anymore because they get all pissed off at me uh because even people that
14:06
live five miles inland for me to have a much higher bill because the weather is vastly different
14:11
and five miles away from here. So yeah, so I don't tell people how low my bill is anymore
14:20
So we have like three topics to talk about, Azure infrastructure as code and DevOps in the cloud
14:30
While I'm thinking about it, because I usually forget everybody, if you have a question for an Azure expert
14:35
please put them in the chat so we can get them answered. But which one of those topics
14:39
you want to start off with first? Well, let's start with a bigger one. Let's start with Azure. Yeah. Okay. So what's going on in your world with Azure right now
14:48
Lots of things. So yeah, so my day job is working with Azure as well as all the community stuff I do
14:53
So you know I spend a lot of time in the cloud particularly with Microsoft cloud and working with that So yeah it my day job It an interesting world and it shifted quite a lot over the last probably two or three years
15:05
So when I first started working with Azure, it was all about IaaS. It was all about virtual machines and storage and networking
15:11
and that's what people were doing, and lifted shifts, taking your on-prem stuff and just running it in a VM in the cloud
15:17
which is not very exciting stuff, but it was the best of those days
15:22
but now I've certainly in my day job I don't spend really very much time at all working with
15:28
EMs anymore it's all it's all paths it's all web apps functions serverless kubernetes containers
15:34
all those sort of things so it's been really interesting to see sort of the shift over the
15:39
last few years into you know moving away from from IaaS which you know I think is it's a good
15:44
thing IaaS is expensive and it's not it's not really using the cloud to its full its full
15:49
advantage. So yeah, it's been an interesting couple of years. But yeah, I work with Azure
15:55
every day. I really enjoy it. I do have the occasional opportunity to work with other
15:59
clouds like AWS. But my personal preference is to work with Azure
16:04
Yeah, yeah. I feel the same way. And actually, I'm kind of glad you said the thing about
16:09
VMs because in my new code rules at the end of the show, I actually talk about that a little
16:14
bit about, you know, the team I previously worked with, the DevOps team, thought that VMs was cloud
16:22
computing. And I kept telling them, no, it's not. Yeah. And it's a fairly common thought is, you
16:29
know, people are going to migrate to the cloud and it's just moving to a VM. And all you're getting
16:33
really is, you know, you get some benefit from it. You're no longer having to deal with hardware
16:38
which is good. But you're not really taking advantage of the real benefits of cloud, you know
16:43
dynamic scaling, all the removing, you still have to patch those VMs
16:49
It's still your job to look after all that. If you can move the thinking away from VMs and move to more managed services
16:56
you gain a lot of benefits by not having to deal with all that thing, all the patching and all the maintenance and security and all that sort of stuff
17:02
along with being able to take advantage of some of the more dynamic features
17:08
Yeah, yeah. To me, that's the real power of the cloud is those services
17:13
right? Microservices and the queues and the eventing stuff and things like that. That's the
17:18
cloud, right? VMs aren't really a cloud. We've had VMs for a long time, right? It's not really
17:25
the cloud. Yeah, they're in the cloud, but that's not the cloud, really
17:30
No, no. And it can be a good starting place if you need to get out your data centers, but
17:34
if you can, you know, if you can redesign your applications to work natively with cloud services
17:40
that's the best way to go. Yeah. And, and especially if you're using VMs, you're
17:45
you're almost instantly slowing your apps down anyway, right? It's, you know, all the benchmarking
17:50
I've done between, you know, my, my laptop here and, and, you know, a beefy VM in the cloud
17:57
my laptop pretty much beats it all the time, right? Because it's, it's hardware. It's not
18:02
you know, running with a bunch of other VMs at the same time. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're
18:05
you're sharing those VMs. I mean, you're, you're sharing it on the, on the past services as well
18:09
but they're more designed for it. So yeah, there's a lot of benefits
18:13
And even moving, just moving from VMs to perhaps containers is a big benefit
18:18
even if you don't want to natively use the Azure services out of the box
18:22
And some people don't. Some people want to make sure they've got portability to move between clouds
18:26
or if something goes wrong, they can change. So containers is also a very good place to start
18:31
where you can migrate your apps into containers, and then you can run them in any cloud
18:35
or on-prem, or wherever you want them. So that can be a good stepping stone as well
18:39
Yeah. And theoretically, I mean, you know, every project's different, you know, as we all know
18:45
And, you know, theoretically, you know, it could be cheaper moving off of VMs, right
18:49
And just using services because then you only get charged really for actual usage
18:55
You're not being charged for a VM just sitting there, you know, and running all the time
19:00
Absolutely. I mean, one of the biggest benefits I see is when you talk about disaster recovery environments
19:07
If you're running an application, you need to be able to fail over to another region fairly quickly
19:12
If you're on VMs, you're often going to basically need to have a secondary region running and pay for those VMs
19:17
You might be able to make it a bit smaller. You might be able to use some things like some of the backup services
19:22
in Azure to automate some of that. But ultimately, you're going to be paying for VMs that are doing very little or nothing
19:28
Whereas if you can move to more PaaS services, then a lot of the time in a single region
19:33
Microsoft are going to take care of that for you. And even if you want multi-region DR, you can do a lot more with being able to scale that up once you have a disaster rather than having to have it running all the time
19:43
So that can be a really big cost save. But people, you know, I know people who are running on-prem who have hundreds of machines running for a DR environment that never gets used
19:51
Yeah. And that's, you know, that reminds me of the company I worked at about 10 years ago because, you know, 10 years ago, you know, they were, you know, on-premise, of course
20:00
And I think when I started there late in the late 2000s, you know, when I went down and I toured the server room, right, which is the typical big server room, you know, that we've all seen in pictures before
20:16
I believe the person told me that they were paying just electricity a month
20:21
They were paying like $250,000 a month just electricity. Right. And those machines, you know, at night weren't really being used, right
20:32
Because our, you know, our customers really only work during the workday in America and Canada
20:38
So there was a huge chunk of the day they weren't really being used
20:42
Yeah, we were doing backups and, you know, maybe moving data around and stuff like that
20:47
But, you know, that certainly wasn't at the usage we see during the daytime
20:50
And you still pay for all those things to run, which you don't do in the cloud, right
20:55
Well, if you don't use VMs in the cloud, then you don't get charged for those things
20:59
Yeah. And even with VMs, you can turn off VMs in the cloud and reduce your costs a bit
21:03
You're still paying for storage and things, but you can at least scale VM, turn them off
21:09
or even use scale sets and scale them up and down a bit more dynamically, particularly if you've got workloads where maybe part of the year you're a lot busier than others or those sort of things
21:19
Yeah. And when Azure first started getting more popular, I actually moved, especially because of the machine I had at the time, not my Surface I have now, but I had a Surface book or whatever they were called, the little ones, the Surface tablet
21:35
And so what I did is I moved all my programming into the cloud
21:38
I just made VMs. And, you know, I've been doing that long before the cloud was around
21:43
I have different VMs I would start up with, you know, on a local drive. and but that works really well especially because you know if your machine crashes you just go back
21:54
to a backup of your vm and you're back up and running in 30 minutes not half a day right but
22:00
but even you know that the the drag on the vms was too much for me and i had to go back to hardware
22:06
at least for programming right yes especially now with visual studio being so freaking slow most
22:13
the time, you know, it's, it's, it's, I'm not going to put it on a VM, you know, and, and
22:18
unfortunately, I'm, well, fortunately, I'm starting a new contract on Monday. And, and
22:23
unfortunately that company is makes all the developers use use VM So it it going to be be challenging But anyway I don want to talk too much about VMs
22:35
So anybody have any questions? No questions yet. So don't forget to submit your questions to Adam
22:44
We've got a Microsoft MVP, Azure MVP here. So make sure you ask your questions about Azure
22:51
And maybe get you thinking about the Azure Summit next month. Well, almost next month
22:56
It'll be next month tomorrow. So let's talk a little bit about infrastructure as code
23:05
So what are you doing on that front these days? Yeah, so this is quite a big passion of mine
23:09
And for anyone who doesn't know what it is, infrastructure as code is effectively defining your infrastructure as code
23:16
rather than going into the Azure portal or whatever and manually creating VMs and then spinning those up
23:22
But yeah, that works. but what you'll find is you'll create all your resources using the portal and you'll come along
23:27
and say okay well i need to spin up a production environment now it needs to be the same but i
23:32
don't remember what i did i don't know how to how to recreate it um so infrastructure as code is the
23:36
ability to sort of define what you want in a in a preset you know set of set of code that is going
23:42
to be deployed the same every time you do it um and allows you to you know check that into version
23:46
control and you know test it and and do all sorts of you know things you do with normal code with
23:51
infrastructure um and it's it's been around for a long time but it's really come to fruition with
23:56
the cloud because obviously people are not facing you know using hardware anymore it's all it's all
24:01
software in the cloud um and so yeah i'm a big advocate of people using infrastructure as code
24:06
to define their cloud infrastructure even if it's only you know a very small amount of you know maybe
24:10
it's a web app and a database there's still some benefits in using that because you you know you
24:15
get you get your stuff deployed in a standard way if you need to make changes to it you can you can
24:19
make a small change to your code, rerun it, and everything gets updated, and you've got that documented as part of your code
24:25
So when you're working with Azure, there are actually quite a few options with using infrastructure as code
24:30
There's a few different technologies. So Microsoft have sort of their native infrastructure as code tool
24:36
that they develop, and actually now there's two of them. So originally, when Azure came out
24:41
there were these things called ARM templates, so Azure Resource Manager templates, where you can define your code as kind of a JSON
24:49
like language where you can you can use that to define your code that's been around for a good
24:55
four or five years now and it's you know reasonably popular but it's always had a sort of
25:01
it's always been quite hard to get started when if you're coming to it for the first time
25:06
and the language isn't particularly accessible it's it can take a bit of work and they're not
25:10
the easiest things to read with mountains of json just yeah so probably about six months or so
25:17
Microsoft released another language, a language called Bicep, which is a pun on the word arm
25:24
So Bicep is a language that sits on top of Arm templates and provides a much more readable
25:30
and less, you know, there's less of the curly braces and everything else you get with Jason
25:36
So it's a lot easier to read and a lot easier to do more complex things with
25:42
So if you want to use sort of the native built-in tooling, then Bicep is probably the way to go today
25:47
But you've also got a few third-party tools. And there's a few of them, but the big tool
25:53
the ones at least I've spent most of the time working with, is either Terraform, which you've probably heard of
25:58
and then there's a newer one, but one I'm quite a big fan of, which is one called Pulumi
26:03
And these are third-party tools for doing infrastructure as code, and they work for Azure
26:09
But one of the big benefits of using the third-party ones is they have many different providers
26:13
So they can work with other clouds, they can work with AWS, GCP, but also work with Kubernetes, work with things like Cloud Flare
26:23
as an example, or GitHub to deploy all those sort of things. So those third-party tools, if you're going to need to deploy resources
26:30
beyond just using Azure, they can be a really useful tool. And particularly perhaps for people on this call
26:39
one of the big benefits of Pulumi is that you can actually write
26:43
your infrastructure as code using real programming languages. So you can use C-sharp and you can use Node and Go and Python and F-sharp if you really want to
26:55
So particularly for developers, and so this is one of the tools sort of I've been using for the last six months to a year
27:02
Quite a lot is this Pulumi tool. Terraform is more of a sort of domain-specific language, a bit more like ARM templates
27:11
It's not a programming language per se. It's a DSL. It's their own custom one
27:16
And then there are a few other languages out there. There's one called Pharma, which is actually written in F-sharp
27:22
but it's more of a declarative approach as well. So lots of different options
27:28
Any of them will work. But, yeah, if you're going to start deploying stuff into the cloud
27:33
and doing it regularly and doing dev and production environments and doing updates and all that sort of stuff
27:41
doing that in code is a really big benefit, I think. And it's something, you know, you get started with early
27:49
You can, you know, you can, you can start with a small thing, you know, maybe take one of your, one of your projects and just look at, you know
27:56
turning that infrastructure into code. You can take, usually take the existing infrastructure and sort of migrate it into code
28:03
But yeah, it's a really, really good way to get started is to do that. And you'll find, you know, at least I did
28:09
Once you started doing a few of them, you want to put everything in there because it's so much easier than having to
28:13
having to do it manually. um and you can version it exactly yeah i mean that is one of the big things you can i mean i talk to
28:21
a lot so it's interesting when i talk to people i work with developers who are trying to pick up
28:26
some of this and then i work with it pros who are trying to pick up some of this as well it's a different it's a different angle the it pros are fine with the infrastructure piece but the code bit
28:33
yeah it's quite new to them and so introducing them to things like git and uh you know cicd and
28:38
all those sort of things is an interesting one whereas with the developers it's more of a case
28:43
of the infrastructure side being the new piece, and they're quite happy with, you know, versioning and everything else
28:48
It's more, okay, well, how do I understand the infrastructure and more of this
28:53
Most infrastructure code tools are quite declarative rather than iterative. So that's a bit of a mindset change as well
29:00
for some developers is taking that approach. So, yeah, it's an interesting conversation
29:06
depending on who you're talking to. But, yeah, you can use a lot of those developer tools now
29:12
for your infrastructure. So put it into Git is always the first place I start with
29:16
just merging it. It's a no-brainer, really. But then once you've done that, one of the really big benefits
29:23
if you start going down that route is testing. You can write unit tests
29:27
You can write integration tests against your infrastructure as code. And it depends which language you're using as to how involved
29:35
and how early you can do that. With things like ARM templates and even, excuse me, Bicep, to some extent, you can do a bit of testing before you deploy the infrastructure
29:47
But a lot of the times what you want to do is make sure that your templates are deploying what you think they're deploying
29:53
And so you end up a lot of the times having to deploy it to make sure to be able to then see what it does
29:59
whereas things like Pulumi in particular, you know, you can write test
30:06
unit tests against the C-sharp, or I write it in C-sharp, whatever language you use
30:10
You can do mocks and things with it, so you can actually get a lot more done with that sort of language up front
30:15
without having to deploy the infrastructure and sort of fail early if you want to
30:21
But, yeah, you can get as complicated as you want with tests. I've seen some very big test suites where people are doing a load of unit tests
30:29
up front and then deploying a whole load of infrastructure, running their tests, then tearing down the infrastructure, you know, just their testing. And you can get quite involved with that
30:38
Yeah, that's, you know, doing something that's repeatable is really, really important. And even
30:43
you know, long before the cloud, I'm talking like over 20 years ago, you know, I was working at this
30:48
company just right up the street. And, you know, one of the jobs of our DevOps person, per se
30:55
You know, every night he burned down all the, you know, QA machines, right, and rebuilt them from scratch every night
31:04
So every morning we'd come in, we would have a clean QA, you know, systems to test with every day
31:11
And I've worked at other companies where we would move over the production database into a testing database every night, you know
31:18
and now with the cloud, that is even more important because you need this repeatable and you need it fast, right
31:26
You can't, and you were mentioning earlier about setting stuff up and I was thinking
31:33
what if somebody who knows how to set that up leaves the company, right
31:37
Which happens a lot, especially in smaller teams, right? Now you're going, oh, nobody knows how to set it up, right
31:43
It should always be repeatable, always, No matter if you're using the cloud or not, you're, you know, setting up systems should be completely repeatable
31:51
And I know each cloud, you know, are different. And like one of the things I always recommend to people that use AWS is that if you're using AWS, you have to hire somebody full time just to do this
32:06
Right. Because and to manage AWS, because to me, you know, I don't know about anybody else out there
32:12
But AWS to me is a lot harder to deal with than Azure is
32:17
And I was really lucky at one company where the guy sitting next to me was that person
32:22
That's all he did most of the day was just manage, you know, AWS and create, you know, create these repeatable templates so he could spin stuff up really quick
32:33
And that's to me, that's a must for cloud computing. Yeah, absolutely
32:38
And you mentioned there sort of being able to be repeatable. most in fact all infrastructural code toolings are idempotent so if you run the same template
32:46
over and over again you should get the same results right and so that allows you to also
32:50
bring in sort of configuration drift management as well so you know if somebody comes in and
32:55
manually tweaks your your web app or whatever you can rerun your templates overnight and it will
33:00
change it back to what you defined in your template right and you can you can take this a
33:04
step further when if you look at things like configuration management which is sort of it's it's like infrastructure as code but now you're talking about configuring your your vms or
33:13
whatever as well that the actual operating system and you can do the same sort of thing with that
33:17
you know having that running on a regular basis means that configuration drift should be fairly
33:23
minimal um now you have to be a bit careful because you end up if you if you've got people
33:29
who are making changes manually because it's quicker or because it's easier for them then you
33:34
have to kind of try and educate them and make sure they go down the right path otherwise you end up you know removing people's changes that people can get quite annoyed about that but yeah if you
33:42
gotta make a change you need to put it into the template yeah exactly exactly and you do end up
33:48
in conversations because they'll turn around and say well it's much quicker for me to just you know nip into the portal and make a change than it is to you know check out a git repo make
33:55
a change put in a pull request get it approved deploy it well yes it is but you know that's that's
34:01
what you know you need to need to do if you want to do it properly and that's you know you can you
34:05
can be a bit different between dev environments and production. Maybe you're a bit more flexible
34:12
in dev because you want people trying things out, but nothing gets into production unless it's in
34:15
the infrastructure code. Yeah. And I just want to take a second. I'm seeing glitches on Sam's
34:25
screen, Simon. So I don't know if everybody else is seeing that, but we've been having some
34:30
technical issues with StreamYard today, everybody. So if you are seeing little glitches on the screen
34:35
We apologize for that. Something's going on with StreamYard. They must have done an update last night
34:42
They didn't test properly. Yeah, I'm saying them on my end as well, which is annoying
34:47
But sorry, sorry about that. It's a bit annoying. But the audio is there. The audio is not cutting out
34:52
So that's the most important thing, really. So the question I had with creating these templates, whether it's through Arm or Bicep or Pulumi
35:01
is does the Azure portal itself have anything to kind of help you jumpstart these things
35:10
Yes and no. So the Azure portal has an option for, if you go into any resource
35:15
there's an export template or export button in there you'll find, and that will generate an ARM template
35:22
And it can be useful to see, you know, what your resources look like in ARM
35:28
what all the properties are and so on. personally i wouldn't sort of copy that and paste it and use it as is because they're very verbux
35:34
you know it basically creates a property for every property in the in the resource half of which which
35:39
you probably wouldn't have set there they're optional or whatever it gives you you get you
35:43
know they're very long scripts and also you know they're in arm and i probably would you know today
35:47
i wouldn't use arm i'd use bicep as a starting point um but it can be it can be a good place at
35:53
least just to go through and see what a resource looks like the other place i'd recommend looking
35:58
at is there is a URL called resources.azure.com, which is a Microsoft URL. And it's basically just
36:04
a, it's the Azure portal, but everything's in JSON. So there's no UI as such, especially it's a big
36:10
tree, but you can go and look at every resource and it will show you all the properties and all
36:14
the values and so on, because that's usually the hardest part is, you know, I want to deploy a web
36:19
app and I want to make sure it's got TLS 1.2 by default. What's the property to set for that
36:25
And so you can look at an existing resource so you can grab that. And then you just need to make sure
36:30
you put that in the right syntax for whatever template it is. And usually the names are the same
36:34
It's just whether you're writing in C Sharp, whether you're writing in Bicep or whatever
36:38
you need to find those. But also there are a lot of examples
36:43
So there's a GitHub repo. I can probably find the URL in a minute. Microsoft have, which have a very large repository
36:49
of examples, both in ARM and in Bicep. There's a Terraform one, very similar
36:54
and they're probably only one for different languages. They have a lot of examples as a sort of starting point
36:59
You can pull that down and start from there and then expand on top of it
37:03
Yeah, that's cool. I was on a call with someone at Microsoft
37:08
about a month and a half ago. And one of the things I was telling her was
37:14
you know, she was saying, well, why don't you have some of these things that we were talking about
37:19
Why don't you have it scripted? And I go, because I'm lazy. You know, I would love to do it scripted
37:23
But then I have to stop and read documentation and try to figure out how to do it And I said you know what Visual Studio should do is allow you to set those things up visually right
37:36
which is the way I prefer to do things, and then press a button and export it to a, you know
37:41
a PowerShell, you know, PowerShell script or something like that. And so I hope she takes that to the team and said, yeah
37:48
we need to help, you know, these people that like visual stuff like me to write batch files by just adding a button there
37:55
and say, here, spit it out, and then you can modify it the way you want it
37:59
I hope Visual Studio does that, but I'm glad at least Azure Portal is doing it to some degree
38:05
That's good. Before we're right out of time, let's get to some questions
38:09
The first one is how to test Redis cache in local machine
38:14
every time I have to deploy Azure to test? so i would suggest looking at using containers so there is there is a redis there is a redis
38:23
container already out there on docker hub it's made by redis um you can run that on your machine
38:28
if you install the docker for windows client or linux or whatever you're doing or even if you're
38:31
using wsl you can get docker running in that um but yeah deploy the container it's going to be
38:36
it's you know it should it should work out of the box for you and then you can just do your tests
38:41
and then throw it away when you're done and that's what i would do rather than trying to install you If you install it actually on your machine
38:46
you've got to go through all the installation process. Usually within a few weeks
38:50
it'll stop working by itself for some reason. You've got to fix it. Just use a container and throw it away when you're done
38:55
Yeah, I was recently watching a video about something about messaging and queuing
39:02
And that's exactly what he was doing. He was sending it all to, I believe, a Redis queue
39:08
for the Redis cache. And he just had it running at Docker locally
39:13
and it worked perfect. So yeah, that's a great way to do
39:17
That's one of the great things about apps like Docker is you can just run it really quick
39:22
and do your stuff and then shut it down. Yeah, you don't have to go through the big install process like you were saying
39:28
So what about optimizing strategies in the cloud? Yeah, okay. I mean, obviously there's a lot you can do here
39:35
but one of the big things I guess is taking a look at your app that you're particularly moving it to the cloud
39:41
to see whether or not it's actually in a state where it can take advantage
39:45
Like we talked about earlier of cloud things, the amount of conversations I've had about applications that are moving
39:50
and they need legacy things. They need things like LDAP to go and do authentication
39:54
or they need specific types of hardware to run on or they're using older versions of IIS
40:02
and they don't work in a PaaS web service or things like that
40:07
If you want to move and you want to take advantage of the cloud features said your apps need to be built with the cloud in mind so you know you know if you're if you're
40:14
storing files somewhere um you know so maybe you've got an upload feature in your application
40:18
um don't leave it relying on a on a smb file share to upload those those files or even an nfs file
40:27
share yes you can do that in azure you can have you could have a web app and then you can have a
40:30
vm running a file share or even possibly use azure files um to provide that you could do that
40:35
But it's going to be a pain to get working. It's going to cost you more than it needs to
40:40
and you're going to potentially end up with possible security problems as well
40:45
So instead, in that scenario, I'd be looking to refactor my app, so just write the code, change the code to use the Azure libraries
40:51
and write my uploads into Blob Storage straight away. It's going to be faster then, it's going to be cheaper
40:56
and it's going to use all the native cloud libraries rather than messing about with things that are legacy
41:03
Yeah, yeah. And to kind of piggyback on top of that, those of you who have older apps
41:09
that you're looking to put on the cloud, to me, the very first thing you have to do
41:14
is yze your code and your app for memory and performance issues
41:21
Because I've been doing that a lot for companies in the last five years
41:25
And there's been a couple of companies that just frankly couldn't really move to the cloud
41:30
until we fixed those issues first. And we know all projects have issues
41:38
And but to me, you got to fix all the memory and all the performance issues before you move to the cloud
41:44
because all those things are going to dramatically affect performance and cost, right
41:50
Because if you have longer running, if you have something that runs, you know
41:54
500 milliseconds as opposed to 250 milliseconds, That's, that's, you're saving half right there on, on, on cost savings. Right
42:03
And so you, you have to, to me, you have to get that stuff working and properly architect it
42:10
Right. And, and that's one of the important things about moving to the cloud is making sure you
42:14
have good, proper segmented out architecture. And then of course, like I said, take care of the memory and performance issues
42:21
Cause those, those, those are going to be a big factor when you move to the cloud and you're going to see them a lot worse on the cloud. Right
42:27
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I know I've read about this before
42:32
but at one company up the highway for me a little bit, you know, when I started there
42:38
and this is the reason they hired me, was when I started there, you know
42:42
they had these mobile devices that, you know, would send a 600K payload into the backend system
42:49
to go through the AI and all that. And when I started the company, you know
42:54
they couldn't sign new contracts with big companies because every one of those 600K payloads took anywhere from 7 to 70 seconds
43:04
to process through the system. And that's just crazy performance, right? And some companies flat out said, that's not good enough
43:14
You have to provide better performance, and that's why they hired me. And when I left, I was in testing, and I had that 7 seconds down to 250 milliseconds, right
43:24
So it's those kind of things like that you really have to look at and see where you can do some work to really impact how fast things run
43:34
And so because of the work I was able to do, they were now able to onboard larger companies because the performance was good enough for them to deal with
43:44
And so, yeah, there's a lot of things you've got to worry about more about the cloud
43:48
And even when you were talking, I was thinking about, you know, I've even had to change my unit tests for my open source stuff because it just doesn't work in continuous integration
44:00
Right. I was saving a bunch of stuff to the file system. And none of that works when you do continuous integration
44:06
And I had to go back and rewrite all the all the unit tests that, you know, did file or something like that
44:13
And so I could get it working. So, yeah, it takes some thought to kind of move things to the cloud the proper way
44:21
Yeah. But you need to spend that time. Right. So you can properly utilize the cloud
44:26
Otherwise, you're going to move stuff to the cloud and it's not going to be any better. And you're going to say, well, this was useless. Right
44:32
Yeah. Yeah. And that's I mean, that's a conversation I've had lots of times. We've moved to the cloud. It hasn't saved us any money. It's cost us more
44:37
Well, yeah, it will do if you don't if you don't optimize for the cloud. Yeah. And I just got a message that looks like, uh, uh
44:44
Twitch isn't working very well with, um, um, stream here right now. So somebody switched over to YouTube. So yeah
44:51
if you're having issues, go to YouTube and see if that works better for you I I again I apologize for uh the streamer at issues Not that I have much I can do about it So another question is
45:07
will applications and data remain secure in the cloud? Can we fully trust the cloud
45:12
This is a big thing, especially if you're dealing with HIPAA and things like that
45:17
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a big question. I guess that's whenever anyone's looking to go to the cloud
45:21
It always comes up. and you know it is something worth thinking about you know it is you are now moving from
45:27
a you know potentially a data center that you own and is this you know you can go in there and you
45:32
can touch the service to now a service that microsoft run and it's run you know used by lots
45:36
of people and you know is shared between them so it is it is something to be you know make sure you
45:43
you understand but often the answer is is yes and potentially more so than your data center
45:49
Microsoft have hundreds and thousands of experts working on the security of Azure
45:56
If they have a breach, it doesn't just embarrass one company. It's going to be a killer blow for their entire platform
46:03
So they have a lot of resources. There are a lot of technologies running in there that we don't even have in your on-prem data centers
46:10
things running at the edge that we don't see. They're not a service we actually buy in Azure, but a lot of the DDoS protection and all the other stuff that comes along with being on the platform
46:18
is there and then tools like Azure Security Center can be used to help you
46:22
monitor those sort of things so there's a lot built into the platform and there's a lot
46:26
Microsoft are doing but you've also got to take some responsibility as well
46:30
yourself when you move there and the amount of responsibility is going to vary depending
46:34
on how high up the stack you go we talked about earlier if you're going to be
46:38
running VMs then you need to make sure you're patching those VMs you need to deal with
46:42
network security groups and make sure you're not leaving RDP port open
46:46
to the internet and all that sort of stuff You take on a level of ownership there
46:52
Whereas if you can move higher up the stack and you can use PaaS or you can use serverless, then Microsoft is taking care of a lot of that
47:00
They're taking care of updates. If you use serverless, they're taking care of the networking
47:03
and everything like that. So it depends where you can go in the stack
47:09
But, yeah, it's a partnership between you and Microsoft. And, you know, you've got to trust them to do their job
47:18
And if you don't, then potentially it's not the right place for you. You know, then you can't turn around and go to Microsoft and say, you know, show me, prove that you're doing this particular thing that I care about
47:29
But they have a lot of documentation. They have a lot of certification around security, you know, ISO 2001 and HIPAA and all those sort of things that you can get
47:39
So, yeah, you've got to build up. You've got to make sure you're happy with the level of trust you're putting in Microsoft
47:44
And you've got to make sure that your application is secured appropriately as well
47:48
Yeah, but don't trust and just forget about it. You have to keep on top of it to make sure Microsoft is doing what they say they're doing
47:56
You know, like, again, I said earlier, you know, nothing's perfect. And, you know, this kind of reminds me of I was asked to do a study at the blood bank and I ended up not doing it
48:10
But, you know, I was really appreciated that the study that was actually run by the out of the big National Institute of Health here in America
48:20
You know, I really appreciate the study, you know, got to one point
48:25
And and and I knew this already. I mean, we all know this, but told other people that, you know, your data is we can't guarantee your data is going to be 100 percent secure
48:35
Right. We can't do it. So you have to make the choice of taking that small little chance
48:42
And so that, you know, what you were saying kind of reminds me of that is, yeah, nothing's 100 percent, but you have to keep on top of things, especially like you were saying, you know, you know, one of the things that I do is if I find out like through the news or something or through somebody I know that a company has been broken into because they're being stupid or something like that, I stop using their services
49:07
Right. There's lots of companies out there. Right. And there's no reason to stay with a company that are well known security problems, you know, or they didn't do a patch when they were supposed to like Equifax, you know, a number of years ago, Equifax was broken into because they didn't do a patch they were told to do, you know
49:25
And so, yeah, we all need to be vigilant of security, right
49:30
But Azure has been HIPAA compliant for a while now, a number of years
49:35
And so I know that was a big thing when I talked to companies around here
49:39
as they were waiting for that kind of certification before they moved their data there
49:45
Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff in Azure you can use to make sure your side of the trust level is secure
49:52
Azure Security Center is a big one. You can hook your applications and your infrastructure up to a security center
49:58
and it will give you recommendations about what you can do to make it more secure. It will give you a score to say you're 60% secure
50:06
and these are all the other things you could do to make it better. And it has a lot of AI stuff, and it will tell you, well, you know
50:11
I've seen these in real life. You've had people trying to RDP into your virtual machines
50:15
and I don't recognize the IP addresses when they come from somebody you don't normally log in from and all that sort of stuff
50:20
So take advantage of the services that are there to help make your application secure
50:26
Yeah. And securing data is not only vast, really, really important. Well, it's always been important, but it seems to be more important these days because so many companies and governments are being hacked into
50:41
And now I forgot where I was going with that. I don't know
50:45
Security is important. You've got to be cognizant of it. otherwise you know like i said you get one bad ding on your company and your business is going
50:54
to go to crap you know i i kind of laugh with you know equifax on tv in america at least is having
51:00
these uh uh commercials now they try to get you back on their platform and i'm going yeah no
51:06
there's no way i'm using anything from your site no way so uh at least if i can help it i'm not
51:15
going to use our services. I know some of that happens without me knowing it, but I'm not going
51:20
to help them in the endeavor. Once you've been burned, you're not going to go back here. Yeah. There's just too many companies out there to deal with. I mean, that you can use that
51:28
seem to be doing better. So it doesn't look like there's any more questions and we're getting
51:36
kind of short on time. So I do want to ask you the last two questions I ask all my speakers
51:46
And before you go, again, I really appreciate you being on the show and I hope you come back. And
51:50
are you speaking at the Azure Summit? I put some sessions in. They've not been selected yet
51:56
so we'll see. There's still a few more spots, so we'll see. Hopefully so. Okay, because I was going to get Simon after you to speak at that summit
52:04
So I'm sure you'll be accepted now that you've been on my show
52:10
Absolutely. But yeah, I look forward to your sessions. So the last two questions I ask everybody because I didn really have any specific questions for you personally is what do you do for fun besides coding Yeah so a few things I mean you can see behind me I do quite a bit of Lego I got quite a few things in there and there a whole load more on the wall over there so that a that a good uh hobby i have when i got uh the time um you tweeted a picture about that this
52:38
morning didn't you yeah i finished up the spaceship there on the left uh this morning so uh that was a
52:43
fun one um yeah so i do that um i do a bit of uh miniature painting so that's a good stress reliever
52:48
when i'm uh when i want to concentrate on painting a small miniature rather than work so yeah those
52:53
sort of things and the usual stuff. As I say, I do a lot of community stuff, so I'm still doing a lot of
52:57
cloud and IT stuff outside of work as well. So all of that takes up most of my time
53:03
Yeah. I'm always curious of what developers do besides coding. I know a lot of
53:07
developers, well, especially the beginners or the intermediates probably code a lot more than
53:13
us older folks do, but you've got to have a well-balanced, right
53:21
And I don't know if this happened the last time I was in India speaking at the C Sharp Corner Conference
53:29
But I got one of the best questions ever. And this woman stood up
53:34
And I was really appreciative that because most women in India don't really speak up very much
53:40
And so I was really happy that she got up. She had a prepared question for me, which I like too
53:45
But she asked me, she goes, so Dave, you do coding. You know, you play music
53:53
You know, you do. You're an award-winning photographer. You know, how do you do all that
53:58
You know, and I said, well, the first thing is, you know, it's all time management, of course
54:03
And I'll never say I'm perfect at it, but I try to do that
54:07
But the biggest thing is all those things feed into my career, right
54:13
Playing guitar every weekend helps me code, right? Doing photography helps me code
54:18
but it keeps my creative juices going. And that's one of the number one qualities
54:24
of a good solutions architect is you have to be creative because you're dreaming up stuff
54:32
that sometimes doesn't exist. And so for me, I do all those things
54:38
because it does help. They all help each other. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and so I'm always curious
54:46
what other developers do, because I know what I do. Everybody knows what I do, but I'm always curious
54:54
And the last question is, of course, do you have anything to plug? Yeah, there's a few things
55:00
So I've been mentioning my website, so samcogan.com. I post there. I try and get a post out on a weekly basis
55:06
and that's all about Azure, cloud, infrastructure as code, DevOps, all those sort of things
55:10
So if you're interested, have a look at that. And then I have a YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash samcogan
55:15
with videos in there. And in particular, one of the things I've been working on for probably the last six months now
55:20
is a series on getting started with ARM templates. So if you wanted to learn how to deploy to Azure
55:27
and using ARM templates, this takes you from basically no knowledge all the way up
55:31
And the last few videos have all concentrated on Bicep as well. So it's great to have a good grounding in ARM anyway
55:38
if you're going to use Bicep because it's all the same thing under the hood. That series, and they're not long videos
55:42
They're all between 15 and 20 minutes long where they'll get you from zero up to being able to do
55:46
all of that infrastructure's code with ARM templates. Well, I'm definitely going to check them out
55:51
because I think this might be happening right now to me, but a couple of times when we got re-awarded
55:59
with the MVP program and there's that, and I always have issues getting my Azure subscription
56:06
working properly. And like one year, you know, I couldn't get it working properly
56:12
and I was, you know, their support's not the fastest thing in the world. And so what they did is they just deleted all my resources
56:19
I'm going, what? Now I have to set all this stuff up again
56:23
Dang it. Yeah, put it in a template and just rerun it
56:28
I mean, it doesn't always help your data, but the actual resources will be there again
56:32
Yeah, it wouldn't help with my Cosmos DB being blown away, but at least get all the other stuff up and running again
56:38
Yeah, exactly. So anyway, thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it
56:41
And I can't wait to see your sessions at the Azure Summit
56:47
No problem. Thanks for having me. It's been great. Yeah. And anytime you want to come back on and talk about something, just let me know
56:52
Great. I'll get you back on. Thanks. All right. Thanks, Sam. That was a great session with Sam Kogan
56:58
I was really happy to finally meet him virtually. Hopefully next year I'll be able to meet him in real at the MVP Summit up in Washington
57:10
And so anyway, I always have strived to get a lot of great speakers, especially about Azure on the show
57:19
And so if you want to see more Azure speakers, let me know who you want to see
57:23
I'll ask anybody. You know, if you say invite Bill Gates, I will invite Bill Gates
57:28
Now he's not going to come on my show, but I'll reach out anyway. I'm not afraid to ask anybody, really
57:36
So anyway, thanks, Sam. That was great. As usual, every week, everybody wins a free copy of CodeRush from DevExpress
57:47
Just go to devexpress.com slash Donna Dave, download your free copy. It's a real copy
57:52
It's not a fake or stripped down version. It's a real copy of CodeRush
57:57
And CodeRush is the only refactoring tool I've ever used for Visual Studio since Visual Studio came out
58:03
So I hope you'll check it out. It helps me to be a really better programmer every day that I'm coding
58:11
So I hope you check it out. You'll get your free .NET Day version of CodeRush
58:16
And now we're going to do new code rules. You ready, Simon? Welcome, geeks, to another episode of new code rules
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You know, I've been contracting on and off for about 20 years. And pretty much that whole 20 years, I've been considered an expert
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in .NET. And when I was hired, even in the beginning, 20 years ago, I noticed that
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you know, the teams or companies really didn't take full advantage of my expertise. Some companies
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did take advantage of my expertise. Even at one company about 10 years ago, 20% of my job was
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actually helping other teams and mentoring people in my team. Sometimes at that company, there would
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be two or three people waiting at my cube to ask me questions or some kind of architectural
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guidance or something like that. I really love helping people in that way
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Quite a while ago, I worked for a company that provides temporary nurses to hospitals
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And again, I was hired as the expert and my cube was actually an earshot at the conference
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room where most of the meetings were. And there were multiple times during that contract where they were talking about something
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in the meeting and I knew the answer and I'm sitting in my head going I know the answer why
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am I not invited to this meeting I have some ideas about that I'll share in a couple minutes
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for a more recent example my last contract job which I was on for a little over two years the
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original manager hired me specifically to basically kick the team in their butt and get them into the
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newer way of coding and things like that. And to mentor the other developers
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who were mostly junior developers, and mentor them and teach them the proper way of coding in .NET and proper way of architecting and also moving them to the cloud
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One personal team I mentored pretty much the whole time I was there
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And even last year, I helped her get into a computer science degree, a master's degree program
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But at almost every turn, I was being blocked by other people from other teams
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For example, one of the things we wanted to do with the project that I architected and coded there, which was the company said was the most successful project in the company's history
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You know, one of the things we wanted to do with that project was to move some of the processing into AWS
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Almost the entire time I was there, we were begging for access to the AWS console
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I mean full access so we can try things out and try microservices or whatever we wanted to do
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We wanted to try them out. And for over two years, we begged and begged and begged
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did so much work on justifying why we need read and write access to the AWS console
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And when I left the company, we still didn't have access to the AWS console
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I couldn't even execute the microservices that I wrote and taught the other people in team how to write
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And we couldn't even execute them to test them with read-only access to AWS Console
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So read-only access for AWS Console for developers, you might as well not give them any access at that point
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Really, you can't do anything except for maybe look at logs. So even though I architected multiple projects to use AWS services, not one of them was working
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when I left the company. And that's two years of begging access. But unfortunately, the DevOps team
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there thought that providing virtual machines in the cloud was cloud computing. That's just not
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cloud computing by any stretch. Yeah, I know I'm laughing, but that's the team we were dealing with
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What made things worse at this company was about over a year ago, the original manager decided he had enough and just wanted to go back and doing development
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So they they put in place another manager from the finance department who had zero experience in developing
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He went to some classes on programming, but he had no experience whatsoever on developing, delivering project products, you know, none
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And when they put him in place, it made things so much worse
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Not only is the team falling apart at this point, but we couldn't get anything done because no one else at that company liked him
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So we were being blocked by even getting funding for projects because of a manager who really didn't know what he was doing
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so at that company there is multiple layers of blockage and to get things
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done or at least get what my original goal was to do at that company so I been thinking about this a lot and one of the reasons I came up with was you know maybe some of the other developers don want me to say things because it make them not look as smart as they project themselves at
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I will probably say that's probably the most plausible reason, to me at least, but I came up
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with a couple others. Another one was, you know, I'm just dealing with developers
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who just don't want to grow and learn. And I definitely felt that at the last contract I was at
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But I can see that, yeah, if you don't want to grow and learn and someone comes in and tries to, you know
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say we need to do things better and differently, they're going to block you at every turn
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And that's exactly what happened where I used to work. The last reason I came up with this
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maybe this is a disruption to other teams. And in the case of where I, my last contract is
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I felt that the teams there, you know, were spent so much time protecting their silos
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as I call them, that they didn't want anybody, they didn't want to help anybody
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because that meant they had to do work, right? So not only are they protecting their silos
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but they just don't want to do any work. So one guy in the DevOps team
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every time we came to him to get access to the AWS console
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he would want us to write up justification. And so we would write it up, get it
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and then he'd find some other thing that needed to be added. And we'd give that back to him
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Then he found some other thing that needed to be added. And it just was this loop of, he's not going to do anything
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And so when he was moved to a different department, I was hoping things would get better in the DevOps department
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But then I found out he's still in the DevOps department, just in another team. And so, you know, that person was a well-known blocker at that company, meaning you don't go to him if you want anything done for sure
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So I have three call to actions. And one is if you're going to hire an expert and not listen to them, this is a failure in management
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And about half the companies that hire me as an expert, this is what I feel, is that the management just isn't taking it, you know, isn't listening to us
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And I've never understood that. If you go hire experts and not listen to them, stop wasting my time and stop wasting your money
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Consultants cost a lot of money. To have them just sit around not doing anything when they're being paid a lot just boggles my mind
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And this is what was happening at my last contract. They had all these consultants paying them a lot of money and they weren't really being used
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And kind of on the flip side, if your team is in trouble or need some guidance and things like that
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which I've done at companies, then reach out and hire an expert. You don't have to hire an expert for six months or three months
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And sometimes it could be just a week just to get you over whatever is going on with the project at that time
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But if you need help, reach out, hire an expert. You know, this is what we're here for
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So it's much better to have somebody come in and have them show you their expertise. And then of course you need to follow through with that expertise and learn from it That it for new code rules this week Let me know your thoughts you know have you been a consultant and felt this way Or are you in a company that needs help and your company won hire an expert to come in on a consulting basis and help your team out Either way let me know what you think and email me at rockingthecodeworld at csharpcorner And with that I see you next time on new code rules
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You know, I have to say it's really weird watching myself during a show while I was watching that
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But maybe it might be bad because I laughed at myself, too
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So, I don't know. But, yeah, you know, Sam and I were talking earlier about, well, I was saying to Sam earlier that, you know
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if a company gets broken into, I'm not going to use their services anymore
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And this company, my last contract, is a very well-known company in America
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Every American has heard about this company. And because of my experience there and just the sheer amount of money I saw them waste
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I will never, ever buy any of their services ever again in my life
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You know, because I have firsthand knowledge of just how wasteful they are
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And I'm not going to give them my money if I know they're that way. So, you know, so anyway, I hope you understood my point with that
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I tried to make it short, but you know me, sometimes I talk too much, especially on new code rules
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But anyway, so thanks for watching. I really appreciate everybody watching this week
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We were off two weeks. I'm glad I'm back. And I have lots of great speakers lined up for the next three weeks
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Next week is going to be David Neal. I'm excited about that. So I hope you join me back next week. I'll try my hardest not to be sick again
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But as long as I don't get the Delta variant, I'll be fine, I think
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Please be safe. Please, please, please. I said this kind of at the beginning of the I talked about COVID at the beginning of the show
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And I talked about the end of all my shows. Please listen to your medical professionals, the scientists out there
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and please go get your shot. If you have access to a shot
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I mean, people are begging for shots in India and America, there's a third of us
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that just flat out don't want to get their vaccine. So please do it
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You know, like I said earlier, you know, this is a world pandemic
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world at the beginning of the name, and we have to solve it as one human tribe
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And this is not going away until we do. So please, please, please go get vaccinated
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If you're 12 and above in America, at least, please go get vaccinated
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If you've been vaccinated or, well, yeah, if you've been vaccinated, please, please go
1:09:13
to your local blood bank and donate blood. The blood centers in America I sure it the same way in other countries have a huge shortage in blood I think America needs something like 30 units of blood a day
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So that means 30,000 donations a day they need, America needs. So please donate blood
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I'm over 12 gallons now, but if you've never done it, go do it
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It really doesn't really hurt that much. And the last time I donated blood, I didn't even feel the needles going in
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And I had two needles in my arms. So please donate blood
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It's easy. It's free. It just takes a little bit of your time
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And in the end, it will make you feel better. And for all the men out there or anybody really is the cool thing about if, you know, if you're worried about, you know, donating blood on the weekend and you have to do chores, guess what
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You don't have to do chores because you're not allowed to do anything for 24 hours physical
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So go donate blood and sit on the couch and watch the game this weekend
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All right. So with that, thanks for watching this week. I appreciate you all being here
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I want you back next week. So please go get your vaccination. And if you have any comments, like I said, what you want the show to talk about, what
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guests you want on the show, anything like that, please email me at rockinacurledworld
1:10:43
world at C sharp corner.com. And with that, I'll see you next week. Thank you
1:11:43
Thank you
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We'll be right back
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