Earlier this year I joined the Azure Synapse Influencer Program. But I don’t receive payments as an influencer instead I get a wide range of benefits, such as early access to new features and capabilities, access to exclusive training and resources, and opportunities to engage with the Azure Synapse product team and also the occasional free swag like a coffee cup and sticker. I joined the program to build my knowledge around the platform and be able to show its value of it to my clients.

I had the opportunity to attend another DevOps Days Chicago which is a regional conference focused on software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them called DevOps. This was the fourth DevOps days I have attended, third in person, and first as a speaker. Speaking of which it’s good to be able to get back to a conference in person. I’m an extrovert so I love meeting new people and don’t get that really from virtual conferences.

Recently I took some time to revisit Azure Cache for Redis I got first introduced to the service in 2018 and a lot has changed since then. I won’t go into detail about Redis and what it is or What is caching. But instead, I want to share my thoughts on using it on the Azure platform. A particular use benefit of using Azure Cache for Redis instead of the self-hosting version for data cache needs is it will allow a business to bring the frequently called data to the cloud so that the data can be called faster with higher availability.

Recap This is a continuation of my 2020 network overhaul. You can read the details about how this project started at this link. I ended the updates to my home network in 2020 in a good place and by that I mean everything was running smoothly with the full network being managed by software. There were no issues but lot’s of opportunities for improvement. So that left me thinking my 2021 improvements would be focused on reducing dependencies on 3rd party cloud services such as Ring and Google Nest cameras.

Backstory For my website, security has always been a second-class citizen I’ve never treated it fairly outside of the basic practices of an SSL certificate and patching of the host and any plugins I might be using. I had the opportunity to join Scott Hanselman for a small group session hosted by my company and one of the things he talked about was providing server-side security and sound of mind to users.

A little disclaimer here, these are notes from a demo on 4-28-22 sorry if this doesn’t make sense later. Overview: Azure Terrafy is a new tool currently in preview as of April 27th from Microsoft designed to help you export Azure Resources listed within the AzureRM provider to a terraform main.tf file and maintain a state file. How To Install It: To be able to install Terrafy you’ll need to download the binary from the github repo.