Richard Presenting LMAO Helps During Outages In 2022, I had a fantastic year of reconnecting with my passions, meeting new individuals, delivering presentations, and gaining knowledge from experienced professionals. To conclude my travels and speaking engagements for the year, I had the privilege of journeying to Florida and delivering a talk at DevOps Days Tampa. Having attended DevOps conferences for many years, I was thrilled to create an engaging presentation that encouraged collaboration and prompted attendees to reflect on critical considerations when preparing for on-call duties.

A few days ago the opportunity to joined a Blacks United In Leading Tech speakers panel event to discuss “The truth about Black Consultants”. This was my first event with this group, it was a great conversation we talked about our personal journeys in the industry of consulting while sharing valuable insights and advice around some key areas of interest: Transferable skills for various positions in consulting. How to set the right expectations and key behaviors.

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 live 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.

Thanks for attending my talk on LMAO Helps During Outages at DevOps Days Birmingham 2022. As promised in the talk i wanted to share my slides for all. For those who missed my talk but stumbled across this post. My talk was about solving the problem of when your company has an outage but there is no need to sweat just remember to LMAO and you’ll get through it having a combination of logs, metrics, alerts, and an observability tool in place will help your company LOL through it.

A few months back had the opportunity to joined my friend Taylor Dorsett on his Podcast to talk about Professional Technical Interviews from a DevOps perspective. If you’re interested in the DevOps space this is a great conversation to listen. Be sure to check it out over on his Youtube channel Professional Technical Interviewee with Taylor Dorsett.

Back in July fellow Azure blogger Billy York wrote a blog post about Monitoring SSL certificates with Azure monitor utilizing a standard test within App Insights, it’s really cool that Azure finally added this ability. I want to talk about an alternative less known method using Azure Key Vault certificate contacts and lifetime contacts. What is Azure Key Vault? For those who are unfamiliar with The Azure service Azure Key Vault the fastest way to sum it up is that its a cloud service on Azure used for storing sensitive application information like tokens, passwords, API keys as well as TLS and SSL certificates used by resources on Azure or accessing Azure resources.