About this blog

Why “Sam Learns Azure”? I want this blog to be about learning – we don’t know everything, and as I blog and explore what we can do when starting from scratch in the Azure cloud. This allows us multiple opportunities to understand what it’s like to be ‘born in the cloud’, and share all of the learnings and pitfalls around this journey. There are 3 main pillars of focus in this project: building infrastructure (with code), developing features with DevOps best practices, and using monitoring to generate feedback

  • Developing features with DevOps: using Azure DevOps and Visual Studio, create a workflow to streamline the delivery of value to end users, using Kanban boards, development, and automated testing. DevOps is our primary interest:
  • Building infrastructure: using Azure and infrastructure as code with “ARM templates”, create a secure, scalable, and reliable web solution. We will be using Platform as a Service (or PaaS) features:
  • Monitoring strategies: using Azure Monitor and Application Insights, create a series of dashboards and alerts to understand bottlenecks, discover and debug issues, and learn from users:

We will accomplish these pillars in a number of chapters, with the first step in our journey involving us building a basic Azure architecture piece by piece, with infrastructure as code, a DevOps pipeline, a MVP (minimum viable product) web application and database, and essential monitoring.  This is a lot, but will give us a fully fleshed out and working website, and we will layer on more core features to scale the application, such as a mobile app, and AI, as well as providing optional enhancements that we think you may find interesting.

We will communicate this progress on this blog, but the output is also available at https://samlearnsazure.com. We will be using a public instance of Azure DevOps, (https://samsmithnz.visualstudio.com/SamLearnsAzure), which can be used as a reference, just like a real project.

References: