Betatalks the podcast

We talk with April Edwards, Senior Cloud Developer Advocate and DevOps practice lead at Microsoft, about her role and passion, and how great mentors help open doors for you or others. Together we reflect on some misconceptions about Microsoft, especially with regard to open source and the use of cross platform tooling, such as PowerShell. And has she seen a shift in the types of cloud services people use in recent years, when helping customers move from legacy to the cloud? We talk about the importance of implementing Infrastructure as Code and making it scalable. Furthermore, she highlights some elements that should not be overlooked if a company wants to successfully implement Azure DevOps.

About this episode, and April in particular: you can find @TheAprilEdwards on Twitter or check out her blogs, video's or podcast contributions on azapril.dev.

About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel

00:00 - Introduction
01:33 - Friend of the day
04:09 - How Abel supported April in her career
10:38 - Why April is enabling DevOps for Java Shops
13:34 - Aprils encounter with PowerShell
21:40 - Infrastructure as code and the barrier to entry Azure
35:26 - Totally random question
36:49 - Closing

Introduction - 00:00

Rick 
Hey there, welcome to Betatalks, the podcast in which we talk to a friends from the development community. I'm Rick.

Oscar 
and I am Oscar.

Rick 
Oscar, how have you been?

Oscar 
I'm doing good. Have you been busy?

Rick 
Yes, been busy. I'm actually kind of struggling with something at a couple of customers now, because I see more and more companies that try to get a grip on services that are being used within Azure. So more and more companies are deploying sort of like platform teams that should see how certain services are meant to be used, and then provision them in that way for other teams to use them. And on one hand, I think it's a good thing to have a general set of this is how we do stuff. But also, it might limit creativity of developers that they need to first ask for a service. And if it's not already being provisioned, need to wait a few weeks before it actually gets provisioned.

Oscar 
Oh, yeah, that sounds a bit old school.

Rick 
Yeah. So I'm somewhere in the middle between this. So maybe I would expect this to happen in production, but not as much during development time. But I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. But I happened running into this.

Oscar 
Yeah, it is interesting, because you do want some governance on it. But you want to give your developers control, right? Yeah, that's the whole DevOps mindset.

Rick 
I think it's the same thing as not being a local admin on your machine as a developer. That's, that's a no go as far as I'm concerned.

Friend of the day - 01:33

Oscar
Oh, yeah. It's complicated. Rick, who's our friend of the day?

Rick
Our friend of today is April Edwards.

Oscar 
April is a senior Cloud Developer Advocate and the DevOps Practice Lead at Microsoft, specializing in application transformation, and DevOps way of working. Her focus is working on Microsoft Azure to take customers of journey from legacy technology to serverless and containers, where code comes first, while enabling them to take full advantage of DevOps. April was previously a cloud consultant and Solution Architect for various partners in the UK, and brings her years of experience in helping customers to plan their journey. In April's spare time, she spends time outdoors, hiking, skiing, or scuba diving. She's also a triathlete competing in Ironman and half Ironman triathlons. Welcome, April.

Rick 
Welcome.

April 
Thank you both. Thank you so much for having me.

Rick  
That's actually a pretty impressive bio that you have there. So could you maybe explain to us what it actually means to be a senior Cloud Developer Advocate, and a DevOps Practice Lead at Microsoft,

April 
it is a mouthful is what it really is. So I'm a, I'm a senior cloud advocate. And what we do is we work with the community, which can be anyone such as yourselves, customers, etc., to help develop content. And that could be, you know, anything from Microsoft docs, or giving talks or contributing to things like Microsoft learn, etc. I personally work with developer communities, and also some operational teams. But I got into DevOps, because of my background in ops and development. Having done kind of both sides of the fence. It's a practice that I really fell in love with, and really start to embrace in my career when I hit many head walls. And you guys talked about a little bit in the intro, you know, best practices, being Abel to enable your development teams enabling your operational teams to work together. And I found this niche in my life and joined advocacy because I like showing people what good practices are. And I love it when I can write content, whether it's a blog, or give a talk and help someone on that journey.

Rick 
Okay, cool. So is that similar to what the low Agda does? Or has been doing? And then one of the persons I think is, has been an embodiment of that team in the past has been Abel Wang, and he has had a pretty big impact on your career. I mean, I think I read on your website, that in February 2019, he had a big part in the change that you made for your career. Could you maybe elaborate on that a bit?

How Abel supported April in her career - 04:09

April
Sure. So I actually met Abel in real life back when we kind of were more in person and things. I saw him give a talk at a Microsoft event. It was a technical training week in Seattle. And I look at my background, and I think we all we kind of all look at our lives when we're in tech and go, you know, what are we good at? What do we love? And how, how can we do this for a living so it isn't work. And I love working in Microsoft, I love working in Azure. And when I saw Abel on stage, he just had this energy and I was like that's it. You see so many technical talks that don't interest you aren't informative, etc. And I just I saw this persona that I said that's what I want to be. Not that I want to be Abel but that's there's someone out in the tech world that is doing what I'm passionate about and presenting in such a way that I believe in so I self introduced myself to Abel and we had a conversation over the phone. And he invited me to come on to the channel nine's DevOps labs to talk about TerraForm on Azure. And Abel loved a lot of ideas. He goes, let's get this recorded. And from there things accelerated it. You know, when you meet people, you just find these open doors, you love working with them. And I started taking on work with Abel working alongside him. And that has led me into advocacy actually. And that turned me from being in a more engineering type role to an advocate role where I still work with engineering, and I still do some engineering, but I'm not writing code every day, probably more like two, three days a week, sometimes four days,

Rick 
I think, looking at how Abel held himself, I could probably, first of all, say passionate he was passionate about, about what he wanted to what he wanted to say. Was that what actually struck you or was it also the fact that he was so invested in what he was actually working on?

April
Both I think, you know, when I've, when I've worked with customers in the past, customers always loved my enthusiasm. And that was something I could bring to the table. And Abel had that same passion. And everything he spoke about, he had that passion for. And I think that's absolutely critical. When you're up on stage or writing content. If you're passionate about the tech, you're invested, and you have empathy about it. And if you're solving a problem for someone, you have even more empathy because you've done it. And he also had an amazing ability to write code. And when you work alongside Abel, he was such a force of nature. And I loved it. I love seeing someone else that was so passionate about those things. And he was very inspiring. And working with him was great. And you know, on stage, he's a force of energy off stage. He was definitely like, very chilled, very laid out, laid back. And he was great to talk to he was very down to earth and very much real life. And he was always great at saying, You know what, I don't want to do this thing. Will you do it for me? And he was super laid back about it. He's like, Yeah, I don't want to go on stage and talk to 2000 people, will you do it for me? And I was like, yes.

Rick 
Okay, well, that's actually quite interesting way of giving you the stage.

April 
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he, you know, he had cancer. One time, he had cancer, and then he was in remission and was clear. And then the cancer came back the first time, he had cancer, he was still healing. And, and that's actually when a lot more doors opened for me, I was not only working alongside Abel, but he goes, you know, I have to go to Poland and give this talk. Oh, and there's Microsoft Ignite the tour, will you go for me, and I said, so that means traveling around the world and talking on big stages. Absolutely. So it was a whole new experience for me. And I fell right into it, I fell into it with ease. And, you know, he wanted to spend more time at home with his wife and his family. And that's very much Understandable, he traveled a lot. So it was my time to pick up the travel. And I had the flexibility to do it. So I did it. And I ran with it. And, and that has also that put me into the career path and advocacy that I didn't carve out for myself initially, that was not what my original career goals were. But I'm ever thankful that opportunity to go do those things and make those connections and have those opportunities in my life.

Oscar 
I think it's, it's amazing if some mentor like opens doors for you and just let you do part of their work. And I really also had that in my career and try to do that to other, other people also like to just enable them. And it's amazing, because in the end, you need to do it yourself. But you need the introduction, nine out of the 10 times. And in this case, you open the door yourself by just speaking to him. I think for a lot of people that's already a big step, especially someone like that, that we already know, talking to a large audience. But yeah, you need people to, to enable you and introduce you and your network. If you want to go a bit further. Yeah, you're one of those persons now that can do that for other people as well.

April 
You know, it's not quite mentoring, it's, it's, it's you start doing something and you get comfortable doing it and going, you know, I've done this a lot. Let me bring in someone else. Give them that opportunity. And it feels great to be Abel to do that with, with people. And I think it's tough because some people want to do it, but don't always, maybe it's not their thing. And it's a great opportunity to learn whether what you're good at and what you're not, and what you enjoy and what you don't. So I always like to take opportunities and try new things and some things. I don't call it a failure. It's definitely a learning experience and going you know what, I enjoyed that I learned a lot, but that isn't for me long term. So I think it's a great opportunity to sit there and be Abel to offer that up to other people. And so you know, give it a shot. You don't like it, you don't have to run with it, you love it, you keep going and being Abel to provide that's great. And that's something I've been Abel to embrace, in in my role. So I actually took over the running of the DevOps lab last summer, last June time. And being Abel to host on that has been fantastic and I took a new look into the show. So the show previously hosted a lot of the Microsoft product groups, fantastic people some fantastic shows. I decided to take more of a community approach. I will be honest you know, at Microsoft, you see a lot of the American folks, you know, pot kettle on this one, but I sit in the UK, I don't sit in the US. So I wanted to work with some of the amazing community that I get to work with here in EMEA in Europe. And that's what I did, I probably have about half, if not 75% of my guests are non Microsoft people, they're community, or maybe vendor related, but all kind of in that advocacy, very passionate community. And I want to give them that opportunity to say, Look, you have an amazing knowledge about how this product works, or how to solve this problem. So I've had this very, very great opportunity to bring people into that to let them display their skills, which I think has been incredible.

Why April is enabling DevOps for Java Shops - 10:38

Rick 
And then now I think you're even also enabling the DevOps for Java shops. So that's actually taking it really away from Microsoft technology, at least as far as the language goes. Is that also because you want it to target a broader audience and have a more of a community feel?

April 
Partially, I think there's a lot of misconceptions about Microsoft out in the field. And I say, in the field in the community, people don't believe Microsoft supports open source, they don't believe that. You can write Java code in Azure, there's a lot of misconceptions. And we have a lot of tooling and enablement for the community for people. And it's things you know, like our tooling, Azure DevOps, not just using things like GitHub actions, and GitHub, but Azure. DevOps enables you to deploy any code to any cloud. And we're cloud agnostic, and a lot of things we do. And we're also one of the biggest contributors to the open source community. And that really takes people back. So I think it's bringing that knowledge to the forefront and saying, cool, you're writing something in Java, absolutely. Come do it. And here's how it's supported in our products. And it's hopefully breaking down those barriers to entry for people that work in other fields that aren't Microsoft products, because that's the reality of the world.

Rick 
It is I mean, it's been a long, long journey for Microsoft to get to their current status to get to where they are right now. And I think Oscar and I did a talk a couple of years ago, it was not your daddy's .NET but the first introduction of .NET core. But I think the same goes for Microsoft. It's not Microsoft, was used to know, 20 years ago, wherever we have a lot of open source support, I think, if I'm not mistaking the number is that more than 60% of all machines running in Azure runs on Linux.

April 
Yes, absolutely. That's a very true number. And it's things like PowerShell, is platform cross platform capable. I'm actually giving two talks in the summer at different conferences for PowerShell. And I'm talking about the cross platform capability of PowerShell. Because PowerShell was known as Windows PowerShell. And, and yes, you can use it on Windows, you can use it on Azure, and it's a really great tool. My former manager is an awesome human. And he is a very open source human being. And yes, he worked for Microsoft. He was open source first on everything he did. And I think it's a great mentality to have. But he sat there one day, and we had a bit of a heated discussion about PowerShell. And, you know, he started kind of going Windows person, Linux person, I said, Well hold on, doesn't matter if your Windows or Linux in this day and age, especially at Microsoft cross platform is where it's at. And he just went touché and, you know, we shook hands. And we agreed on, you know, a way forward. But he was adamant about not using PowerShell in our code in our pipelines. And I said, Well, hold on, it's super powerful. It's easy to use, and you can cross platform it and he's like, okay, cool. Let's give it a go. So I think, be Abel to change the hearts and minds of people and understand that we're not the ways of old anymore at Microsoft. And it's great to see all everyone embrace that.

Aprils encounter with PowerShell - 13:34

Rick 
I think you've had your own encounter with PowerShell. And it not being cross platform in the past where I think you did some stuff in bash.

April 
Yes. This is a great story. So this actually goes back to Abel Wang. So I worked in PowerShell for years. You know, I don't want to age myself. But when PowerShell 2.0 came out, I was using it heavily to manage environments and infrastructures in in, in the companies I worked for. And when I was invited on to Channel Nine to record my first ever episode for TerraForm on Azure. I said you know what, I'm gonna write my entire demo in bash. And I'm just gonna do it in bash. So I looked like a more Dev, because I was scared. And I'll be honest, and we all have this in our jobs. I was scared to be seen as not dev enough. So I was like, I'm gonna write all bash because I look cool. Did my demo and everything as I get into the recording Abel is like, I'm a PowerShell. Guy. And I just like sunk. And I'm like, I'm not changing my demo, because I was so nervous. I practiced what I was going to say 1000 times I did my demo. 1000 times get there on the day. And Abel was like, don't care. We're going to run with a natural flow. I don't care what you've practiced. We're going to wing it. And we did. And it was amazing. And it's one of my favorite videos that I've ever done because it showed me the Art of Doing something naturally and then we got done the recording and Abel is like, Hey, we got done early. That was really fast. Do you want to go have lunch with Jeffrey Snover. Now for those of you listening, Jeffrey Snover is the creator of PowerShell. I was like, yeah. Okay, so we go have lunch with Jeffrey Snover. And again, this is someone that I learned PowerShell from looked up to for years. In the middle of lunch, Abel goes, Uh, yeah, tell Jeffrey what you did today. So I had to sit there during lunch until the creator of PowerShell how I wrote something in bash, because I want to be more Dev. And I just sunk into my chair and turned bright red. But that was a defining moment in my career where I said, You know what, screw it. I love PowerShell. It is cool. I'm going to make it cool for everyone. And I'm not going to, you know, for go what I believe in to make people think I'm more dev or whatever I me m. And I'm going to do, I'm going to do me, right. So yeah, that was that was a fun day. That was a little bit of embarrassment. And that will never happen again.

Rick 
Yeah, but it was a big learning experience. Because just like you said, you do. I mean, that's what it all comes back to. And if you are on stage, or if you are recording, I mean, it shows if you're, if you're passionate about what you're doing, that shows and that catches on. And if you're just there trying to be whatever what you think everybody else needs you to be, that probably won't work, right. So that's probably the reason why stuff works.

April 
Absolutely. And that was the best advice from Abel, he goes, You do you. And that applies to how I speak on stage using PowerShell and demo. But also when I would have a technical idea, I'm like, Abel, I want to write this blog or do this thing. And then I would see like Scott Hanselman released the series, he goes, so you do you, you're gonna do it your way Scott's gonna do it his way. Screw it, you do you and that empowered me. And whenever I'm kind of having a day where I'm doubting what I'm going to write, because it all happens to all of us. Is my content valid? Is my people going to like it? I think right? I'm going to write it for me. If one person gained something out of my blog or my talk, then I'm happy, then that's success. That's impact delivered to me. So I do I just I'm me and I don't I don't apologize for it.

Oscar 
Yeah, worst case scenario in two years time you find your own blog after Googling. To help you out with something.

Rick 
Your own external memory.

April 
I've done that before. Like, how do you solve that problem, and I wrote a blog like a year and a half ago, and I'm like, let me go look that up. I have a blog for you. But I think that's, that's where the value is. When I write these blogs coming, you know, whether I'm engaged in a Customer project or encountering a problem, I do write the blog for me and how I solve something. And it can be something really simple, but so many people are like, Oh, my gosh, that's helped me overcome this blocker. And while it can be simple, it isn't always simple for everyone else, or it may have been a really tough technical blocker for me. So I do enjoy being Abel to reference stuff and come back to it and remember how I solved it because my memory is not amazing. At all, especially from a year ago.

Rick 
Well, that's why writing is a good thing. I think, like you said sometimes it's the simple things I think I've had a few years where workspaces already mapped in another directory on this lawn, this machine was my biggest hit blog post that I wrote, just because a lot of people were running into it and wanted to find out, hey, how can I solve this? So? Yeah, I totally agree on that one. Let us get back a little bit to your work and where you focus on Microsoft Azure and taking customers from Legacy into the cloud, let's say? Do you see a general shift in the type of services people are using in the cloud? I mean, we started out with cloud services, then we get app services. Now we have all these serverless solutions, but also containers, and especially with the new addition container apps, I think is a very valid addition to the Azure ecosystem. Is there also a shift in services people tend to look at initially, or is that still based on the knowledge that they already have for their doing on premises?

April 
So I think there's two methods that we see a lot of we see a lot of people do a lift and shift, I believe, and I don't want to say it's 83%. But it's over 80% of the workloads in Azure are virtual machines still, without question, Pete, a lot of customers, big customers, medium sized customers lift and shift their data center into virtual machines, because yes, that is what they know. And they're not really leveraging what the cloud can do. And they look to refactor after the fact that like, Oh, we'll get everything in the cloud and refactor it after. And I've worked with a lot of customers that sit there and go, we have subscriptions everywhere. We have no guardrails. And I would say, you know, in 2013 2014, when I was really starting to do a lot of data center migrations into Azure, it was a little bit more of the Wild West. So now we've progressed to a model where there are so many tools that are free to A assess your environment and B to help with that transformation and also to put guardrails in place, so things like cloud adoption framework, etc. And it's all scripted with infrastructures code. So you know, let's say, even say five, six years ago, you had to do things from scratch. So a lot of customers did go lift and shift, and they'd start toying with things like Kubernetes and containers, and you know, service fabric when that was a lot more popular in Azure and Azure web apps and Azure web apps were a breakthrough for a lot of customers, but they were still looking at how to get it there. So a lot of customers today, start with their apps. And they start with an application stack. And there are so many great ways to go. And customers often ask, you know, where do we start which service? For me, I've been doing a lot of work with Azure static web apps, because they're free, and a lot of people are running static sites. Now, if you know, one more enterprise plan, there's a cost to it. But it is an easy way for people in the community just spin up a website, it's easy way for you and I to spin up a website. And then for customers that want to start, you know, dipping their toe in the water, it's low overhead maintenance. And we see a lot of customers looking into containers and Kubernetes. And container apps, I think, where Kubernetes has had some barrier to entry is the learning curve. Without question. Well, we've made it easier without, you know, without any doubt, but there's still that barrier to entry. So things like container apps coming onto the market help lower that barrier to entry. So I think we see a shift in a lot of customers going pas first, instead of just lifting and shifting, refactoring their apps, and looking at these managed services to help them do that. And a lot of the tools have DevOps tooling built into it. Like Azure static web apps, when you deploy it, you pull your code from your repo, and you're good to go. You have full CI CD capabilities. And same thing with container apps. So building in greater functionality lowers that barrier to entry. So we're seeing a lot more people embracing the platform of service and serverless things much more so than, you know, five plus years ago,

Infrastructure as code and the barrier to entry Azure - 21:40

Oscar 
You mentioned in about infrastructure as code, you do see that becoming the normal now. What I also see is that you have some different clients who have the bit more early adopters that went to the pass and the Functions as a Service and all kinds of things really early. But they are a bit behind. In my experience right now. Like they started really early, but it was still clicking stuff in portals. And where you see new shops or going into the cloud really late and enterprises and stuff. Now starting out with that, and with that stuff, to me, it's a bit of a struggle. Sometimes if a client just starts out doing infrastructure as code, when already having like six years of experience and like 150 services in Azure? Do you see that a lot, or you get a lot of questions around that?


April 
Every day, every single day. No, and I think so many people get, you know, we see all these great new shiny things and articles. And the majority of our customers are still learning these things. So I think when we talk about DevOps, if you're a developer, it's a little bit easier for you, because you're already using Source Control, you're writing code, and you're like, Okay, another language, or I can use my existing language, and deploy something with tools like Paluma, et cetera. For an ops person, it's harder to get started, because why do I need source control? What is Git? There's a lot more for an operational team to learn. But when we talk to ops teams, you know, they're scared when they go to the cloud, they're like, Well, I point and click, and I do things. And I'm right, we're going from a reactive approach to a proactive approach. So we have to change your mindset. And most of DevOps is mindset and culture changes. And that's probably the hardest part. So we are putting tools out there to make that easier. So when Azure first came out, you could literally write an ARM template. And if you don't know, JSON, you know, it was hard. And it was hard when I learned it. Now you can go and deploy something and export that JSON template. But going a step further, we have repositories all over GitHub with templates, you can utilize. we've open sourced bicep, we've open sourced arm. So you can go create templates and deploy infrastructures code. And then you have things like TerraForm, and other tooling out there, like pulumi, where you can get those templates to run your code in. And I can't talk about what's coming down the line, because it's super secret. But there are products coming down the line that are going to enable anyone to deploy a template into Azure and get started a lot faster. So we're lowering that barrier to entry. And that's really important for everyone so that we can get infrastructure and you know, everything else moved over. But then also the learning and the scaling of that makes that easier. And I think, you know, if you're working in operations, and you're looking at the cloud, like scripting, automation is going to be probably the biggest part of your job. And we need more people to be doing that. And if you want to, you know, keep your career going. Like we still need people to point and click and maintain infrastructure, but we really need people that can automate and deploy this infrastructure as code and make it scalable. That's the value add, but there are definitely things coming down the pipeline that are going to help lower that barrier to entry when it comes to infrastructure as code and getting started because it is it is really hard. And it's, you know, you're learning a whole new skill set on top of your day job.

Oscar 
And there are so many choices in the moment. It's also a good thing. Of course, there are multiple ecosystems to do something with. I'm a big fan of bicep at the moment, like everyone around me, but it's really from the developer side makes a lot of sense. But if I talk to clients, and especially with the ops teams also needing to shift over some, some running servers with the out of the box apps on it, I get the questions like, What should we use? Like, yeah, well, for our team bicep makes sense. It is hard to consult them that and it's hard to oversee their problems in there, because they might be power shelling their way out of things for years, but manually running them. Because on prem, there's hardly any automation that I see for infrastructure.

Rick 
So again, it all boils down to it depends, right?

April 
Yeah, but it does every time every single time. It depends.

Oscar 
But the problem is, the bigger the company is, and that's a bit what you said in the intro, Rick is they somehow want to get a grip on choosing one thing or like this, there are like five different things. And they all depend where to use him. It's hard to sell sometimes, because in a cabinet, let's choose just one like, Yeah, well, then you get.

Rick 
But why.

Oscar 
Like everyone was a bit annoyed. Like.

Rick 
Nobody's really happy and everybody is a bit annoyed.

April 
We've just we just angered everyone.

Rick 
Yeah, I can totally see that one.

April 
Yeah. And when I, before joining advocacy, I was on the engineering side. And we were engaged with some of the top 400 customers in the world. And we were engaged with small development teams. And they had that exact problem. You go in and say, right, well, we're going to work in a new agile way of working, we're going to move away from waterfall, what tooling are you using? And, you know, a lot of the times are like, well, you know, the executive team requires us to use x, we're not allowed to use VS code, because it's not an enterprise level product. And I'm like, Okay, what do you use? notepad plus? Okay, you know, and it's, yeah, true story. And we have a lot of large customers in the world that are embracing Azure, but using some legacy tooling, and they don't, and that the corporate side of it doesn't want change. And they're saying to your developers, you must use x and y. And it's things like, you know, we're writing code next to these people. And this guy spent hours trying to find one piece of code in TerraForm, because I can't find it. And he also had a crack down his screen, which didn't help but he was using Notepad plus, plus that pulled up, I've pulled up his code and VS code and said, Oh, it's right there. He's like, How'd you find it was like, because it told me where to find it gave me a little squiggly line.

Rick 
And that's the cool thing, right? If you, if you use the correct tooling, it will enable you to do your job so much better. And that's why I can never understand why somebody way up high in a company says, Thou shalt not or thou shalt, I mean, of course, we need to take into account that we can use everything in anything from all around the spectrum. But if it's tools that actually support you in the language that we want to write software in, and then who cares what tooling you use.

April 
Exactly, and I think, well ahead, and there's a security side of it. And I actually had this discussion with a customer the other day, they're talking to me about security and endpoint security on developer machines. And I said, Well, hold on, you're talking about a very legacy way of thinking. I said, Do you want to lock down your developer machines, which you can do. But if you develop inside a dev container, security's becomes a less of discussion on the developer workstation, and then you can allow them to develop code and not worry about it doesn't work on my machine. And the person goes, well, you know, what about a dev container, there can be a leak and said, Look, there's nothing 100% I said, you need to secure the dev container, your dev container needs to be created in a repo. And all code needs to be checked in and reviewed. I said, so if you're following really solid developer practices, you've mitigated your security risks, and I sent some articles and some things and they're like, this is fantastic. Thank you. So it's, it's changing the way of thinking of how we did it 10, 20 years ago, and you're right on prem, like nothing is automated unless someone's written a script in Python, or PowerShell. It's taking that and translating that to something a little bit more, you know, diverse when you go to the cloud.

Oscar 
Yeah. But it's for everything almost right? This is shifting in mindset, you can give someone a new stack or a new language. And the first thing they will do is rebuild the thing they were doing last year in a different language and fighting the system. But it is a new mindset. Because in, for instance, in the cloud, is there are other ways to enforce policies that you have, because there is security, and there are concerns around that. But it's not for preselecting and vetting all the services out there because by the time they agreed on it, or they dismissed it, because it's lacking a feature. The service has already changed. And it has the feature now for instance.

April 
Yeah, and that's customers always ask, well, what's the five year plan for this product? And I'm like, I don't know. Like we publish our would map about six months to a year, maybe 18 months, I said, but the world changes. So let's think back to when COVID hit, every organization that survived COVID had to adapt on the fly, Microsoft had to make changes in a couple of weeks to some of our biggest events. That, you know, in two months, we shifted what would have taken probably two years to change. And it's, it is a mindset change. And all of us during COVID had to change how we work in order to deliver the services we deliver to our customers. And that forced everyone to new ways of working. And, you know, unless someone lights a fire under you, you know, you don't always see why, because it's a lot of work, it's hard. There will probably be tears and frustration. But the end game is hopefully a lot prettier than what was on the other side of the fence.

Rick 
I'm going to go back on something Abel said when he was over here in the Netherlands actually speaking at our user group, he said if something hurts, do it more often, right?

April 
Absolutely.

Rick 
So I have, I have just one question more about the DevOps side of things. And you're trying to teach customers to take more of the Agile or DevOps approach. And one thing that we run into quite a lot over here is that as soon as companies start migrating from running their software, either on premises or building software and giving out to customers, especially that last one, as soon as those types of companies migrate towards a cloud solution, they are now also responsible for actually keeping the software up and running. And I think that's actually one of the biggest changes for a lot of vendors out there that currently just ship, let's not say DVDs, but USB sticks or downloads for their software, they are now actually running that software for their customers, and they are expected to keep it running. So there's a big chunk of work there, right?

Oscar 
It's a completely different company, right building software that you burn on a CD comparing to hosting SAS.

Rick 
But there's a lot happening in that. Is there any guidance from Microsoft as far as that transition goes?

April 
So and I know you've probably heard this from Abel as well. It's a talk we give to our customers in the community quite a bit about the Microsoft transformation. So we used to ship you DVDs and CDs, right? How did we take our products from a, you know, a packaged software product to a cloud driven service. It's a talk I give a lot how we transformed it. Number one was the culture change for us. And among when we talk to customers about delivering software, I've worked with a lot of ISPs and organizations that are delivering a product. And they're looking to host an Azure, there's things they have to consider. And the biggest thing is the culture and the mindset change, then you also have to look at the tooling and the products that you're using, and the process that you're using to deliver this. And that's those are things that play into it. But a lot of customers go, Oh, we're gonna go to Azure and it will fix everything, or another cloud, whatever we do. And they haven't changed the mindset of how they're delivering that they haven't restructured their teams to fix that. There's actually a team at Microsoft right now. They're called the DevOps dojo. They're made up of various people from across Microsoft and GitHub, that are delivering services to customers and helping them transform and deliver those products. And they have written blogs, and we've just done a series of videos on the DevOps lab. And they will be getting launched soon, along with the further blogs, but it's how to make those changes. And number one, it's about the culture change. And every blog they write has culture in it, and also building trust with your customer base. So you know, we've talked about Microsoft days of old. So let's think about when we used to deliver a box product as Microsoft, you'd get your CD DVD, you install it. And if it broke, you had to call support, and sit on hold for hours and work to that SLA. Whereas now you can open an issue on GitHub right away. And if there's a service outage, we are transparent to our customers. So we've delivered cloud services, but then we have brought our customers closer to the product with various mechanisms. So once feedback loops, being very transparent about our product, and we've actually had to change how we develop our products. And that was part of the culture change. You guys talked about in the opening a little bit about, you know, development not being the same as production, our code from day one has to be production ready, that includes security being built in testing being built in so that the code we're writing is production ready from day one, what it is getting tested. And then also, we own that code. We own the inception of the idea and our product teams, to its deployment, and its monitoring and management. So that full cycle of Yes, I push code for the product that might be as your DevOps, Xbox, windows, you name it, but I own it. And that's changed the mentality of the teams. It creates empathy, it brings the engineering teams closer to the end users. So we have made a massive amount of change. So that's their story that we share externally, all the time. And the DevOps Dojo team is sharing that story through their customer transformation experiences currently as well. So we are developing more references for customers to see how other customers have done it. And we also host customers to talk about their transformation stories in a very similar manner.

Rick 
Well, that's actually good to know. And I saw that it's also on the, on the DevOps lab show, so I'm going to check that one out. Oscar, do you know what time it is?

Totally random question - 35:26

Oscar 
Is it time for a totally random question?

Rick 
It is time for a totally random question.

Oscar 
April, name one thing on your bucket list.

April 
Oh, to ski Shawnee.

Oscar 
Well, can you explain?

April 
So yeah, I can. I grew up skiing, I started skiing at the age of three. I'm a massive fan of skiing, I got invited to the Junior Olympics. I was used to be a professional ski instructor and was invited to ski with the demonstration team, the US Ski Team demonstration team down in South America and got injured. But when I was a kid, there was a very famous skier in the 80s and the 90s. Men named Glen plake. Glen plague is an American skier. He was very famous for his Mohawk. And as a child, I was obsessed with his style and the way he skied. And I emulated that in my own skiing, and he used to ski in Shawnee, because in Shawnee, they don't have a lot of rules that they have in the US about skiing out of bounds and skiing cliffs and kind of the back area is out of bounds areas. So I'm not far from Shawnee. But I still have yet to ski it. So that is on my bucket list to do.

Rick 
Nice.

Oscar 
Cool.

Rick 
It's the cool thing about these totally random questions is that you learn something about somebody that otherwise would probably never get out there. So thanks.

April 
Absolutely.

Closing - 36:49

Rick 
April, is there anything that you would like to get back to today, or it's something that you would like to add?

April 
Well, I think, for me, I'm just writing blogs. And I've one of the blogs I'm going to be writing about is migrating from Azure DevOps to GitHub, I'm migrating the Microsoft dev blogs platform. So nobody see you don't from the website, you won't notice it. But from the back end, the way we produce our blogs is through a PR process on Azure DevOps. I'm actually migrating that to GitHub today. So hopefully, I'll write a blog on that. And some of the new features that we're utilizing to automate our blogging process for the Microsoft sites,

Oscar 
Cool. This, but you struck a nerve there, because it is a bit of bending question, of course, is like, Should we move to GitHub

Rick 
We even asked Martin Woodward because we had him on the show earlier? And he said, Well, I'm going to see these two services coexist for quite some time now.

Oscar 
Of course, it's Microsoft, they will support you. But as long as you need.

Rick 
In the end, if I need to make a choice now what should I do?

April 
So your favorite answer, it depends. That's, it's entirely true. So as your DevOps is a fully mature product, it does a lot of amazing things. GitHub does not have that maturity. So there has been massive investment to bring the feature parity up into GitHub, and it is not going to be the same as Azure DevOps. Yes, they're going to coexist alongside each other for some time. So which way do you go? It depends, my biggest, the biggest thing I raised with customers is where does your data need to sit? And most of the customer projects I worked on previously, data had to reside in their in their region. So Azure DevOps was the was the best fit because A, we needed the planning tools of Azure boards and all the incredible tooling that is in Azure DevOps, but the data had to sit in their Azure tenant, if you will, because it's all controlled with AD. And that's where they repost it, so you can control the region. GitHub is going to bring that feature out with GitHub Enterprise, but it isn't there yet. So for many people, the data residency is the biggest issue.

Rick 
You actually had quite a few interesting hooks for us to try and keep up to date with whatever's coming. Because you have a very, super secret thing coming out, which is interesting.

April 
Yes

Oscar 
Yeah. So this blog post and the secret thing to help you land properly in more infrastructure as code, kind of things. Yeah, we're really looking forward. So maybe we will need you on as a guest once you can talk a bit more about.

April 
Absolutely. Well, I think, let's just say build time, there's going to be some when Build comes out in May this year, there's going to be some great announcements. I might even be speaking about some of them. We shall see. So, but I will definitely some blogs out. We'll definitely get some blogs out.

Rick 
We'll keep our eyes on that one.

Oscar 
Thank you very much.

Rick 
April, thank you so much for being our guest.

April 
Thank you both for having me. It was a pleasure to be here today.

Oscar 
Thank you for listening to Betatalks the podcast. We publish a new episode every two weeks.

Rick 
You can find us on all the major streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes

Oscar 
See you next time.

Rick 
Bye.