Ask Me Anything with Scott Gu – If Carlsberg did meetings…

Mid December 2018, I received a DM on twitter from a new follower @deanbryen which was basically read like so –

Hey Gregor! I know you’ve been doing a ton of stuff with the Azure community both in Scotland and online. Thanks for that!!

We’re organising a small (10-15 people) private event for top UK tech community members to attend an AMA with Scott Guthrie in January. I added you to the list of invitees, so this is me inviting you 🙂

What:  ‘Azure AMA (ask me anything) with Scott’ An opportunity to have a closed-door discussion with Scott Guthrie on the state of cloud in the UK

So on Friday 18th January I went down to London to the Microsoft Reactor and met with Scott Guthrie to ask him question’s on the status of Azure in the UK – an Ask Me Anything session – not gonna lie I was super excited by this opportunity.

Firstly it was amazing to get recognised as someone with a passion for Azure and be recognised, it felt like a reward for all the hard work I put in with blogging, user group, helping other people and giving feedback on Microsoft products etc. – I get a lot of people saying their inspired by how I took to learning Azure and how they want to do the same.

The meeting was just after 11am, Scott introduced himself and the products and teams he manages, he spoke about .Net, Azure, GitHub, AI, Data and more and if you think about that, that is a huge amount of people and projects to be responsible for.

One thing that struck me was his passion for it and his in-depth knowledge of where the teams are, what’s planned ahead, even down to the release dates for the vnext in these products.  GitHub was mentioned a good few times and with Microsoft purchasing it he talked about how recognised how people might react but he knows that GitHub will get even better moving forward for all types of developer’s.

Microsoft want to keep old friends and make new friends and that’s an awesome way to run a company.

It’s not every day your sat in a meeting with the Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft.

If your interested to know what Scott is like in person, he’s relaxed, friendly, very engaging, loves hearing feedback (good and bad), and a very nice person indeed, he talks openly and honestly about everything he and Microsoft is doing and how they give back as well.

We talked about a lot of stuff within an hour and here is a list of the things I can remember in the conversation: –

• Staff Training and how to get staff trained at a professional level for moving to the cloud
• Azure Governance and how companies can have policies in place
• Azure Security Centre
• The new Azure portal homepage and the layout etc – I asked can we customise it (that’s in the pipeline)
• Containers in Azure, Kubernetes etc
• Data Centre’s and Carbon footprints as well as renewable energy
• Microsoft Learn and byte size learning and how its effective and how its been well received
• Events like Build and Ignite and how the new Ignite events are being well received
• Cloud Advocates and more regional / local events coming, more Ignite local events coming
• Visual Studio code and how popular it has become
• Managed Service Identity (MSI) and how its being built-in more and more going forward into Azure
• Python tooling that’s coming and how it will be best in class

A lot of the we above we spoke about and these are just my recollection of the main topics that came up, yes we could have stayed there all day asking Scott questions but we had a limited time with him as you can imagine, with more time I’d like to have know what a day-to-day normal day involves.

Before Scott left I managed to introduce myself and grab a selfie which was awesome, not a day or meeting I will forget about anytime soon, If Carlsberg did meetings…

Lastly huge thanks to @deanbryen for the invite, Anna Fear for organising and to the UK Cloud Advocates who I spoke with when we had lunch together.