Northern Azure user group February 2025 Meetup

The NAUG is back for 2025 with a new location and a new sponsor

Session Details
Session 1 - Martin Farrow- How to ensure your cloud transformation fails

Description - A slightly humorous and mildly sardonic talk on the main issues organisations face with Cloud Transformations.

A bit about Martin
Martin is the Director of Cloud and DevOps at KMPG and has over 35 years of experiences in the IT industry. He has worked through the emergence of Open Systems, Web1.0, Open Source, Web 2.0, high performance commodity computing, cloud and more recently AI. At heart Martin is deeply technical, he bought his first computer in 1980, that had 16K of memory and now knows around 25 programming languages. In the noughties Martin’s HPC team delivered a 3 Peta Byte data cluster to CERN one the largest in Europe at the time . After spending a couple of years in politics, more recently Martin has led the technical IT separation aspect of one of the largest energy sector divestitures in the world at $9.2b as well as led major, multi-million pound and multi-year cloud and devSecOps transformations for major financial and government organisations.

Session 2 - Danny McDermott - From Edge to Azure - How Azure Arc simplifies data transfer from your edge deployed container apps to Azure

Description
In this session I will talk about the latest release of Azure Container Storage for Azure and how it simplifies transferring data from your containerised application to Azure Blob Storage. There will be practical demos, showing how to deploy a new AKS cluster on Azure Local with a few command lines, installing ACSA as a Kubernetes storage class, and a containerised app to demonstrate how file transfers work in practice

A bit about Danny
Danny is a Cloud Architect for the Azure Apps and Infra ICOE at Avanade. With 30+ years working in IT, mainly focussing on infrastructure and within the Microsoft ecosystem. Experience within FSI, defence, manufacturing, logistics, aviation, public sector and retail
Past 10 years have been focussed as an Azure and hybrid cloud working as a consultant to clients within EMEA. Awarded Azure MVP for past 5 years.

Agenda:
5:30 - 6:00 - Welcome & networking
6:00 - 7:00 - Martin Farrow
7:00 - 7:30 - Food,drinks and networking
7:30 - 8:30 - Danny McDermott

Location Details
Address:18 Lower Byrom St, Manchester M3 4AP.

ECOM are based in a renovated space called the Bonded Warehouse which sits on the same site as the Old-Granada studio tour.

The entrance to the bonded warehouse can be reached from Lower Byrom street just next to the Museum of Science and Industry, the building entrance is on the right hand side across from the crystal maze. Google and apple maps may attempt to direct you to the rear of the building, if in doubt use the what3words location and look for the Crystal Maze too.

what3words:///rounds.sadly.refers