Just a few days into December of 2019, I decided to start learning more about Azure. There were a few contributing factors that were peaking my interest. Work for a few reasons.
First, we had been venturing into the cloud journey with Oracle SaaS, specifically PBCS and OAC-Essbase/DV. It was the first dip of our toes into the cloud for EPM and Analytics. There was excitement and there was pain, there was sunshine and there was rain … like the song from the late 80’s by
Joy And Pain by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock
[Hook:]
“Joy and pain
Like sunshine and rain
Joy and pain
We still had a Platform we were running on-prem that had started being used almost 4 years prior and clouds were beginning to become a viable option to consider as some of the products were at a maturation point that were of “production grade”.
So, Oracle-ly speaking. September 2019, I was able to attend Oracle Open World in San Francisco and was selected to present. In addition to my presentation, I had the opportunity to speak directly with product teams; managers, development and strategy. Attended a number of sessions as well, not easy given that there were 60,000 people in attendance. The Oracle cloud.
Second was that I recently attended AWS re: Invent in Las Vegas. Vegas is Vegas. But it was about the conference. A number of my co-workers had been learning about AWS, and even going so far as to achieve certifications, some, multiple! I was impressed knowing how hard they had studied. At the conference though, I was curious for myself and wanted to attend as many sessions as possible to know and learn more! Have to say that the conference was like no other. Attendance wise, it was sold out at 65,000! Have to say that it felt like every bit of that, if not more most of the time. Every session was waiting room only, and some had overflow rooms. It was a conference that I was glad to be able to attend, learned from each and every session that I was able to get into! It was eye opening and jam packed into a few days, multiple hotel conference centers, rooms and for sure learned what the cloud feels like in a sea of thousands
Lastly is Azure. So there has now recently been a big push to learn about Azure, what it offers, etc. With that, I took it as another learning opportunity of yet another cloud provider. It was interesting to see all of the trends over the past decade of cloud providers, AWS, GCP, Azure and others. But knowing very little about Azure other than this article posted in the summer of 2019.
Microsoft and Oracle to interconnect Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud https://news.microsoft.com/2019/06/05/microsoft-and-oracle-to-interconnect-microsoft-azure-and-oracle-cloud/
But with all of that, it was time to get to learning. Figured the first thing was to at least learn the Fundamentals. And that is just what I did. It was good to know that shortly after the first of the new year in 2020 I was able to start putting what I was learning into real world experience. After going through the Learning Path for Azure Fundamentals (9 hr 48 min), it was finally time to take the AZ-900 certification exam.
And after only 10 days of studying. Took the exam and PASSED!
What’s next? More cloud!!!
Communicate with Data 