I’m happy to announce that my book, ”Learning Microsoft Azure: Cloud Computing and Development Fundamentals”, made it to BookAuthority’s Best New Cloud Computing Books:

https://bookauthority.org/books/new-cloud-computing-books?t=15r0k8&s=award&book=1098113322

BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition. Thank you for all your support!

The book is available for purchase on Amazon.

As a software developer I like continuous learning and to learn by doing. I love learning more about new modern technogies available. It is important to me to keep in track of the new developer technologies that are useful and interesting.

I personally think it is exciting to learn more about Microsoft Azure technologies. Of course, there are other big cloud providers in the market these days. However, Azure technologies suit me best as I do software development in Microsoft C# and in .NET / .NET Core. Currently, they are supporting more and more programming languages and integrations.

The Microsoft Azure cloud platform have a lot of great cloud services that are really fascinating and interesting. I am amazed how these cloud technologies can help solve technical and real-life problems.

I wish I could select all of them but here are my to 6 favorite Azure cloud services.

Azure App Service

As a PaaS (Platform as a Service), Azure App Service is one of the most practical and popular service used in most application development in the cloud. I really like creating and developing any apps in any programming language and platform that I want in my favorite IDE like Microsoft Visual Studio or VS Code.

Develop, code it, and you are ready you publish it to an Azure App Service where you have all you need in one place — on the Azure Portal! You can even use Azure Cloudshell and other supported command line tools to do all you want from VS Code. From development to management, to the logging analytics of the applications.

I like that this service gives the option to auto scale, Application Insights to monitor the performance, and do a lot of cool stuff that are useful — for example the Deployment Slots in Azure App Service that is really cool! If you haven’t tried it, check it out!

Azure Service Bus

I had an Azure Tech talk about Azure Service Bus at Azure User Group Manila. I mentioned and shared about it as one of my favorite Azure technologies along with my Filipina Azure Developer friends. I even did a technical overview about it. This technology is pretty great in solving complex messaging problems with different great features like message sessions, auto delete on idle, dead letter queue and more. It is worth checking if you having having queue problems you need to solve.

Azure Service Bus solves complex messaging problems that many developers have to solve. We aim to develop quality and reliable cloud messaging solutions in our applications. The service Service Bus guarantees reliability, scalability, and security in messaging delivery. Send and receive reliable asynchronous messages or data that you can scale and secure. — Azure Service Bus, A Technical Overview

I actually have simple example codes in GitHub about different types of Azure Service Bus Queues and Topic — it’s example sender and receive on a console app.

• jonahandersson/AzureServiceBusMessageSender
• jonahandersson/AzureServiceBusReceiver

Azure Functions + Azure Durable Functions

Serverless computing and its technologies are pretty great if you want to pay only for what you use without worrying about deployments and the infrastructure management. Actually it is not really “serverless”. There is actually an infrastructure behind it. What makes it serverless is that you don’t need to care about the server administration because Microsoft Azure takes care of that for you. You just need to pay for what you use on your Azure Functions.

Serverless Compute Service like Azure Functions enhanced developer productivity too so it is a win-win. Azure Functions are event-driven and are trigged by events such as HTTP triggers, data store events, timers and more. You can also integrate Azure Functions with other Azure services and third party services.

Azure Durable Functions are the extension and enhanced version of Azure Functions. It is special because it stateful unlike normal Azure Functions. Having stateful serverless functions can be cost-effective if you have long-running task to do.

There different types for Durable Functions — the client, the orchestrator and the activity. You can code stateful workflows by writing functions using the orchestrator and stateful entities by writing entity functions. For more information about Azure Durable Functions.

Durable Functions have several patters like Function Chaining, Fan-In/Fan-Out, Human Interaction, Monitoring and more.

You can check out my simple example for function chaining on my GitHub repo for it below.

https://github.com/jonahandersson/AzureDurableFunctions_Simple_Example

Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machine is completely the other world and opposite Azure Functions and Durable Functions which is a Serverless/FaaS.

If you want to have all control over your infrastructure or if you need to migrate existing applications without the need of doing too much modernization, then Azure Virtual Machine is ideal. You can deploy one or many of your favorite image or choice directly on Azure Portal or programmatically deploy via Azure CLI, Powershell or ARM templates.

Azure VM Managed Instances allow multiple virtual machines.

I had a talk about Azure Virtual Machines that you can check out https://youtu.be/Ym1hzEfgoWE

Azure Key Vault

If you want to securely keep all your secrets, keys and certificates for your applications then Azure Key Vault is perfect!

Centralizing storage of application secrets in Azure Key Vault allows you to control their distribution. Key Vault greatly reduces the chances that secrets may be accidentally leaked. When using Key Vault, application developers no longer need to store security information in their application. Not having to store security information in applications eliminates the need to make this information part of the code. For example, an application may need to connect to a database. Instead of storing the connection string in the app’s code, you can store it securely in Key Vault.

Azure Key Vault Overview - Azure Key Vault

Next time you need to way to save all your important info, use key vault in Azure!

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is the last of this list but definitely one of the best and innovative cloud services that Microsoft Azure has! I like that this Azure suite for organizations and project management combining DevOps services in one place. Developers and IT operations can collaborate together in one place! You have the option to save your repositories, create CI/CD with Azure Pipelines, create project management processes with Azure Boards, create different kind of tests in Azure Tests and create artifacts with Azure Artifacts.

Plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster with a set of modern dev services.

Azure DevOps Services | Microsoft Azure

So these are my top 6 favorite Azure Services but this list could have definitely long since I have more than 6 favorites! 😊

About Author: Jonah Andersson is a Filipina-Swedish Software Developer who codes full stack system development in C# .NET/NET Core. Jonah is passionate about continuous learning, developing and sharing knowledge about Microsoft Azure cloud technologies. She one of the #AzureHeroes in Sweden. A woman who codes in tech who likes writing, advocating gender equality in the tech industry through mentorship and by being role model on her spare time. Follow her on Twitter @cjkodare, LinkedIn and her website at https://jonahandersson.tech

“The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you. ” - B. B. King

The quote above has been my favorite since I was a kid. It is my quote of inspiration for continuous learning.

Learning and mastery takes time, patience and consistent practice. When you have focused devotion to learning, you reap the harvest of wisdom and deepened knowledge that nobody else can take away from you. It doesn’t mean that you can be greedy and keep that knowledge to yourself. You have the power, ability and opportunity to share your knowledge to help others and make a difference.

I think that is what our lives is about — to connect and collaborate with the right people that comes our way in our unique journey in life.

We all went to school to learn. We go through many years of school in our lives because it is fundamental and essential. We study hard to get good grades and merits. We compete to excel and get awards. We want to be best in what we do and what we want to do.

When we finished school, we thought we finished learning what we had to learn. However, that is not the reality. The reality is — it is just the beginning of the true learning — in life.

When we begin our career at any profession we choose, that’s what when really start to apply what we learned. To be agile in every unique situation we encounter. To learn from our mistakes and wrong decisions. To solve the problems we encounter. To deal with difficult people we meet. To keep the ones that we value the most and let go of those that hinder us in our walk in life. I personally can relate to through my own journey.

So, a bit about me and my story. Professionally, l currently work as a Fullstack Software Developer a.k.a programmer or Software Engineer. As for education, I studied BSc. Computer Science in college with major in programming. My first programming language was Visual Basic on tube computers with Windows 98 Operating System in it. I only had tiny external memory floppy disks to save my files. I had learn computer typing at a good speed, Logic gates and converting binary codes. I’ve had several types of jobs and career roles after college. My first job in 2006 was technical support in different levels American companies. I also worked as an International travel consultant, SEO Specialist, web developer, programming coach, and now as an IT Consultant with Software Engineer and cloud computing focus.

To follow my passion and dream in working with computers and tech, I studied more programming (Agile System Development in C# and Java Development) before I started working full-time as a programmer.

I studied programming but I am continually learning myself by investing time to learn during the week. I study continually to level up with the fast-paced technologies these days and also to follow my passion in my field of career.

If you are not updated with new tech and programming languages in this era, there is a big risk of being “left-behind” in the tech race. This means being an experienced or new programmer doesn’t matter if you cannot work with new technologies and build your skilled continuously. Most of all, understanding the problem that you have to fix or create with your tech skills. Of course, collaboration is also a key.

Unless you really want to work maintaining old systems the rest of your career, then maybe you can get by missing a good chance of creating something great with new technologies — like cloud computing in Microsoft Azure and other cloud computing platforms, advancement of AI, Big Data, Machine Learning, serverless, containers and more.

So, continuous learning is important to me as a programmer. A software developer/engineer who wants to develop not just systems — but also herself.

PS. This is my first medium article and I hope it is a good start of writing more inspirational Tech stuff! 😊 Thanks for reading!

About Author: Jonah Andersson is a Filipina-Swedish Software Developer who codes full stack system development in C# .NET/NET Core. Jonah is passionate about continuous learning, developing and sharing knowledge about Microsoft Azure cloud technologies. She is a Microsoft MVP and one of the #AzureHeroes in Sweden. A woman who codes in tech who likes writing, advocating gender equality in the tech industry through mentorship and by being role model on her spare time. Follow her on Twitter @cjkodare, LinkedIn and her website at https://jonahandersson.tech