Where are you on your journey?

I am not very far into my cloud/hybrid journey. Where I work, most of our estate is on premises. What systems are currently in the cloud are considered production, so making changes is very limited. No extreme changes to try a new feature. It does, however, allow some experience with managing a hybrid environment. I can see what processes work like before and what processes have to be modified to handle a new way of connecting.

This makes if difficult to get “hands on” with basic features, let alone, new features that come along. While this does make getting up to speed more difficult, it’s still something you can do.

Which challenges did you face?

My biggest challenge was having to find training on my own. If an orginization is looking to move part of their infrastructure to the cloud, they spend money for proof of concept, and training. There time to figure something out before it goes live. Maybe they already have a hybrid environment and want to add a new feature or move an old system up. In this case, again you’re in the thick of it and get to experiment with it while someone else worries about the cost. Also, when this is your work priority, you spend “work hours” figuring things out.

If they aren’t at that point, it’s up to you to control your own learning. You will likely have to use off hours and probably some of your own money to pursue learning. Do not just shrug and say “maybe someday”. Cloud computing is here to stay. On prem isn’t going away, it’s just changing. The slider of what is in house and what is in a cloud environment will go back and forth, but there will be both.

How did you address them?

I went and found resources. If your company is not interested of not ready to move some assets to the cloud, what do you do? You have to do it on your own. There are plenty of resources available for free or for a reasonable cost to get you started on your “cloud guru” path.

  • Sign up for a trial.
  • Get a Visual Studio subscription and use the monthly credit there.
  • Get a trial subscription to LinkedIn Learning or
  • Pluralsight (or both).
  • YouTube
  • SQL Server User Groups whether local, virtual or recorded earlier are great resources. Presentations from people that have “been there, done that” are great and these people that are giving back to the community are usually more than willing to answer your questions.
  • SQL PASS. Now that PASS has been resurected by Red Gate, the entire catalog of content is available or will be shortly, for free. That’s a huge amount of information and training available to grab. Make use of it. They are also bringing back and sponsoring PASS Summit (Nov 8-12, 2021).

There really is no excuse. If your work isn’t handing it to you, go get it yourself.

Learn. Grow. Improve.

Thanks for reading.

Be sure to check out my other T-SQL Tuesday posts.