2018 has been a year of new beginnings for me. I started a new job just before the first of the year and have been really enjoying the work that I get to do - helping developers in my company leverage cloud resources, both in Azure and in Google Cloud Platform.

This has chewed up my time, between doing the work and trying to stay ahead of the cloud my time for content has been pretty much non-existent. As such, I will not be renewed as a Microsoft MVP for 2019. It has been 10 years that I have had the privilege to be a member of this awesome community and meet so many wonderful people, it will surely be missed. I am hoping to keep myself focused on technology and get back to writing - I have missed that as well. Who knows, with enough practice maybe I can get back to another book or even back in the MVP program, but let’s take some babysteps first and get started again.

Because I have not been chosen for renewal, I will need to figure out how to cover the costs of learning Azure. My organization will surely help at some level, but the amount of “what does this do” that I had the opportunity to do as an MVP was a bit awesome. Thank’s Microsoft for keeping such a great program going - to all of the MVPs in the community for keeping it the excellent community it has become.

I am in the process of moving my blog to another host - it had been in Azure, and looking at the estimated costs for the services I was using, I thought maybe it time to try something else - enter the ghost hosted platform. I chose it because maintaining the content for a blog is hard enough - having to worry about maintaining the system and services that run it are not something I wish to worry about. That and I have been curious about this platform for a while… so why not.

What about Azure? I am planning to put as much effort and focus into Azure and Cloud learning as I possibly can. If I can learn something, I think there is benefit in helping others learn it too, and keeping the notes as blog posts for things I try out will give me somewhere searchable to return when I forget how to work that one feature.

##2019 Update In addition to all the things above, I will be doing all that I can to learn Google Cloud Platform as well. I am hoping to create a solid architecture (with the help of many others) and build a flexible and useful cloud strategy as we move forward.