Welcome to The Black Cloud blog… where literally anything is possible 😉

Quick disclaimer – Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

Who am I?

Chris Black – currently I am Azure Stack Technical Authority working for UKCloud; having said that, this is a private blog but full disclosure was necessary 😉

As of 01-11-2020, I am officially an Azure MVP!!!

My IT background historically was VMware Virtualisation and PowerShell automation, but for over a year now I have been blessed with the unique opportunity to be very actively involved with Microsoft Azure Stack.

I hold a decent amount of various certifications – you can take a look at those on my LinkedIn profile at your own peril 😉

I would classify myself as OpsDev rather than DevOps as I am far from being as skilled as some of the extraordinary Developers I happen to either work or crossed paths with.

Am a firm believer of the open source technologies and sharing with the community. Hopefully my GitHub profile can attest to that.

Why blog?

There are many reasons why I decided to start this blog. A bit of a history of Azure Stack should be inserted here; however, I will boil it down to the basics:

Azure Stack is an extremely new, fantastic but also daunting at first technology and not nearly enough people know about it.

I would like to change that. So what am I doing about it?

• I am already running a Meetup user group for Azure Stack in the UK.
• I spearheaded and am maintaining a Knowledge Centre – documentation repository created by necessity as the required documentation did not exist or was not good enough.
• I frequently edit Microsoft Docs for Azure Stack, Azure, PowerShell etc… as well as contribute to various repositories for “auxiliary” technologies like Ansible, Terraform and the like.

Sadly, I find that it is not enough and also not all content that I would like to share can be formatted into a GitHub Page or a code block. Sometimes it requires a little bit of a wall of text and potentially a sense of humour 😉

This is what I will try to do here. I expect to be linking a lot to GitHub, as most things I do are code driven things, but at least here I will be able to talk in a more relaxed manner about the great things Azure Stack can do and how to do them.

Also, I will try to talk about the myriad of problems we face and hopefully offer some solutions and suggestions.

Please feel free to comment, get in touch with me, generate some positive Azure Stack buzz… 😀

I am looking forward to seeing you all here 🙂

Happy Azure Stacking!