 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking to Daniel. Hello. Hi Chris. Yeah. I'm Daniel. I'm living in Germany near to Cologne have been for seven years right now and MVP was a short little break in it. Where I was working three years for Microsoft. Yeah, those those little the little pause that sometimes happen with people. I do like sometimes for folks that don't know us to that, you know, Microsoft if there's an MVP that goes and works at Microsoft. There are some that you know Microsoft employees that still show up at MVP events because technically they won the award and they get to participate in stuff for a whole year. And so depending on the timing of when you become an MVP, but then others like yourself who then leave Microsoft and the product team that whoever the MVP gods who decide who is MVP jump in and say, Hey, just need to get this person right back into the MVP program. So so what is your so you said you who you are and and you've talked about where you are. What do you do for a living to maybe talk more about your role and how that relates to your MVP focus. All right, so when I left Microsoft, I joined a startup called Linux, which is had quartered in Bonn in Germany. We were recently acquired by SAP and I joined their four and a half years back. The platform engineering and platform operations team in the engineering department. So I'm currently a senior staff software engineer, but actually do not any coding like developing Microsoft services. So my day to day job is more likely being a subject matter expert for Azure advising our engineering teams which service best fits for their needs. And yeah, in the end responsible with the team with the department I'm in for for running the entire platform on Microsoft Azure that provides the software as a service enterprise architecture tool we are offering to our customers. Well, I know that and we were talking about before we started recording. I mean, there's a number of executives that have left Microsoft and gone over to SAP. There's a strong relationship between the companies there. But in general, I mean, how have you found, you know, that your team your organization kind of supports you as an MVP. Is it something that benefits you in your current role? I would say it supports me a lot in my current role because I mean, you know it as an MVP you get early insights into the services or features that's coming to serve already existing services. It's not that I can entirely speak about secrets that are shared with us, but I can point the entire organization or our department into the right direction to being prepared for a new feature that is coming so that we can really, yeah, I would say as it is public preview, maybe not, I mean in production, but in the test environment, starting with the public preview feature. Then when we are ready to better on it for the services we operate. So that's from the standpoint being an MVP to have this kind of insight and strong relationship with Microsoft is very beneficial. From the other side, it's like the supporting from the company is like that I get the time to do, yeah, writing blog posts. I would say during my work time, most likely I'm doing it in the Friday afternoon where I put two or three hours aside just for site projects that are work related, testing new things out and I mean, if you're in the platform engineering, platform operation space, every day you learn something new in Azure, which is, I mean, we were running sometimes into issues, struggling and then it's like, if you found the solution, it's like a right up to share with the whole community or that they know it and during back at my time before I joined Microsoft, I was working as a cloud architect cloud consultant. And so my own blog space is more like my personal knowledge base. So it's not that I forced myself to write it. It's more like, yeah, I have a problem. I fixed it. I write about the solution, publish it to my blog because it's more or less my own knowledge base. So that's the kind of motivation behind it. So I'm basically for being MVP, getting renewed, it's most likely having my own blog and try to speak as much as I can at well-known events. Most likely, I would say in Germany and in Europe was, I would say it was more easier before COVID during working at Microsoft. So I continued as I worked at Microsoft with this kind of blogging and sharing the knowledge. And I would say before COVID it was like at Microsoft, like, yeah, you talk about these things about Azure. So it was a no-brainer to have this kind of coverage for the travel course, to travel to a venue, to a well-known event sharing the knowledge with the other people. That was really great. In my current role, it's more like they really try to be at events, but most likely step down a bit. I mean, a lot of other MVPs have, I would say, I would say they have more of the time to travel to those kind of events. I really enjoyed it back in the past, but I mean, I have two kids so it's more like the challenge, whether you spend your time and if you have a family, it's clearly obvious that you spend time with the family. You know what's interesting too around this? Because I'm, again, early in my, I'm a 12-time MVP and early in my MVP career, I was doing a lot of events and it was just kind of built into my role. Again, I was at the company where they supported it. They paid for a lot of the travel, but it was still a lot of time and usually on weekends, like SharePoint Saturday events around the world. And so it was great to be able to go and do that. Not everybody has a company that's that supportive in doing that. But like you, I mean, I don't have small kids, but I'm just, I'm doing a lot less speaking, more content, contributions in other ways. So I always like to tell people that are interested in becoming an MVP. Like, look, you don't have to go speak at events around. That's just, that's one path. But I don't know, how do you answer that? Especially in the Azure space, where do you see that there are opportunities for people that want to go kind of make a name for themselves and get involved and maybe pursue becoming an MVP? Are there areas within the Azure space where you'd say, hey, here's, here's areas which are, you know, I know not yet fully tapped where there's a lot of opportunity? I mean, Azure is really a massive services overkill, I would say. Sure, there are a lot of things where you can have, I mean, even spaces that are already covered, especially if we are looking into our, into the networking space, which is a huge important topic. I know a lot of MVP that are in this kind of space and sharing their knowledge. I would say if someone is really interested into, I would, I would more generally speaking about starting into the tech space, like if you're working already in a consultancy company or whatever doing tech, especially in the markets of the university would like to get, yes, like to get started how to become an MVP. It's most likely I guess the, that was for me the easiest part. I mean, I started my blog during my studies in Informatics to share my experience with, with my studies, sharing solutions are for the practical things that needs to be done. And then I just continued with like writing, as I already mentioned, so my blog is my personal knowledge space and I guess that's the easiest way to get started. I was also part of a moderator in a forum. So, but I would say the easiest thing today to get started is like having a blog post and sharing your own knowledge, your own experience you make with these kind of different technologies, day to day work you have, sharing that with the community. And even if it's like, or I would say Azure Networking, so a very generic crowded space, it doesn't need to be these kinds of fancy new stuff we're in, but if you're totally here, have the passion for it to be at the forefront, like I would say, the recent thing that Microsoft launched a year ago, Azure Container Apps. And if that's a kind of technology that you burn for, and you would like to share your knowledge and you find that's the space I would like to be in for the next two or three years, that's totally fine. But if you're like more the, I would say the architect, the generalist that shares knowledge about how to design the networking storage structure, I mean, in the microservices space in Kubernetes, you need to store your data somewhere. And if it's being blob storage, Cosmos DB, or even like our open source database like MySQL Postgres, that can be also a space, and I mean, not everyone is a database administrator with deep knowledge and databases, but if you have the favor for it, and share your knowledge, your experience, your tricks, quirks, with the databases that will help a lot of people, and then get the recognition within the MVP community or in general in the IT community. And then somehow I would say you get the nomination and it's a fit, it's a fit. And then surprise, surprise, you have been an MVP. Well, like I always say, so many of us say, and I say over and over again, you're like, look, I'd be doing the things that I do, the content creation, the writing, the speaking, regardless of having the MVP award. And so it's something that you can't count on it. It is a bit of a black box for us. So it's an award. And so, but you can start down this path and be creating that content. Like I blog the same way it sounds like you blog. Like it's more of things I'm interested in, it jumps around on different topics. And I write about music stuff occasionally three or four times a month. So it's more for me personally, but you can go in and do a little bit of research and find out like what are the, what are the common questions that are being asked, especially around Azure. It just seems to me like there's, well, like for us that are technologists that are really involved in this living, bringing others, like of course we're excited to go talk about the latest features, the latest announcements to go showcase those things. But most of what people where I see the most views, the most traction that I get is when I do kind of one-on-one topics where I'm answering fundamental questions and walking people through, let me introduce this is what this is. Let me show you how to move to the next step. So even if you're just learning aspects of the technology, you can go and do that kind of fundamental content and help people learn. And again, my feedback is that I think you'll get a lot more traction a lot more quickly than going and writing about trying to talk about only the latest, the biggest news, which is where most of the activity is usually around the new stuff. Yeah, but as you said, a lot of people favor this kind of one-on-one teaching the basic stuff and I, I mean, where I was working at Microsoft, I was a TSP, a technology solution professional, technical pre-sales during architectural design sessions proof of concept with the customers. It was really surprisingly when you were at the customer site and talk with them and especially during the coffee breaks where you get more insights about the customer and how they operate Azure. What was really surprising for me is that only a few companies were really leveraging reserved instances to bring down there as a compute cost. And I mean, that's, I mean, for us, they are being in the space for years right now. It's such a no-brainer, but for a lot of people it's like, oh, I mean, there are different use cases. I mean, what was this kind of, I'm so such with how we say where they left AWS and now host their whole staff on-prem again. I mean, it totally depends on the use case. And for sure, if you're just doing plain pay as you go in the cloud, cloud is expensive. No question. So you need to optimize the tabbing. I mean, these optimizations reserved instances, and then most likely selecting the right SKU for your use case. So you don't need the premium SKU if you don't leverage all the features of it. So the standard is more of maybe the better fit and you save a lot of money. So especially those kind of basics are really, I would say a good starting point for people and not doing the latest tech stuff. Well, you gotta do a mix. I mean, we have to go and write about, talk about the new stuff occasionally, but be right, I mean, as you were talking, I was just thinking, you know, that's a niche where I think there is a huge opportunity, especially in the Azure space, if for somebody could come in and kind of brand themselves as be like the Azure cost reduction person and find like go in, like think about that. If you had somebody that went in and just look for opportunities and shared tips on, hey, here's how you can drive this down and wrote longer architectural pieces of how you design a system so that you reduce the cost. Microsoft may not always like that kind of content, but I mean, I think, again, the community would eat that up. I think that would be, I don't know, maybe there's somebody that's already doing that today. I don't know, it's familiar in the Azure space, but. Yeah, I mean, that's especially, I would say Microsoft are not keen that you bring down your cost, but for my experience when I was working as a TSP for Azure, it's like, if you teach the customer, how can they save money for their existing resources? They have enough money to spend on new resources or in the end, this kind of what it's called in Microsoft Azure consumed revenue, what the kind of customer consumes are in the long-term distance, if you teach the customer how they can optimize their cost in Azure, they will grow. So it's not, so I would say if they had not cost optimized that, you will have a breakdown for the next month, but in the end, the curve will go up and they will consume one more in Azure because they are confident how they can bring down certain kind of costs and reinvest that in future technology. I mean, we see that across the board. I mean, I just had a conversation today with a partner that has a customer that is building out a chargeback model. So basically they want to understand what licenses are they paying for that are not being used? How much storage are they using? How fast is that growing so that they can transfer dollars in? So they're trying to be as efficient as possible. So again, sometimes, I mean, Microsoft sellers, Microsoft salespeople hate it. When we tell a client, no, you can get almost everything you want to do with an E3 instead of paying for an E5. And so Microsoft hates that. They're trying to sell everybody on the most expensive, you know, the highest volume of that. But to your point, when you get people that are more better optimized, when they're getting the most out of the technology they already own, there's a natural growth up into those other areas and those advanced features. But not if they feel like they're being ripped off. Not if they're spending unwisely and they don't have a good awareness of what is actually being used and consumed. That's so true. Yeah. That's an ongoing battle. And the battles were with Microsoft sellers around that. Man, you've lived on both sides of that. So you understand that. Yeah, for sure. And I guess that's one of the benefits for my current company. I know how to play the game with Microsoft. Yeah. I've had some tough calls with some Microsoft sellers that you're like, what are you doing trying to screw up my deal and trying to explain, like what is in the best benefit of the customer that we share and what's the right thing to do and let's work together to make sure they're getting what they need. And it may not be the dollars that you want to close out in Q4. Sorry. But if it's the best thing, long-term from the customer, happier customer long-term is the most important thing because then they stick around and then they expand their spend over time. That's so true. Our long-term thinking, like, yeah, I mean, that's kind of buzzword vendor lock in, but if you have a happy customer that knows how to use your platform, how to optimize for it, they will, yeah, will have this kind of lock in naturally because they trust your platform and not like, oh, I'm ripped off. I have no other chance to switch to any other, I would say, cloud provider because it's this kind of middle feature that Azure offers. I need to use it. And that's, as we talked about the last five minutes about it, it's like, you need to make the customer happy, feel welcome, and then the things that they use more and more on the platform is the natural growth effect. Right. Yep, completely agree. Well, Daniel, really appreciate your time. I know it's late on a Friday night. Thank you for, for staying up, but for folks that want to connect with you, reach out to you, where, where do they find you? Where are you the most active in social? I have a Twitter account or it's now X. Yeah, I'm still used to Twitter. I still use, I saved Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, so it's at Neumann Daniel, RSI handle. I'm on Blue Sky as well or hackaderm.io, the master done instance, but most likely. Yeah, I mean, there was this kind of, yeah. Yeah. Elon Musk took over Twitter, renamed it to X, but in the end, or it's still the, the platform to go. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah, but time will tell. Yeah. So I'm, I'm active on X, retreating all this stuff like, so I'm heavily involved or not heavily involved in Kubernetes, but I'm, I'm very active in this kind of Kubernetes cloud native space. So I have this kind of some kind of journey doing Windows Server system center stuff on premises and Windows Azure peg moving on to Microsoft Azure. And then when this kind of, I would say the container orchestrator was determined Kubernetes as a winner that was a, I was, oh man, it's so long back. I guess it was around one dot 10. I started with Kubernetes. So it's a long time back from a, from a version perspective. If I remember correctly. So I found my space in the Kubernetes space was containers, microservices and, and all the stuff around it. Like what I'm really interesting is this kind of far, all this kind of networking logging stuff, troubleshooting observability. Yeah. I run my own blog. It's Daniel's tech blog.io where I would like to post more frequently, but as we have two little kids, you've, you focused your, your time you have available. Yep. More to your kids than to your technical blog. So when I tried to, to publish one to two blocks, blog posts per month, I would love to do more. But as I said, said, yeah, family comes first. And I would say the hobby that's already my job technology are second. So yes, that's most likely where you find me. And then some, as I stepped down from frequent speaking more on the selected range, maybe on one or the other conference. So I will be joining KubeCon Cloud NativeCon in March in Paris. So everybody that's there might ping me up front. And we can have a coffee, doing a little chat. And if somebody needs advice on how to become an MVP, I'm happy to provide the advice. Maybe to close it out. When I started, my blog, it was entirely in German. And then during some of the MVP summits the colleagues in the cloud data center management space, they were asking, hey, why don't you write in English? And I was arguing, yeah, like there are only a few German blocks. But then I started to write in English to improve my English skills. So languages were never my best classes in school. So how are you doing, bro? Well, it's funny because my company's German company based down most of them in the Munich area. But so I understand that there's a few countries in the world where it's important to have native as well as English. And obviously most IT globally, it's done in English. But there's still a huge German market for German speaking and that side of it. So that's a skill. The other one, if you could also speak Japanese, that's another one where it's important to have native. But yeah, I actually know somebody who speaks French, German, and Japanese. And I was like, wow, you've got the trifecta there of these communities that do a lot of native writing speaking. But I'll have your links out in the blog post out on YouTube on the podcast as well. So hopefully people will find you. This will go live before that March event. So hopefully help get the people in touch with you. Yeah, perfect. So this is the point I would like to point out is if you're not comfortable to write in English, just starting with your native language. Yeah. Yep. Oh, definitely. Yeah. And I mean, that's some kind of the uniqueness, I would say, in the MVP program if you write in your native language to block or during your YouTube videos or your broadcasts, I would say it's this kind of unique selling point which might be the first step or the interesting step to be nominated and maybe awarded with the MVP award. And if you feel as at Sunday, as myself, like thinking, OK, you got the feedback by doing to write in English. And yeah, then seeing the turning point where you say, OK, let's try it to improve your own English skills and so on. So first, I mean, yeah, I hate two points. I mean, one, you're exactly right. There are plenty of opportunities to become an MVP. If you don't speak or write in English, well, that's fine. There are there are I've run into. Sometimes I've reached out for this interview series and I had somebody in Italy is just like like my English not good. No, you know, didn't didn't want it to join. You know, again, as I said, in Japan, and we've got some Chinese native speakers that are MVPs that have not been able to interview. So definitely there are opportunities. The other thing is, thankfully, the technology is catching up pretty quick. And within the next couple of years, I don't think it's going to matter. I think that the translation services will get good enough that we'll be able to automate a lot of that, you know, even like watching if you were to do a session, a webinar in German to be able to have the live transcripting in English or even dubbed out with an English voice, like that's coming rapidly. There's already tools that are out there that are available. They're not always great, but they're getting a lot better. Yeah, technology is improving and it makes it lower the barrier for people that are not familiar with if it's English, French, Japanese. So it's lowering the barrier and making content available to a broader audience. And I mean, that's a great example of technology which serves the humankind and not only our favorites, the company behind the technology to generate money out of it. Yep, completely agree. Well, Daniel, really appreciate your time. Thanks for the invitation, Chris.