As we began our journey with this book, my hopes were to keep things simple and direct while sprinkling in my experiences where needed. Being a harsh critic of myself, I feel I struggled a bit with sharing because of how fast Azure changes in reflection to the issues I had to resolve, many of which don't really exist anymore. As we journeyed, we learned about as a Service in reflections to resources, whether they be IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. The first piece of this transformation is to create a cloud strategy, to cover moving your existing resources to the cloud, application modernization, and greenfield development. Your plan should be fluid and allow for new changes and learning. I also have learned, in addition to your cloud strategy that you should create a learning strategy to help with these new changes in Azure, as you most likely won't solve issues the same way tomorrow as you do today.

Your planning should always include a roadmap, so everyone can understand the forward movement and help with course corrections based on new findings. I try to keep three stages in mind: experimentation, transformation, and migration. Experimentation helps with the learning of how to solve a problem in Azure and I try to include all parties evolved under the DevOps structure. Transformation is about redesigning the application to better take advantage of Azure resources. An example would be using Application Insights for logging. Migration is the process of moving most resources to Azure. An example would be data repository data.

Remember some key points we have to cover:

• Fail fast, learn fast, meaning try many and then use the best
• Push the boundaries by taking advantage of cloud capabilities
• Use data-driven decisions by using telemetry to gain insight
• Simplify
• Communicate early and often as transparency is key

In previous chapters, we learned about tenants, subscriptions, and resource groups and then headed to architecture. From there, we covered some development and DevOps. At this point, we have our application in Azure and we need to look at how we can manage and support it. Azure has quite a few powerful tools that have matured over time. When I first got into Azure, one of the best-leveraged tools and one I still believe is underutilized is dashboards.