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The second part of our interview with Microsoft cloud solution architect Wesley Backelant, in which he talked about his role, what the job entails and what’s ahead for the cloud industry.

A Microsoft insider, Wesley Backelant is a Belgian cloud solutions architect who works together with the company’s customers to engineer and deploy impactful data and advanced analytics projects. Among other things, Wesley is an expert on the various components of the Azure AI platform. He is also a frequent speaker at numerous community events and regularly shares Azure news and tips.

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Interview with Wesley Backelant: What part of being a cloud architect at Microsoft do you enjoy the most?

There are a couple of aspects that make it very interesting to me, personally. One of them, and that’s probably one of the benefits of being at a company like Microsoft, is leading the space in terms of innovation and cloud. You are at the forefront of technology, and that’s what I like. I like new stuff. Every time I get to learn something new, I see it as an incredible challenge, and I really love doing these things and getting my hands on new stuff and new technologies. That’s what drives me from a technological standpoint.

But the other thing that I really like about being in the data and BI space is that it puts you in a position where you are not just talking about technology, you’re also talking about business and societal outcome. One of our customers, for example, is in the public transportation space, and the fun part there is that, when you do something that’s innovative with them, you know that it´s going to have an impact on people and that it’s going to improve the experience of a hundred thousand or millions of people. To me, that’s one of the more rewarding parts of my job. Seeing a project succeed is fun, but seeing it drive real impact is the real deal.

At the technical level, what do you love most doing as part of your job?

Making it all work together. Azure is a continuously evolving platform. New things pop up all the time. Figuring out where all those things fit together and how you can make things more efficient and cost-effective is one of the role’s key drivers and, honestly, quite fun. Matching what we deliver as a technology to something that can actually provide value to the customer by leveraging existing building blocks.

Also, coding is not so much part of my job officially, but it’s still something I love to do, because it’s quite tangible. You get to see the result pretty immediately, and that’s a lot of fun.

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What tools do you like using the most?

I would be obliged to say Azure SQL Database is my favourite tool, as SQL is my old love, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair, especially, if you look at what we’re doing today with open source. I’d like to split my answer between cloud and open source.

Containers and Kubernetes are clearly changing the way people are building software these days. I talk a lot with start-ups and partners, and pretty much all of them are building stuff based on containers and mostly Kubernetes as an orchestrator. It’s impressive to see what the impact of these tools has been in the relatively little time that they’ve been around for. We are also seeing them as a big foundation for our own services.

Then there’s open source. For example, something people sometimes forgets is that, whenever you have a service that has to run in production, you need proper monitoring and alerting. It’s not the most fun part of building a solution, but it’s one of the most crucial steps when you want to do something seriously. We have Azure Monitor, which is a great tool that I strongly recommend, but at the same time, I’m a huge fan of open-source solutions like Prometheus and Grafana. Luckily, they have integrations with Azure Monitor, so that makes them even more interesting. What amazes me of the open-source world is the community, and the power of the community, how the community sets the direction in a lot of ways. Even the big players follow the direction set by the community. That’s quite nice to see.

As a data expert, what’s the biggest issue you are seeing with data these days?

I think we all know the challenges from a more technical point of view, so data quality, governance, etc, to me things that between quotes we can easily solve with technology. But one of the biggest challenges I see with customers is being more data-driven. It sounds like a marketing term, but it really is not.

I really believe most companies are aware there’s a lot of value in the data they have, in applying machine learning or even good reporting. But getting into thinking what’s the difference I can make with this data, and do I have the proper environment and organisation in place to really benefit from it? That’s where I still see a lot of companies struggle. If I were a c-level person, that’s probably the question I would ask myself – are we organised to benefit from all the data and what it can bring to our company? Becoming data-driven is more than just saying you are data-driven. It also means having a proper organisational structure in place together with technology and tools.

Interview with microsoft Wesley Backelant: What’s next for cloud?

One of the things is that I still see too much of is that there’s still a strong focus on infrastructure. I still see a lot of IT departments that can tell you what server or specific IP address is hosting an application or service.

Things can change, the infrastructure can scale in or out. It shouldn’t matter to you. I really believe that infrastructure part is one of the things will see disappearing over time. One of the best things about cloud is agility, and when people start really to adopt the whole serverless idea, and also DevOps as a philosophy, that’s the point where we’ll really see the whole power of cloud.

Secondly, at Microsoft we strongly believe in the intelligent cloud and edge. Bringing some part of that computing power, or at least how it works closer to where the data is, is definitely also an area where there is a lot of innovation happening these days. The big challenge is, obviously, making it all work seamlessly together. We are definitely doing progress there. But I still think there’s going to be a lot of new developments in this area still. And, thirdly, there is the abstraction of where things are running. If you look at tools like Azure Arc, basically, Kubernetes is having a big impact on that whole story. Being able to host your solutions be it on the public cloud, your own cloud or multiple clouds and having it all seamlessly work together from an operational standpoint and management point of view – that’s also where cloud is going.

Check out more of our interviews from our podcast episodes.

You can follow Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Also, make sure to check out his blog: My long term memory for data and development related information.

The first part of the interview with Microsoft cloud solution architect Wesley Backelant to discuss his career trajectory and share some tips on how you can gain new skills and become a self-made IT pro like him.

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Check out the second part of the interview

So, Wesley, tell us a bit about your professional trajectory. How did you get started in your career?

I’m actually what they call a self-made man. I started studying ICT or IT, but I had been doing an internship at a company during high school, and that’s the company I got started in. They were looking for someone to help them and support them with software development and, because I worked there as an intern, they asked me to go work with them in my first year of university. They offered to teach me. There were some very senior people working there, who knew everything about development and so on. So, I left my studies and joined the company.

I decided to do that the first year because, to be honest, the education system in Belgium at the moment was not that strong at this level, so I was kind of frustrated. I finished high school and I thought, okay, now I am going to study IT stuff, I am going to learn how to program, and when I got there, there was a lot of stuff that I had to do that was completely unrelated to IT. There was accounting, economics, different languages. It was all super interesting, of course, but I was there to learn how to develop, and even when we did that, it was only old school stuff that we learnt, COBOL, and so on.

When I got that opportunity to get hands-on, I said, okay, let’s do this. It was a leap of faith too, but it turned out to be okay! A small company, so I was the IT department together with a few colleagues. We did a bit of everything.

Interview with Wesley Backelant from microsoft: What sort of career path eventually took you to become a cloud architect at Microsoft?

Well, sometime after that, I started getting interested in the database side of things, more than on development. I needed bigger challenges, so I got into outsourcing to have more variation, customers and technologies to get in touch with.

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I then had the opportunity to become a database architect at a large enterprise in Belgium, and I took it because I knew they were hosting one of the most transaction-intensive SQL environments in Belgium at that moment. I thought it would be a great learning opportunity, which kind of proved to be true, because it put me on the next level of data, focusing on database design, performance tuning, and so on. They were also looking into some business intelligence solutions and, given my passion for data, I had been doing some reporting services work. We implemented together with a colleague the first reporting solution there, and that’s how I got into contact with some people at Microsoft. I figured that, with that experience, it was the right time to apply for a position at Microsoft, as they were looking for a pre-sales for their data and BI.

Back then I was not really a BI specialist, I was more focused on the database engine, but I figured, hey, new stuff to learn, fantastic, let’s take that leap. It was the same year I first saw the demo for what back then was called Red Dog, which is now known as Azure, at an internal event. Looking back, it was hard to imagine. It was the early, early days of Azure, and, seeing that demo, it was still hard to grasp what cloud would mean nowadays.

It was fun being there. Being at the birth of Azure, so to speak, put me in a nice position. I actually grew up and worked together with Azure at Microsoft, meaning that I was blessed to be able to go through this whole cycle of innovation and new services coming up. You know, looking back at something like SQL Server 6.5 and what keeps me awake at night today, it’s really amazing. We are so far from the traditional idea of the database now.

What educational resources do you turn to as someone who is constantly learning new things?

Well, at Microsoft there’s a huge focus on learning these days. It’s one of the key priorities to make sure everyone is up-to-speed with technology. Especially with our roles as cloud architects, we need to be ahead of the curve in many ways. But it’s a broader concept, of course. Everyone at Microsoft needs to at least have some part of technical knowledge, and there’s a strong push for that. Most of that is coming from Microsoft learn these days, which is also open for external people, so I really would encourage people to look at it, as there is great content on the platform.

Additionally, I like to look at blogs, from the official Microsoft blogs to the heroes in the industry. For me that’s actually the queue, when I see something on a blog post, I say, okay, let’s see how can I learn this, how can I get my hands dirty with this.

Is that what you tend to favour, a more practical approach to education?

What I’ve noticed works best for me — I have these “production-like” pet projects. It could be something you do at home, but where you try to have a scenario in mind. Playing with technology is one thing, but you only start to learn when you have requirements, I think.

At first, I had zero knowledge of Linux, for example. I saw it was going to become important. Since I had a server at home running Windows, I decided to make it a Linux server – that was before cloud, to be clear – so I said, okay, let’s use Linux, let’s start building RAID arrays, save some pictures on a central server, etc. I broke the server several times. Luckily, I had backups, thanks to experience. I think I had to re-install it like 3 times because I did something wrong with permissions and partitions in Linux, but that’s learning.

The point is that you need something that has real requirements so that you challenge yourself to try new things. And for me that’s what works best, getting your hands dirty with technology. It, of course, starts by reading and learning the basics. But then you need to start pushing yourself.

Check out more of our interviews from our podcast episodes.

You can follow Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Also, make sure to check out his blog: My long term memory for data and development related information.