preface
The hardest thing I have done is write this book. It took me four and a half years, and I never gave up.
I’ve been working with Azure since 2012, back when the cloud felt like an exciting new frontier—full of promise, potential, and, frankly, a whole lot of confusion. Over the years, I’ve built everything from data pipelines to AI-powered apps and from websites to sprawling distributed microservices. Each project was a reminder of just how much Azure could do—and how overwhelming the endless list of services, regions, and features could feel.
That tension—the excitement and the overwhelm—is what led me here. I wanted to create a resource that felt real, practical, and human—not another dry academic tome, not a thousand pages of jargon and buzzwords, but something you could actually use. I wanted to write a book that I would want to read myself, and something that could meet you at the keyboard, not just in the classroom.
In truth, part of writing this book was personal. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it—that I could take more than a decade of late nights, customer projects, conference talks, and, yes, a few llama-related metaphors, and turn them into something useful for others. My hope is that as you read, you’ll feel like you’re learning from a colleague who’s been there, tried that, and is willing to share both the shortcuts and the scars.