Networking, the marmite of the IT world; people do truly love it or hate it. Luckily Jack Tracey, our speaker at Brighton Cloud this month, is on the love-it side of the table.

Moving to the cloud doesn’t mean networking goes away – in fact it becomes even more important as it’s how everyone uses, accesses, and consumes the services and applications you host within the cloud.

At this Brighton Cloud session, Jack covered Azure Networking 101 to help you understand Microsoft Azure’s global network and the various services and constructs you can use to start understanding and using Azure today to host your applications and services.

Jack is a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft with 12 years in the industry and we caught up with him following the event…

Hey Jack! Can you tell us a bit about you and the work that you do?

I’m a Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft in the Customer Architecture and Engineering (CAE) team, and also a former MVP for Azure. I can be found maintaining and updating our solutions like Azure Landing Zones most of the time. And when not in those worlds, you can find me assisting customers with all things Azure Infrastructure, Security, Governance, Infrastructure-as-Code & DevOps

Any key highlights / takeaways for anyone who missed your talk?

Cloud networking is still just networking, just more layer 3 than layer 2. Forget about VLANs everything in the cloud is about routing.

Did you come up through a “traditional” techie route or has your career taken twists and turns along the way?

Yeah pretty traditional, no university here for more and didn’t even complete my A levels. I got a job as a helpdesk engineer for a small MSP in Crawley when I was just 17 and learnt everything on the job, and it’s served me well so far.

Always embrace the never stop learning culture and also the learn it all and share it all culture. No point knowing it and keeping it to yourself.

Is there a moment that helped define your career?

The naysayers have also been a big driving force to me, I love an underdog story and proving the naysayers wrong.

Also being involved in tech communities is super valuable, being awarded Microsoft MVP for Azure for my community impact was a moment ill cherish forever.

What piece of advice would you give your younger self?

Carve your own path. Be a shepherd, not a sheep. There will always be the “old guard” that put a downer on everything and are unhappy, don’t let them stop you with your plans.

What’s your big tech prediction for 2023?

More infrastructure as code adoption across the board. And the rise of AI and how we learn how to use it in our daily lives/work will be a big theme.

Silicon Brighton wouldn’t be here without people like you giving back to the community so… what does the word community mean to you?

Community to me means a few things. Primarily it’s a group of like minded individuals/groups that come together to support and learn from each other.

A community is also something that grows over time and embraces diversity and inclusivity. A community without diversity and inclusivity is something I can never imagine and never want.

You can find all of Jack’s links at bio.link/jacktracey and watch his talk at Brighton Cloud here: