Sales improvement
To be successful in sales means that our employees need to have knowledge of what they are selling. In the past we had them trained on Azure fundamentals, and asked them to take the exam.
The feedback from our sales team was that the basic theoretical knowledge is not enough to convince our potential customers. The innovation rate of Azure is so high that we needed a more real-time approach. Together with HR and an external learning partner we decided to use CloudSandboxes.
With this application our sales team is able to familiarize themselves with the latest Azure terminology and really lead the conversation.
Due to CloudSandboxes we also got more sales leads, because our sales team is trained by our consultants using the CloudSandboxes environment. In this way they stay both up to date with Azure knowledge and are skilled to have more in-depth sales pitches.
The HR-department also extended the usage of CloudSandboxes to our delivery-team, to help them being better prepared for their interviews. We see an increase of our acceptance rate with 20%.
Innovation
Our company spends approximately € 30 million annually on cloud resources. In order to keep costs under control, one of the actions of our FinOps team is to evaluate monthly with the DevOps team which (old) resources can be deleted. Initially we used, our own Kusto query to get an overview of the latest Azure resources according to the Azure Activity log.
Remarkable was that a large number of resources was used only once. These resources had been used by the DevOps team for innovation purposes. These resources should have been deleted after use within a day.
We did a free trial with CloudSandboxes, to give developers the option to create temporarily resources in a cost-efficient environment. Now they decide upon creation of a resource where to deploy them. It could be either in their normal working environment (Prod-Acc-Test-Dev) or in the new sandbox. By working and experimenting in this sandbox environment, we are sure that the resources created here are automatically shut down.
It has been a turning point for the development department to be able to take responsibility for managing costs in this way.
Onboarding
As a product owner I work at a financial enterprise and I am responsible for one of their applications. This application handles 100 million transactions on an average day and it runs fully cloud-native. Our development team consists of 10 developers and a flexible pool of 30 experts. Due to this large flexible pool, onboarding was always complicated. We had multiple copies of our development environment, due to the different team members. Managing, updating and deleting old environments almost became a full-time task for the ops-of-the-day.
We really needed a solid solution to automate these operational tasks.
After trying different solutions, we came across the SaaS-application CloudSandboxes. We really liked this product from the start because of their unique vision. It is easy to use and super effective.
Nowadays, when a new team member is onboarded, they can spin up a part of our application in their own CloudSandboxes environment. Our application has a full microservices architecture design, so only the necessary components are created in this sandbox environment. The new team member can familiarize himself with our application and get acquainted with a new micro-services every day.
The sandbox environment of CloudSandboxes is ideal for this purpose as there are no consequences to the application in either the dev/test or production environment.
I am also happy that the administration from our side is put to a minimum, because the application is fully integrated in the Azure portal. There is no need to go to different portals, or to login with different accounts. Everything is manageable from within the same Azure portal.
If necessary we can delay the removal date with a simple Azure lock. When we create one-day resources in the CloudSandboxes environment, we can change them to multi-day resources by adding a simple lock. Interesting is that we noticed that almost nobody needs multi-day resources. They prefer to have a fresh environment in the morning so this environment is up to date.
Presenter
As an Azure MVP (Most Valuable Partner) I am often invited to give demos about the latest and newest Azure features. I present the new features and possibilities of Azure with a real-life demo.
My aim is to show as many options as possible regarding the different resources and to my experience that is very enlightening for those who are less familiar with Azure.
Presumably, I am not the only one who doesn't prioritize the management of his own environment. I am always confronted with an accumulation of created resources, resulting in ever-increasing costs.
I have tried to lower my cloud bill by creating my own PowerShell script which runs once a week in an Azure function. This script deletes unused resources based on the different tags I have introduced. However, I wasn't too happy with the solution since I had to set the tags manually every time.
Recently I was introduced to the CloudSandboxes application which offered me the perfect solution. So from that moment on I give my demos in the CloudSandboxes environment.
This sandbox environment is now automatically cleaned up, meaning all unused resources are deleted. This is the biggest advantage compared to my own script, because I do not have to do anything.
I am also very happy that I no longer pay too much, and the "pay-per-use" principle now actually benefits me.
Exam preparation
My name is Samuel Kanori, I work at a consultancy company as a manager and I am responsible for a team of 20 Azure consultants.
We are very proud that we are awarded with 12 Microsoft Gold competencies. In the interest of our customers, we have to maintain this status and therefore our consultants have to periodically pass the necessary Microsoft-exams.
To ensure that our consultants prepare well for their exams, we have created a training environment with the help of the CloudSandboxes application. Now our consultants can practice without limits and at the same time we stay within budget.
An additional advantage is that web developers, database experts and Office365 experts can also use the same CloudSandboxes environment.
Cloudsandboxes provides me with a management report which gives me information about the progress of the consultants' training and the daily and monthly saved costs.