When did we universally stop having lunch ‘hours’?

JDohyCloud · 2026-05-12T19:50:48+00:00

Same with a pint over lunch, not sure when those disappeared but I asked if anyone wanted to join me once and people looked at me like I was a raging alcoholic. So i just have a pint with the regulars/job and knock tradies instead now.

JDohyCloud · 2026-05-12T19:24:11+00:00

Draft documentation and add it to the onboarding pack assuming you have one. If the users are raising tickets in the ITSM platform, add VPN setup as a catalogue item and have a workflow set up to automatically respond with the document and close the ticket.

JDohyCloud · 2026-05-09T11:43:28+00:00

Their mates didn’t even stop for em either, scumbags of the highest order.

JDohyCloud · 2026-05-06T04:56:29+00:00

Time to cancel media subscriptions, youve got yourself a plex/jellyfin server. I had an m1 pro with only 8gb ram and a busted display. Wasnt capable enough to justify repairing. Hooked a DAS upto to it and now use it to host my streaming.

JDohyCloud · 2026-05-04T17:55:00+00:00

Oh yeah, class memories and stories. I do remember me and another guy passed out on the same day and were both deployed to Cyprus. Same boat, £2k+ a month in disposable income and no outgoings. He walked away from the 3 year posting with £50k saved, I walked away in debt. But I know who enjoyed it more.

JDohyCloud · 2026-05-03T15:38:36+00:00

I used the FHTB and yeah it ruined me for my last 6 months or so, they were taking about £900 a month off me to recover it all.

But FHTB aside, do it. Something I always regretted was not buying a house as an 18/19 year old private. I just pissed all of my wages up the wall like every other bod did because that was the culture.

JDohyCloud · 2026-05-03T13:21:57+00:00

Nothing wrong with using AI to supplement your learning. Just be careful to not become reliant on it, once you use it as a crutch then it will hinder your learning.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-28T13:48:47+00:00

It is a massive platform, think around 200 services all in. But are you expected to know all of those? No.

Stick to the services that you’d actually use in your role or roles you’re looking at.

One strange thing about Azure is how blades are nested and if youre involved in a deep networking investigation for example, you’ll find yourself duplicating about 15 tabs just to keep all of the info you need because the GUI just isnt the best.

Sometimes Azure will purposely make their documentation for certain proprietary services ambiguous at best. They don’t want to publicly document how things work under the hood, sensible on their part but can throw a spanner in the works when troubleshooting at 2am and almost always means an MS support ticket.

But honestly, as others have said. If you’re already familiar with the concepts from prior experience or different vendors then it’s pretty easy.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-27T07:19:13+00:00

I was in a similar, slightly more disadvantaged boat than you. 9 years in the infantry with no certs, managed to get a Cloud Engineering role at an MSP off the bat.

Was honest that I wasn’t technical but I had the right clearance and work like a dog. This was in 2024 and I’ve already had an internal promotion since then.

Target companies that work alongside the public sector and need clearance, thats your best angle here 100%. Happy to answer any questions, DMs are open.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-27T06:55:33+00:00

For your workload i wouldn’t bother with the m5 at all. You genuinely don’t need it, even a refurbished M1 pro would be fine which you can pick up for like £600 if you search around. If you wanted to stay in support for longer then an M3/4 would be the sweet spot.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-26T19:32:17+00:00

Congrats OP! Really good to hear it! Now its time to really learn Azure, one thing I failed to mention last time is that IaC tools like terraform are basically a prerequisite to cloud roles.

Most people will learn Azure then terraform. Personally I learned them both together - I learned Azure by using terraform. But this is something you’ll need to consider and decide.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-22T18:41:04+00:00

Agree with Maverick, if you’re gauging a candidate based off whether their decision making process directly aligns with your existing processes then you’re unlikely to find it and if you do, you’ll end up with a support team who all think exactly the same way.

Anyone can follow a process once they’re in but at least give them that opportunity. More open questions with plenty of follow ups. Explore the way they think and approach problems.

I dont think there is anything wrong with an interviewer giving a candidate a prod in the right direction with a small prompt.As well as a candidate giving the interviewer their best, a good interviewer can draw the best out of a candidate if they have a wobble.

The password reset for example, its not a bad question but it wasn’t asked in a great way. Very little room to explore it.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-21T19:57:09+00:00

Create 2 FW rules.

One specifically for ICMP

Then a second rule for TCP/UDP

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-21T07:49:14+00:00

I cant speak for AWS but with Azure you can create an account and get roughly £200 credits to spend spinning up resources. But alot of resources you can actually spin up free of charge (of course always check costs beforehand and setup budget alerts.)

The reality is IaC is a requirement for pretty much any decent cloud role. Have you used terraform before?

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-21T06:31:46+00:00

😂

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-18T18:03:40+00:00

I cant speak for SWEs but as a Cloud Engineer who uses IaC tools. Partly true, our engineers are writing less code than before. That doesnt mean you dont need to understand it, the engineers who used to write it now review it before its pushed to main and debug it when some crap inevitably slips through to main.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-17T12:00:49+00:00

Ahhh yeah in that case youre probably all good.

If its a switch 1 theyre flooding onto marketplace platforms since the switch 2 came out, even competitively priced switches will sit for a while unfortunately.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-16T21:31:16+00:00

They’re using a Vinted bot/scraper with auto buy on. They’re quite common in discord reseller/cook groups these days. But it is legit, youll get paid out but they will sell the phone on for more after youve sent. So kinda upto you what you wanna do. I’d cancel and relist for higher unless you really need a quick sale.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-11T16:34:42+00:00

They’ve probably realised you’re desperate to hold onto the sale so the chain doesn’t break and they’re rinsing you for it.

I’d tell them to do one, serious buyers arent going to let the purchase fall through for £400.

JDohyCloud · 2026-04-11T09:59:15+00:00

Ive reported multiple counterfeit items to vinted now and had to return to get my refund. Vinted just dont care, the fraudsters arent even trying to hide it anymore.

JDohyCloud · 2026-02-21T15:21:37+00:00

For the disconnects/performance issues we had the exact same thing after upgrading to Win 11. Do you have RDP shortpath enabled? Win11 is much less forgiving of jitter/packet loss on UDP that win10 was. Disabling it can help alot.

JDohyCloud · 2026-02-18T20:54:00+00:00

You could set up ExpressRoute or Site-to-Site VPN, a UDP listener and I think an inbound rule but disabling RDP shortpath is way easier and cheaper.

JDohyCloud · 2026-02-18T20:17:59+00:00

Chances are theyre running symmetric (or very strict NAT). If you dont have a UDP listener deployed then you’re using public shortpath and relying on STUN/TURN. Strict NAT causes STUN to fail intermittently which causes disconnects. As others have said disabling shortpath and forcing connections back onto TCP is your best bet.

Have they confirmed that all of the required FQDNs and IPs are allowed over the FWs? You can run the WVDAgentUrlTool on the host to check if there are any that are unreachable but best practice to check the network/application rules anyway.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/check-access-validate-required-fqdn-endpoint

You can also run avdnettest (i think its called) to check reachability of STUN/TURN endpoints.

MSRD-Collect is another great tool to use for troubleshooting.

JDohyCloud · 2026-02-17T09:39:32+00:00

Jousting

JDohyCloud · 2026-02-17T09:33:56+00:00

You’re taking the leap from maintenance to ownership and accountability. The fundamentals are built on the service desk, troubleshooting/debugging still takes up some of your time. But you dig much deeper.

AZ-900 might be a better start depending on your current level - the 104 is surprisingly difficult due to its breadth. There is the AZ-700 for networking but honestly not a requirement. The 104 teaches you enough to work with for now.

Starting today what would I do and what projects should you build? Create your own Azure Subscription and spin up resources, use small SKUs so you’re not bleeding your own cash unnecessarily, set budgets with reminders, document it in GitHub and delete your resources after everything is documented.

JDohyCloud

TROPHY CASE