50. Behind the scenes of Umbraco; modernization, infrastructure as code and the Azure ecosystem - with Morten Christensen

In this episode, we talk to Morten Christensen. He works at Umbraco HQ where he helps build Umbraco Cloud and the Headless cloud offering. Morten is also an Azure MVP, Azure Lover, and community addict. First, of course, we dive into Umbraco, an open source content management system based in .NET. We talk about the headless offering and the benefits for both Umbraco and its users. And we discuss a big project at Umbraco in recent years: Morten and his team needed to modernize their cloud platform. From running on virtual machines to a platform as a service. They had to rebuild everything from scratch on Azure App Service in gradually transition customers to the new platform. And in part, the goal was also to modernize their own service infrastructure, updating all their own services to the latest .NET Core and Linux-based containers. And Morten talks about the considerations and choices they made regarding infrastructure as code, for example, choosing between ARM or Terraform. Another thing we talk about is the fact that Morten does a lot for the tech community, organizing user group meetups and conferences. Furthermore, we dive a bit deeper into his love for Azure. We discuss the Azure ecosystem, the service he is most impressed with, Azure Service Bus, and the fact that Azure has become so big that it is (almost) impossible to know everything about Azure. And finally, how does Umbraco monitor their platform and respond to scaling issues or outages? Morten explains how his team uses Application Insights and what they do with the insights. And how they use the practices from Team Topologies, his favorite book, to structure their development teams. 

About this episode, and Morten Christensen in particular:  you can find @mortenchr on Twitter & GitHub. You can read all his interesting blogs on his website. Find out more about the book Topologies here.  And, watch his talk from Cloudburst about the challenges they have been through via YouTube.

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