Introducing Robert Bermejo Blasco, MVP. Founder & Co-Organiser of the CATzure group.
It was a pleasure to speak with Robert, and gain an insight into the work he carries out to support and grow the Azure Community.
Please tell us about your own role.
I’m Robert Bermejo, I work in SCRM Lidl Internation Hub as Backend Technical Lead, also I’m MVP in Azure since 2017. I love cloud, I’m working in Azure in the last 8 years and I love fighting with all the Azure Services. Also I’m founder and Co-organizer the CATzure group with Manuel Sanchez, Txema Balseiro & Adrian Diaz and Co-organizer in the NetCoreConf one the biggest .Net and Azure conference in Spain.
How did you become involved with #GlobalAzure and the CATzure Microsoft Azure User Group & Community.
Our Community organize Global Azure in Barcelona with Madrid. We joined with Madrid to get sponsors for the two cities and we managed to establish a close link with Madrid’s Azure communities. I created CATzure in 2016 to share knowledge with others about Azure, at this time an Azure Community did not exist in Barcelona.
In 2018 Manuel Sanchez, Txema Balseiro and Adrian Diaz joined the organisation, and we began to organize a lot of events like: Azure Integration Bootcamp, Azure Devops Bootcamp, Azure AI Bootcamp and other events like: Azure Days, meetups, NetCoreConf. We also help other communities to organize events.
As the years have passed we noticed that the events have become more and more successful. The Saturdays morning event has grown to 3 or 4 sessions. These kind of events have enabled our Community to grow, we now have 882 CATzurianos.
What are the greatest benefits of getting involved with the Group for attendees?
The best benefit is networking. Our user group allows our Community to meet other great professionals, to talk with them without restrictions and share knowledge
In your opinion what is the most exciting thing about working with Azure?
To keep pushing for and find the limits. When you read about cloud and Azure in this case, all seems the perfect world, but it isn’t. When you work every day in azure, when all you infrastructure is in Azure and dependent on the azure’s services, you need to find the limits of them- to find how use it and how get the best performance.
What is your favourite Azure Product and why?
Azure Functions. To only think in code and not about infrastructure is the best things that could happen to the developers. Also because Azure Functions provide a lot of options to solve problems and the time to market are exceptional.
What are the Key Skills required to make a great Azure Professional?
The ability to adapt quickly to change. Azure is changing every day. Everyday Azure releases a new service that can help to improve your infrastructure. As a Cloud developer / architect you need up to be up to date and apply the new features in your products without fear and quickly.
What in your opinion has been the biggest advance in Azure in the past 18 months?
This is a personal opinion, for me it is the release of a premium plan for Azure Functions. Their performance is absolutely amazing and their scalability is incredible.
What are the biggest challenges you face working with Azure?
Performance, scalability and replication.
We need to have geo replicate the back-end and support a millions of users with a great performance
To allow for this I need to improve our architecture and infrastructure every day, to give the best service to our customers.
What do you look forward to most at your events?
When we can organize events, I look forward to great sessions with great speakers, the opportunity to network and learn a lot of things about Azure.
