Just caught on LinkedIn and wanted to share.

After 15 years at Microsoft, John has been promoted to Partner!

For those unaware of how Microsoft’s hierarchy works, making "Partner" is a massive deal. It is notoriously difficult to achieve and reserved for top tier of leaders and architects in the company. It's a major career milestone that very few reach.

Considering how many of us have passed our AZ-104s, 305s, and 900s because of his study crams, this feels incredibly well-deserved.

Huge congrats, John - we're massively proud of you!

Getting quite real now. Companies I work for are now seriously starting projects to move away from American services, which includes Azure. Already mandates to not start new stuff in Azure, AWS etc. Investigations in alternative European solutions.

Interesting times. Anyone else see this happening?

I want to share my experience working as a full-time blue badge Azure Support Engineer at Microsoft, based in EMEA. I reported to two Indian managers (M1 and M2), both based in India. Seeing so many people here complain about Azure support quality, I can honestly say: I’m not surprised at all. In fact, as long as Microsoft continues outsourcing to India and similar developing countries, I don’t believe things will ever truly improve.

The workload was absolutely insane - endless ticket queues, unrealistic expectations, and no real support from leadership. The volume just kept piling up, and you were expected to work through it all without complaint.

One of the most frustrating aspects was the cultural disconnect. The way Indian management approaches customer service is completely different from Western standards. I remember getting into an argument with my Indian manager because they insisted we call customers just to try to get good feedback scores - even when the customers had clearly specified that they preferred to be contacted by email.

I tried to push back, pointing out how disrespectful and ineffective this was, but I was shut down. The manager insisted it would “improve the customer experience.” It was obvious to anyone with common sense that it was a bad idea, but the culture of fear was strong - no one dared to speak up. If you did, you were labeled “not a team player.”

There were times I got into heated arguments with my manager because customers would get angry when I called them against their preference, yet when something went right, the manager would take credit. It was demoralizing.

Honestly, I felt ashamed working there, and at Microsoft in general. I was forced to do things I didn’t believe in - just to keep up appearances or chase metrics that didn’t reflect real service quality. The management was incompetent, detached from the realities of both the job and the customers, and completely focused on numbers over people.

Edit: Just to clarify, I’ve already left the company and the CSS organization. If you think my experience wasn’t real, that I wasn’t a true blue badge FTE, or whatever else - you’re free to believe that. Honestly, I don’t care if the whole department gets laid off (especially considering how many layoffs Microsoft is doing these days).

I just wanted to share my experience and vent a little, that’s why I specifically marked this post as “Rant.” This job caused me a lot of mental stress over the past few years, and the experience was unbelievably bad. When I saw the comments here about Azure support, I thought my story might help shed some light on why things are the way they are. If you think I’m lying or just trash-talking a former employer, that’s fine. Believe what you want. I have zero intention of ever working for them again, and honestly, I wouldn’t recommend this job to my worst enemy.

I’ve been working in the Azure ecosystem for a few years now, and I’m reaching a breaking point with the naming conventions and constant rebranding.

It feels like as soon as I finish updating our internal documentation or finally get a client to understand what a service does, Microsoft renames it.

• Azure AD becoming Entra ID? I still have to correct stakeholders in every single meeting.

• The confusing web of Microsoft Defender products (Plan 1, Plan 2, for Cloud, for Endpoint, for Servers...).

• Azure Purview changes, licensing name changes, etc.

It’s getting to the point where I feel like I'm spending more time translating "Microsoft Marketing Speak" to my manager than actually architecting solutions.

Is this actually hurting adoption for anyone else? I find myself recommending AWS in some meetings simply because the service names (like S3 or EC2) have stayed the same for a decade and people know what they are.

What is the worst/most confusing rename you’ve had to deal with recently?

Is it really that bad in the US?

A former Microsoft worker has been job-hunting for 9 months. He says it feels like companies are 'looking for Superman.'

https://www.businessinsider.com/former-microsoft-worker-job-hunt-money-struggles-2025-9

I wanted to provide a boost for people looking to kick off the year with Azure learning so over the holiday break I spent about 40 hours creating a full AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals certification course. There are no slides, it's all me whiteboarding and demonstrating to help easier and more interactive learning. There are also zero adverts or interruptions.

📽️ AZ-900 Full Course Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nED0_vMEniWBQjSoxTsBYS3

📖 AZ-900 Course Handout
https://github.com/johnthebrit/AZ900CertCourse

It is made up of 54 lessons based around the assessed skills and is about 8.5 hours in total which means it is easily digestible. The handout has all the whiteboards and relevant links.

I will be updating my study cram for AZ-900 over the next week with the latest info as well.

Best of luck and please subscribe to support the channel.

🎉 I am honored and proud to share that I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the technology areas Azure Infrastructure as Code and Identity & Access, within the categories Microsoft Azure and Security. A big thank you to this community for the support and inspiration along the way! ❤️

Download for iPhone/iPad

Download for Android

UPD: since v3.0 the app has paid features. Such as exam simulator, progress tracker and much more. Also AZ-305/AZ-500/AI-900/DP-203/DP-900 and other exams added.

Let me introduce v2.7.1 of mobile app which may help you to prepare for Microsoft Azure certification exams mentioned in title.

(The introductory post is here. Please check it if you hear about Learn Azure first time.)

What's new:

• First, I collect all your feedback and fix the wrong and tricky questions. Thanks for reporting!

• There are more questions added to existing tests

• New: Internal web-browser to read articles inside app added. Some users on Android sent reports that after opening article to learn in an external browser, then it is impossible to back to the app.

• I’ve also added a pop-up through which you can share the feedback about the app. I’ll appreciate it.

Currently, I am going to develop version 3.0 which will contain all-in-one solution to prepare for Azure certifications. Include video-tutorials, achievements/reminders and mock-exams which is close to what is offering by Microsoft.

Seriously, you need to find a new job because you suck.

Today login to find now everything on the left hand menu is now hidden in drop down menus so now I have drill further down to find stuff.

Stop smoking meth you hacks and get someone with a clue to do your jobs because you have utterly failed.

Before you go settling on a Microsoft product deployment. You really have to weigh the possibilities of being hung out to dry in production.

I had a Purview issue and opened a ticket on July 8th. Initially the Defender for Endpoint team confirmed it wasn't an issue with that which took a week. They then transferred the ticket to the Purview team and it sat for 22 days unanswered! I got a call yesterday by this inept team manager yesterday, encouraging me to open a ticket again. I told her that I simply did not care anymore, the product and configuration has been tested and communicated to our client as is. Which of whom is a very large customer for them, we were merely doing a PoC for product deployment for them. Instead of giving any care look at the response I get.

I hope this email finds you well. My name is * and I am the Operations Manager of the Team + supports here at Microsoft.

I happened to review this case today. To my understanding, the issue is unresolved due to delay and poor support. I would like to apologize for the delay in the response and any frustration that you have faced here.

We will move forward with archival of this case at this time. We will happily re-open this case & work with you again in the future should you have any further questions or issues regarding the same topic.

​​​​​​​We greatly appreciate your partnership & hope you have better experiences in the future with Microsoft.

1️⃣7️⃣5️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ 🎉🎊

Another huge milestone hit yesterday and a great way to start the year, 175,000 subscribers!!!

As always, I feel very blessed and appreciate everyone's support to help continue to grow the channel and help as many people as possible.

I continue to love learning, planning, and creating the content on the channel and have lots more planned.

If you've not subscribed head over to https://onboardtoazure.com and subscribe to get notified about latest content.

I don't have ANY advertising on the channel, or any upsell, it's all about helping people learn without distractions.

Key content includes:

📖 Recommended Learning Path for Azure
🔗 https://learn.onboardtoazure.com

🥇Certification Content Repository
🔗 https://github.com/johnthebrit/CertificationMaterials

📅 Weekly Azure Update
🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks

☁ Azure Master Class v2 (currently being updated)
🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY

⚙ DevOps Master Class
🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq

💻 PowerShell Master Class
🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8

🎓 Certification Cram Videos
🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA

🧠 Mentoring Content
🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGHxNkSWB0PjzZHwZ0BkXZZ

❔ Questions? Maybe I answered it in my FAQ
🔗 https://savilltech.com/faq.html

👕 Cure Childhood Cancer Charity T-Shirt Channel Store
🔗 https://johns-t-shirts-store.creator-spring.com/

🔎 Looking for specific content? Search the channel and browse playlists.

Thank you again

Yesterday I finished the v2 Azure Master Class. The complete playlist can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY and is over 22 hours of content! As always, no advertising or upsell, just help.

I recommend using the GitHub repo at https://github.com/johnthebrit/AzureMasterClass which includes all the demo files used and 120-page handout with slides, links, whiteboards etc. along with further watching videos if you want to go deep into any specific area. Also created a release so you can just download a zip file of all the content if that's easier.

Happy learning!

I wrote an app that'll help you sketch cloud architecture diagrams for free. All Azure, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, CNCF icons are preloaded in the app. Hope the community finds it useful: cloudskew.com

Edit: Thank you for the reddit gold & awards folks. Will pay it forward!