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I'm excited to announce that I’m joining Microsoft!!! I’ve had a GREAT 6.5 years with Imaginet doing DevOps, ALM, Agile, and architecture consulting. I got the opportunity to work with many smart people on a TON of interesting projects. And by the way – they are hiring right now!

My new role at Microsoft is a DevOps Architect on a brand new team whose goal is to drive VSTS and ultimately Azure adoption, in this case by focusing on helping (large) customers apply effective DevOps practices. The idea is to build relationships with Microsoft's biggest customers, and act in an advisory role to help them be successful in deploying things to azure and/or adopting VSTS. One of our first activities will be providing the Enterprise DevOps Accelerator benefit that was announced at the VS 2017 launch. This is a free 2-week engagement provided by Microsoft or one of our partners to customers that purchase 50+ VS Enterprise licenses. The goal is to help a customer migrate an application to Azure using DevOps practices and tools (i.e. VSTS). My team will be responsible for those engagements, determining what we can do to add the most value in 2 weeks, delivering some of them ourselves and working with partners to deliver others, and evolving the offering as we learn.

What I find most exciting is it’s a brand new team - with the broad goal of helping drive Azure/VSTS adoption via good DevOps – and me (and my team) will have a large amount of autonomy to decide exactly how we go about achieving that goal. On that note, my first order of business will be building a team – specifically I’m looking for a world-class DevOps expert to work alongside me to build the team, and help determine our direction and strategy. If you or somebody you know are a world-class DevOps expert, please get in touch with me and lets chat! For now the best way to reach me is dylansmith256@hotmail.com

PS - It will also be nice to not be a billable consultant anymore, not having to always be selling and convincing customers to give us more business.