Who is Attila?

I need to admit, I was lucky all my life. When relational DBs and Oracle SQL tuning was popular I was there. Later when virtualization came to our town, I was there. I learned how to run an entire region working at a US startup, quite self-driven. I enjoyed DIB in a global organization at Microsoft. What’s Next?

I was born in socialist Hungary in 1980 at the edge of Generation X and Millennials.

The Hungarian People’s Republic (1949-1989) was a socialist republic and a satellite state of the Soviet Union. It was succeeded by Hungary in 1989 when I was 9 years old.

My father was an architect and my mom worked as a bookkeeper. My father wanted me as a mathematician, architect, or priest. I wanted to repair televisions as a child because our TV often broke.

In my childhood, everyone had the same kind of TV in Hungary. My dream job at age 8 was to repair TVs because I felt like this is easy, sustainable, high-demand work. There was a massive install base. The guy who repairs TV was like a magician: he solves the problems. Everyone wanted to see him/her(?) in their homes with a warm welcome and a today’s coffee similar drink of the 80s. That’s all humankind needs.
This is my first computer, a Commodore Plus/4. I got it from my cousin, Andrea when I was 12. She bought it in Vienna. It was a game-changer in my life. Very few people had such in our socialistic times. Actually, it still works, after 29 years.

I got early access to the computer when I turned 12. This was a game-changer in my life. Because of the lack of games on Commodore Plus/4 and my curiosity to build something new I started to do programming in BASIC. That was the only programming language and computer available in 1992.

My entire education is about computer science and I graduated from college as an application developer. I was a real computer geek. No girlfriends, no parties, but computer-based get-togethers with like-minded teenagers.

In my early twenties, I learned how to service people at Ericsson Hungary working as an IT Helpdesk/Admin. 1000 people in Budapest, great diversity, and warm Scandinavian family-friendly environment.

Later I worked at a software development company called Allround Ltd. on the largest Oracle database that exists in town at T-Mobile Hungary. I was in charge of Telco fraud detection and become a senior Oracle PL/SQL developer over 5 years period.

Because I used VMware a lot to reproduce customer environments to support the development cycle and I was running the most popular virtualization-related blog in Hungary I got the VMware Systems Engineer job. I was the first technical resource in Hungary of this US “startup”. It was a major disruption in my life, in a good way. My first Sales kick-off event in San Franciso, working in a diverse team including all EMEA regions. Early days of virtualization. At that time every large company adopted virtualization so it was relatively easy to become very successful. I learned how to run hands-on labs in San Francisco, VMworld. I replicated the same in Hungary at the VMware User Group (VMUG) event in Budapest resulting in the largest VMUG community in CEE with ~300 attendees, based in Budapest.

When my stunning sales peer (Tamás) left for a regional role at a leading storage vendor, I joined a US startup together with our previous VMware sales director in CEE (Zoran). At Virtual Instruments (VI now called Virtana) we managed to sell complex Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) solutions to large enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia and Turkey. I had an amazing manager and mentor (Alex) and he was so kind to provide valuable feedback with lifetime impact- we are friends forever.

After VI, in my mid-thirties, I joined Microsoft as WW Hosting Team field warrior. Imagine a global startup team in a large organization. It was an amazing experience I made great connections and we deployed the Microsoft System Center product stack (Hyper-V to Windows Azure Pack) across all the major service providers in CEE. At that time DevOps was PowerShell Deployment Toolkit, we used a tool called Service Provider Readiness Toolkit. I had the privilege to report to a truly amazing leader (Stephane). I have seen early adoption of cloud in our region and worked in several multi-tenant service provider cloud migration attempts. Our team designed and helped partners to adopt hybrid scenarios, such as backup and DR to the cloud. Just like Azure Stack, it was a little early and pioneer work in our time zone. My last role at Microsoft helped me to better understand the SaaS side of the cloud (Microsoft 365) while getting new skills around Endpoint Security (Intune) and Azure Virtual Desktop.

I left Microsoft in September 2021 with great connections. I become an Entrepreneur, self-employed. I would like to highlight my mentor (Jeanne) who made a lifetime impact on me and helped me to find my way.

After leaving Microsoft, I started to work on contract for a global distributor, AWS business development, and technical mentoring, 3 days a week. For another 2 days and often weekends and late afternoons I was working on my desired certifications. I invested part of my savings to support my future work. It is always smart to be bold and unstoppable when it comes to your future.

Take a look on my recent technical certifications.

My achievements in 2021. I have bold plans to continue. However, I prefer live work experience over certifications. I also build LABs, to prove and share my knowledge.

Check out this post to see my certification plans for 2022: What’s next and WHY? My Career Vision & Personal Development Plan – Cloud Migration Blog by Attila Macskasy

In the last two years, I am not only focusing on technology but on people as well. While I continue to keep up with the technology I am learning leadership skills as well.

I started to learn human skills as well. LinkedIn Learning is a perfect platform for that. Follow my LinkedIn profile to see my latest achievements. My most recent certification is Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging for All (linkedin.com)

I am a father of two boys 2 and 4; have a lovely wife, Adrienn. We like to travel, I have relatives in Canada, lots of Friends in the US and all around the globe.

In my free time, I am working on my YouTube Studio.

Related posts

Comparison of VMware relocation options in public cloud

I keep researching this topic from several perspectives: regional availability, provided architecture, most popular use cases, VMware software versions, provided hardware configuration, and finally the price of a 3-node vSphere cluster in the Cloud.

AWS MiGratioN, GCP Migrate4Cloud, and Azure Migrate pros and cons

It’s been more than 5 years since I am testing and comparing 1st party migration tools. I have seen these tools getting better over the years, with major improvements by acquisitions, end-of-life products, continuous changes, and improvements not just the tools but the methodology around, well-architected, CaF, the concept of the landing zone, 5Rs become 7Rs. In this article, I am sharing my experiences with the most commonly used cloud migration tools.

Oracle Database service for Azure – connecting Azure VM and Power App

I have connected a Database Admin Azure VM running Oracle’s SQL Developer (Windows version) and a Microsoft Power Platform application displaying Oracle’s HR demo schema (via on-premises data gateway on Azure VM connecting with Power Platform’s Oracle Premium Connector) to the same Oracle Database hosted on OCI.

Oracle Database service for Azure – linking subscriptions

As part of my multi-cloud research, I wanted to test Oracle Database Service for Azure. In this article, you will see how to sign up for the new service and how to link Oracle and Azure accounts. I used Frankfurt datacenters, Azure MSDN, and OCI paid account (Free Tier does not work) using my private Azure Active Directory.

Why multi-cloud is the way to go? VMware and Oracle perspective.

While cloud migration is still a popular topic during customer discussions, I have noticed that more and more customers are considering an exit plan from one cloud (vendor lock-in) to another cloud meaning there is an increase in multi-cloud migration demand. VMware, Oracle, and SAP are the major workloads in on-premises data centers today. Based on my research both VMware and Oracle are very vocal about the importance of having a multi-cloud strategy.

AWS Site-to-Site VPN using MikroTik RouterOS

There are two ways of approaching this challenge. (#1) running MikroTik virtual appliance (CHR) in AWS (#2) using Virtual Private Gateway, a “cloud-native” networking solution provided by AWS. Each solution has its own benefits.