Howdy and welcome Gurus. I'm Chase one of your Azure training architects and welcome to a fresh episode of Azure This Week. Now in last week's episode, you got to see Matt Ulasien discussing some things that are happening in Azure news, but also you got to see things that are going on at a greater scope at Microsoft with ChatGPT. Now I'm gonna use this episode of Azure This Week to piggyback off of that and dive a bit deeper into ChatGPT and how we can use it as Azure Cloud professionals to streamline our daily work lives and improve our productivity as engineers by augmenting our brains with ChatGPT. And I don't mean literally augmenting our brains.

What I'm talking about here is actually just using this product to help us do our work on a daily basis and inform us on how to do things by providing us with a quick response on different prompts that we might have. So let's go ahead and get started by jumping into that. All right, Gurus, here we are inside of the ChatGPT webpage and as you see, I'm using ChatGPT Plus. Now you don't have to use Plus you could use just ChatGPT and try the free version and use that. The only difference really that you're gonna notice is just some performance difference, but you can ask all the same questions and get all the same responses that you need.

Now what we have to understand is that as Azure engineers we're gonna face challenges on a daily basis and these challenges can come in the form of challenges that we might face where we're having to architect solutions for internal applications and workloads that we have running at an organization that we work for, or for any sort of architectural solutions that we have to provide for customers that we're consulting for if we're a cloud consultant. So there's plenty of challenges that we're gonna face on a very regular basis that ChatGPT can help us out with. And the main benefit here being that ChatGPT is gonna give us some time savings and some savings on effort so that we're not having to constantly repeat these laborous tasks. So let's say in an example where we have a customer that's come to us acting as a cloud consultant to deploy a hub and spoke network topology into their Azure environment and they have a business requirement that they wanna codify that infrastructure using infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or ARM templates. Well, we can easily service this request and make short work of it by using ChatGPT to help us out on this.

So we could come over to our ChatGPT prompt here and we could say, "give me the code for a Terraform script that deploys a hub and spoke network topology into Azure" and it's gonna actually give us a Terraform script for doing exactly this. Now it's important to understand that when you're working with ChatGPT, not all of its answers are a hundred percent correct. So you need to make sure that you're reviewing the information, especially when it comes to code, make sure you review that code before you push it to production because it may have some issues that you need to address before you push it to production since it's coming from an AI model and not from an individual that's creating this with a specific purpose in mind. But you'll get a general template that you can now use and modify and review to deploy into your customer's environment, so you didn't have to go through the manual task of actually coding out all of this infrastructure. Now when you're working with ChatGPT, also there's a character limit in the response and there's a workaround for this that you can just ask it to finish the response if for whatever reason it doesn't give you all of the characters as we see here, it ran into the character limit.

So I can actually just ask it to finish the response and hit enter and it should start finishing the response. Now you see here it's not in a code block for the remainder of this and that sometimes happens and then sometimes it jumps back into a code block. But you can now use this Terraform script to deploy into the customer's environment once you've reviewed it to make sure that it is absolutely correct. Now, this can also help us do things like answer questions. Maybe this same customer after we've deployed all of this has some questions about best practices for securing their virtual networks in Azure.

Well, we can ask ChatGPT to help us out with that response. We can say, "give me the best practices for securing virtual networks in Azure", and it's gonna go through a list of best practices that it thinks that we can use to secure our virtual networks inside of Azure and we can actually take this information and inform decisions for the customer based on this information. Maybe they're asking for a reason, maybe there are certain technologies that they want to implement to secure their networks. Now always the best practice is gonna be security by defense and depth, meaning using multiple controls to control your network security. And in this case of our response here, we see that ChatGPT has given us some options like Network Security Groups, Azure Firewall, VPN gateways for site-to-site IPsec tunnels.

Um, we have an Azure Bastion for jump boxing into our environment. So we're getting a managed jump box that's gonna be automatically secured by Azure, some private endpoints and other information on best practices for securing our virtual networks. Now let's say that we want to provide this response in the form of an email to the customer. Well, we can ask ChatGPT to help us reformat all this information into an email response. We can come here to our prompt and we can say, "create an email providing a list of the best practices you mentioned in a format that I can send to a customer".

Hit enter and now it's going to reformat all of information by providing a list of the best practices for securing virtual networks in Azure in the form of an email to our customer. Now we can slightly modify this email to make sure that it is going to have the correct customer name and the correct information by pulling out any of the incorrect responses that we might get from ChatGPT. But as we see, this helped us write an email fairly quick that we can for the most part use and send this information onto our customer. Alright, so there you have it folks. As we've seen in this episode of Azure This Week, we can use ChatGPT as Azure Cloud professionals to augment our daily lives and really augment some work that of course we could do with our brains.

However, it's going to help us do this much more quickly with less laborous efforts in doing things like codifying infrastructures with infrastructure as code toolings or researching the documentation for best practices. We could do these things manually, but we could use ChatGPT to make short work of these laborous tasks, and ultimately allow ChatGPT to curate the information for us and then we can review it for accuracy before we use this information in production, in code, or provide this information to our customers. Now, if you're interested in learning more about ChatGPT, I wanna make sure that you have the opportunity to check out a course that we have on the platform and I'll make sure to include that course for ChatGPT and Generative AI: The Big Picture in a link in the description of this video. Alright Gurus, that is all my time for now. Thanks so much for joining me in this episode of Azure This Week.

I've been Chase and I look forward to seeing you and more Azure This Week.