CLOUDY MUSINGS

More and more, I'm finding that I'm getting asked a series of similar questions when a customer decides to pick up a Cloud Solution Provider or switches between a Cloud Solution Provider for Microsoft. It starts with a: "What happens to our tenant? Do we lose our identities? Does someone have to rebuild Entra ID?" The short answer is no. The longer answer is the rest of this post, because while nothing dramatic happens to your tenant, plenty of small things change at the bill

After spending years working across Azure, AWS, and GCP, I can tell you the most frustrating part of FinOps is rarely the optimization itself. The hard part is getting everyone in the room to agree on what the data actually means before anyone can act. Every provider exports billing differently, every tool invents its own abstraction layer on top of that, and every dashboard ends up starting with translation instead of analysis. You spend the first hour of every cost conversa

I posted my FinOps for AI badge last week and almost immediately started getting messages. The interesting thing was most of them weren't actually about AI. A few people wanted to know whether the certification was worth pursuing, but most of the questions were really about the broader FinOps certification journey. Where does FinOps for AI fit? Should somebody take Engineer first? Is Practitioner still the right starting point? What's the deal with FOCUS? Is Professional wort

I have been attending Microsoft events in one form or another for a long time, and I have learned that the first wave of conference reactions is usually not where the real story lives. The first wave is always loud. It's the keynote clips, the social posts, the product names, the demos, and the inevitable rush to figure out which announcement is the announcement everyone should be talking about. That's useful to a point, but I usually find the more interesting story a little

You'd be surprised by the kinds of questions I get from customers these days. A lot of them start in places that feel familiar enough. Someone wants to understand Microsoft's decision to deprecate WSUS. Someone else is trying to figure out whether Azure Update Manager makes sense for their environment. Another customer is looking at Linux for the first time after spending most of their career in Windows-centric shops. On the surface, those sound like completely different conv

This topic comes up constantly. Sometimes it's at the start of a discovery conversation before we get into modernization, governance, platform engineering strategy, security, or cost optimization. Sometimes it's during a migration discussion where the existing documentation is incomplete or just plain wrong in the way only cloud infrastructure documentation can be. And sometimes it's simpler than any of that: someone just needs to know what's actually running in Azure across