CLOUDY MUSINGS

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

Cloud conversations still tend to start in the same place. We talk about scalability, resilience, performance, and maybe security if we are feeling disciplined. Cost usually shows up later (way later), almost like a postscript to the architecture. It is something we validate after the system is live, after usage patterns are real, and after the bill gives us a reason to care. The problem with that sequence is that by the time cost shows up, most of the meaningful decisions ha

So you're looking at Azure Data Box, and it seems pretty straightforward. Microsoft sends you a physical box, you load it up with data, ship it back, and boom: your data's in Azure. Simple, right? Then you actually start planning the migration. You open the portal, dive into the docs, and suddenly you're reading the same paragraph about "regions" for the third time, still not entirely sure what it means. Here's the question I've been asked from time to time: If I create my Da

The code referenced in this blog can be found here ! There are still moments when Azure catches me by surprise. Back when I first moved away from traditional on-prem environments, I was convinced the Contributor role was almost identical to Owner , just without the ability to manage access or view billing. Simple, right? Turns out that was completely wrong, and what I learned since then keeps saving me headaches every time I spin up a new environment. My goal of this post is

If you pull cost data from Azure’s Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) subscriptions, you might have noticed something new in Microsoft’s documentation lately: the legacy “Get Usage Details” API is being deprecated. That’s right. The familiar Consumption API that so many FinOps teams built automations around is heading for retirement. Before you start rewriting every script you own, take a breath. This change is not a disaster. It is an upgrade. Let’s talk about what is happening, why Micro

People often toss around latency and throughput like they are one and the same. They are not. They live in the same world but serve very different roles. One cares about how fast something starts. The other cares about how much it moves. Understanding the difference is vital for cloud architects, platform engineers, FinOps professionals, and really anyone building digital systems. The best way to think about them is like two roommates with wildly different sleep schedules.

Hey friends! After I posted my last blog article, I figured folks may want a quick way to change TLS to 1.2 for all Windows servers...