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

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

One of the more interesting things about enterprise AI adoption is how quickly people become comfortable with these tools. We spent years teaching users to be skeptical of links, cautious with downloads, thoughtful about where sensitive data goes, and generally a little suspicious of shiny new software. Then AI assistants showed up, proved useful in about thirty seconds, and a lot of that caution went straight out the window. Suddenly people are pasting customer contracts in

There's a very specific moment in almost every Azure File Sync conversation where things go from "this is going great" to "wait, what do you mean we can't do that?" P.S. That happened this week and it took me back, hence the blog post. This usually happens right after the POC looks successful. You've synced a few hundred gigs from the D: drive of an on-premises file server, cloud tiering is working, ACLs look intact, and everyone feels good. Then someone asks how you expose

I was reminded of Conway’s Law the day I watched an episode of The Bear where Carmy tried to redesign the entire kitchen workflow in the middle of lunch service. Onions were flying. Pans were screaming. Richie yelled “cousin” every twelve seconds. Sydney was five seconds away from either fixing everything or throwing a stainless steel pan into the alley. Half the staff looked like one more missed step would send them into a new career that involved silence and scented candles

Platform engineering isn’t just about standing up Kubernetes clusters or pushing Terraform templates. It’s about creating a team that...

Like a lot of my posts, this conversation came up last week with a customer. As per usual, I figured a quick glimpse into what I've seen...

I think we can all agree, DevOps has been the north star for engineering teams trying to ship software faster, safer, and more reliably...