CLOUDY MUSINGS

As with previous blogs, working code and all relevant how-tos exist in this GitHub Repository! Clone, star, fork...whatever makes the most sense! You ever get halfway through a conversation about endpoint security or device posture and realize you're just kind of assuming everyone's on Windows 11 Enterprise? Not because you checked, not because anyone validated it recently, just because that's how it's always been said out loud. It feels settled, like something that got figur

As with previous posts, all source code and a corresponding GitHub repository can be found here! This is one of those questions that seems like it should have a straightforward answer, but it doesn't because what good fun would that be if there were a straightforward answer? I'm sure you've been here before: someone spots an enterprise application in Microsoft Entra ID, notices it has permissions or credentials attached, and naturally asks: who created this thing? If you star

There is a very particular flavor of frustration that only appears in identity work. I used to work in the identity and network access division at Microsoft, so my joke was I needed to move faster over the course of my career, because I've landed smack dab in identity and by proxy security most of my career. The moment I'm talking about is when Microsoft Authenticator calmly informs you that you have "too many devices registered." You know with absolute clarity that this is i

The companion code for this blog can be found here . One thing you may have noticed is that I have been in PowerShell a bit more frequently as of late. The back story is I had a machine that all of a sudden didn't respond well with PowerShell and I spent quite a bit of time cleaning everything up. Whenever plagued with PowerShell issues, I run through an extensive list of troubleshooting every time a machine doesn't play nice and figured it might be a good time to share some

All sample PowerShell companion code for this blog can be found here . Azure has plenty of tools that do one thing really well, and Azure Resource Mover fits right into that category. If you need to move supported resources across regions without rebuilding from scratch, this is your tool. The trick is knowing what it was built for, what it refuses to touch, and how to use it without creating a surprise outage. This guide walks through what Resource Mover is good at, what it

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

Cloud engineering looks complicated from the outside. But when you peel back some layers, it doesn't seem so daunting. I believe in breaking down tricky concepts so that even a six-year-old could understand. We don’t need to make everything so complicated that no one gets it. To me, that's the quickest way to lose the hearts and minds of your esteemed colleagues, customers, and peers. The Complexity of Cloud Engineering What I've found is that folks often imagine giant Terraf

In my last post , I talked about what’s changing with Azure’s Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) APIs and why the old Usage Details endpoint is being retired. Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves! If your FinOps automations rely on Microsoft.Commerce/UsageAggregates, you’ll need to migrate those scripts to use the Exports API or Cost Details API. This post covers the exact code changes you need to make in PowerShell and Python (typically what I see most often with my customers and what I t

All code for this blog can be found here . I keep hearing more and more interest by customers I work with in exploring Cloud...

All code for this blog can be found here . I've been trailblazing with Azure since 2016. Before 2016, I set up an Entra ID (formerly...

All code for this blog can be found here . So you went all-in on Spot VMs to save money, but now you’ve hit that dreaded eviction wall....

Shannon's Disclaimer: All code for this blog can be found here . I'm going to start putting together code based blogs with their own repo and will clean up older blog posts as time allows. If you spend enough time working in the cloud, you get used to things breaking in ways that make no sense. Case in point: the other day my Azure CLI on Windows decided it was going to stop working. I started in WSL because that is usually where things behave the best. I ran az login and ins

This post came from a customer conversation that started with a seemingly innocent question: “I’m using GRS for my storage accounts....

Over the course of my career, I've picked up various Visual Studio Subscriptions that enable me to build and maintain a small Azure...

Like a lot of my posts lately, this one kicked off with a customer question. An innocent question at that, but the kind that makes you...

Like a lot of my blog posts as of late, I get asked all sorts of questions by customers struggling to make sense of Azure and in this...

A few weeks ago, my Pi-hole started throwing up errors that I may have incorrectly identified as a bad upstream DNS provider . Now do I...

In my presales role at AHEAD, I focus on the "art of the possible" in customer conversations. We often analyze customers' cloud storage...

If you've been following my blog, you know I often write about the environments I manage for demo purposes. I definitely cut corners and...

In my last post, I built out a quick script to remove Internet Explorer from Windows servers. Now that Internet Explorer has effectively...