That question matters because Azure has more than 200 products and cloud services across storage, networking, virtual computing, databases, analytics, and AI. Without a clear use case, teams either buy too much or pick the wrong service. I have seen both, and the bill shows it. This guide walks through ten real uses of Azure, … Read more >>
Last spring, a deployment pipeline at a mid-sized retail company stopped working on a Tuesday morning. Nothing had changed in the code. The cause was an old script that signed in with a shared admin account and password, and Azure now required multifactor authentication for that account. The team lost half a day, and the … Read more >>
Azure Data Studio is a cross-platform desktop tool for querying SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance. Microsoft built it on the same foundation as Visual Studio Code. Many teams used it because it ran on Mac and Linux and had notebooks and a lightweight query editor. If you want the background, … Read more >>
A development team opens its usual SQL editor to troubleshoot a slow customer portal. The saved connections still work, and yesterday’s queries run normally. However, the tool is no longer receiving security fixes, and the team’s troubleshooting notebooks contain production results that should never have been committed to Git. That is the situation organizations still … Read more >>
When your architectural requirements demand complete network isolation, massive compute scale, and private on-premises connectivity, the answer is the Azure App Service Environment (ASE). In this tutorial, I will break down the core mechanics of ASE (focusing heavily on the modernized ASE v3 standard). Azure App Service Environment What is an Azure App Service Environment … Read more >>
An online retailer adds a second Azure region after a holiday outage. The team already has Application Gateway, so it expects automatic cross-region recovery. During testing, however, customers still reach the failed region because the gateway only handles traffic within its regional deployment. The decision between Azure Front Door vs Application Gateway comes down to … Read more >>
A logistics company in Texas asked me to help with their order API. It ran on three virtual machines that sat mostly idle overnight and fell over every holiday sale. A developer had also pasted the database password into a Docker environment file, and that file lived in a shared folder. They wanted containers, but … Read more >>
Teams learn how to check Azure App Service logs only after an outage, when pressure is highest, and data is already gone. Azure App Service is a managed platform for hosting web apps and APIs. It gives you several log types, and each one lives in a different place. You will learn what each log … Read more >>
A few years ago, I joined a call with a retail company in Ohio. Their checkout API had slowed down every Friday evening for a month. Nobody had alerts set up, and the monthly Azure bill had jumped 30 percent. Half the team said, “Check Azure Advisor.” The other half said, “Open Azure Monitor.” They … Read more >>
A healthcare billing team once sent me a panicked message. A developer had tested a new queue-processing function by deploying it straight to the shared dev environment, again and again, to see what happened. Each failed attempt pushed bad messages into a live queue, and the poison-message count climbed past 3,000. A one-line bug cost … Read more >>