A manufacturing company I worked with backed up its file server by dragging folders into a browser window. It worked for the first 20 GB. Then a 400 GB engineering share timed out three nights in a row, nobody knew which files had made it, and the person who ran the job kept a SAS … Read more >>
In this comprehensive article, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know about Azure SQL Database pricing to help you make informed decisions that align with your business needs and budget. Azure SQL Database Pricing Azure SQL Database Deployment Options Before diving into specific pricing details, it’s important to realize that Microsoft offers several … Read more >>
A software company I worked with moved its customer portal to Azure SQL Database and picked the biggest, safest-sounding option for every environment. Dev, test, and production all ran on Business Critical. Three months later the finance team asked why a database serving 40 internal testers cost nearly as much as production. Nobody had matched … Read more >>
A media company moved 80 TB of backups and video archives into Azure and expected a small monthly bill. Three months later, finance asked why storage costs had tripled. Everything sat in the Hot tier by default. Versioning and soft delete were on for a container that was overwritten nightly. A reporting job also downloaded … Read more >>
A junior admin I mentored wanted the Azure Fundamentals certification to move from help desk to cloud operations. He signed up for a paid video course, bought a practice exam bundle, and then opened an Azure account to “practice.” Three weeks later, a forgotten virtual machine had burned through his free credit. He had spent … Read more >>
A logistics company called me after its order system froze every Tuesday at 9 a.m. The database was an Azure SQL Managed Instance, and nobody could say why. There were no alerts, no saved logs, and no baseline of normal behavior. The team found out about each outage from angry warehouse supervisors. The cause turned … Read more >>
A retail company I worked with had sales data spread across three places: an on-premises SQL Server, a folder of CSV exports, and a reporting database that timed out every Monday morning. The analysts pulled files by hand and built spreadsheets. Nobody trusted the numbers, and the finance team had no idea what the reporting … Read more >>
A client of mine in Ohio called me on a Friday afternoon because their on-premises file server had finally run out of disk space, and their finance team couldn’t process month-end reports. They needed compute capacity that afternoon, not after a six-week hardware procurement cycle. This is the exact situation where an Azure VM (Azure … Read more >>
A client of mine, a logistics company based in Georgia, called me last year convinced their Azure bill had a billing error. Their backup costs had tripled in four months, and nobody on their team had touched a single setting. After a short audit, I found the real cause: three new production VMs had been … Read more >>
When I first started working with Amazon Web Services out of office in Austin, Texas, I remember staring at the AWS Global Infrastructure map and wondering why there were so many dots on it that weren’t labeled “Region” or “Availability Zone.” Those extra dots, scattered across cities like New York, Chicago, Denver, and Seattle, turned … Read more >>