cloud computing

Discover my recent professional and personal milestones, from speaking engagements at Azure Fest and the European Collaboration Summit to the continued growth of the Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast. I also share updates on my home studio equipment upgrades and celebrate reaching significant strength training goals in the gym.

I explore the newly announced F5 NGINX service on Azure, explaining why this Platform-as-a-Service offering is preferable to traditional compute-based deployments. By walking through the straightforward provisioning process and initial configuration steps, I demonstrate how to get started with this tool for load balancing and web serving.

Drawing on my decade of experience with Microsoft Azure, I reveal the actual monthly costs of a personal solution that tracks AKA.MS URLs from Twitter, which averages around €26 despite my efforts to minimize expenses. I break down how the Azure SQL database accounts for over 80% of the bill after an upgrade was necessary to handle growing data volumes, emphasizing why relying on initial estimates rather than active monitoring leads to unexpected spending.

I explore how the Azure Well-Architected Framework guides modern identity management, highlighting the critical shift from fragmented on-premises directories to a unified Azure AD tenant. By examining the identity checklist and best practices, I demonstrate why centralizing identities into a single enterprise directory remains a fundamental pillar for effective cloud architecture.

After activating a Windows 365 trial to test its performance and practical value, I break down the licensing structures and pricing differences between the Business and Enterprise editions. I explain why I chose the Business edition for my cloud-only corporate environment and argue that the $45/month Standard plan offers the most reasonable balance of speed and resources for typical desktop tasks.