CLOUDY MUSINGS

I posted my FinOps for AI badge last week and almost immediately started getting messages. The interesting thing was most of them weren't actually about AI. A few people wanted to know whether the certification was worth pursuing, but most of the questions were really about the broader FinOps certification journey. Where does FinOps for AI fit? Should somebody take Engineer first? Is Practitioner still the right starting point? What's the deal with FOCUS? Is Professional wort

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

This topic comes up constantly. Sometimes it's at the start of a discovery conversation before we get into modernization, governance, platform engineering strategy, security, or cost optimization. Sometimes it's during a migration discussion where the existing documentation is incomplete or just plain wrong in the way only cloud infrastructure documentation can be. And sometimes it's simpler than any of that: someone just needs to know what's actually running in Azure across

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

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