CLOUDY MUSINGS

Infrastructure changes have a way of producing unexpected side effects! (a.k.a. gather around for another lively lesson learned the hard way...) Sometimes it's a routing issue that doesn't surface until something tries to use the affected path. Sometimes it's a service dependency that nobody documented because it always just worked. And sometimes it's discovering that cloud management platforms don't automatically resume where they left off after you've changed the environmen

As with previous blog posts, all code can be found here! The Norns sat beside the Well of Urd weaving fate into the roots of Yggdrasil. The thread was already spun long before anyone knew how the story would end, and by the time the consequences arrived, they were simply discovering decisions that had already been made. I found myself thinking about that recently (HUGE Norse mythology fan) after yet another conversation about cloud billing, because the parallels are stronger

More and more, I'm finding that I'm getting asked a series of similar questions when a customer decides to pick up a Cloud Solution Provider or switches between a Cloud Solution Provider for Microsoft. It starts with a: "What happens to our tenant? Do we lose our identities? Does someone have to rebuild Entra ID?" The short answer is no. The longer answer is the rest of this post, because while nothing dramatic happens to your tenant, plenty of small things change at the bill

After spending years working across Azure, AWS, and GCP, I can tell you the most frustrating part of FinOps is rarely the optimization itself. The hard part is getting everyone in the room to agree on what the data actually means before anyone can act. Every provider exports billing differently, every tool invents its own abstraction layer on top of that, and every dashboard ends up starting with translation instead of analysis. You spend the first hour of every cost conversa

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