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Cloud is not inherently more expensive than on-premises once you account for hardware depreciation, power, cooling, and network costs — but it requires designing cost into your architecture from the start. This Azure Mythbusters episode examines fixed versus variable cost envelopes, auto-scaling strategies for spiky workloads like Black Friday traffic, the IaaS/PaaS/serverless cost spectrum, and cost as an implicit sixth pillar alongside the five pillars of software quality.

Moving workloads to Azure does not eliminate management decisions — scalability, resilience, and high availability all require deliberate configuration. This Azure Mythbusters episode contrasts scale-out via VM Scale Sets and auto-scale rules with scale-up by increasing VM SKU size, explains availability sets and availability zones, and shows how PaaS services like Azure Functions still require you to choose the right plan and design cross-region resilience with Traffic Manager.

Requirements remain essential when migrating to or building on Azure — from availability SLAs and RPO/RTO targets to compliance, data sovereignty, and cost. This Azure Mythbusters episode uses composite SLA calculations and Azure Architecture Center reference architectures to show how under- or over-specifying requirements directly shapes your design, region strategy, and overall cost.

In my spare time, I work on a pet project called Theatreers. The aim of this is a microservice based platform focused on Theatre / Musical Theatre (bringing a few of my passion areas together). I've recently re-architected the project to align to a multi-region serverless technology stack.

Consider this scenario. You are managing a software project using Azure DevOps, and you have multiple teams working towards a common cadence. Perhaps that cadence is managed by a central team. To gain the most value from your sprint planning, you would need to associate the iterations from the project level with each individual team. This is a scenario that I have for my fictitious Theatreers project, but also a scenario I encountered recently with a colleague. I have been helping them setup an Azure DevOps project to track the development of IP and collateral, so that they can more accurately forecast what they expect to land and show the value being delivered by the team.

Cloud Governance seems to have come up a few times over the past few weeks, so I wanted to post a short, sharp blog about it!

Scalability is one of the common areas where I have seen common misconceptions, when customers begin building on the platform.

In case you had not already heard, Logic Apps have now reached general availability on Azure (or read an MSDN article by Jeff Hollan on the topic).

When designing a solution, you want to be sure that your communications are secure and that your users can trust your application. Typically, SSL certificates can be useful for this purpose.That is well and good from a design and development perspective, but there may some management headaches when operating and governing the solution. How do you keep track of the certificates? How do you guarantee that they are kept secure? How do you ensure that certificates renew on time?

If you have been keeping up to date with the latest and greatest in Azure Services (yes, I know there are quite a few!), you may have heard of a new service called Azure Functions. Azure Functions is an event-driven Platform as a Service capability, helping you to execute code upon the occurrence of a particular event. It is currently in preview, though already has a lot of potential.