Yes. Visio is still a thing. To draw expressive diagrams with the correct visual representation of the underlying services you need to have access to quality stencils.

There is the Microsoft Azure Cloud and AI Symbol / Icon Set - SVG from Microsoft of course but I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from David Summers today where he shared his own additional set of stencils for Azure.

If you have not been working with Management Groups to manage Azure at scale, I recommend to review the documentation. You should also take a look at the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (which was just recently updated).

When you start using Management Groups you might want to change the display name of the root management group or do other changes to the hierarchy. To get started you need to have access to the root management group. If you have global administrator permissions, follow the documentation (especially this) on how to set that up.

When you begin to operationalize your deployments and want to add monitoring one of the things you might do is to create shared dashboards as part of your deployment. A shared dashboard is basically the same as a non-shared dashboard except it is a full Azure resource, lives in a resource group and can be created through ARM.

If you use Management groups to manage Azure at scale you may get hit with a bug in the Azure portal, that I discovered today. If you rename the Root Tenant Group the portal stops showing any previously create management groups. Their assignment are still active and you can still manage them using PowerShell or CLI but the portal will start show the out-of-the-box experience.

Both development and production environments are deployed in a fully automated fashion using ARM templates. As part of these deployments we also create Notification Hubs and related authorization rules.

I noticed today that some of our deployments were failing due to the fact that the Notification Hub resource provider was not able to find a related resource although the necessary dependencies were defined.

For automatic deployment of test environments we are spinning up App Service instances and want to automatically set connection strings for the database and other services in the same template.

According to the Azure Resource Manager documentation the property connectionStrings of the Microsoft.Web/sites/config resource type can be used. Alas, when I use that property the connection strings are not configured on the App Service.

In my first days at HorseAnalytics, one of the first tasks was to review the codebase and streamline the build and release process. That meant to move all repositories over to Azure DevOps so that we can use the pipelines to build and release new versions of our products.

Today I needed to create a test database for one of the products I’m working on. In the backend it uses LINQ to SQL against a SQL Azure Database. Exporting the production database and cleaning it up with millions of records in it turned out to be not the most efficient way of creating an empty test database.

After spending close to eight years in different roles at Microsoft, my time with Microsoft has come to an end. I accepted a new role, starting on May 1st, as Chief Technology Officer with HorseAnalytics an animal tech startup focused on providing a telemetry data platform for horses.

Governance is one of the major adoption challenges when it comes to cloud computing. Organizations find themselves “not ready” to consume cloud services whether that perception is more a gut feeling or comes from experience.

Microsoft works hard to built a rich toolset to cover many aspects of governance such as Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, Azure Cost Management and many more. But tooling is only half the equation.