Azure Weekly

Issue #387 - 18th September 2022

A slight DevOps theme in the highlights this week; Bicep is in Visual Studio, and API Management DevOps Resource Toolkit v1.0.0 (GA). An announcement that could be a bit of a game changer: Azure Code Signing, democratizing trust for developers and consumers, and a good guide to programmatically generate Cloud Resource Names Part 1 and Part 2.

James Broome published the second in his series on planning and delivering modern data analytics solutions in successful data projects start by forgetting about the data and Barry Smart has recorded his session from Data Scotland 2022: Fake it 'til you make it - generating production quality test data at scale using Azure Synapse.

A theme that has been increasingly occurring in Brain Trust conversations with our customers is that of "trimming IT (cloud) budgets" in preparation for a (global) recession. There are many different tactics that can be used with Azure; changing contract type (eliminating CSP fees seems to be a theme), using reserved instances, auto-scaling to deal with peak / off-peak demands, dev/test pricing, moving resources to more modern VM SKUs, migrating workloads from VMs to AKS for higher density. These are the low-hanging fruit. If you want to take a more holistic view, to form a strategy across your IT estate, you may need a more structured process, as some of these decisions will need to be ROI based (i.e. need budget in order to deliver cost-savings). Barry Smart (who used to be CTO of a 100 year old Financial Services company) shares his tried and tested approach in A simple toolkit for IT budgeting and planning, which establishes a data-driven, evidence-based approach for auditing your estate, and grouping "digital assets" into four groups: Protect, Invest, Tolerate, Retire, which enables an easier conversations with senior decision makers & budget holders. It's worth a read!