Meet Brain: The AI system behind Azure reliability

By Dustin Ward

In this article How Azure’s AI-powered reliability intelligence system works Why Brain is needed What is Brain? Azure’s centralized AIOps for cloud reliability Foundations of Azure’s digital twin for cloud health What it means to operate against a cloud intelligence system The future of agentic AI and cloud operations What’s next for Azure reliability and…

Proving application resilience on Azure with Chaos Studio

By Dustin Ward

Takeaway: Azure Chaos Studio helps organizations validate application resilience by simulating outages, failovers, network disruptions, and infrastructure failures before they impact production. You don’t know with certainty that your application is resilient until that resilience is tested. Better to learn it isn’t by deliberately breaking it in a test environment and watching how it reacts,…

Azure IaaS: How to design, build, and optimize cloud infrastructure for long-term cost efficiency

By Dustin Ward

In this article Compute: Matching resources to workload requirements Storage: Balancing performance and lifecycle management Networking: Improving efficiency without compromising resiliency Continuous optimization is where long-term savings happen Continue your Azure IaaS optimization journey Create a resilient infrastructure with Azure This blog post is the third part of a blog series called Azure IaaS which…

Upgrade Amazon EKS clusters with confidence using Kubernetes version rollbacks

By Dustin Ward

Upgrading a Kubernetes control plane has long been a one way door. Open source Kubernetes doesn’t support control plane rollback, so once you upgrade, there’s no going back. The community is making real progress here, and KEP-4330 introduces emulated versions to ease rollback. But in practice this constraint has pushed organizations to build elaborate compensating…

Claude in Microsoft Foundry is now generally available

By Dustin Ward

Claude in Microsoft Foundry is the production path enterprises have been asking for: true frontier model choice, Azure-native controls, simplified procurement, and faster time to value. Most enterprise AI projects do not stall because of model quality. They stall because of everything around the model: procurement, governance, networking, and data. Claude in Microsoft Foundry is…

The 2026 Agent Confidence Index: Where 300 builders see real momentum

By Dustin Ward

A couple of months ago, I sat across from my nine-year-old daughter’s teachers at a parent-teacher conference. They were kind but concerned. She takes her time on assignments, they said—often deep in thought. How would she do on timed tests next year? I told them I wasn’t worried. What they described as a problem is, to me,…