Introducing Azure Multicloud Interconnect for AWS

By Dustin Ward

As organizations accelerate AI adoption and modernize their digital estates, applications, data, and infrastructure increasingly span multiple cloud environments. Customers are choosing the best platform for each workload, leveraging unique capabilities across providers to drive innovation, resilience, and business agility. Yet while multicloud strategies have become commonplace, networking between cloud environments remains complex. Establishing private…

Inside Microsoft’s marketing team: Scaling expertise with AI

By Dustin Ward

Business leaders are facing a familiar challenge at an unfamiliar scale. Every organization is being asked to move faster as markets change quickly, customer expectations continue to rise, and technology advances at a pace that can feel overwhelming. Teams are expected to deliver greater results, often with the same resources they had before. AI is…

Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now generally available

By Dustin Ward

Today, Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are generally available, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. R9g instances are memory-optimized and deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based R8g instances, powered by the most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built. R9g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads including databases, in-memory caches (Valkey,…

AWS Weekly Roundup: Welcome DuckLabs to the team, Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), and more (August 31, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

The news that interested me the most last week was the DuckLabs acquisition. AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind DuckDB, the popular open source analytical database that runs in-process and executes SQL directly against files like Parquet, CSV, and JSON. DuckDB stays open source under its independent foundation…

Managed PostgreSQL vs. self-hosted PostgreSQL: Key benefits and trade-offs

By Dustin Ward

Summary This post is for technical decision makers evaluating where to run production PostgreSQL workloads. It compares two valid operating models—self-managed PostgreSQL and a managed database service—through business and operational outcomes: control, engineering capacity, resilience, security, cost predictability, risk tolerance, and access to specialist expertise. The right choice depends on which responsibilities the organization needs…

The Economics of Agent Optimization: Four ways to lower the cost

By Dustin Ward

This blog post is the second of a four-part series called The Economics of Agent Optimization which shares the strategies, capabilities, and proof points to help you optimize agent costs and run AI as a managed investment system on Microsoft Foundry. The first post set out the three decisions that system rests on: optimize each…