Azure IaaS series: Explore new resources for building a stronger, more efficient infrastructure

By Dustin Ward

Why a modern cloud infrastructure foundation is critical to your business Infrastructure has always been foundational to running business-critical cloud workloads; but today, it has become a strategic driver of innovation, resilience, and growth. As organizations accelerate digital transformation, infrastructure decisions increasingly shape how quickly teams can adopt AI, how reliably applications operate at global…

Introducing OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail to run your autonomous private AI agents

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail to launch OpenClaw instance, pairing your browser, enabling AI capabilities, and optionally connecting messaging channels. Your Lightsail OpenClaw instance is pre-configured with Amazon Bedrock as the default AI model provider. Once you complete setup, you can start chatting with your AI assistant immediately —…

Unlocking document understanding with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms – remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights. Enter mistral-document-ai-2512 in Microsoft Foundry. This new…

Instant access incremental snapshots: Restore without waiting

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re excited to introduce instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disk, delivering an industry-leading snapshot experience where creation, disk restore, and production-ready performance all happen instantly. Instant access snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra Disk are usable immediately upon creation, allowing you to restore new disks without waiting…

AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI partnership, AWS Elemental Inference, Strands Labs, and more (March 2, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

This past week, I’ve been deep in the trenches helping customers transform their businesses through AI-DLC (AI-Driven Lifecycle) workshops. Throughout 2026, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating these sessions for numerous customers, guiding them through a structured framework that helps organizations identify, prioritize, and implement AI use cases that deliver measurable business value. AI-DLC is…

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud adds governance, productivity, and support for large AI models securely running even when completely disconnected

By Dustin Ward

As digital sovereignty becomes a strategic requirement, organizations are rethinking how they deploy critical infrastructure and AI capabilities under tighter regulatory expectations and higher risk conditions. Microsoft’s approach to sovereignty is grounded in enabling enterprises, public sectors, and regulated industries to participate in the digital economy securely, independently, and on their own terms. The Microsoft…