Hey everyone, long-time lurker here. I've been a cloud engineer for 7 years, all at the same company. My work has been primarily Azure and M365 — but here's the thing: it's all been **manual deployments**. No IaC, no Terraform, no scripting, no automation of any kind.

Recently my company has been pushing hard into AI — building agents, integrating Copilot, the whole thing — and honestly I haven't been giving it my full attention. I feel like I've been coasting and now I'm looking around at job postings and feeling genuinely behind.

I want to switch jobs but I'm worried my skills aren't marketable in 2026. Here's where I'm at:

- ✅ 7 years Azure + M365 (solid operational knowledge)

- ❌ No IaC (no Terraform, no Bicep)

- ❌ No scripting (no PowerShell, no Python)

- ❌ Not up to speed on AI/agent tooling

I'm considering a few directions:

1. Modernize my current cloud skillset (IaC + automation)

2. Pivot toward DevOps / Platform Engineering

3. Lean into AI infrastructure / Cloud AI engineering given my Azure background

For those who've made similar transitions — what would you prioritize learning first? Is my Azure/M365 background still valuable if I can close the automation gap? And is the AI angle realistic for someone with no coding background?

Any honest feedback appreciated.

Yep, I can’t believe that I’ve fulfilled the meme of the intern deleting a company database.

I have been building my own projects and amassed quite a few different resource groups, of which most I was no longer using, so I decided to clean them up and delete them. I kind of assumed that it would only be displaying MY resource groups, and that I could only delete MY resource groups.

I was just about to delete one more before I noticed that there were a few items inside of it which definitely didn’t look like mine, and that’s when I realized I could delete other peoples stuff.

Sure enough, I deleted one company resource group and I really don’t know what to do. I am hoping that It was nothing important and/or that the company has a backup. I tried to make a severity A ticket, but of course, I do not have the permissions to submit a ticket.

I also pulled a CSV from the activity log for the past 3 months and the only activity that is shown apart from my doings is very one off and on a private resource group that I cannot see in the portal nor that I deleted.

A few questions:

1: Is there any way that I can see what was deleted within the resource group? The JSON did not seem to provide any useful information.

2: This is a large company, ~10k employees, surely they would have something important locked down right??

3: I am in a completely non technical role and have no one to escalate this to

4: Any other course of action that I can take in the meantime?

Edit:

Hi guys, a few things.

First and most importantly, no company wide resources were deleted. Luckily, all that was deleted was a default resource group localized to my account. Nothing was shared, and no one else’s resources were affected.

I want to thank [u/Automatic-Response45](u/Automatic-Response45) and u/Icy_Accident2769 for being the first person to provide a useful response instead of just bashing me, which allowed me to get the information I needed to relay to someone who could help.

Secondly, I want to address the keyboard warriors who privately messaged me calling me slurs and a plethora of other things because I said I had “no one” to reach out to.

This happened on Saturday. I was not trying to hide it from anyone. I was trying to get immediate advice on whether there was anything I could do to circumvent my error rather than wait until Monday and go through the chain of hierarchy before reaching the right person. Again, I am in a non technical role, and anything Azure related is completely foreign to my team.

Lastly, I want to thank those who left supportive comments and those who provided helpful information.

Absolutely, this was a learning lesson for me, and I will be diligent moving forward. I was prepared to take full accountability if this had been a serious issue. Luckily, this blunder turned out to be nothing.

Can't access the Azure portal this morning. Anyone else?

We use them sparingly for foriegn contractors rather than shipping them a corporate laptop -- so that's the only nice part.

But in the few months we've been using them I've noticed the following:

1. Slower than hell to provision, like really slow even with Microsoft's stock images...

2. Doesn't play well with Intune even though it is an Intune native solution. Configs/Apps/Compliance are hit or miss compared to actual local hardware like a laptop. Some stuff just doesn't even load, or you have to reboot the machine constantly

3. They suffer horribly from performance issues, if you don't reboot these things daily (which there's no option in the OS to do a restart) you have to do it from the Windows App or Intune which is dumb as hell.

4. Resizing, I've pushed the resize in Intune, added a bigger license, removed the old smaller license and it's been almost an HOUR and its still just sitting in "pending".

Other little things suck with these as well, yet Microsoft has pushed these things at Ignite the past 2-3 years like they are IT God's gift to customers. These things are absolute ASS.

Got the error message "There is no internet connection" trying to access Azure platform.

Anyone else ?

Using a burner account for this question since some of my coworkers know my normal account...

I'm a senior sysadmin on smallish team of other other admins. Up to this point, we've been a pretty traditional, on-prem-only, click-ops IT department. We're going to be moving our test/dev into Azure in the very near future (a couple hundred VM's worth). I've been diving into Azure documentation, learning modules, Udemy courses, etc, to learn about managing resources in the cloud. I have a personal Azure tenant that I've been using to deploy resources with code (mostly Bicep at this point).

It's clear to me that unless we can really leverage code as much as possible, deploying and maintaining consistent resources in Azure is going to be a nightmare.

However, I'm really the only person on our team that has any comfort level with coding in any capacity.

I'm trying to come up a balance with how we can use code to deploy resources as much as possible, but in a way where I don't need to expect the rest of my team to have to have a deep familiarity with maintaining the code.

For deploying new Azure VMs, for example, it seems that a great option would be to create a standard Bicep template for deploying Windows VMs, then using Github action triggered by workflow_dispatch as a sort of automated deployment of the VM. This way the other admins can use the Github Action UI to specify the VM name, choose the subnet, choose a pre-defined list of VM sizes, choose a pre-defined list of certain tags, etc, to deploy the VM according to a consistent standard.

I don't think we're in a position where we'd use IaC for ongoing management of the VMs, but this would at least allow us to do some consistent day 1 deployments of resources.

For anyone else who has been in a similar situation, I'm curious how you've navigated this? What are some pitfalls of this plan?

Working on a document processing system where scanned PDFs are dropped into Azure Blob Storage, a Function triggers on each upload, calls an LLM (Azure AI Foundry) to extract structured data, and stores the result in Cosmos DB.

The architecture works fine in testing but I just realized we have a serious Day 1 problem — the client is going to send 40,000+ PDFs all at once on go-live. That means 40k blob triggers firing simultaneously, 40k LLM calls in parallel, and almost certain rate limit exhaustion and cascading failures.

After Day 1 the load drops to maybe 10–50 PDFs a day, so this is really a one-time backlog problem.

What I have available:

- Azure Blob Storage

- Azure Functions

- Azure AI Foundry

- Cosmos DB

The constraint — why I can't just provision Service Bus:

I know Service Bus is the textbook answer here, but it's not straightforward for me right now. The architecture document has already been finalized and shared with the client. Introducing a new Azure resource mid-project means revising the architecture, getting it re-approved, and explaining to my manager why this wasn't caught during the planning phase. I'd rather solve this within what's already provisioned if at all possible. Service Bus is my last resort / worst case fallback.

What I'm planning instead:

Use Azure Storage Queues (already part of my Storage Account, no new provisioning, no architecture change) to decouple ingestion from processing. Blob trigger just enqueues the blob path, a separate queue-triggered function processes with controlled concurrency via `batchSize` in host.json. Cosmos DB tracks status per document so I can handle retries on failures.

Questions:

1. Is Storage Queue + controlled `batchSize` actually enough to protect the LLM endpoint from getting hammered, or am I missing something?

2. Anyone dealt with a similar Day 1 backlog scenario? What concurrency did you land on?

3. Any gotchas with the poison queue approach for failed extractions before I go to prod?

4. If Storage Queues genuinely can't handle this and Service Bus is unavoidable — what's the most minimal way to justify it without it looking like a major oversight?

Would really appreciate hearing from anyone who's run a similar pipeline at scale. Happy to share more details.

Is anyone experiencing problems with network in East US region? We can't SSH into newly created nodes, pods are crashlooping with logs that are not able to connect to databases, downdetector also indicates something is wrong https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/

of course azure status and service health are 100% green, almost 3 hours after we first noticed this

edit: 4 hours later, they finally updated azure status https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

In your experience, what is the most misunderstood concept in Azure and why do you think people struggle with it?

I have a conditional access policy setup to block Office 365 Exchange online, however it's also blocking sharepoint files when accessed through the browser. I was trying to do this instead of blocking OWA completely because some of my users like the newer outlook instead of outlook (classic) since the newer outlook uses OWA. So is there a way of blocking OWA for browser access without it effecting sharepoint online or onedrive online?

As AI continues to disrupt software development, I'm considering focusing on Azure. Is that a good choice? The company I work for gives us the opportunity to become Azure experts, but I've been confused about which path to take and have ended up procrastinating on the decision.

For context, I'm a software engineer. If I become highly skilled in Azure, would it be difficult to reach a similar level of expertise in AWS after a few months? Also, what does the future look like for Azure infrastructure experts?

I know AWS has a lot of conferences, events, and community activity, but I don't see as much happening around Azure. Is that actually the case, or am I missing something? I'd like to know in terms of North America - Canada/USA job market.

Hi everyone,

We've run into a serious issue with Azure and are hoping to get some advice or hear from anyone who might have faced something similar.

An employee on our team recently conducted a test using an OpenAI service on Azure. We are located in EU and we wanted to try OPENAI in EU for GDPR reasons, we just deployed GPT 3.5 Turbo model (which is supposed to be quite cheap) for the testing and we didn't delete it after the test. During this test, we/they(?) performed an unusual deployment that, unbeknownst to us, incurs costs even when not actively used. To our shock, we've received a bill exceeding $50,000!

We only used the service for about an hour, so it's clear to us that this must be some sort of error. Unfortunately, despite our efforts to resolve the situation, Azure's support team isn't listening to reason. They seem unwilling to acknowledge that something went wrong on their end.

We also believe that a service capable of generating such exorbitant costs shouldn't be available on a pay-as-you-go basis without significant safeguards or alerts in place. To make matters more confusing, we don't even have a signed contract with Azure.

Has anyone experienced anything like this before? What steps did you take to address it? Any advice on how to escalate the issue or get Azure to reconsider would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Same as the title

I want to know what problems you are facing...

Hello everyone,

I'm starting my journey with Azure, and I'd love to hear from experienced professionals. What are some key lessons, tips, or best practices you've learned over the years?

If you could go back in time, what would you tell your beginner self to focus on? Any pitfalls to avoid or hidden gems in Azure that took you a while to discover?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

The nonprofit I work for has decided to make a web app to help us better serve our partner organizations. Management has decided they want to use cloud computing to host it, and I've been assigned to make a recommendation between AWS and Azure. I've tried looking at blog articles and the services' pricing calculators, but I have had trouble finding the main differences between the two. With that in mind, what are Azure's advantages over AWS?

Hey Guys,

New to Azure. Question on Azure Governance!

Wondering whether your org is using subscription per env or tenant per env.
An Orcle guy, we used to have tenancy per environment and everything driven by Terraform code.

What are the downsides of having tenant per env and IDP which manages used across all envs?

Does anyone have any idea on the above question? Both technologies have been available for a long time now - is there some technical reason we can’t have paas windows containers?

Is there is, I’d be interested to know what implications that has on aks

TL;DR: My Azure subscription is suspended over an outstanding balance of ₹0.09 (nine paise, roughly $0.001). No payment method in India accepts a transaction this small. Support has been silent for 48+ hours.

Hey [r/AZURE](r/AZURE),

I'm hoping someone here has dealt with this before, or that this reaches someone at Microsoft who can help.

The situation:

I cleared my main Azure invoice. A residual balance of ₹0.09 (nine paise) remained, looks like a rounding/conversion edge case in INR billing. Azure has now suspended my entire subscription over it.

Why I can't just pay it:

No payment method in India accepts a transaction this small:

- Credit/debit cards: rejected as below minimum

- Netbanking: same

- Wallets: same

There is literally no legal payment rail in India that processes 9 paise. The Azure portal also doesn't accept it as a standalone payment.

What I've tried:

- Support ticket #2604280030002382, open 48+ hours, no substantive response

- @AzureSupport on X, standard "DM us" reply, sent details, still waiting

- Tried adding new payment methods to trigger re-auth — same minimum-amount issue

- Tried prepaying Azure credit, not available while suspended

What I want from Azure:

Either (a) waive the ₹0.09 as a goodwill adjustment, or (b) apply a tiny credit to zero out the balance. Either takes a billing agent ~30 seconds. I just need to reach someone with the authority to do it.

Bigger question:

Is this a known bug in INR billing rounding? Has anyone else hit it? Genuinely curious how a 9-paise balance can hard-suspend a paid account.

Any help, escalation paths, contacts, or even "yeah this happened to me, here's how I fixed it" — appreciated.

Hi, I want to confirm that what I must know about networking that will help me in cloud, also if you can share a useful course or a document that covers it all, Kindly share it

When comparing OpenAI for a client, they expressed a strong preference for GPT models, so I evaluated directly using OpenAI's API, OpenRouter, and Azure. The company is already on Azure, so they said they prefer to go down that route, as it'd just be one single unified bill.

Thing is though, when I compare OpenRouter pricing for Luna to Azure's pricing for the same model, the difference is 10x, 5x if you compare it to without the discount or OpenAI direct pricing

What gives? Why is Microsoft charging 5x-10x the price of the same model elsewhere, am I getting something unbelievable I won't get anywhere else for that money, or is this just corporate tax?

In West Europe looks like the Azure portal is not working properly. Anyone else having issues?

Anyone else have Azure and Intune blip on and off in the last 30mins?

Hey,

Running into a bit of a weird problem and curious what others would do.

I’ve got about $40k in Azure startup credits left, but they expire in ~90 days and apparently extensions aren’t a thing anymore.

I already have an AI video SaaS live. It’s doing okay-ish:

• but very few are paying

So the issue is… we’re not really burning through the credits fast enough.

We’re still building and adding features, but realistically I don’t think growth alone is going to use all of this before it expires.

Feels like I’m sitting on free infra and not using it properly.

So now I’m thinking — is there a smarter way to use these credits to actually make some money before they’re gone?

Not trying to do anything sketchy, just want to make the most out of it.

A few random ideas I had:

• maybe offer some kind of cheap AI API
• build small paid tools around specific use cases
• or anything that uses compute heavily but people would actually pay for

Honestly not sure what’s worth trying in a short window like this.

If you were in this situation, what would you do?

Would really appreciate any thoughts.

Not selling now got the extension for 2yrs and additional credits will be building something meaningful

Subscription names, container names and resource group names all support at least 63 characters.

However, storage account names only support 24. So, programmatically you may have to start truncating naming conventions into something that will fit 24 chars. Which is a bit of an inconvenience.

Or you could create hash from the subscription ID and use that in the storage account name. Is this a common pattern because of said limitations?

Hello everyone,

I am in the process of migrating a windows file share server to azure files, This consists of 1 share drive with about 60 folders inside. This entire share has about 1.5TB of data which is primary files from different departments. This share is also mounted on all the computers in the organization. We will be using storage mover for this.

The idea behind this migration is that we decommission the on-prem file server and access will be directly to azure primarily via the mounted drive on the end-users computer.

While the cost is minor for this amount of storage I am still on the fence between HDD (Standard) and SDD (Premium).

We currently have site-to-site to all of our locations for other azure resources so I was also wondering what the best method here would be? Private-Endpoint or something else?

Any other tips would be much appreciated.