The most common mistake I saw with early ARM template adoption was writing a separate template for each environment — one for dev, one for staging, one for production. This preserved the "separate documentation per environment" mental model that preceded IaC, just in a JSON format instead of a
Windows Azure
I've been presenting this presentation all year. I've tweaked it a little after each section. Funny thing is I never blogged that content... So I'd like to take
microsoft sql
If you've seen my OnPrem to Azure presentation, then you know one of the two big reservations I had about windows azure was we couldn't create a transactionally
There's a Pig script at one client that is 847 lines long. It ingests raw clickstream data from HDFS, applies session reconstruction logic, calculates funnel conversion rates, joins against a user dimension, filters out internal traffic, handles three different upstream data formats based on a timestamp condition, and
A client called me earlier this year with an interesting problem. They had a building automation system — HVAC, power meters, door sensors — all generating data. They wanted that data in their analytics stack. The problem was that the vendor-supplied monitoring software only showed real-time dashboards and stored nothing
Windows Azure
For the past 3 years...up until TechEd 2013, Microsoft was "All in" when it came to the cloud. Their goal was to see all new features and services come to the
Software developers figured out something operations teams were slow to learn: reproducibility comes from artifacts, not procedures. A compiled binary is reproducible because the build system produces it deterministically from source code. An application deployment is reproducible because the same binary gets applied to each environment. The procedure for deploying
AssertEquals works great for scalar values — a count, a status flag, a calculated amount. But a lot of stored procedure logic produces result sets: multiple rows, multiple columns. Testing that a procedure returned the right set of rows isn't something you can do with a single scalar assertion.
Terraform wasn't released until 2014. Ansible was around but Windows-focused Azure automation wasn't its strength. In 2013, if you wanted repeatable, version-controlled Azure infrastructure, the native answer was Azure Resource Manager templates — JSON documents that described the infrastructure you wanted and let Azure figure
There is a specific moment I have learned to recognize. You are creating a new stored procedure, or building another SSIS package, or writing another CREATE TABLE statement, and you open up a previous one to copy the structure. Not the business logic — just the skeleton. The error handling, the
At some point in almost every growing Azure deployment, the conversation shifted from "how do we make this SQL Server more available" to "how do we make it handle more load." Scale up — bigger VM size, more memory — was the first lever. It was often enough.
The hardest tests to write aren't the ones that verify simple logic — those are manageable with FakeTable and AssertEquals. The hard ones are tests for stored procedures that call other stored procedures. You're trying to test Procedure A, but Procedure A calls Procedure B, which sends