The art of simplicity

A recent survey by Flexera found that businesses waste an estimated 30% of their cloud spend on unused or unnecessary services. For small businesses with tight margins, this isn't just inefficient—it's potentially devastating. While tech giants promote cloud solutions as essential for every modern business, the reality for most small operations is quite different. Cloud is flexible, not cheap. Although you can build cost-effective solutions on a cloud platform, you have to be purposeful about this and design your solution specifically for it. The cost predictability problem One of the most frustrating aspects of cloud services is their variable pricing models. While providers advertise low entry prices, costs can quickly spiral as your usage increases: Pay-per-use pricing makes monthly bills unpredictable Resource provisioning often requires overestimation to prevent outages Hidden costs for data transfer, API calls, and storage can shock you at month...

If you are a student and enthusiastic about AI and Cloud in general and Microsoft technologies specifically, than I would encourage you to check out the Microsoft Innovator Series . This series offers a range of events that can help you improve your technical skills and are a good headstart for the Imagine Cup , Microsoft's premier global technology startup competition for student founders. There are still some events planned between now and the end of this year, so certainly have a look!   More information Event Series | Microsoft Reactor A Journey of Innovation and Inspiration with Microsoft Imagine Cup 2025 - Microsoft Community Hub

With more and more workloads running in the cloud, optimizing the resource consumption becomes an important feature of every application. Being able to dynamically scale down the memory limit can help us reduce costs when demand decreases. However before .NET 8, when a service tried to decrease the memory limit on the fly, it could fail as the .NET garbage collector was unaware of this change and would still allocate more memory. No longer in .NET 8!  A new API was introduced that allows to adjust the memory limit on the fly: This will instruct the garbage collector to reconfigure itself by detecting the various memory limits on the system. Calling this API can result in an InvalidOperationException when the newly set limit is lower than what's already committed. Remark: For smaller workloads it can also be useful to switch from Server GC to Workstation GC, which optimizes for lower memory usage. The switch can be done by adding this flag to your csproj file: More inf...

I'm currently attending NDC Oslo . During one of the sessions, this one to be exact, the speaker shared a nice CosmosDB feature; Time to Live . Some of the typical questions, you ask yourself when building applications are: Should I use hard or soft deletes? Are there any regulations on how long I can keep this data(e.g. GDPR)? How can I keep the amount of data under control? In the talk, the example they mention is weather data that is collected through various services. This data captured and used to feed an artificial intelligence algorithm to predict the most fuel-efficient way to operate a vessel in the North and Baltic sea. After a prediction is done, the weather data is no longer necessary and can safely be deleted. Thanks to the Time to Live(TTL) feature in CosmosDB implementing this requirement is really easy. You have to 2 ways to control the TTL value: At the container level At the item level Control TTL at the container level Open...

This is the poster that every Cloud Architect should hang above his bed: Cloud Design Patterns: Prescriptive Architecture Guidance for Cloud Applications

Microsoft released a free e-book   about cloud native development of applications using serverless. From the About page : This guide explains the components of the Azure serverless platform and focuses specifically on implementation of serverless using Azure Functions . You'll learn about triggers and bindings as well as how to implement serverless apps that rely on state using durable functions. Finally, business examples and case studies will help provide context and a frame of reference to determine whether serverless is the right approach for your projects.

Microsoft created another free e-book for every organisation that thinks about moving to the cloud: the Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide for IT Organizations . This book will guide you through the first steps of you cloud implementation process. What is covered: Chapter 1: Governance – This chapter covers the starting points, from the aspirational “digital transformation” to the important tactical steps of administration and resource naming conventions. Get an overview of topics such as envisioning, to cloud readiness, administration, and security standards and policy. Chapter 2: Architecture – This section takes a longer look at security, touches on cloud design patterns, and provides several visual representations to help you understand network design. Chapter 3: Application development and operations – Here, we cover backup and disaster recovery, as well as application development from an IT operations and management perspective. You’ll learn about the culture of Dev...

Google goes “all-in” to win the hearth and mind of .NET developers to let them use the Google Cloud Platform. To support this effort they released a set of whitepapers to help you rearchitect your monolithic .NET application using microservices and modernize your authentication, database and caching building blocks. Here are the whitepapers: Move-and-improve white paper about rearchitecting a monolithic .NET application using microservices Modernizing your .NET Application for Google Cloud white paper about modernization of critical functions, including authentication, database and caching   All improvement steps are done on a typical .NET application. You can find the related code in this GitHub repository .

Yesterday I blogged about Azure Functions and how the Visual Studio tooling can make your life easier. But the guys at Amazon are not sleeping and I noticed that they added support for C# as well. Note that the AWS Lambda functions in C# are using the .NET Core 1.0 runtime. Similar to Microsoft, you get full tooling support thanks to the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio . Install the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. Open Visual Studio and create a new project. Choose the AWS Lambda Project template and click OK. Next step is to select a Blueprint. We choose the Simple S3 Function blueprint. You get a new project containing the following files aws-lambda-tools-defaults.json: . This file contains default values that the blueprint has set to help prepopulate some of the fields in the deployment wizard. Function.cs: Inside this cs file you can add your own logic. project.json: this is the default project.json for .NET core application...

I hear people talk about JavaScript fatigue, the constant churn of new frameworks, tools and libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem makes it difficult to keep up. I must say that I have the same feelings regarding Cloud, every week Microsoft, Google or Amazon announce a new PaaS, SaaS, FaaS,… offering. A great resource to help you understand what’s going on inside the Amazon cloud space, is the Open Guide to Amazon Webservices . From the github page: A lot of information on AWS is already written. Most people learn AWS by reading a blog or a “ getting started guide ” and referring to the standard AWS references . Nonetheless, trustworthy and practical information and recommendations aren’t easy to come by. AWS’s own documentation is a great but sprawling resource few have time to read fully, and it doesn’t include anything but official facts, so omits experiences of engineers. The information in blogs or Stack Overflow is also not consistently up to date. This guide is by...