Mastering AI: Effective Strategies for Critical Analysis

Pip: Welcome to Azure Advice, where we ask the hard questions — like whether the AI you're asking hard questions of is actually giving you hard answers. Mara: Today we're working through a piece by Christoph Corder on how to actively challenge AI reasoning rather than accept its first output — the method behind aContinue reading “Mastering AI: Effective Strategies for Critical Analysis”

How to Challenge AI for Better Insights

A few weeks ago I wrote about a mindset shift that changed how I use AI: I assume it’s wrong until it proves otherwise. That post got a lot of traction, and the most common response was some version of “okay, but how do you actually do that?” Fair question. The mindset is one thing.Continue reading “How to Challenge AI for Better Insights”

Podcast Episode: AI Adoption And Cloud Engineering

Pip: Welcome to Azure Advice — where Christoph Corder has been quietly solving problems that most people are still complaining about in Slack. Mara: This episode covers two stretches of territory: how AI tools actually get adopted — and whether they're trustworthy enough to deserve it — and then the operational side, specifically how AzureContinue reading “Podcast Episode: AI Adoption And Cloud Engineering”

Podcast Episode: AI And Cloud Diagnostics

Pip: Welcome to Azure Advice, where the cloud is always sunny and the packet captures are always someone else’s problem. Mara: Christoph Corder has been busy — this episode covers how AI systems are built to orchestrate rather than just respond, and how cloud performance problems hide in plain sight, from loopback connections to memoryContinue reading “Podcast Episode: AI And Cloud Diagnostics”

Podcast Episode: Debugging Production Failures

Pip: Welcome to Azure Advice — where the authentication is broken, the memory is leaking, and the connection pool is set to self-destruct every thirty seconds. Christoph Corder has been busy. Mara: He has. Today we're covering authentication failures at the protocol level, memory leaks driven by a cascade of zombie processes, a health checkContinue reading “Podcast Episode: Debugging Production Failures”

Understanding AI’s Data Bias and Model Collapse

There is a quiet problem building at the foundation of modern AI, and it does not get nearly enough attention outside of research circles. It has two parts, and understanding both of them matters whether you are building AI systems, using them, or just trying to figure out how much to trust their output. PartContinue reading “Understanding AI’s Data Bias and Model Collapse”

Common Kerberos Authentication Failures Explained

Authentication failures are a specific kind of frustrating. The application is running. The network is up. The credentials are correct. And yet: access denied. The system is doing exactly what it was told to do — which is precisely the problem. The customer reported a 383ms latency on authentication. There were no errors of anyContinue reading “Common Kerberos Authentication Failures Explained”

Solving Memory Leaks in Azure App Services

41 Zombie Domains and a 10.7GB Memory Dump: Inside a FileSystemWatcher Storm Some cases arrive already on fire. This was one of them. The customer was a customer running a .NET application on Azure App Service. The application was recycling. Not occasionally, continuously. And it was leaking memory at a rate that had produced aContinue reading “Solving Memory Leaks in Azure App Services”

Why You Should Challenge AI’s Confidence

When I first started working with AI tools, I was genuinely stunned. The power, the speed, the breadth of what it could do, it felt like someone had handed me a turbocharger for my brain. I dove in headfirst. Then it burned me. Not once. Not twice. AI confidently gave me wrong answers, fabricated references,Continue reading “Why You Should Challenge AI’s Confidence”

Understanding Azure App Service Application Initialization

Overview Application Initialization (AppInit) is an IIS module built into Azure App Service (Windows) that triggers application warm-up before instances begin serving production traffic. Without it, the first request after a restart, scale-out, or slot swap absorbs the full cold-start penalty: JIT compilation, cache priming, EF model building, and connection pool establishment. AppInit eliminates thatContinue reading “Understanding Azure App Service Application Initialization”