The Hardest Support Job You’ve Never Heard Of When your car breaks down, the mechanic lifts the hood. When your cloud app breaks, your support engineer is standing in the parking lot. Listening through a closed window. Taking notes on the sound. That’s not a metaphor I invented to be dramatic. That’s the actual jobContinue reading “The Hidden Art of Forensic Engineering in Cloud Support”
Tag Archives: Cloud
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”
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”
Avoiding Health Check Failures in Java Applications
The 30-Second Misconfiguration That Held a Deployment Hostage There is a special category of production bug that hides in plain sight. It doesn’t crash anything. It doesn’t throw an exception you can grep for. It just quietly prevents your infrastructure from doing what it’s supposed to do, and it waits patiently while you stare atContinue reading “Avoiding Health Check Failures in Java Applications”
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”
Transform Frustration into AI Innovation
Chris Corder| Azure Senior Technical Advisor | Published Author & Speaker. Building AI-Powered Diagnostics for Cloud Systems | Azure • Networking • Performance January 2026 A few months ago, I wrote about how the most miserable task in your job might actually be your best AI automation opportunity. For me, that task was network packetContinue reading “Transform Frustration into AI Innovation”
Azure Advice 