Forum Widgets
Latest Discussions
Understanding Storage Account replication downtime
I have a Storage account that's used as a CDN to host a lot of generally small files which occupy about 2GB. This is a small but critical part of our application which is used heavily by our app but which has no redundancy (it currently only has LRS replication). It's hosted in UK South and while Storage Accounts are very reliable, I'm concerned that if there's ever a regional outage there's nothing I'd be able to do. The requirements therefore are: Convert it from LRS to GZRS i.e. actively replicating from UK South to UK West. No app changes required to detect when the primary goes down and to switch to the secondary-this needs to be transparent. No or low downtime when the change is made. We need to be able to write to the secondary after failover. As a software company anything that limits our ability to push code changes is not acceptable, so RA-GZRS is off the table. After doing a bit of reading, I found the following warning in the docs: If you choose to perform a manual migration, downtime is required but you have more control over the timing of the migration process. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/redundancy-migration?tabs=portal#downtime-requirements This is typically light on detail and leaves some critical questions unanswered: Is there any way of estimating how long the downtime will be so I can appropriately set expectations of management and customers when scheduling the maintenance window needed? It specifically mentions manual migrations i.e. making the change through the Azure Portal, would making the change through IAC e.g. Bicep or Terraform be any different? Any input from anyone who's made any similar changes will also be appreciated. Edit: I've just checked and found that UK West still doesn't have Availability Zone support, is my best option for reducing the risk of this single point of failure to set the replication to GRS? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/regions-list#azure-regions-list-1
How to troubleshoot if a cookie is being sent to application gateway with each and every request
I have a rule on WAF policy associated with application gateway with a rule (set as topmost rule) to allow traffic if a particular cookie is sent with the request. But we are seeing some requests that are not hitting that rule and instead hitting different rule and thus getting blocked. My thinking is that the cookie is not being sent by the application in that request, although the developer says that it should be sent with each request. How can I log enough detail on application gateway to see if a cookie was really sent with the request that was blocked or not.
Azure Static Web App CI/CD
Hi everyone! I know this is a silly question, but I want to ask why, after connecting my Azure Static Web App to my GitHub and it would connect the Git Workflow, the commit would fail. Although, I haven't finished setting up some other resources yet, and I just connected my StatWebApp URL to my Azure Maps, there are other resources that I still need to deploy, and I still need to properly wire the backend to my Azure AI Services. Thanks in advance!
Applying DevOps Principles on Lean Infrastructure. Lessons From Scaling to 102K Users.
Hi Azure Community, I'm a Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer, and I want to share an unusual journey. I have been applying DevOps principles on traditional VPS infrastructure to scale to 102,000 users with 99.2% uptime. Why am I posting this in an Azure community? Because I'm planning migration to Azure in 2026, and I want to understand: What mistakes am I already making that will bite me during migration? THE CURRENT SETUP Platform: Social commerce (West Africa) Users: 102,000 active Monthly events: 2 million Uptime: 99.2% Infrastructure: Single VPS Stack: PHP/Laravel, MySQL, Redis Yes - one VPS. No cloud. No Kubernetes. No microservices. WHY I HAVEN'T USED AZURE YET Honest answer: Budget constraints in emerging market startup ecosystem. At our current scale, fully managed Azure services would significantly increase monthly burn before product-market expansion. The funding we raised needs to last through growth milestones. The trade: I manually optimize what Azure would auto-scale. I debug what Application Insights would catch. I do by hand what Azure Functions would automate. DEVOPS PRACTICES THAT KEPT US RUNNING Even on single-server infrastructure, core DevOps principles still apply: CI/CD Pipeline (GitHub Actions) • 3-5 deployments weekly • Zero-downtime deploys • Automated rollback on health check failures • Feature flags for gradual rollouts Monitoring & Observability • Custom monitoring (would love Application Insights) • Real-time alerting • Performance tracking and slow query detection • Resource usage monitoring Automation • Automated backups • Automated database optimization • Automated image compression • Automated security updates Infrastructure as Code • Configs in Git • Deployment scripts • Environment variables • Documented procedures Testing & Quality • Automated test suite • Pre-deployment health checks • Staging environment • Post-deployment verification KEY OPTIMIZATIONS Async Job Processing • Upload endpoint: 8 seconds → 340ms • 4x capacity increase Database Optimization • Feed loading: 6.4 seconds → 280ms • Strategic caching • Batch processing Image Compression • 3-8MB → 180KB (94% reduction) • Critical for mobile users Caching Strategy • Redis for hot data • Query result caching • Smart invalidation Progressive Enhancement • Server-rendered pages • 2-3 second loads on 4G WHAT I'M WORRIED ABOUT FOR AZURE MIGRATION This is where I need your help: Architecture Decisions • App Service vs Functions + managed services? • MySQL vs Azure SQL? • When does cost/benefit flip for managed services? Cost Management • How do startups manage Azure costs during growth? • Reserved instances vs pay-as-you-go? • Which Azure services are worth the premium? Migration Strategy • Lift-and-shift first, or re-architect immediately? • Zero-downtime migration with 102K active users? • Validation approach before full cutover? Monitoring & DevOps • Application Insights - worth it from day one? • Azure DevOps vs GitHub Actions for Azure deployments? • Operational burden reduction with managed services? Development Workflow • Local development against Azure services? • Cost-effective staging environments? • Testing Azure features without constant bills? MY PLANNED MIGRATION PATH Phase 1: Hybrid (Q1 2026) • Azure CDN for static assets • Azure Blob Storage for images • Application Insights trial • Keep compute on VPS Phase 2: Compute Migration (Q2 2026) • App Service for API • Azure Database for MySQL • Azure Cache for Redis • VPS for background jobs Phase 3: Full Azure (Q3 2026) • Azure Functions for processing • Full managed services • Retire VPS QUESTIONS FOR THIS COMMUNITY Question 1: Am I making migration harder by waiting? Should I have started with Azure at higher cost to avoid technical debt? Question 2: What will break when I migrate? What works on VPS but fails in cloud? What assumptions won't hold? Question 3: How do I validate before cutting over? Parallel infrastructure? Gradual traffic shift? Safe patterns? Question 4: Cost optimization from day one? What to optimize immediately vs later? Common cost mistakes? Question 5: DevOps practices that transfer? What stays the same? What needs rethinking for cloud-native? THE BIGGER QUESTION Have you migrated from self-hosted to Azure? What surprised you? I know my setup isn't best practice by Azure standards. But it's working, and I've learned optimization, monitoring, and DevOps fundamentals in practice. Will those lessons transfer? Or am I building habits that cloud will expose as problematic? Looking forward to insights from folks who've made similar migrations. --- About the Author: Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer and Azure Developer. CTO at social commerce platform scaling in West Africa. Preparing for phased Azure migration in 2026. P.S. I got the Azure certifications to prepare for this migration. Now I need real-world wisdom from people who've actually done it!The November Innovation Challenge Winning Teams!
We run the Innovation Challenge program because we believe the only way we can have the best AI platform for every person and every organization is by having a truly diverse and highly skilled community of developers building AI solutions on Azure. We run the Innovation Challenge program because we are geeks who love a good hackathon. We run the Innovation Challenge program because we get blown away by what our community can do. From our first Innovation Challenge hackathon in June of 2024 to our sixth that just finished in November of 2025, the growth curve is steep! Our judges work with the best development teams in the world, delivering cutting edge AI solutions. But even with our front row view of things, we are amazed by what can be done today when ad hoc teams come together, despite limited resources and tight deadlines. Participants were asked to choose one of these real world use cases. Auto-resolve Service Desk: Create a multi agent service desk experience that reduces wait times and backlog while earning trust through safe automation, transparency, and graceful escalation. Civic Chat: Build an intelligent civic engagement platform that enables communities to access local government information, participate in discussions, and receive personalized updates using Azure AI services. Customer Personalization Orchestrator: Build a team of agents that segments customers, retrieves product content, creates message variants, and executes A/B/n experiments, with safety checks for content and proof of uplift. This time around there were 76 projects from over 300 participants representing more than a dozen organizations in the program. The winners chosen by the judges came from Código Facilito, DIO, GenSpark, Project Blue Mountain, and Women in Cloud. First place $10,000 AgroHelpdesk: an intelligent service desk for agribusiness that uses a coordinated set of AI agents Second place $5,000 CivicUtopia: an intelligent and inclusive civic engagement platform designed to streamline how citizens interact with their local governments and political landscape. Multi-Agent Service Desk for Education: Large educational institutions struggle with repetitive service desk requests—password resets, course enrollment inquiries, transcript requests, and more. This solution intelligently resolves routine cases while escalating only the complex ones to human staff. Third place $2,500 ResolveIQ: an intelligent helpdesk solution that uses autonomous AI agents, advanced orchestration, and Azure cognitive services to revolutionize customer support and internal assistance. ChainReach AI: multi-agent system that automatically personalizes marketing campaigns at scale CivicChat (D.C.) : a multilingual, AI-powered civic engagement assistant designed to make government information accessible, trustworthy, and easy to understand Tune into Microsoft DevRadio over the next couple weeks to meet these teams!Can I send MgGraph traffic over Service Endpoint from Azure VM?
I have a Azure VM which resides on a subnet that has UDR to send all traffic to 0.0.0.0/0 through our firewall which in turn sends the http and https traffic to our proxy. I am having problems executing graph queries on this VM. "connect-mggraph" succeeds because "Microsoft.AzureActiveDirectory" service endpoint is there on this subnet. But after that query to get a user or anything else throws "an error occurred" message. My thinking is that the traffic is not being sent over https/http and thus not being forwarded to our proxy from the firewall. Thus , I want to see if it is possible to send this traffic through a Azure Service Endpoint instead?
