Opinion

The ‘toggle-away’ efficiencies: Cutting AI costs inside the training loop

You don't need the newest GPUs to save money on AI; simple tweaks like "smoke tests" and fixing data bottlenecks can slash your cloud bill and carbon footprint.

By Jayachander Reddy Kandakatla

Mar 20, 20269 mins

Artificial IntelligenceGenerative AITechnology Industry

By Gautam Sikka

Mar 20, 20269 mins

Artificial IntelligenceSoftware DevelopmentTechnology Industry

Designing a metadata-driven ETL framework with Azure ADF: An architectural perspective

A metadata-driven ETL framework using Azure Data Factory boosts scalability, flexibility, and security in integrating diverse data sources with minimal rework.

By Vikram Garg

Jun 26, 2025 8 mins

Database Administration Microsoft Azure SQL

Bringing post-quantum cryptography to Windows

Microsoft prepares for security in a world where our old codes are easily broken. Get familiar with these technologies now before they become necessary.

By Simon Bisson

Jun 26, 2025 8 mins

Application Security Data and Information Security Security

Software development meets the McNamara Fallacy

Measuring and measurements are taking over software development. Let’s not lose sight of what really matters.

By Nick Hodges

Jun 25, 2025 4 mins

Careers Engineer IT Leadership

Public cloud becomes a commodity

Enterprises are not as swayed today by fancy new bells and whistles from the Big Three cloud providers. They want commodity features: low prices, reliability, and regulatory compliance.

By David Linthicum

Jun 24, 2025 6 mins

Hybrid Cloud Multicloud Private Cloud

Why AI projects fail, and how developers can help them succeed

AI initiatives fail for a handful of well-known reasons. Developers, data scientists, and technology leaders hold the keys to keeping them on track.

By Matt Asay

Jun 23, 2025 8 mins

Artificial Intelligence Engineer Generative AI

Developers set the pace for genAI tools adoption

Generative AI vendors are quickly learning not to ignore developers, or developer experience, in the rush to bring new AI tools to market.

By Josh Fruhlinger

Jun 20, 2025 3 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

The hyperscalers disrupt the sovereign cloud disruptors

New offerings from AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have upended the sovereign cloud services market—and raised questions and concerns.

By David Linthicum

Jun 20, 2025 5 mins

Cloud Security Data Governance Data and Information Security

Taking advantage of Microsoft Edge’s built-in AI

Why use expensive AI inferencing services in the cloud when you can use a small language model in your web browser?

By Simon Bisson

Jun 19, 2025 8 mins

APIs Artificial Intelligence Generative AI

OpenAI’s o3 price plunge changes everything for vibe coders

o3 used to be too slow and too expensive for daily coding—no longer. The latency is now bearable, the price is sane, and the chain-of-thought pays off.

By Andrew C. Oliver

Jun 18, 2025 7 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

Design a better customer experience with agentic AI

AI agents are rewriting the future of customer experience. Here's what developers and tech leaders need to know now.

By Isaac Sacolick

Jun 17, 2025 10 mins

Business Intelligence Generative AI SaaS

Navigating the rising costs of AI inferencing

We won’t make progress with AI if we don’t know how to predict costs accurately. Enterprises are running in circles.

By David Linthicum

Jun 17, 2025 5 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Hybrid Cloud

The key to Oracle’s AI future

Making its database and cloud services ‘AI-centric’ has brought Oracle newfound momentum. It still needs to figure out developers.

By Matt Asay

Jun 16, 2025 9 mins

Artificial Intelligence Databases Generative AI

New Python projects to watch and try

Python is bursting with updates and innovations worthy of your attention. This week’s report highlights some of the best of them, with handy guides to get you started.

By Serdar Yegulalp

Jun 13, 2025 3 mins

Development Tools Programming Languages Python

Europe is caught in a cloud dilemma

The EU is pushing back against the dominance of US-based cloud providers. Balancing sovereignty and innovation will require a comprehensive strategy.

By David Linthicum

Jun 13, 2025 5 mins

Data Governance Hybrid Cloud Technology Industry

Use geospatial data in Azure with Planetary Computer Pro

Microsoft is bringing its science-focused geospatial data platform to the enterprise, ready to provide insights to solution developers and data scientists.

By Simon Bisson

Jun 12, 2025 8 mins

Cloud Computing Databases Microsoft Azure

Managing software projects is a double-edged sword

Sometimes you have to balance protecting your people with being a loyal member of the management team.

By Nick Hodges

Jun 11, 2025 6 mins

Careers Engineer Software Development

What the AI coding assistants get right, and where they go wrong

ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, RooCode, and Claude Code all have their strengths, but no single assistant ticks all the boxes.

By Andrew C. Oliver

Jun 10, 2025 7 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

Don’t be a victim of high cloud costs

Many enterprises believe cloud costs are beyond their control but also lack comprehensive plans to optimize workloads and manage their usage. It’s time to take responsibility.

By David Linthicum

Jun 10, 2025 5 mins

Cloud Computing Cloud Management

The AI platform wars will be won on the developer experience

Microsoft learned from Visual Studio Code that making it easy for developers to do their work is a strategy for success.

By Matt Asay

Jun 9, 2025 8 mins

APIs Development Tools Generative AI

JavaScript innovation and the culture of programming

JavaScript tools and frameworks thrive and evolve in an ecosystem that is equal parts competitive and collaborative. This month, we showcase some of the best examples of technology innovation in JavaScript.

By Matthew Tyson

Jun 6, 2025 3 mins

JavaScript TypeScript Web Development

Decentralized mesh cloud: A promising concept

Less latency and high scalability are great, but does your enterprise have the skills to handle the increased complexity?

By David Linthicum

Jun 6, 2025 6 mins

Cloud Architecture Cloud Computing Emerging Technology

Automating devops with Azure SRE Agent

Microsoft delivers another internal AI tool for the rest of us that adds agents to workflows and site reliability engineering.

By Simon Bisson

Jun 5, 2025 8 mins

Devops Generative AI Microsoft Azure

Naming is easy! A guide for developers

Naming things properly, completely, and clearly is a huge part of writing good code. And if you avoid these traps, it’s easy.

By Nick Hodges

Jun 4, 2025 7 mins

Careers Engineer Software Development

3 keys to successful cloud migrations

Without an integrated security strategy, a plan to monitor cloud operational expenses, and an overall architectural blueprint, enterprises will never tap cloud’s full potential.

By David Linthicum

Jun 3, 2025 5 mins

Cloud Architecture Cloud Computing Cloud Security

Private cloud still matters—but it doesn’t matter most

Steady workloads are great to stay in house, but game-changing innovation like AI requires the flexibility and elasticity of the public cloud.

By Matt Asay

Jun 2, 2025 8 mins

Generative AI Hybrid Cloud Private Cloud

F-strings with superpowers: What’s new in Python 3.14 beta

The latest version of Python is sweet as pi and packs a punch. Here’s the rundown on all the new features to start using now.

By Serdar Yegulalp

May 30, 2025 3 mins

Libraries and Frameworks Programming Languages Python

A wake-up call for real cloud ROI

Skyrocketing cloud bills aren’t delivering on their promises, and proactive enterprises are doing something about it.

By David Linthicum

May 30, 2025 6 mins

Cloud Computing Cloud Management Private Cloud

Using Microsoft Fabric to create digital twins

Microsoft’s data lakes meet the industrial internet of things, helping you create complex models with data from multiple sources.

By Simon Bisson

May 29, 2025 8 mins

Cloud Computing Machine Learning Microsoft Azure

How to hire software developers

You’ll only attract top-tier developers if your organization is built to support them. And if you avoid these common mistakes.

By Nick Hodges

May 28, 2025 5 mins

Careers Engineer IT Leadership

What we know now about generative AI for software development

GenAI coding assistance capabilities are evolving quickly as developers and devops teams find new ways to integrate AI copilots into the software development lifecycle.

By Isaac Sacolick

May 27, 2025 9 mins

Development Tools Devops Generative AI

IT leadership lessons from Leeroy Jenkins

A viral video from years ago reminds us of the importance of strategy over impulse, an especially valuable point in light of AI and cloud computing.

By David Linthicum

May 27, 2025 5 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Technology Industry

The tough task of making AI code production-ready

With AI introducing errors and security vulnerabilities as it writes code, humans still have a vital role in testing and evaluation. New AI-based review software hopes to help solve the problem.

By Matt Asay

May 26, 2025 8 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

How generative AI rollouts fail, and how to fix them

Too many generative AI rollouts fail, or fail to live up to expectations. Here’s what developers and tech leaders are learning about putting genAI first in enterprise development.

By Josh Fruhlinger

May 23, 2025 2 mins

Artificial Intelligence Careers Generative AI

Enterprises are wasting the cloud’s potential

High cloud costs rooted in insufficient training and inadequate architectural oversight use up money that could go to innovation or new markets.

By David Linthicum

May 23, 2025 5 mins

Cloud Architecture Cloud Computing IT Strategy

The Windows AI platform takes shape

Windows AI Foundry supersedes Windows Copilot Runtime, as Microsoft doubles down on delivering AI-powered applications on Windows.

By Simon Bisson

May 22, 2025 14 mins

Development Tools Generative AI Libraries and Frameworks

Five rules for coding with Booleans

Booleans may seem harmless, but using them can be fraught with peril. When you can’t avoid them, follow these five rules.

By Nick Hodges

May 20, 2025 6 mins

Careers Engineer Software Development

Cloud asset management: A crucial missing ingredient

Complicated cloud infrastructures can greatly benefit from automated oversight that tracks cloud resources, links costs to applications, and integrates security.

By David Linthicum

May 20, 2025 5 mins

Cloud Computing Cloud Management Cloud Security

How we replaced Azure Redis with Memcached

Although we had to implement a self-healing cache mechanism directly within our application, switching to Memcached saves us $5,000 per month.

By Sachin Suryawanshi

May 19, 2025 5 mins

Cloud Computing Databases Microsoft Azure

What comes after Stack Overflow?

The future is unknown as developers start taking advice from machines rather than peers. How will we keep the LLMs honest?

By Matt Asay

May 19, 2025 8 mins

Artificial Intelligence Development Tools Generative AI

Programmers dig Python and Zig

As Python’s popularity soars to an all-time high, the language gains a new lock file format, two Rust-based type checkers, a speedy partner in Zig, and a slew of proposals to improve performance. Read all about it in this week’s Python Re

By Serdar Yegulalp

May 16, 2025 2 mins

Programming Languages Python Software Development

Cloud and IT strategies in a time of global upheaval

Navigating the new world requires business resilience, heterogeneous architectures, and a more diverse approach to cloud partnerships.

By David Linthicum

May 16, 2025 5 mins

Cloud Computing IT Strategy Multicloud

Accessibility in Microsoft Edge with ARIA and ARIA Notify

Microsoft is experimenting with new APIs to link the web to assistive technologies, widening the reach of our code.

By Simon Bisson

May 15, 2025 7 mins

Development Tools Libraries and Frameworks Web Development

The three refactorings every developer needs most

All refactorings are useful, but Extract Method, Rename Variable/Method/Class, and Extract Variable will have the biggest impact on your code.

By Nick Hodges

May 14, 2025 6 mins

Careers Engineer Software Development

How to use genAI for requirements gathering and agile user stories

Generative AI can enable transformation capabilities when organizations look beyond productivity drivers. Here’s how agile teams are using genAI to accelerate and improve requirements gathering and writing agile user stories.

By Isaac Sacolick

May 13, 2025 6 mins

Agile Development Devops Generative AI