Your architecture diagram is not your resilience

By Dustin Ward

This first article in our resilience series draws on a conversation with Mark Russinovich about how resilience is changing in the AI era and what it takes to continuously validate it at scale. What surprises me most about resilience failures is how ordinary the drift is. A workload is deployed across availability zones, but a…

Designing agent-first platforms: What changes when agents do the work

By Dustin Ward

For decades, applications have been designed to wait. A user clicks, a request arrives, code runs, a response goes back. And we got very good at this. We learned to forecast traffic, scale on demand, wrap everything in enterprise controls, and run it all with the operational discipline that keeps critical business systems available around…

How Microsoft’s Physical Security Engineering Team scaled hybrid operations with Azure Arc and Azure Virtual Desktop

By Dustin Ward

When a physical security operator begins a shift supporting Microsoft’s global datacenter operations, they depend on a collection of applications and systems that help monitor access activity, review video feeds, investigate alerts, and coordinate physical security operations across a complex global environment. Those tools must be available, responsive, and reliable from the moment a shift…