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…

The future of infrastructure resiliency starts with modernization

By Dustin Ward

Why infrastructure resiliency is essential for modern applications and AI workloads Organizations today face constant pressure to modernize; business-critical applications are being transformed, AI workloads are becoming foundational to business operations, and infrastructure environments continue to grow in complexity. Yet modernization only succeeds when organizations have confidence that their applications, data, and infrastructure can withstand…

Two zones or three? A design framework for zone-resilient Azure workloads

By Dustin Ward

Takeaway: Zone resiliency isn’t a single number you apply to a whole workload. The useful question isn’t “how many zones?” but “how many zones does each component need to survive the loss of one?” Decide zone patterns component by component, use service-managed zone redundancy wherever it fits, and reserve three-zone designs for the components that…

Enterprise AI transformation relies on the end-to-end platform: Azure was built for this moment

By Dustin Ward

Summary The recognition for Microsoft over the past couple of weeks comes down to models, infrastructure, data, applications, and developer tools working as one system when AI moves into production. Enterprise AI is moving into production, and our customers are becoming multi-model. Organizations will use frontier models where capability matters, and smaller, specialized, and open-weight…