Shannon Eldridge-Kuehn

Why Service Endpoint Policies Only Work for Azure Storage (And Why Everyone Gets Confused About This) Let me tell you about a moment that happens to almost everyone working with Azure networking. You're designing a network, you discover service endpoints, and you think "Great! This keeps my traffic on...

Service endpoint policies only apply to Microsoft Storage.

Not SQL. Not Key Vault.

That’s not a feature gap. It’s because policies are evaluated by the service, and only Storage implements that enforcement model.

Deep dive:
www.shankuehn.io/post/why-ser...

When Microsoft Authenticator Says “Too Many Devices” and You Know That’s Not True There is a very particular flavor of frustration that only appears in identity work. I used to work in the identity and network access division at Microsoft, so my joke was I needed to move faster ove...

Microsoft Authenticator: “Too many devices.”

Me: But...I just deleted them....

If you’ve hit this wall, you might be troubleshooting the wrong object.

What’s actually happening + how to fix it:

www.shankuehn.io/post/when-mi...

#Azure #Identity #CloudEngineering

State of FinOps 2026 Report Read the latest State of FinOps Report to discover the latest findings and trends within the FinOps discipline.

This is what happens when thousands of FinOps pros compare notes and show their homework!

The State of FinOps 2026 report just dropped this week: data.finops.org

#finopsallthethings

The CAP Theorem Is Why Your Cloud App Sometimes Feels Off There is a moment every cloud engineer seemingly has, whether they admit it or not. You open an application and something feels strange. A record you just saved is not there yet, a dashboard shows two...

Your cloud app isn’t gaslighting you...you just met the CAP theorem! The CAP theorem is why something can succeed… then fail… then succeed again without being broken:

www.shankuehn.io/post/the-cap...

#distributedsystems #captheorem #consistency #partitiontolerance #availability

Azure Data Box Regions, Cross-Region Costs, and Migration Questions Everyone Asks So you're looking at Azure Data Box, and it seems pretty straightforward. Microsoft sends you a physical box, you load it up with data, ship it back, and boom: your data's in Azure. Simple, right?Then...

“If the Data Box is in one region and my storage account is in another, am I paying cross-region fees?”

I wrote a blog so we can all stop panicking about the region dropdown 😅

👉 www.shankuehn.io/post/azure-d...

#Azure #AzureDataBox #CloudMigration #FinOps #CloudLife

Stop Guessing: How to Actually Identify Your Azure Billing Structure Note, the companion code and corresponding full GitHub repository is located here.Azure costs are tricky enough without licensing contracts adding another layer of confusion on top. One of my long-run...

If you have ever heard “we have a MACC for M365 and Azure” and paused for a second, you are not alone.

I wrote this to help people stop guessing and confidently identify Azure billing structures before things get messy.

www.shankuehn.io/post/stop-gu...

HCP Terraform's Enhanced Free Tier, Explained With Clarity Why This Suddenly Feels Like a Big DealEvery so often, something shifts in the cloud ecosystem and the reaction is immediate and loud. Feeds fill up, takes get hotter by the minute, and a fairly strai...

HCP Terraform free isn’t gone. It got a haircut, not a burial. 😅

If you want something that explains the changes without the panic posts and angry comments, I wrote up a clear take for humans.

Read it here 👇
🔗 www.shankuehn.io/post/hcp-ter...

#Terraform #Cloud #IaC

First renewal of the year!!!!!!!!!!!!

How Azure Picks a Discount (and Why Your Bill Looks Confusing) When I wrote Azure Savings Plans, Finally Explained with Math That Actually Makes Sense, I was very focused on solving one specific problem. People were looking at Savings Plans and feeling like they ...

Azure doesn’t stack discounts.
It chooses one per hour.
Reserved Instances first, then Savings Plans, then pay-as-you-go. That’s why bills feel confusing.

www.shankuehn.io/post/how-azu...

#Azure #CloudCosts

Azure Savings Plans, finally explained with math that actually makes sense Math IS hard and mathing isn't my strong suit. I am writing this blog because I STILL get tripped up at times with Savings Plans. You guessed it...this becomes a cheat sheet for ME in the future, too!...

Azure Savings Plans aren’t confusing because you’re bad at math. They’re confusing because they’re explained badly.

Once you see them as pricing substitution instead of a discount, everything clicks.

www.shankuehn.io/post/azure-s...

#Azure #SavingsPlans #CloudCosts

Just Because You Have an EA and Enterprise Support Does Not Mean You Are Ready for a Breach There is a common and risky assumption in Microsoft Security Support belief I hear more often than I probably should, especially in large enterprise environments where a customer may have an Enterpris...

Real talk:
Enterprise Support helps when something breaks.

Incident Response helps when someone breaks in.

They are not the same.

Wrote this up after one too many misconceptions:
www.shankuehn.io/post/just-be...

#CyberSecurity #Microsoft #EnterpriseSupport #IncidentResponse #Identity

FinOps Is Not About Saving Money. It Is About Asking Better Questions. Somewhere along the way, FinOps picked up a bad reputation. I had a customer tell me they viewed FinOps as akin to security. I felt it was a bad comparison, as most FinOps teams I work with, plus cust...

FinOps is not about cutting costs. It is about understanding consumption, making intentional tradeoffs, and being surprised less often. If that feels harder than it should, these are the questions worth asking.

www.shankuehn.io/post/finops-...

#FinOps #CloudCostManagement #CloudSpend #CloudFinOps

Azure Offer IDs: What They Are, Why They’re Confusing, and Why Your Automation Keeps Lying to You Like all my previous blogs, code to accompany this post exists here.If you have ever tried to answer the question “what kind of Azure subscription is this?” using automation, you probably assumed ther...

Offer IDs in Azure should be simple!

The reality is they are not.

You’ve seen them in the portal.

Your script didn’t.

Here’s why, and a script that finally tells the truth 👇

www.shankuehn.io/post/azure-o...

#Azure #CloudBilling #FinOps

HTTP Confused Me for a Long Time...Here’s What Finally Helped! For a long time, HTTP felt like background noise to me. Websites loaded, APIs responded, dashboards refreshed, and everything mostly worked. Whenever HTTP came up, I subconsciously filed it under “dev...

If HTTP has ever felt like background noise its history is the missing context. I traced how HTTP evolved and why those changes still matter in modern systems.

www.shankuehn.io/post/http-co...

#historyofhttp #evolutionofworldwideweb #www #demystification

The Big Debate: Azure Files vs. SharePoint a.k.a. How to migrate file data without breaking apps, users, or your weekends!All code for this blog can be found here!In my time of supporting customers embracing a "digital transformation", every f...

Azure Files vs SharePoint is not a storage decision. It’s a workload decision. I wrote this blog to help you pick the right one before your migration quietly goes sideways.

#ItDepends #ButItActuallyDoes #FileMigration #ArchitectsOfBlueSky

www.shankuehn.io/post/the-big...

The Problem Wasn’t NTP. It Was DNS. Obviously! More tales from the homelab!I noticed another error in Pi-hole after upgrading to v6, but ultimately zero issues throughout the house. I don't trust these things and actually learned something I proba...

Pi-hole v6 upgrade sent me down a fun rabbit hole.
NTP errors, nothing actually broken, and then the realization: I let Pi-hole depend on itself. DNS ate time.
Homelab lessons learned here 👇

www.shankuehn.io/post/the-pro...

#itsalwaysdns

From Pi-hole v6 Log Anxiety to DNS Zen: The Real, Slightly Messy Journey to Unbound This post starts the way a lot of my homelab stories start: Everything worked, but my brain refused to accept it due to log files indicating there was a problem. What came about was an interesting jou...

Pi-hole v6 didn’t break DNS. It did (however) expose assumptions I didn’t realize I was making. This is the story of log anxiety, recursive queries, and why boring DNS is the best DNS.

www.shankuehn.io/post/from-pi...

#itsalwaysdns #unbound #pihole

PAYG Is Not Losing Support, But the Grace Period is Going Away! Sneaky Distinction! There has been a lot of noise lately about Microsoft “changing support” for Azure Pay As You Go subscriptions. Depending upon who you ask, this has turned into everything from “PAYG is being deprecate...

Azure Pay-As-You-Go isn’t going away. Support isn’t disappearing. But the old grace period you’ve silently relied on? That is.

Here’s what’s really changing, why it matters, and how to prepare:

www.shankuehn.io/post/payg-is...

#learnitall #subscriptionchanges #payg #azure

How to License Your Code on GitHub (And Why It Matters) If you have ever shared a project on GitHub and wondered what license you should choose, or whether you even need one, you're not alone. If you've followed my blogs more the last few months, I've deve...

Everyone dealing in code knows this moment:

The code is done.
Then the LICENSE question hits.

A short, curious take on GitHub licensing for your repos.

#learnitall

www.shankuehn.io/post/how-to-...

When Az PowerShell Gets Weird: How to Clean Up Duplicate Modules Without Breaking Anything The companion code for this blog can be found here.One thing you may have noticed is that I have been in PowerShell a bit more frequently as of late. The back story is I had a machine that all of a su...

PowerShell running slow?

Before you blame Windows, Defender, or Mercury in retrograde...one thing to check would be your Az modules.

Duplicate versions = silent pain.

Blog + how Shannon fixes... 👇

www.shankuehn.io/post/when-az...

Azure Resource Mover: What Actually Moves, What Doesn’t All sample PowerShell companion code for this blog can be found here.Azure has plenty of tools that do one thing really well, and Azure Resource Mover fits right into that category. If you need to mov...

Azure Resource Mover does one job well, until you expect it to do everything. Use it right and it saves time. Use it wrong and it becomes a lesson in dependencies, region limits, and why tenant moves are a completely different conversation.

#learnitall #azure

www.shankuehn.io/post/azure-r...

Contributor is Not the Magic Wand You May Think it is! The code referenced in this blog can be found here!There are still moments when Azure catches me by surprise. Back when I first moved away from traditional on-prem environments, I was convinced the Co...

The Contributor RBAC role in Azure is powerful. It is also misleading. If you think Contributor can do everything except billing and RBAC, you will want to read this blog (and bookmark for the future)!

www.shankuehn.io/post/contrib...

#azure #azurerbac #contributor #gotchas

You Can't Use Azure Migrate to Move Between Tenants (Even if you Try to Run it in Azure) Tis the season! Customers always ask the most interesting questions about cloud capabilities. This one isn't documented well and you have to sort of piece it together by "reading the tea leaves" (my l...

A customer wanted Azure Migrate to map dependencies & perform a tenant migration in Azure. Azure Migrate, running in Azure, will basically cross its arms & say “no.” I explained why & shared what actually works.

www.shankuehn.io/post/you-can...

#Azure #tenant #AzureMigrate #migration

Turns Out Even I Can Mix Up Azure Policy and Service Groups. Oops. a.k.a. Here's Your Full Guide to Understanding Azure Cloud Governance Without Losing Your Mind or SanityCloud governance is one of those topics that sounds straightforward until you start hearing peop...

I mixed up Azure Policy and Service Groups...now my Azure cloud card is under review. Since my brain apparently blue-screened, I wrote a blog so you can avoid the same fate. Bonus: it doubles as my own reference until Microsoft inevitably deprecates something.

www.shankuehn.io/post/turns-o...

Boolean Comparison Operators - The Tiny and Mighty Code Tidbits Running your Cloud World As with previous blog posts, all example code can be found up on my GitHub account. You will find all code here!Cloud engineering looks complicated from the outside. When you peel back some layers, th...

Back at it!

Boolean operators are the unsung heroes stopping your cloud from lighting itself on fire.

New blog is up, where I try to turn the “deep technical” into “oh yeah, that makes sense.”

www.shankuehn.io/post/boolean...

Conway’s Law: What Your Cloud Team Can Learn from Stressed Out Kitchen Staff I was reminded of Conway’s Law the day I watched an episode of The Bear where Carmy tried to redesign the entire kitchen workflow in the middle of lunch service. Onions were flying. Pans were screamin...

If your cloud architecture feels like Carmy’s kitchen during lunch rush, you might be running headfirst into Conway’s Law. I wrote about it.

www.shankuehn.io/post/conway-...

#conwayslaw #thebear #squads

Updating Your Scripts: PowerShell and Python for the New Azure PAYG APIs In my last post, I talked about what’s changing with Azure’s Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) APIs and why the old Usage Details endpoint is being retired. Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves! If your FinOps aut...

My old Pay-As-You-Go API: 💀
My new Exports API: 😎

Microsoft is changing the endpoint, so I wrote a blog to save you the debugging spiral.

👉 Read it here: www.shankuehn.io/post/updatin...

#Azure #FinOps #Cloud

The Azure PAYG API Shift: What’s Actually Changing (and Why It Matters) If you pull cost data from Azure’s Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) subscriptions, you might have noticed something new in Microsoft’s documentation lately: the legacy “Get Usage Details” API is being deprecated....

RIP to the old Azure Usage Details API. You served us well, throttles and all.

Time to meet your replacement: Cost Details and Exports.

What’s changing, why it matters, and how to stay ahead of the cutoff:
www.shankuehn.io/post/the-azu...

Latency vs Throughput: Why They Get Mixed Up and Why That Matters People often toss around latency and throughput like they are one and the same. They are not. They live in the same world but serve very different roles. One cares about how fast something starts. The...

Latency gets up early and moves fast.
Throughput stays up late moving a lot.

Read the full breakdown (and why your “slow” app might not be what you think):
👉 www.shankuehn.io/post/latency...

#Cloud #FinOps #PlatformEngineering #Azure #AWS #Latency #Throughput

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