Azure

The governance case for keyless Azure: why shared keys are a liability, how managed identity plus RBAC fixes it, and how security, network, and platform teams enforce it.

One control plane for enterprise AI — how APIM’s AI gateway gives security, network, and infrastructure teams governance over models, MCP tools, and agents. The full v2 surface.

Every Microsoft integration I have shipped starts at the same gate. Call the Graph API, wire up SharePoint, add “Sign in with Microsoft” to an app, and none of it works until you have an App Registration. Get it wrong and nothing downstream authenticates, which is why this is the one setup step I slow down for instead of clicking through.

I was at Microsoft Ignite for the Foundry announcements, and the framing runs ahead of the substance. Microsoft rebranded most of its Azure AI stack as Microsoft Foundry: one PaaS spanning models, agents, tools, knowledge, and governance. Underneath the launch-day gloss, three things actually matter to anyone shipping enterprise agents.

Business users kept asking my team for one-off data pulls: how many orders above $150 in December, which products are low on stock, that sort of thing. Every request meant a developer dropping their work to write a throwaway SQL query. So I built a REST API that does the translation instead. It feeds the database schema to an LLM, gets back a SQL query, runs it, and returns JSON. One codebase, four interchangeable providers (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini), switched by a single environment variable.

The short version # Four ways to get a file into Azure Blob Storage from a .NET and Angular app, and when each one earns its keep:

Introduction # I built this chat app to answer a narrow question: how little infrastructure do you actually need to stream tokens from Azure OpenAI into a browser? Less than most tutorials assume. There is no SignalR here and no WebSocket hub.