Your CI watchdog can't live on the pool it watches
A self-hosted runner pool was down for 6 hours 38 minutes. Its watchdog ran on the same pool. What went wrong, and how to monitor CI from outside.
Blog
Notes from the field on cloud, security, and AI engineering.
14 articles
Your Azure OpenAI private endpoint may not be carrying your traffic
A private endpoint existing does not mean traffic uses it. Two DNS problems that kept Azure OpenAI calls on the public endpoint, and how to check yours.
What we find in apps built fast
The failure classes a stabilization assessment keeps finding in apps built quickly, including with AI builders, and how to check your own.
What breaks when you move a GitHub repo
Moving repositories between GitHub organizations without breaking CI/CD: the hidden dependencies, and the order to change them in.
Two SQL Server incidents where nothing crashed
Two SQL Server on Azure VM incidents where the engine never stopped: a backup retry storm, and log backups that quietly ended for seven databases.
The logging feedback loop that more than quadrupled an AWS bill
How S3 access logging, CloudTrail data events and GuardDuty malware scanning fed each other until one AWS account's bill went from about $1.7K to $7.8K.
Applied AI EngineeringSupport tickets from your apps, straight into the CRM
How a customer-facing app, a backend job and an AI receptionist open support cases in Omnisnia CRM with scoped, revocable support tokens.
Applied AI EngineeringOne intake pipeline for our web form and AI receptionist
How we send website enquiries and AI receptionist calls into Omnisnia CRM through one public web-to-lead endpoint, and why a public token is safe there.
Key-person risk after an engineer leaves
A continuity checklist for when the one engineer who understood your platform leaves: secrets, state, credentials, access and ground truth.
Fail-safe tools for a voice AI receptionist
Lessons from building our own AI phone receptionist: tools that degrade safely, caller ID matching, conversation tuning, and live-call verification.
DR workarounds that never merge are defects with a timer
A failover exercise hit three defects that had been found and worked around 15 months earlier. Why imported Terraform hides them, and how to fix them.
Cutting Microsoft Sentinel cost without blinding your detections
Four lessons from reducing Sentinel and Log Analytics cost for a healthcare client, including the cheaper table plan that silently emptied 33 detections.
Cutting an agent platform's LLM spend by 79%
How a multi-agent platform's metered model spend fell from about $107 to $22 a day: attribution, three cache layers, model routing and loop caps.
Caging an autonomous AI agent inside an enterprise tenant
The control pattern we design to before an autonomous AI agent touches a Microsoft 365 tenant: identity, network, policy, logging and a kill switch.
No articles match that search.
Not sure where to start? Start with an assessment.
A senior review of your app, cloud estate, or AI platform, scoped and quoted before work starts, that ends in a prioritized plan, so you decide what to fix and when.
Talk to an engineer