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Exploring the Azure Control Plane vs Data Plane & What It Means For Your Terraform Modules (Plus, A Free Mastercard Shoutout)

A couple of months ago while working on automating some Azure AI deployments, specifically Azure AI Search, the usual routine began - pull up the azurerm Terraform docs, locate the search service resource, and... notice a surprisingly short set of input variables. "Ah, this one is going to be fun." The realization hit quickly: the Control Plane isn't enough to get this done. The Data Plane needs to be in the mix as well.

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Why IAC?

The other day I was having a conversation with someone, catching up on the various problems we're solving at work these days. I was on my usual soapbox talking about Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automation, and cloud. After my spiel, they asked me: what's the point of IaC? Isn't it faster to just do things in the portal? Over the years I've gone from asking this question myself to gaining real-world experience that has given me a far more thoughtful answer than I would've had years ago. The answer might surprise you: yes, the portal is faster—but it's the faster route to a worse solution.

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What You Really Want Are Intelligent Apps (Part 2: Automating AI Foundry)

Building production-ready AI applications shouldn't feel like navigating a minefield of preview APIs and missing Terraform resources. In the latest Stay In Sync post, we tackle the reality of automating AI Foundry deployments when half the infrastructure doesn't have proper Terraform support yet. From Microsoft's confusing dual architecture for "AI Foundry Projects" (seriously, why are there two completely different things with the same name?) to wrangling OpenAI agents through REST API calls because native resources don't exist.

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What You Really Want Are Intelligent Apps (Part 1)

Every week brings another LinkedIn post about another company's "AI transformation." If you're the one tasked with making this actually happen at your firm, your team is probably asking when you'll have your own AI Platform (or whether you can finally get SecOps to unblock ChatGPT). You know you need to act, but where do you start?

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This Terraform Module Could Save You from Accidentally Nuking Your Storage Account File Share

Accidentally deleting a storage account is easier than you think — recovering from it shouldn’t be hard. In this post, we introduce a Terraform module that automatically provisions backups for your Azure Storage Account using a Recovery Services Vault. Infrastructure-as-code meets disaster recovery, the right way.

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We Built a Multi-Cloud ETL Demo Before We Won the Work

We built a working multi-cloud ETL pipeline in just a few hours to back up our RFP response—connecting Azure SQL to BigQuery using Cloud Run, GCS, Terraform, and GitHub Actions. This post breaks down how we did it, what we learned, and how this pattern can scale for real-world data workflows.

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How to Detect Infrastructure Drift in Terraform Using CI/CD

Learn how to automate Terraform drift detection with GitHub Actions. We’ll cover why drift happens, how to catch it early, and how to integrate these checks into your DevOps workflow.

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