Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Your developers install agent plugins every day: pulling from unmanaged GitHub repos, copying Cursor commands out of Slack, pointing Codex at a personal Git fork. Each of those is a new, uncontrolled distribution channel inside your software development lifecycle, and your platform team has zero visibility into any of it. A plugin is not a preference file. It is executable software, and right now it’s arriving on developer machines with no versioning, no provenance, and no audit trail.

Feature flag migrations have a reputation problem. Ask anybody who’s been through one before and you’ll hear the stories, usually from someone still a little frustrated about a bad cutover, with a postmortem or two to show for it. The reputation is mostly undeserved. While the risks are real, they’re well understood and easily controlled. Getting a migration right doesn’t require a big coordinated effort.

Retention policies apply to locations. Retention labels apply to items. Both live in Microsoft Purview, both retain content, and admins regularly use the wrong one. What each actually does and when to use which.

This is the first in a series we’re calling AI ROI Dispatches, where we share stories from CloudZero and our customers on tying AI spend to real business outcomes.

Eight new Azure recommendation types now scan your environment for idle, unattached, and over-provisioned resources, then tell you exactly what to cut.

Platform engineering has become one of the most discussed topics in cloud native infrastructure. Yet despite the rising focus, most conversations around platform engineering skip over the uncomfortable truths. What actually works at scale? When should you build versus buy? And how do you avoid the traps that trip up even experienced teams?

AI has made writing code fast, and you can feel it. Commits are up, pull requests are up, new repos spin up over a weekend, and your engineers swear they are faster. But where are all the new products? If every team really got faster, the software you use every day should be getting visibly better. AI helped your engineers ship more code. It didn't help your team ship more products.

AI adoption has accelerated faster than most organizations expected. What started with chatbots has quickly evolved into AI systems capable of making decisions across enterprise environments, with the promise of faster service and more efficient teams. But many organizations are discovering an unexpected challenge: as AI usage expands, costs become harder to predict. Most AI platforms operate on token-based pricing models.

When you’re building with AI, you can get a lot done in 30 seconds. Waiting minutes for CI feedback on your latest change can feel like an eternity. Chunk sidecars are designed to give you feedback fast, running your full test suite against the same Linux environment as CI, directly inside the agentic loop. Traditional CI pipelines can take five or ten minutes to catch a basic lint error or failing unit test.