Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top Tips is a weekly column where we explore practical ways to navigate the technology shaping our everyday lives. This week, we're tackling a common feeling: the fear of not being “tech-savvy” enough, and sharing simple habits to help you become more confident, curious, and comfortable with the technology you use every day. Ever felt like you’re the only person in the room who doesn’t understand what everyone is talking about? That little fear of looking clueless?

Have you ever opened a new app and immediately known what to do? You know where to click, what an icon means, and somehow everything feels exactly where it should be. Then you open another app and spend several minutes looking for a basic setting, navigating confusing menus and wondering why something so simple feels so difficult. What makes the difference? It isn't always the technology. Often, it's psychology.

Ever heard of Murphy's Law of IT Administration? It states that the server hosting your security tools will go down at the exact moment a critical vulnerability is making headlines everywhere. Whether it's a sudden power shutdown, a database hiccup, or a local network failure, losing access to your central management tools right when you need them most is every IT team's worst nightmare.

I recently heard a song that was written by a girl but sung and composed by AI. It left me confused— I'm not sure if I liked it. I was a bit prejudiced and automatically hated it because it was composed by AI. Similar to many works of AI, it had a rhythm, but it was too repetitive and lacked emotions. This made me think about all the other forms of art that might be created by AI, and it left me with a bitter feeling.

Microsoft Azure has become one of the most widely adopted cloud platforms for running business applications, databases, containers, analytics workloads, and enterprise services. Modern Azure environments now extend far beyond virtual machines, encompassing services such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure SQL Database, Azure Functions, storage accounts, networking services, and serverless applications.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's trending in the tech world and list practical ways to explore these trends. This week, we're looking at something we rarely think about until the end of the day: the tiny digital habits that quietly eat away at our time. Have you finished a workday feeling busy but strangely unaccomplished? You started with the best intentions.

Riya has managed IT operations at a mid-sized FinTech company for six years. She knows the infrastructure inside out: Every server, monitoring alert, and compliance requirement is owned by her team. So when Riya heard the engineering lead mention their new internal developer platform in a quarterly review, she assumed her team would be looped in eventually. This did not happen. Three months later, Riya's team was called in to investigate an outage.

Organizations are increasingly integrating GenAI capabilities into their applications to deliver richer, more contextual user experiences—from AI-powered customer support and enterprise search to content generation, virtual assistants, and automated workflows. To build and scale these GenAI-powered experiences, they are turning to platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, which provides access to foundation models that developers can integrate into their applications.

A friend who runs data engineering at a mid-sized logistics company once showed me something that made me laugh, and then made me a little sad. Her team spent four months building a chatbot that was supposed to answer simple questions like "how many shipments are delayed in the Chennai warehouse right now." The bot worked beautifully in the demo. Then someone asked it a real question, and it confidently returned a number that was off by almost a factor of ten. Not because the model was dumb.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's trending in the tech world and list practical ways to explore these trends. This week, we're talking about boreout, the lesser-known cousin of burnout, and how to stay engaged as AI takes on more of the routine work. There was a time when finishing your work early felt like winning. Now it somehow feels... suspicious. You glance at your inbox and nope, there are no new emails.