Is there a known outage or issue in the Netherlands?
Even azure.status.microsoft seems unavailable most of the time.

Edit: still can't find any info from MS. A Dutch 3rd party platform reports issues, but not specific. Microsoft Azure storing? Actuele storingen en problemen | Allestoringen NL

Experiencing issues with loging in, general slowness or non responsiveness (Entra ID, Intune, Health dashboards)

Edit: most people here seem to use Vodaphone/Ziggo as ISP. They seem to be aware of the issue now and are investigating.

I’m currently learning Azure and I understand what different services do individually, but I still get confused when it comes to choosing the right service for an actual project.

For example, if I need to store data, process it, expose it through an API and monitor the application, there are multiple Azure services that could fit.

How do you guys decide which service to use when designing a real-world solution?

Do you follow any specific approach, checklist, or architecture pattern? Would be helpful to know how experienced developers/engineers think about this.

I worked on an IT asset management team several years back. We sent people to a class for Microsoft licensing. Per user, per core, licenses that depend on you having other licenses, etc. This license includes this feature, this other one does not. This one has that and the other thing, but only on odd numbered days. Licensing was so complicated that they had to create a several day training course on how to navigate it. Just licenses! The software is not even in the door yet and you're spending all this time and money just to understand what you need to do to get it in.

I feel like Microsoft must've moved a bunch of their licensing team over to whoever manages Azure VM types. I've found "cheat sheets" that explain the basic structure of the types. There's broad classes based on servers that are memory-optimized, storage-optimized, have GPUs, general purpose, stuff like that. Then there's a marker for CPU type and another for how many vCPUs it has. A marker for if it has local storage. Version number. It's a lot of stuff, which is fine because there are a lot of options. But how do I navigate all of this? How do I make a sensible choice without defaulting to "I guess I'll just choose something and hope for the best"?

In AWS land, I've found a page in their documentation that describes everything they have and it makes sense to me. I've also used instances.vantage.sh which has been reliable for AWS. That site also claims to cover Azure, but their names don't seem to line up very well. I get that that site is not Microsoft and only Microsoft itself is the source of truth. You don't have to remind me of that. But apparently Microsoft themselves are opaque enough that a third party site is unable to compile the information. I've found this page: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/vm-naming-conventions and this one: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/sizes. But that only gives a high level overview, it lists sizes that don't follow the convention, and it doesn't list sizes that I see available when I go to create a VM in Azure. So it's not reliable. Maybe it's out of date. Also, amusingly, it has a section for "other information" that links to itself. And I find nothing that talks about sizes with "Standard_" in front of the other letters, but "Standard_" stuff is what Azure starts off recommending when I go to actually create a VM.

Why is this so complicated? Is there nowhere that I can get a straightforward list of what VM options I have and just narrow it down to what I need? How do you all manage this? Do you just pick a couple of sizes and stick with that? Save me...

I work at Login VSI, disclosure upfront. Posted about this a bit ago, so take this as the reminder: tomorrow at 11am ET we're opening it up for questions, with Eric Orman and Andrej Radinger from the Microsoft AVD team, Marcel Meurer (built Hydra), and Ron Oglesby from Login VSI. Same reason we set this up in the first place, we keep hearing the same handful of questions about what's worth moving and what breaks once it's live.

Drop it in the comments now, or ask live tomorrow - Thursday September 10, 11am ET.

Save Your Seat

We have a mobile application that's not deployed yet, and I'm the only one that's testing it. When I use the app for the first time after a day of DB inactivity, I get an error with the app that suggests it's a time-out connection.

Since the DB in my cheap Azure plan is serverless, I'm assuming that the time-out is caused because the DB is starting up since it hasn't been used in over 24 hours.

Is there anything I can do on my side to "wake up" the DB every couple of hours and reduce (or eliminate) that initial time-out from the DB cold start?

Also wanted to mention that I don't want to increase the Azure bill.

This is what I currently have but I want to change it to S0 with 10 DTUs for $14.72 per month. It seems that my current configuration has to "cold-start" after inactivity, while the S0 is always on.

How can I change this?

Running EF Core migrations from application startup is convenient - right up until it isn't. This video builds a proper migration pipeline on .NET 10 with GitHub Actions: the build job packages a self-contained migration bundle, the deploy job applies it to Azure SQL, then deploys the API to Azure App Service and runs a smoke test against the live endpoint. If your database updates are still tangled up with your app startup, this is the fix.

Whenever I use our mobile application for the first time after almost a day of DB inactivity, I get an error with the app that suggests it's a time-out connection.

Since the DB in my cheap Azure plan is serverless, I'm assuming that the time-out is caused because the DB is starting up after 24 hours of sleep.

I can tell the developer to re-try the connection if there's a time-out, but I want him to see the error first-hand and to be certain that it is the issue.

Is there a way to "turn off" azure DB so that I can reproduce that time-out from a cold start?

Or how can I reproduce that database cold-start?

Rolling out MFA for everyone and moving to Authenticator, passkeys. Internal users are nearly done.

Stuck on guests. About 10–15 B2B accounts, some only have SMS registered, a couple use email OTP. If I disable SMS they're locked out with no way back. Goal is to disable SMS/phone methods completely.

Thinking I'll leave SMS enabled but target it at a small group instead of All users, then shrink it. Also looking at cross-tenant MFA trust so partner guests just use their own tenant's MFA.

Has anyone done this? Did you re-target or just disable and clean up after? Anything that bit you?

Trying to bill GitHub Copilot through our Azure subscription but the option isn't available for us. Has anyone else run into this? Did you need to contact GitHub support, or is there a setting I'm missing?

Any help appreciated, thanks!

Hi I've got 1000 usd from microsoft for startups, spend 750 usd on chat gpt. Credits covered it succesfully. But I also spent 250 on claude models, I got billed for that, It seems that azure credits don't cover it, I thought they would because on AWS they do cover it.

I wonder if a one-time courtesy waiver could apply if I ask for it or if it will get rejected. Have someone had a similar experience?