CloudTales · cloud architecture blog
Practical Azure architecture for security, identity, and regulated workloads.
Infrastructure design, Microsoft Entra, Azure, Windows Server, Linux fundamentals and real-world technology decisions, by Vassilis Dionisopoulos. Every article can also be heard, narrated by an Azure neural voice.
Neural Networks for Architects: Four Small Programs Instead of a Maths Lecture
Every AI service you put in an architecture diagram, whether it is a chat model, an OCR API or a fraud score, is built from one very small idea, repeated a very large number of times. You do not need the maths to design around it, but you do need to know what …
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Do You Need a Blockchain? Ten Years of Banking Already Answered
Every year or two, someone asks me whether a project should “go on the blockchain”. Sometimes it is a bank, sometimes a public body, and once it was a loyalty programme. The question always …
Zero-Key Architecture on Azure: I Disabled Every Key
There is an audio player at the top of this post. Press play, and an Azure neural voice reads the article to you. The pipeline behind that player touches Azure Functions, Azure AI Speech, …
I Asked the Domain Controller for a Ticket. It Handed Me a Service Account Password.
I did not break into anything. I did not exploit a bug. I logged in as the most powerless user in the domain — no admin rights, no special group, nothing — and I asked the domain controller …
I Watched One Stolen Hash Walk Into a Second Machine. Then LAPS Shut the Door.
Everyone knows pass-the-hash is dangerous. Almost nobody has watched it happen on their own network. There is a wide gap between two things. One is reading “an attacker can reuse a local …
Fail-Closed VPN Gateway on Linux: A Design Deep Dive
A fail-closed VPN gateway routes selected devices through a VPN tunnel and guarantees one thing above all else. If the tunnel drops, those devices lose internet access instead of leaking to …
Azure Budgets Don't Stop Anything — The Enforcement Gap and How to Close It
Most teams treat an Azure budget as a brake. They pick a number, assume the platform will slow spending down once costs reach it, and move on. That assumption fails the first weekend someone …
Architecture highlights
All architecture →
01Neural Networks for Architects: Four Small Programs Instead of a Maths Lecture
02Azure Cache for Redis Retirement: The Real Cost of Migrating to Azure Managed Redis
03Azure Private DNS Zones at Scale for Private Endpoint Architectures
04Azure Landing Zone Networking: Self-Managed Hub-and-Spoke vs Azure Virtual WAN
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