About

About CloudTales

A cloud architecture blog about infrastructure design, platform decisions and the technology shifts shaping enterprise IT. Microsoft-centric, with growing coverage of Google Cloud, and every article is also available as audio.

Articles: 37
Categories: 4
Narrated: 100%
Writing since: 2023

Two angles, one blog

Hands-on Microsoft platform work

Microsoft Entra ID, Windows Server, Active Directory, PowerShell and Azure Bicep: how things are installed, configured and secured, with the commands that do it.

How technology changes organizations

From the industrial revolutions to AI, cyber-physical systems and sustainability: the wider view of why platforms change, and what that means for the people who run them.

What this blog covers

Cloud Architecture

Azure-first design, Google Cloud networking and broader patterns.

Read the articles →

Microsoft Entra & Identity

Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), multi-tenant management and access design.

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Windows Server & Active Directory

Installation, configuration, AD logical components and server editions.

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Linux & Operating Systems

Distributions, fundamentals and history.

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Infrastructure Services

Print and file services, networking and day-to-day operations.

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PowerShell & Automation

Practical scripting for Windows environments.

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Digital Transformation

Industrial revolutions, AI and ML foundations, cyber-physical systems and sustainability in IT.

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Free cloud tools

Utilities at cld2day.com to validate assumptions and compare options, built alongside the blog.

cld2day.com ↗

How this site is built

CloudTales practises what it writes about. There is no web server to patch and no database to breach, every Azure key is switched off, and the whole site runs for a few euros a month.

flowchart LR
  G["Markdown on GitHub"] -->|push| A["GitHub Actions<br/>Hugo + Pagefind"]
  A -->|deploy| S["Azure Static Web Apps"]
  S --> R(["Reader"])
  F["Azure Functions<br/>narrator"] -->|reads new articles| S
  F -->|text| SP["Azure AI Speech"]
  F -->|MP3| B[("Blob Storage")]
  R -->|Listen| F
  P(["Podcast apps"]) -->|podcast feed| F
  F -.->|short-lived link| B

From a Markdown file on GitHub to a page and an audio narration.

Build

Hugo + GitHub Actions

Articles are Markdown files in GitHub. Every push builds the site, indexes it for search and deploys it in under two minutes.

Hosting

Azure Static Web Apps

Static pages on Microsoft’s global edge, with managed TLS certificates and a strict Content Security Policy.

DNS

Azure DNS

The cloudtales.gr zone, including the records for email on Exchange Online.

Narration

Azure Functions

A .NET 10 app on the Flex Consumption plan finds new or changed articles every night and serves the audio.

Voice

Azure AI Speech

A neural HD voice reads every article. Only text that changed is narrated again, detected by a hash.

Storage

Azure Blob & Queue Storage

MP3s live in a private container and play through short-lived, read-only links signed with Microsoft Entra ID.

Security

Zero keys

Every service key is disabled. Each component signs in with a managed identity and least-privilege roles.

Monitoring

Application Insights

Logs and failures from the narration pipeline, sent with Entra ID authentication, not an instrumentation key.

Pagefind

Full-text search that runs in your browser from a static index. What you type never leaves the page.

Podcast

CloudTales Audio

The same narrations as a podcast feed for Spotify, Apple Podcasts and any podcast app.

Comments

giscus

Comments live in GitHub Discussions, in a public repository, without ads or anonymous spam.

Diagrams

Mermaid

Architecture diagrams are written as text and drawn in the site’s colours, light or dark.

The narration pipeline is open source: cloudtales-gr/cloudtales-narrator on GitHub.

Where CloudTales is heading

CloudTales is moving toward more architecture and decision-focused writing: when to use a service, what trade-offs it introduces, and how it behaves under real constraints. Expect deeper coverage of multi-cloud patterns, identity-driven architecture and the operational reality of running enterprise platforms.

The foundational material stays. Explainers like “What is an Operating System?” sit next to architectural pieces like “Managing Multiple Azure Tenants for Enterprise Cloud Environments”, so engineers earlier in their cloud journey have a way in.

About the author

Vassilis Dionisopoulos is a Principal Cloud Architect with 25 years in enterprise infrastructure. His work spans national-scale healthcare platforms, telecommunications, banking and retail: environments where identity, uptime and audit drive design choices more than novelty.

He is multi-cloud certified across Azure, AWS and GCP, and holds an MBA and an MSc in Computer Science. The writing here reflects what has actually worked, and what has broken, in those environments.

Free tools

cld2day.com complements the blog with free utilities: practical tools to validate assumptions and compare options before you commit to a design.