Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AWS Lambda durable functions let you build long-running, multi-step workflows for use cases such as payment processing, order fulfillment, and AI workflows with human approval. A single durable execution can pause for a wait or callback, retry failed work, and resume in a fresh Lambda invocation without losing its state. The strong resilience provided by durable executions, however, creates an observability challenge because each invocation produces its own telemetry data.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, ran the most honest experiment in agentic AI: they gave a version of their own model $1,000, a small fridge in the office lunchroom, and one job. Run a shop. Make a profit. They named it Claudius. Claudius did not make a profit.

Instead of building a separate role for every team, region, or department, admins can create a single role that automatically personalizes access for each user based on their SSO attributes. Someone moves teams or a new group gets created, and the new access takes effect at their next login with no CloudZero configuration. As AI spend grows, more companies are looking to give teams visibility into their own AI costs without exposing every individual’s usage across the org.

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.

The compliance question isn't "are we using a private cloud?" Rather, it’s "does our private cloud actually do what compliance requires?" Private cloud has a reputation for solving compliance problems that it doesn't always deserve. The logic seems straightforward: keep data off shared public infrastructure, maintain more direct control, and satisfy the auditors.

Feasibility is a prioritization question that comes before strategy. The five-question check produces a "now, later, or fix blockers first", before anyone touches a target architecture. Strategy earns its place once feasibility returns "now." Feasibility comes before strategy. Before anyone designs a target architecture, builds a runbook, or commits to a multicloud operating model, the question is whether the migration is the right move now, and what would make it fail.

Hyperscale providers are nothing if not consistent in their temptation of enterprise IT buyers. They bombard leaders with a simple message: migrate to the public cloud, shut down data centres, and enjoy both financial savings and operational agility. However, as UK enterprises have scaled their digital footprints, a more nuanced reality has bitten. Public cloud costs have swollen.

Every finance person I know lives in the same loop approaching the end of the month, quarter, or fiscal year. Leadership wants to know where the financials will land (most times before the close has occurred). CS wants customer margins. Someone on the People team needs each department’s AI spend for an OKR review, and they need it quickly to make business decisions. Each answer sits in a different tool or a different spreadsheet, and I bounce across all of them several times a day.