Practical insights on Platform Engineering, Azure, GitHub, Terraform, and AI-powered delivery
The Draw.io MCP Diagramming Agent Skill provides a reusable working method for creating clear, editable diagrams with Draw.io MCP. It supports cloud architectures, network topologies, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes platforms, event-driven systems, C4, UML and more, while applying consistent guidance for layout, containment, connector routing, labels and validation.
Agent skills are only useful if the agent knows when to use them. A clear description acts as selection metadata, helping the agent load the right guidance, avoid noisy context, and produce more consistent results across repeated engineering tasks.
A quick HolmesGPT demo using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI and a local kind cluster. Deploy a deliberately broken Kubernetes pod, ask HolmesGPT to investigate it, and see how it identifies the root cause from the pod spec, scheduler events and cluster state.
Building Terraform modules is rarely the hard part. The harder part is deciding whether a module should exist at all, where the boundary should sit, how much of the provider surface to expose, and which platform defaults should be opinionated rather than endlessly configurable. In this post, I walk through why I built a terraform-module-creator GitHub Copilot skill to help with that design work up front, using live Azure MCP and HashiCorp MCP guidance to shape better module boundaries, interfaces, documentation, validation, and long-term supportability.
Learn how an Excalidraw Agent Skill powered by Excalidraw MCP in GitHub Copilot can generate Cloud, Terraform, and workflow diagrams from natural language prompts.
How I built the azure-pricing skill for GitHub Copilot, using Azure MCP and the Azure Retail Prices API to bring live Azure pricing into architecture and engineering workflows.
Learn how to generate Azure architecture diagrams automatically using Draw.io MCP and GitHub Copilot Agent Skills. Build consistent, readable diagrams directly from structured inputs and integrate them into engineering workflows.
If you are using Azure API Management service, you may get notified or see an Azure advisor recommendation regarding – Disable trusted service connectivity in API Management. While reviewing Azure Advisor recommendations across multiple subscriptions, I noticed something interesting: only a subset of our API Management (APIM) services appeared in the advisor alerts. This prompted … Read more
Recently I blogged about Deploying to Azure: Secure Your GitHub Workflow with OIDC, this is a follow on post – looking at deploying Terraform to Azure using OIDC and GitHub Actions With Microsoft and GitHub both emphasising identity-based access, using OIDC for Terraform deployments isn’t just secure. It will become the new norm. OIDC authentication … Read more
OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication for GitHub Actions and Azure deployments is a real game-changer in the world of security. It significantly enhances security when deploying to your Azure environment. In this blog post, I’ll explain why to use OIDC, walk through setting up an Azure AD application with federated credentials using Azure CLI, and demonstrate … Read more