Recent content in My mission on Thomas Van Laere
Some time ago, while gathering reference material for a session on Confidential Containers, I ran into a Microsoft demo on GitHub and Microsoft’s Azure AI Confidential Inferencing: Technical Deep-Dive blog post. It’s a very insightful post from September 2024 that goes into detail about how Microsoft was/is tackling confidential inferencing in Azure’s AI portfolio. Both mentioned…
💡 Update As of Microsoft Build June 2026, Azure Linux OS Guard has effectively graduated into Azure Container Linux , which is now generally available on Azure Kubernetes Service. The immutable, security-focused host OS story is no longer just a preview experiment since Microsoft now positions Azure Container Linux as the GA path, while Azure Linux 4.0 is the separate general-purpose distro that…
💡 Update A couple of weeks after this post went live, Microsoft unveiled the Azure Cobalt 200 , a custom Arm Neoverse V3–based CPU. The successor to Cobalt 100 entered private preview in June 2026. Better yet, at Microsoft Build 2026, they published a hands-on public Build lab for Azure Cobalt 200. The lab demonstrates CPU-only AI inference on Arm64 with Phi-4-mini, INT4 quantization, and ONNX…
💡 Update As of Microsoft Ignite 2025 and Build 2026, the Azure AI platform has shifted quite a bit. Azure AI Foundry is now Microsoft Foundry , and GPT-5.x models are among the mainstream production options. Foundry Local is a lightweight SDK and runtime for embedding curated, hardware-accelerated models directly into applications running on a user’s device, including offline. Also new is…
Welcome to the AI Boom . 👋 You can’t escape it, I certainly can’t. AI is everywhere, reshaping industries, workflows, and our expectations of what’s possible. I get the appeal—it’s unlocking solutions to problems that were once nightmares from an algorithmic standpoint. Things that used to be hard are now surprisingly accessible, even in typically risk-aversive enterprise…
Five years seems like an eternity, but that’s how long it’s been since I last wrote and spoke about Privileged Identity Management. Since then, there has been a name change and a bit of a portfolio shuffle in Microsoft’s Azure AD offerings, so much so that it has been rebranded for quite some time now. To be completely honest, I still catch myself calling it Azure AD PIM from…
Not long ago, a community member reached out with an intriguing question: 💬 “Can the steps in your blog for replacing the Azure DevOps Personal Access Token be applied to Azure Pipeline agents running in Windows containers as well?” This is a great question! The original steps I shared were designed specifically for hosting Azure DevOps agents on Linux. While adapting them for Windows…
I’ve been working with Azure DevOps for quite some time now, tracing back to when it was known as Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services. Over the years, I’ve developed a strong familiarity with it. When Microsoft acquired GitHub and started investing heavily in it, my colleague Micha Wets and I decided to examine both platforms closely. We even put together a…
While working on my previous blog about Confidential Containers on Azure Kubernetes Service, I followed a setup guide to get a demo running. One of the steps involved setting up something called the Entra Workload ID for Azure Kubernetes Service . Until then, I had only heard about its now-deprecated predecessor, Azure Active Directory Pod identities. Despite having some experience with Workload…
🔥 Deprecation notice – November 2025 Hi there, this is future Thomas speaking! Since this post was originally written, there’s been an important update from Microsoft: the Confidential Containers preview on AKS is set to sunset in March 2026 . After that date, existing Confidential Container node pools will continue to run but may experience reduced functionality , and it will no longer be…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! One of the things I think that Microsoft’s Confidential Compute team has to get right to make the offering more compelling is to raise the feature parity with what is currently already available on Azure. I can imagine that this is no easy feat, since there’s years of development that have gone into making those features. Things…
Last year , I delved into the intricacies of the Secure Key Release process used in Azure Confidential Computing. I managed to release an encrypted private RSA key from an Azure Key Vault, but unfortunately at the time, I was unable to decrypt it. It’s been almost a year since I last explored this topic. After some additional exploration and learning, I’ve returned with additional…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! At the end of April 2023, I had the opportunity to talk about Azure Confidential Computing at a Belgian community meetup hosted by the Microsoft Cloud and Client Management community ( MC2MC ). In my presentation, I briefly discussed the core components that required for Azure Confidential Computing to function seamlessly on Microsoft Azure.…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! A few months ago, I wrote a post detailing how to leverage Azure Key Vault’s Secure Key Release feature. Upon revisiting that post, I realized that I had utilized Key Vault’s access policy feature to enable a specific security principal for the release operation. While Key Vault access policies are an older method of managing…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! A few weeks ago I got another excellent question from a community member, who had run into an issue while trying to validate a Confidential Virtual Machine’s (CVM) Guest attestation token. “We are using AMD SEV confidential VMs and are trying to validate a guest attestation token, which was signed by Microsoft Azure Attestation.…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! 💡 Update March 20, 2023: After publishing this article on Secure Key Release, the Confidential Compute team reached out to me for assistance in creating documentation. I am pleased to say that the ACC team valued my input and together we have incorporated it into the Azure documentation ! Together, we have curated various scenarios and…
⚠️ 19 July 2022: Azure Confidential VMs are now generally available . This blog post has been revised. In my preceding blog post, I had written about the state of confidential computing on Microsoft Azure. More specifically I went over a few key IAAS services and zoomed in on the “Trusted Launch” capability for Azure virtual machines since it is very much a key part of what powers…
It’s been a while since I explored the intriguing universe of confidential computing. Before diving into the subject, I was under the impression that confidential computing was something that you could toggle at the VM level to magically make everything more secure . Upon closer inspection, however, I began to realise that this was not entirely the case. The idea behind confidential…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! A few weeks ago I received an excellent question from a community member, which sent me down the fascinating rabbit hole of Windows containers once again! The question, and while I’m paraphrasing, went something along these lines: “Could you share some information on how page files are allocated in a Windows Server container…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! I had some spare time last month and decided it was time to take a closer look at Azure Chaos Studio , which is a managed service that allows you to orchestrate fault injection on your Azure resources, or inside of virtual machines, in a controlled manner. It helps you to perform chaos engineering on the Azure platform. 💡 Chaos engineering…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! Sometime last year, around the end of September, I wrote about “ Chaos Engineering on Azure ”. In that post, I described what chaos engineering was all about and took a closer look at an open-source project called Chaos Toolkit . A few months after publishing that post, probably around December 2020, I was taking a look at my…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! Last year, on December 3rd 2020, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Purview at the “ Azure Data and Analytics digital ” event. I didn’t have the time to closely inspect what the service was all about but at first glance, it became clear that the service was a data governance tool, one I quickly marked as…
My colleague Yannick Dils , who specializes in digital transformation, cloud, and modern workplace adoption, and myself were invited to deliver a talk for “ Azure Back to School 2021 ”. Our talk aimed to inform the viewer on some of the various sorts of Azure governance tools that they have at their disposal, many of which are built into the Azure platform. The talk is an amalgamation…
I started my Azure journey somewhere in 2014 by deploying .NET applications while I was still making a living as a Microsoft .NET consultant. I suppose I could say that Windows Azure Web Sites was one of the first services that got me interested in and ultimately hooked to the potential of the Azure cloud. Windows Azure Web Sites its successor, Azure App Services, is also a very versatile and…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! A little over a year ago I began writing about all the various parts that make up a Linux container. My motivation for doing so was because I thought, and still think, that the “ why ” is more often discussed as opposed to the “ what ”. Mind you, I do not think it always necessary to delve into the “ what ” as long as you are…
My colleague Yannick Dils (who specializes in digital transformation, cloud adoption, and modern workplace projects) and I were at the virtual water cooler when we found ourselves in a discussion about automating certain aspects of a migration project. Yannick stumbled upon a conundrum: “How do we check whether or not an Azure AD tenant is in use, without access to Microsoft Partner…
I am getting increasingly more questions about how to tackle certain “enterprise cloud governance” issues. At the risk of sounding slightly anecdotal, I’m going to assume that a lot more enterprises are taking advantage of those capabilities. Many of these enterprises need assurances that there is as little deviation from the rules as possible. In many instances, they have to…
Today I’m going to jot down some thoughts on Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4, which is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. According to the CNCF 2020 survey report , using and deploying containers is still challenging and getting your team to make the cultural shift to containers is just as difficult (if you’ve ever tried to change the way people work, chances are that…
After a slight detour writing about how chaos engineering can be applied to an Azure architecture , I decided to once again set my sights on exploring the internals of Linux containers. My primary motivation for writing about this is that I believe that container internals are not highlighted nearly as much as they could be, instead, most of it is abstracted behind (great) tools. I do not think…
📣 Dive into the code samples from this blog on GitHub ! The 28th of July started pretty much the same as every WFH-type morning ever since the second quarter of 2020, for me. A cup of coffee, reading through latest Azure blog posts that came through during the night and try my hardest to fend off the FOMO. One of those blog posts was titled “ Advancing resilience through chaos engineering…
About three months ago, I wrote the first part of what makes containers function the way they do. My primary motivation for this is because I think it isn’t highlighted nearly as much as it could be. I also could not fit everything into one single post as it was already rather lengthy, so now I will continue with walking through the remaining namespaces on the list. As I stated in my earlier…
Now and again I notice that Microsoft puts out a blog post about new capabilities that have been added to the compute platform. Confidential Compute has been, somewhat, a blind spot for me. I remember first hearing about ACC when Mark Russinovich talked about it at Ignite 2017 in his “ Inside Microsoft Azure datacenter hardware and software architecture ” session, which is still very…
I have had the pleasure of talking at several tech-meetups about container technologies. Most of the time I explain to the attendees how these technologies can assist them in supplying value to their end-customers, more often and more efficiently, through various DevOps processes. I suppose I get to talk about the “why” part often, but not enough about the “what” part of…
In December 2019 my colleague Micha Wets and I were at it again, with another session, at another great conference. This time we were invited to speak at CloudBrew 2019 in Belgium. The topic that we would be discussing with Azure governance. Time to turn things up another notch. Let us assume that we have all these great governance features in place, to prevent us from doing something outrageously…
In December 2019 my colleague Micha Wets and I were at it again, with another session, at another great conference. This time we were invited to speak at CloudBrew 2019 in Belgium. The topic that we would be discussing with Azure governance. When it comes to Microsoft Azure, this is a topic that has been getting more and more attention and this is a very good thing. Perhaps you can remember what…
On November 14th Microsoft announced the general availability of the Azure Key Vault Virtual Machine extension. This extension makes it easier for applications running on virtual machines to use certificates from a key vault, it achieves this by abstracting away some of the more tedious tasks. It has also been build with some of Microsoft’s best practices regarding authentication, network…
In May 2019 my colleague Micha Wets and I met for Azure Saturday 2019 at the Microsoft HQ in Munich to talk about Kubernetes in a Microsoft World. We discussed what such a world would look like for someone who is primarily running a Microsoft-based technology stack. And in more detail, we showed the audience what we’ve noticed amongst our own customers, innovations in Windows Server…
In May 2019 my colleague Micha Wets and I met for Azure Saturday 2019 at the Microsoft HQ in Munich to talk about Kubernetes in a Microsoft World. We discussed what such a world would look like for someone who is primarily running a Microsoft-based technology stack. And in more detail, we showed the audience what we’ve noticed amongst our own customers, innovations in Windows Server…
In May 2019 my colleague Micha Wets and I met for Azure Saturday 2019 at the Microsoft HQ in Munich to talk about Kubernetes in a Microsoft World. We discussed what such a world would look like for someone who is primarily running a Microsoft-based technology stack. And in more detail, we showed the audience what we’ve noticed amongst our own customers, innovations in Windows Server…
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