Azure and cloud infrastructure

September 2, 2024

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Lukas Velush

Autopilot speeds up Windows 10 image deployment inside Microsoft

The first experience a new employee has at Microsoft shouldn’t be waiting for their laptop to get set up. “We’re transforming the experience our employees have when they first turn on their PCs,” says Sean MacDonald, a principal group program…
August 17, 2024

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Pete Apple

Microsoft uses a scream test to silence its unused servers

Do you have unused servers on your hand? Don’t be alarmed if I scream about it—it’ll be for a good reason (and not just because it’s almost Halloween)! Check out Pete Apple’s expedition to the cloud series The learnings, pitfalls,…
June 14, 2024

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Inside Track staff

Implementing Microsoft Azure cost optimization internally at Microsoft

Our Microsoft Digital team is aggressively pursuing Microsoft Azure cost optimization as part of our continuing effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our enterprise Azure environment here at Microsoft and for our customers. Adopting data-driven cost-optimization techniques, investing…
April 17, 2024

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Inside Track staff

How Microsoft is transforming its own patch management with Azure

[Editor’s note: Azure Update Management is becoming Update Management Center, which is currently available in public preview. Please note that this content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing…
October 26, 2023

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Beth Garrison

Boosting employee connectivity with Microsoft Azure-based VWAN architecture

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in our ongoing series on moving our network to the cloud internally at Microsoft. Whether our employees are in neighboring cities or different continents, they need to communicate and collaborate efficiently with each other.…
September 22, 2023

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Eric Scheffler

How we’re deploying our VWAN infrastructure using infrastructure as code and CI/CD

Editor’s note: This is the first in an ongoing series on moving our network to the cloud internally at Microsoft. We’re building a more agile, resilient, and stable virtual wide-area network (VWAN) to create a better experience for our employees…
February 22, 2023

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Inside Track staff

Designing a modern service architecture for the cloud

The digital transformation that many enterprises are undertaking has its benefits and its challenges: while it brings new opportunities that add value to customers and help drive business, it also places demands on legacy infrastructure, making companies struggle to keep…
February 27, 2020

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Lukas Velush

How ‘born in the cloud’ thinking is fueling Microsoft’s transformation

Microsoft wasn’t born in the cloud, but soon you won’t be able to tell. Now that it has finished “lifting and shifting” its massive internal workload to Microsoft Azure, the company is rethinking everything. “We’re rearchitecting all of our applications…
February 5, 2020

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Chloe Wattles

How Microsoft sped up Windows updates for its employees

It would be an understatement to say that Vidya Iyer wants installing updates to Windows to be easy for Microsoft employees. “Our goal is to make the reboot feel like a non-event,” says Iyer, who is helping transform the way…
January 7, 2020

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Rob Boone

How retooling invoice processing is fueling transformation inside Microsoft

Until recently, processing incoming invoices at Microsoft was a patchwork, largely manual process, owing to the 20-year-old architecture and business processes on which the invoicing system was built. The existing Microsoft Invoice platform allowed only manual invoice submission. External suppliers…
December 11, 2019

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Aleenah Ansari

How Microsoft is modernizing its internal network using automation

After Microsoft moved its workload of 60,000 on-premises servers to Microsoft Azure, employees could set up systems and virtual machines (VMs) with a push of a few buttons. Although network hardware servers have changed over time, the way that network…
October 16, 2019

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Lukas Velush

How Microsoft used SQL Azure and Azure Service Fabric to rebuild a key internal app

When Raja Narayan took over supporting the Payee Management Application that Microsoft Finance uses to onboard new suppliers and partners, the experience was broken. “Our application’s infrastructure was on-premises,” Narayan says. “It was a big, old-school architecture monolith and, although…

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