Elliott Leighton-Woodruff

Latest writing

• Enterprise Live Migrations Just Killed Your Best Excuse to Stay on Azure Repos

  9 September 2026 · 6 min read

  Enterprise Live Migrations hit public preview on 31 August. Cutover is typically under 30 minutes, but only if you're on GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency. Here's what moves, what doesn't, and the CLI for the first repo.

• AzureRM 5.2 Is Another Sign That Platform Engineering Has Won

  21 August 2026 · 11 min read

  AzureRM 5.2 is not the story. Managed identities, Terraform and Managed DevOps Pools are. Here's how Azure platform teams are moving from Infrastructure as Code to Platform as Code.

• Actually validating deployments with TF's new AzureRM 5.0

  30 July 2026 · 9 min read

  AzureRM provider 5.0 adds opt-in preflight validation that calls Azure during plan. It's useful, but it's not magic. Here's where it helps, where it skips resources, and what will bite during the upgrade.

• The Front Door Terraform Quirk That's Really Just Classic Telling You to Migrate

  23 July 2026 · 6 min read

  Your Front Door Terraform plan isn't broken, it's Classic showing its age. Here's why the drift happens, and why the real fix isn't a workaround.

• GitHub Copilot Billing Just Changed. Don't Get Bitten.

  10 June 2026 · 7 min read

  GitHub Copilot moved to usage-based billing on 1 June 2026. For individuals it is mostly a measurement change. For enterprise IT, it is a FinOps problem you need to start solving now.

• Your AI Agents Are in Production. Who's Governing Them?

  27 May 2026 · 11 min read

  A two-repo pattern for managing AI Foundry agents, system prompts, guardrails and APIM policies as code. Approval gates, full audit trail, no portal clicking.

• I'm Still a Terraform Fan. But Bicep's New Snapshot Feature Made Me Look Twice

  31 March 2026 · 8 min read

  Bicep v0.41.2 makes Snapshot generally available and gives Azure-only teams an offline, reviewable way to preview change impact without Azure What-If noise.

• Azure Blueprints are dead! Welcome to Deployment Stacks

  18 March 2026 · 7 min read

  Azure Deployment Stacks bring predictable lifecycle control to landing zone governance and give IaC teams a practical path away from Azure Blueprints.