Today, we are going to look at some of the practicalities of Spec Kit and use Spec-Driven Development to create a Platform Landing Zone aligned to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, using Bicep as the Infrastructure as Code.

I was recently working on a content discovery app and needed access to current Microsoft documentation, but I wasn't keen on scraping their site (and dealing with all that maintenance overhead).

Service Principal vs User‑Assigned Managed Identity? This came up again for me recently while deciding what to standardise on for Infrastructure as Code deployments.

Now that Workload Identity Federation (WIF) is broadly supported, it’s pretty simple to move a traditional service principal off a client secret and onto federated credentials – or create it that way from day one. So why bother with a user‑assigned managed identity (UAMI)?

Because I've formed a preference over the last couple of years: for most DevOps / platform automation scenarios, I'll reach for a User‑Assigned Managed Identity with WIF before I create (yet another) service principal. This post walks through the why, plus where a service principal still makes sense.

Azure Communication Services can be used to add voice, video, chat, and SMS and email capabilities to applications. It is a fully managed communication platform that enables developers to build rich communication experiences. Today, we will explore the email capability through an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server hosted on Azure Functions, enabling us to send emails from any MCP client.

You might be deploying to Azure Functions or attempting to retrieve the Function App URL, and you may encounter errors like:

• Encountered an error (BadGateway) from host runtime.
• Encountered an error (InternalServerError) from host runtime.