Carlos Mendible

Azure Quick Review (azqr) v4.0.0 is now available. This release expands azqr beyond best-practice assessments with new tools for VM sizing, Service Health analysis, SQL Server lifecycle management, and region selection. It also includes breaking changes, so if you are upgrading from v3.x, review your scripts and automation before replacing the binary.

Running an Azure VM on an older SKU generation, hitting quota limits, or simply looking for an alternative size? The new alternative-vm-sku command in Azure Quick Review (azqr) makes it trivial to discover compatible alternatives for any Azure VM SKU ranked by a multi-factor compatibility score. Whether you’re modernizing workloads, responding to quota constraints, or optimizing costs, having a ranked list of compatible SKU alternatives removes the guesswork from VM size selection.

Running SQL Server past its end-of-life date exposes your organization to unpatched security vulnerabilities and growing Extended Security Update (ESU) costs. Understanding exactly which instances are affected — and what it could cost you — is the first step toward a sound modernization strategy. This post introduces the Azure Quick Review sql-eol plugin (formerly sql-esu), which scans both Arc-enabled SQL Servers and Azure SQL VMs, estimates your possible ESU spend, and recommends migration paths to Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI).

AI is evolving beyond individual models toward autonomous agents capable of reasoning, acting and collaborating across tools and systems. This talk looks at how Foundry-based AI platforms, combined with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), help teams move from experimentation to reliable, scalable agentic systems. Focusing on real architectures and deployed use cases, we explore how governance, security and operational control are achieved in practice, how MCP standardizes agent interaction with enterprise systems, and the key trade-offs when building agents that must operate under real-world constraints. Presented at CONVEX 2026 with Manuel Sánchez.

Kubernetes 1.36 graduated image volumes to stable. This feature lets the kubelet pull any OCI artifact from a registry and mount its filesystem directly into pods as a read-only volume — no init containers, no emptyDir copies, no custom CSI drivers. In this post I’ll walk through a complete example: packaging versioned project content as a scratch-based OCI image and serving it from a Go HTTP API running on AKS.

If you are running AKS with Node Auto Provisioning (NAP/Karpenter) and using Azure Disk ZRS (Zone-Redundant Storage) Persistent Volumes with volumeBindingMode: Immediate, you may have noticed that pods get stuck in Pending state. In this post, I’ll show you a temporary workaround using a Kubernetes mutating admission webhook that fixes this scheduling issue.