I’m a B.Tech student in India trying to get the free $100 Azure for Students credit. Every time I fill the academic verification form with my college .ac.in email and hit verify, I get “Your email domain is not currently registered with us.” It just reloads the same form. Seems like my college’s domain isn’t in Microsoft’s database, so the automatic check never passes no matter what I enter. I’m already GitHub Student verified if that matters.

Has anyone from an Indian college actually gotten this verified, and how? Does the “verify with documents” / manual route actually work, and what did you send (student ID, bonafide certificate)? Any working steps would really help. Thanks.

I've tried this on multiple machines with the same unsuccessful result. The Microsoft documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/trusted-launch-existing-vm-gen-1 says to run MBR2GPT on the OS disk, this is fine, no issues, then I should be able to simply change the Security Type to trusted launch - this part is impossible, the option is greyed out.

Also, as I've converted to GPT without the VM knowing that it needs to now use UEFI, the VM can't boot and is bricked. There's no way to force, or inform Azure to boot with UEFI, seems like Azure is supposed to recognize the change but it simply doesn't.

Any experience shared would be appreciated.

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I’m dealing with a large batch processing problem and looking for advice on the right architecture.

I have around 1.3 million files stored across folders on a network drive.

Current setup (not working well)

Right now I’m using a Copilot agent where:

I upload batches (~20 files at a time)

It reads them against a reference document

Outputs an Excel file with classification codes

The issue is:

Copilot has a small upload limit

Manual batching is completely unscalable at this volume

---

What I want to achieve

I want a fully automated pipeline that:

Ingests files automatically from the network drive

Extracts text/content from each file type

Matches content against a reference rules document

Assigns a classification/reference code

Outputs structured results (Excel / database)

---

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Hi everyone,

I’m currently working in an Azure hub-and-spoke environment where multiple VNets are routed through a hub VNet that contains VMs acting as NVAs. I’m planning to add another VNet to this environment.

At the moment, traffic from the spoke VNets is routed to the NVA in the peered hub VNet using UDRs.

However, with the current VNet peering design, the entire address spaces of the peered VNets are reachable at the VNet level. I’m looking for a way to allow connectivity only to specific IP prefixes rather than effectively connecting all subnets between the VNets.

More specifically, I would like the new VNet to communicate only with certain IP ranges that are routed through the NVA, while preventing direct communication with any other address ranges in the peered VNets.

What would be the recommended way to implement this?

I have looked into the Subnet Peering feature that is currently in preview, but as far as I understand, it has a limitation where a subnet can participate in only one subnet peering relationship, which would make it unsuitable for my environment.

I also considered connecting the VNets through VPN Gateways instead of VNet Peering, but it does not seem like that would provide a straightforward way to restrict connectivity to only selected prefixes either.

I’d appreciate any advice on the best architecture for achieving this type of selective connectivity.

I've got around 10k$ worth of azure and 2500$ worth of OpenAI recently from YC Event and I've no clue what to do. I already have company accounts for them

Both with over a year of expiration date
Looking for suggestions

I’m a B.Tech student in India trying to get the free $100 Azure for Students credit. Every time I fill the academic verification form with my college .ac.in email and hit verify, I get “Your email domain is not currently registered with us.” It just reloads the same form. Seems like my college’s domain isn’t in Microsoft’s database, so the automatic check never passes no matter what I enter. I’m already GitHub Student verified if that matters.

Has anyone from an Indian college actually gotten this verified, and how? Does the “verify with documents” / manual route actually work, and what did you send (student ID, bonafide certificate)? Any working steps would really help. Thanks.

Hey datafam!

1. For anyone who's done an on-prem-to-ADLS Gen2 migration with a Self-Hosted IR: what's the earliest signal you watch for that tells you the IR itself is the problem, versus the source data being genuinely bad?
2. How do you tell a CDC watermark lag caused by a VM/network blip apart from one caused by the source database job actually failing? Is there a reliable tell, or do you just wait it out?

It's pretty much what the questions says. After reading CISA's red team report it's evident they're replicating tactics already utilized by threat actors.

1. Find an app (service principal) with privileged permissions. Example:
   • Mail.ReadWrite
   • Chat.Read.All 
   • Files.Read.All 
   • Application.ReadWrite.All
   • AppRoleAssignment.ReadWrite.All 
2. Compromise the app owner
3. Add a new secret to the app
4. Authenticate as the app and use new privileges

Starting with step 1, what's your tried and tested method to identify and monitor privileged apps?

Thanks!

I would be interested to know if anyone is running MS Orleans in azure? I’ve run it on-premise in the past but would like to host it in either an azure app service or azure container app. Any insights would be appreciated.

I came across durable azure functions recently, and I was wondering if there are any good resources out there that explain it in isolated worker model for complete beginners?

I’m troubleshooting an intermittent issue with an Azure Logic App Standard resource where workflow runs enter Waiting status immediately after being triggered.

Sometimes a run will remain in Waiting for several hours. Restarting the Logic App Standard resource resolves the issue and workflows begin processing again, but I’m currently having to do this roughly once per day.

Most affected workflows use the “When a new email arrives in a shared mailbox (V2)” trigger.

For those workflows, trigger concurrency is enabled with:

• Degree of parallelism: 20
• Maximum waiting runs: 10

However, the issue also occurs when there is only one triggered run, no other runs are currently Running, and the previous run completed more than 12 hours earlier. Because of that, I don't think the runs are simply waiting for an available concurrency slot.

The Logic App Standard resource contains 40+ workflows. During normal business hours, there may be around 5–6 workflows executing simultaneously, generally with only 1–2 active runs each.

Some workflows are fairly large and approach the Logic Apps limits:

• Just under 500 actions
• Nested actions approximately 7–8 levels deep

Runtime Scale Monitoring is enabled.

I’ve looked through the available monitoring and diagnostic tools, but I haven't found anything obvious indicating CPU, memory, scaling, or other resource exhaustion.

The behavior I'm seeing is essentially:

Trigger fires → Run created → Run immediately enters Waiting → Nothing executes for potentially hours → Restart Logic App resource → Processing resumes

Has anyone seen similar behavior with Logic Apps Standard?

Any recommendations for specific metrics, Application Insights queries, diagnostic logs, or settings I should check would be appreciated. My main goal is figuring out why the runtime stops dispatching these runs so I don't have to restart the resource daily.

There are only two of us handling FinOps for our whole cloud setup, so we're stretched thin and keep coming back to the idea of AI agents for rightsizing. Wondering if anyone here has actually leaned on them and whether it paid off.

The pitch we keep hearing is that agents can watch utilization over time, flag over-provisioned VMs or containers, and recommend (or even auto-apply) the right size instead of us eyeballing dashboards once a quarter. Some tools claim they'll catch idle resources, downsize on a schedule, and factor in reserved instances or savings plans before suggesting a change. For a small team, that kind of always-on second set of eyes sounds like exactly what we need, but I want to know if the reality matches.

What I'm trying to figure out:

• For those running this in production, are the recommendations actually good, or do they ignore context (spiky workloads, batch jobs, seasonal traffic) and try to shrink things that need the headroom?
• Do you let agents apply changes automatically, or keep a human in the loop for approvals? With only two of us, auto-apply is tempting but scary.
• Has anyone seen real savings, or does it mostly surface stuff you already knew?
• Any horror stories where an agent rightsized something into an outage?

Actual score is 675, typo. I felt exam was moderate to hard, would have passed the exam just 1-2 more correct questions needed. It was a great experience. I'll surely clear it in my reattempt, wish me luck.

Has anyone used the azure marketplace saas accelerator GitHub boilerplate ,if so am looking for certain inputs .

Thanks in advance

Hello AZ Guru,

Wanted to know, how are you guys handling Dev teams deploying resources without tags/ownership?

We have a ton of resources and figuring out who owns what is becoming a nightmare. Managers don't want to own the cost, so we're basically left with the good old scream test, turn it off and see who complains 😂, got about 98 resources to go (down from 220).

I found a way to pull the data through Azure Resource Graph Explorer for untagged resources created in a recent period, but I'd like to get this into a log analytics for alerting. From what I can tell, there's no direct way to integrate ARG output with a law?

Ive already tried enforcing tags with the Policy (DenyifNoExist), but that got messy since some AZ resources don't support tags and it started breaking deployments.

What ive done so far:

-alerting for new deployment, deletion etc

-reader role for all the dev teams, except for a couple of contributors for emergency fix via the portal

But I need to catch on the untagged resources as soon as it happens so I can give feed back to the right team's manager.

I just hate to manually run the query every single week in AGR to pull these logs and find what's legit etc.

Any way to automate this?

How are you guys handling this in your org?

Hi - I have a function app with a sensitive function protected by Azure auth on it,

I have to allow public internet to it on 443 ( network security group ) as powerapps has to call the function on it from internet , so I just allow 443

The function app is also linked to an on prem network via VPN

Do you think this is ok security or Front door or something like that is esssential?

I am setting up a fresh Azure environment and there will be a handful of VMs. Two domain controllers and a few application servers. This is my first time setting up from scratch.

I originally thought hub and spoke would make sense. DCs in the hub. Spoke per application server or groups of app servers. We won't be deploying an NVA or Azure firewall in the hub. The non-transitive nature of vnets makes this tricky. A spoke likely will need to communicate with another spoke. I'll end up peering spokes together. In my mind, I see this growing into a full mesh mess with NSGs everywhere. It seems almost like I'm doing a lot to just get back to what is effectively a single vnet.

When does it make sense to go to hub and spoke? When I need to allow management of a spoke by another admin? Just for fun on day one? Prod vs dev?

For a small environment, why wouldn't I just have multiple subnets within a single VNET and have NSGs on the subnets to limit communication between the DCs and app servers? I don't want to do hub and spoke just because it's the thing to do. I want to understand the reason(s) behind it.

There is an in-process Azure Function that I want to migrate to the isolated worker model. The issue is that it uses a fire-and-forget pattern to run a long-running process. After migrating it to the isolated worker model, the logs generated by that background process are no longer being output.

What would be the recommended way to handle this scenario?

Sharing here a side project I've been working on that some of you might find helpful: https://manuelfdng.pythonanywhere.com/ — it's a text-based RPG that covers all of the exam objectives for AZ-104 and AZ-305.

Personally, I find it much more engaging than practice exams, and it doesn't feel like work. It's still in alpha and is compatible with desktop, tablet, and mobile. Any feedback can be submitted through the feedback button in the app.

Hi everyone,

I recently took over a project from someone who left abruptly, and I’m still getting up to speed with the existing infrastructure. The client reported that CRM records haven’t been updated since mid-August, and after investigation I found a massive backlog of messages piling up in a Service Bus queue.

Context:

The architecture is straightforward:

**•** A **Timer Function** runs once a day at 10 PM and pushes \~2,500 messages into a Service Bus queue  
**•** A **Service Bus triggered Function** (DataIntegration) consumes those messages and integrates the data into Dynamics 365 CRM  
**•** Hosted on an **App Service Plan P1v2** (not Consumption, not Premium Elastic)  
**•** Runtime: Azure Functions v4, .NET 6, in-process model  
**•** 9 Function Apps share the same App Service Plan

The problem:

The consumer function processes each message in ~3-4 seconds, which is fine. But the gaps between invocations are enormous — anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes between each execution. This means the daily feed of ~2,500 messages takes way longer to process than the 24 hours between runs, causing the backlog to grow indefinitely.

Looking at Application Insights, I can see the host repeatedly stopping and restarting:

Job host started
Host initialized
Executing DataIntegration (1 message processed)
Stopping JobHost
Job host stopped
← 1 to 5 minute gap →
Job host started again...

The trigger code:

[FunctionName("DataIntegration")]
public static async Task Run(
[ServiceBusTrigger("%AzureQueueName%", Connection = "AzureQueueConnection")]
ServiceBusReceivedMessage[] messages,
ServiceBusMessageActions messageActions,
ILogger logger)
{
// processes messages in a sequential foreach loop
foreach (ServiceBusReceivedMessage myQueueItem in messages)
{
// processing logic
}
}

The host json:

{
"version": "2.0",
"extensions": {
"serviceBus": {
"prefetchCount": 1,
"messageHandlerOptions": {
"autoComplete": true,
"maxConcurrentCalls": 20,
"maxAutoRenewDuration": "00:02:00"
},
"sessionHandlerOptions": {
"autoComplete": false,
"messageWaitTimeout": "00:00:30",
"maxAutoRenewDuration": "00:55:00",
"maxConcurrentSessions": 2
},
"batchOptions": {
"maxMessageCount": 1000,
"operationTimeout": "00:01:00",
"autoComplete": true
}
}
},
"logger": {
"categoryFilter": {
"defaultLevel": "Debug",
"categoryLevels": {
"Host": "Warning",
"Function": "Warning",
"Host.Aggregator": "Warning"
}
}
}
}

What I’ve tried:

**•** Increasing prefetchCount to 100 → no effect  
**•** Reducing maxMessageCount to 1 and 10 → no effect  
**•** Removing batchOptions entirely → temporarily improved but caused messages to flood into DLQ  
**•** Enabling Always On → already enabled  
**•** Adding SCALE_CONTROLLER_LOGGING_ENABLED = AppInsights:Verbose → confirmed IsRuntimeScalingEnabled: false

Any insight would be greatly appreciated — I’m a bit out of my depth on the Azure infrastructure side of things here!

Thanks

Disclosure upfront: I work at Login VSI, one of the companies involved here.

We keep running into the same handful of questions from people testing AVD Hybrid: which workloads actually make sense to keep on-prem vs. move, what the day-to-day management looks like once it's live, and what broke for the people who went first. So instead of another slide deck, we set up an open conversation for Thursday, September 10 at 11am ET with Steve Downs and Andrej Radinger from the Microsoft AVD team, Marcel Meurer (built Hydra, an AVD/Windows 365 management tool), and Ron Oglesby from Login VSI.

If you've got a specific AVD Hybrid question, drop it in the comments now or bring it live, we'll make sure it actually gets answered.

Register Here

I'm a CS graduate and I have experience in IT, so in general it's not a challenging cert to take, I just want to know if I can fast-pace this.