I am delighted to launch “The Azure Daily“, the new Azure news aggregator and newsletter site, gathering together Azure announcements and the best Azure articles from around the Internet in one easy-to-consume source.
Some History First
Way back in 2006, I decided that I was going to leave my then employer and go out as an IT contractor for the first time. I had many influences on my career back then, and some of the best had an online presence. I decided that I would launch my own blog, which would serve two purposes:
- Become my own notebook: Anyone who has worked with me for long will know how bad my memory is – I often forget that I’ve already done something before assigning a task for it to be done. I also search my own blog for solutions like some other bloggers that I’ve talked to.
- Market myself: In 2006, I was known to a few people on the Mark Minasi forum. I wanted to use my content to draw web searches and get some attention to boost my career.
I wrote lots of original content. But one of the “note-taking” tasks that I did was to find articles or posts from Microsoft or the community and write about them. Say Microsoft announced something; I would discuss the value or context of that something and expand on the impact, complexities, and considerations that the Microsoft article did not include. At my peak, I would spend hours every night doing that after work – obviously this was before marriage and kids!
The nature of content changed. My life did too. Today, my content comes in bursts when something inspires me. But I still kept on top of what was happening in the Azure world.
Some Recent History
Like many people in 2025, I was made redundant. More accurately, I volunteered for redundancy when my employers sent out a redundancy notice to all of the consultants in my office. They were convinced that there was no more Azure consulting business out there. I was convinced that their grip on reality had long since slipped. I decided to take my company, Cloud Mechanix, which was a side gig, and go full time with it as a pure Azure consultancy. My focus is split multiple ways now:
- Keeping the accounting legal (my weakest link)
- Marketing
- Sales
- Doing the actual consulting work to generate revenue
As one can imagine, the time to sit back, filter through dozens of articles every day, and read the interesting stuff disappeared. I wasn’t helped by my RSS aggregator (Feedly) having problems with the Microsoft feeds (which were confirmed to be OK).
I needed something better.
Welcome The Azure Daily
The Azure Daily is a Cloud Mechanix-operated site that offers readers:
- Azure content: Directly associated or related content that impacts Azure usage
- Content filtering: I can spell AKS. I know little about it, so I don’t want to read about it or Data Lakes. But I know people who work on AKS who couldn’t give a fig about VNets or NSGs. Pick your categories and see only what matters to your role.
- Editorials: A brief introduction or explanation for each article, giving you context before you read the original.
- A weekly newsletter: Sundays, 07:00 UTC. No daily inbox spam – just the week’s most relevant Azure news delivered once a week.
How I Built This (And Why It Works)
I’ve been using Claude AI as my army of agents and employees throughout 2026. When I say I do marketing, I mean that I seed, supervise and test it. When I wrote a Terraform module library, I designed it, supervised the inputs and parameters, and tested it. The authoring, validation, testing, quality control, documentation, and release are completely automated. The Azure Daily is built the same way.
Yes, the site is written by AI. Yes, the editorials are written by AI. No, this isn’t SEO spam. I filter and supervise every editorial, and it’s deliberately tuned to my style and perspective. It’s no accident if it reads like I’ve written the content.
Credit Where It’s Due
I’ve had a mixed relationship with aggregators. I welcome sites that drive readers to original sources by discussing an article, maybe doing a short quote, and then sending readers my way. On the other hand, I’ve had people literally take my content, do a tiny credit, and make it appear like they wrote the article. That’s not happening here.
The Azure Daily is one of the good guys. You will find a short quote, a link, and proper credit on every article. I want readers to read the original content and discover new sources of information. I want the original authors to be discovered and get the credit they deserve.
Compliance Stuff
The observant might note that there is a sign-in option. This is entirely based on Microsoft authentication and is handled by Microsoft. The sign-in is entirely optional – it allows you to receive the weekly email.
Security-wise, I’m using Front Door and WAF. A Zero Trust authentication model is being used. The code and infrastructure have been scanned. I will be writing another article about the design in the near future.
It’s Over To You
Please check out the site at azuredaily.cloudmechanix.com. Pick your categories. Sign up for the weekly newsletter. There’s no monetisation, no dark patterns, and no surprise tracking.
I hope it’s of use to you.
