Azure Key Vault: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Enterprise Secrets Management

In the world of cloud-native applications, secrets management has evolved from a necessary evil to a critical architectural concern. Azure Key Vault stands as Microsoft’s answer to centralized secrets, keys, and certificate management, providing a secure foundation for enterprise applications. Having implemented Key Vault across dozens of production environments, I’ve come to appreciate its role… Continue reading

LlamaIndex: The Data Framework for Building Production RAG Applications

Introduction: LlamaIndex (formerly GPT Index) is the leading data framework for building LLM applications over your private data. While LangChain focuses on chains and agents, LlamaIndex specializes in data ingestion, indexing, and retrieval—the core components of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). With over 160 data connectors through LlamaHub, sophisticated indexing strategies, and production-ready query engines, LlamaIndex… Continue reading

Azure Application Gateway: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Regional Load Balancing and WAF

While Azure Front Door excels at global load balancing, many enterprise scenarios require regional application delivery with deep integration into virtual network architectures. Azure Application Gateway fills this niche perfectly, providing Layer 7 load balancing with integrated Web Application Firewall capabilities within a single Azure region. Having architected countless regional application delivery solutions over my… Continue reading