Azure in China

Microsoft Azure presence in China is always a question when there is a need for any customer to deploy azure applications specifically for Chinese Regional customers. Recently I had an interaction with a Microsoft Certified Trainer, who carelessly said Azure only uses Chinese partner based environment is only for serving CDN (Content Delivery Network) needs,… Continue reading

Introducing Azure IoT Edge

During Build! 2017 Microsoft has announced the availability of Azure IoT Edge, which would bring in some of the cloud capabilities to edge devices/networks within your Enterprise. This would enable industrial devices to utilize the capabilities of IoT in Azure within their constrained resources .  With this Microsoft now makes it easier for developers to… Continue reading

Azure CosmosDB – a multi-model, multi-API for highly scalable applications

Azure Cosmos DB is the next generation globally distributed multi model database from Microsoft. Cosmos DB has been built from scratch in mind with efficient global distribution and horizontal scalability aspects as the core. Azure Cosmos DB guarantees single-digit-millisecond latencies at the 99% availability across the world with Enterprise Level SLAs. Offers a set of… Continue reading

LLM Output Parsing: Transforming Unstructured Text into Reliable Data Structures

Introduction: LLM outputs are inherently unstructured—models generate text, not data structures. Yet most applications need structured data: JSON for APIs, typed objects for business logic, specific formats for downstream processing. Output parsing bridges this gap, transforming free-form text into reliable, validated data structures. This guide covers the techniques that make parsing robust: format specification in… Continue reading

IoT Central–Microsoft’s SaaS solution for IoT

Microsoft has today released their IoT SaaS offering for customers and partners called as “Microsoft IoT Central”.  IoT Central enables powerful IoT scenarios without requiring cloud solution expertise and also simplifies the development process and makes customers to make quick time to market solutions, making digital transformation more accessible to everyone without overhead of implement… Continue reading

Advanced RAG Patterns: From Query Rewriting to Self-Reflective Retrieval

Introduction: Basic RAG retrieves documents and stuffs them into context. Advanced RAG transforms retrieval into a sophisticated pipeline that dramatically improves answer quality. This guide covers the techniques that separate production RAG systems from prototypes: query rewriting to improve retrieval, hybrid search combining dense and sparse methods, cross-encoder reranking for precision, contextual compression to fit… Continue reading