A personal journey in Azure engineering

I would like to provide a personal example of a Data by Design initiative that had a top-down, bottom-up, and side-to-side approach all at once. Years ago, when Azure was in its initial stages, I was responsible for the Azure Data Platform’s Engineering Fundamentals program. This program was the result of strategy and technology shifts, as Azure was in its infancy and many of the employees had originally worked in a box product environment. The concept of shipping in a day was foreign, as was building products on top of other infrastructure cloud services that were also shipping in a day. We needed to shift engineering fundamentals left to ensure available, extensible, supportable, and trusted services.

To do this, we had to significantly invest in frameworks, training, process automation, and monitoring to assess the maturity of each product against standardized architecture, engineering, support, and risk management processes. This...