350 - Microsoft Tech Updates

And this is something that I'm not perhaps surprised.

I think this was announced previously, but now there's a timeline for retirement of Azure Blueprints.

and before i go through this one toby did you ever go with azure blueprints for anything

no and there's a solid reason for that azure blueprints never left preview few people know that it's been out there for years but it's been a preview all the time it never went general availability which is why also on the website it's always said actual blueprints is in preview When I worked at Microsoft and we did the cloud adoption framework and all the guidance, it was very clear guidelines internally saying, hey, this is a preview feature.

You cannot recommend this in a enterprise production grade workload because we only talk about GA services because, as we know, previews might change.

Now, I think this is the only service I've ever seen with Azure that goes from you know, inception to preview to retirement without actually having production grade or generally available time.

I think everyone treated it as generally available because it's been there for years and years.

But that's Yeah, limited exposure to it because of that.

So I never actually relied much on it for that reason.

I did not recall it was always in preview because a lot of the things nowadays, it's announced in April and come June, it's generally available.

But that was obviously a different time back then with Azure Blueprints.

So if you're not familiar with Azure Blueprints, what it was able to allow you to do was to lock down and minimize the capabilities somebody could do in an Azure environment.

I know that Microsoft was using this for some of the labs they had at events and certification exams.

I sort of like this one, but it was a little bit clunky.

to get up and running.

So Azure Blueprints will be retired.

And July 31st, 2026, which is really soon now, you won't be able to create any new Blueprint definitions.

October 31st, 2026, you won't be able to modify your existing Blueprint definitions or create new assignments based on those definitions.

And end of December, you won't be able to modify any existing Blueprint assignments.

The solution is to migrate to deployment stacks.

And it's not sort of the same thing, but it sort of provides some of the similar capabilities.

And the migration essentially is that you export the blueprint definitions, you get a fun JSON file.

And then from that JSON file, you sort of extract the role assignments, the policies, the templates, the locks, what you have in there.

And then you might deploy those as deployment stacks.

So if you feel you're still using Blueprints, perhaps now is the time when you have maybe time during the summer vacation.