Parity between Azure and AWS

It is worthwhile to maintain knowledge parity between Azure and AWS. 

If you use a cool thing in Azure, chances are the same functionality exists in AWS (e.g. managed kubernetes service - known as AKS or EKS in respective clouds) and so you should know how to do same cool thing in AWS.

Cloud economics may dictate future decisions.

A Nod to AWS EKS

AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is a fully managed Kubernetes service provided by AWS. 

EKS simplifies deployment and management of containerized applications using Kubernetes. Users need not manage the Kubernetes control plane or nodes manually.

Jargon warning: 

The Kubernetes control plane is the central management utility of a Kubernetes cluster. 

It maintains cluster state, making decisions about the cluster and responding to cluster events. It is made up of several key components that work together.

AWS basically runs the control plane for you.

There are a number of use cases suggested by AWS.

Copliot Studio and Cost Analysis

Copilot Studio is a Microsoft product for building and managing AI agents. 

It has a corresponding licensing guide enabling you to estimate costs of building and running agents with it. At time of writing the licensing guide has been updated in July 2026.

Revisiting Port 443

Port 443 is primarily known for handling HTTPS traffic over TCP, enabling secure communication between browsers and servers.  

It can be used with UDP in specific scenarios like QUIC (for lower latency secure communications) and HTTP/3.

When diagnosing why an HTTPS connection is failing, an in depth knowledge of port 443 is needed.

Visual Studio Community July 2026 Release

See the status of GitHub Copilot from the Visual Studio IDE. Built-in .NET and Azure skills are introduced.

Agent Skills Introduced by Anthropic

Anthropic introduced agent skills which have now been embraced by other vendors too e.g. Microsoft.

Agent skills are a standardized way to extend agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows.  It consists of a folder containing a SKILL.md file.  This contains metadata and instructions for the agent to do its task.

Other stuff can be bundled with the skill as well, as follows.

agents-new-skill/ ├── SKILL.md # Required: metadata + instructions ├── scripts/ # Optional: executable code ├── references/ # Optional: documentation ├── assets/ # Optional: templates, resources └── ... # Any additional files or directories

The PEM Format

PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) is a format used for transmitting cryptographic keys, certificates and other data.  

PEM structure consists of a text file in Base64 encoded data format (a binary-to-text encoding consisting of 64 printable characters - the idea is you can push binary data into a communication channel that only supports text). Base64 is famous for its use in attachments, since SMTP in its original form was designed to support 7-bit ASCII characters only.

An alternative to PEM in Java contexts is DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) used for X.509 certificates and private keys.