Thomas Thornton is a cloud and DevOps specialist focused on Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, GitHub, and Terraform. Through practical tutorials and real-world troubleshooting, he helps developers and platform teams build, secure, and automate modern cloud solutions.
21 articles from this blog
Explores the challenges of Terraform module design and introduces a custom agent skill to address design decisions before code generation.
GitHub Copilot Rubber Duck uses a second AI model to review code plans, catching subtle errors in multi-file tasks.
Analyzes design choices for effective GitHub Copilot Agent skills, focusing on task shape, descriptions, boundaries, and testing.
Explains how Agent Package Manager (APM) solves packaging and versioning problems for GitHub Copilot agents and skills across teams.
Using Excalidraw with MCP and GitHub Copilot to create architecture diagrams directly in VS Code, keeping them part of the design workflow.
Integrates live Azure pricing into GitHub Copilot via an MCP skill, enabling cost estimation during architecture design without switching tools.
Extends an AI diagramming skill to generate AWS architecture diagrams using Draw.io MCP, improving on generic tools for clarity and reliability.
Automating Terraform provider upgrades using GitHub Agentic Workflows and MCP servers to generate safe pull requests.
Introducing an Azure Diagram Agent Skill that uses Draw.io MCP and GitHub Copilot to automate the generation of consistent, readable Azure architecture diagrams.
Explains how Draw.io MCP automates diagram generation from code, integrating diagrams into engineering workflows and version control.
A guide to integrating the GitHub Copilot SDK into GitHub Actions workflows to create an automated AI-powered Pull Request review assistant.
Explores how AI is transforming Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by enabling standardization, shifting from writing code to describing intent, and automating tasks.
Guide to identifying and disabling the deprecated 'trusted service connectivity' feature in Azure API Management before its March 2026 retirement.
Git Rail Control is an interactive, gamified platform for learning Git commands through a railway-themed simulation.
Guide to integrating HashiCorp's Terraform MCP Server into GitHub Actions for AI-enhanced, real-time infrastructure validation.
Highlights from GitHub Universe 2025, focusing on AI-driven development, Agent HQ, and new tools reshaping how developers build software.
A technical guide exploring GitHub's new Agentic Workflows, which integrate AI agents into GitHub Actions for adaptive, intelligent automation.
A guide to implementing passwordless, cross-tenant authentication for Azure API Management using Managed Identities and Federated Credentials.
Introducing an AI-powered GitHub Action for automated, comprehensive Terraform plan reviews across 11 domains to improve CI/CD pipeline security and efficiency.
A guide on using GitHub Actions to securely checkout a specific branch from a private repository, enabling reusable components in CI/CD workflows.
