Welcome to AzureToZ

AzureToZ is a tech and coding blog, and at its core is one idea: a good tutorial should take you the whole way. From an empty resource group to a working, verified setup. From “I’ve never touched this” to “I’ve got it running and I understand what I did.” No steps quietly skipped, no “the rest is left as an exercise for the reader” right where it gets interesting.

But it isn’t only tutorials. It’s also where I write up the interesting things I run into along the way: the quirks, the gotchas, and the small discoveries that don’t need a full step-by-step but are worth sharing anyway.

This first post is the one that explains the rest. What the site is for, where the name comes from, who I’m writing it for, and how it’s actually built.

Why I built it

Most of what I’ve learned in this field, I learned by building the thing and breaking it a few times on the way. The trouble is that a lot of technical writing online stops short of that. You get reference docs that assume you already know the shape of the problem, or blog posts that show the happy path and go quiet the moment something needs a real decision.

I wanted a place to write the version I’d have wanted in front of me the first time round: start to finish, in order, with the reasoning left in. Writing it down also keeps me honest. If I can’t explain a setup cleanly enough for someone else to follow it, I usually didn’t understand it as well as I thought.

So tutorials are the backbone of AzureToZ: guided, hands-on walkthroughs you can actually follow along with. Around them sits everything else I find worth recording, the smaller notes and oddities that come out of using this stuff day to day.

Where the name comes from

Two things are doing the work in “AzureToZ.”

The first is Azure. It’s home turf and it’s where a good chunk of the early material lives: cloud networking, infrastructure, security, and the Fortinet-on-Azure patterns I spend real time on.

The second is hiding in plain sight: A to Z. That’s the promise baked into the name. Each guide is meant to go the full distance, beginning to end, with nothing left dangling. And “A to Z” is deliberately broad. Azure is the starting point, not the boundary. If I’ve used it, tried to use it, or wrestled with it in my day to day, it’s fair game here.

A name that’s both a focus and a scope felt about right.

What you’ll find here

Most posts are tutorials. A clear goal up top, the prerequisites laid out before you start, numbered steps you can work through, and a verification at the end so you know it actually worked rather than just hoping it did. The rest are shorter findings pieces: a quirk I hit, a gotcha worth flagging, or something interesting I came across and wanted to write down.

The subjects sit roughly in a few areas, and the list will keep growing:

• Azure: networking, infrastructure, and security, plus the Fortinet-on-Azure patterns and AVS (Azure VMware Solution) when the cloud and homelab worlds meet.
• The homelab: where most of this gets tried out first. Hypervisors and virtualization like Proxmox and VMware, and the hardware sitting underneath it all.
• Networking and firewalls: OPNsense, VyOS, FortiGate, and the routers and gateways I actually run.
• Findings and quirks: the gotchas, surprises, and small discoveries that don’t warrant a full guide but are worth a short writeup.

If I’ve worked with it and there’s something useful to say, whether that’s a complete A-to-Z walkthrough or a quick note on a quirk, it fits here. The scope is wide on purpose.

Who it’s for

If you learn by doing, by having the thing open in another window and following along, this is written for you. Engineers picking up a technology for the first time, people inheriting a setup who want to understand it by rebuilding it, homelabbers tinkering for the fun of it, and anyone who’s hit the point in a tutorial where it stops exactly where the real problem starts.

You don’t need to be an expert. You do need to be willing to type the commands yourself. That’s the whole deal.

How the site is built

AzureToZ runs on Hugo, a static site generator, so every page is plain pre-rendered HTML. There’s no server sitting there waiting to be patched, and the attack surface is about as small as it gets.

The workflow behind it is hands-off by design. Articles are written in Markdown and pushed to a GitHub repository. From there a CI/CD pipeline takes over: it builds the site with Hugo and ships it to Cloudflare Pages, which renders and serves it from the edge. In practice that means publishing a post is just a commit. Push the Markdown, and a few moments later it’s live, fast, and globally cached, with nothing for me to deploy by hand.

It’s a fitting stack for a site like this, and the kind of thing that might well turn up as an A-to-Z walkthrough of its own one day.

What’s next

The real content starts with the next post, a proper follow-along build rather than a meta one like this.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around as the catalogue fills out. The first tutorial is where it actually begins.