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Introducing the 2025 Advent Calendar

stephentulp
December 1, 2025

7 minutes to read

Tags: azureiacPlatformEngineeringGitHubbicep
2025 Advent Calendar


Welcome to the 2025 Advent Calendar


It feels like only yesterday I was writing the 2024 Advent Calendar introduction post. Yet, as I type this, December 1st is here, signaling that the end of the year is fast approaching. Like many people I’ve spoken to recently, 2025 has absolutely flown by, and I’m very much looking forward to the festive season and enjoying some well-deserved downtime with family and friends.

Reflecting on the past year, some of my key personal highlights for 2025 have been:

  • Customer Success: Partnering with both new and existing customers to accelerate their Azure Platform Engineering journeys.
  • Insight Expansion: Helping to establish a new location for Insight here in Australia and showcasing our capabilities in Cloud, Platform Engineering, and CCOE.
  • Community Speaking: Presenting at the Latency conference on the Developer Experience (DevX) with Infrastructure as Code, Self-Service, and Platform Engineering.
  • MVP Summit: Attending the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle, connecting with fellow MVPs, product teams, and reconnecting with old friends.
  • Open Source Contributions: Continuing to actively participate in the Bicep, Azure Verified Modules, and Azure Landing Zones community calls and contributing wherever possible.

Throughout the year, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who reached out to mention they had followed my previous Advent Calendar series. Hearing that the content was practical and helped them in their day-to-day work was incredibly rewarding and served as a great motivation to do it all again this year. I started the planning phase back in early October, brainstorming various themes and potential topics for the 2025 Advent Calendar. I had a few ambitious ideas that I was eager to explore, but as often happens with best-laid plans, life and work got busy. Days quickly turned into weeks, and then months, and suddenly, here we are at the starting line once again!

After speaking with several colleagues and community members to gauge their interests, I decided to maintain the core themes of Platform Engineering, Bicep, and Azure Landing Zones. However, given the rapid advancements in AI, I’ve also been exploring how these capabilities can complement and enhance our existing DevOps and Platform Engineering practices. I thought this years Advent Calendar would be the perfect opportunity to share some of these new learnings while also revisiting and updating key topics from previous years.

2025 Advent Calendar - AI Powered Azure Engineering

AI technologies are becoming increasingly effective at resolving bottlenecks in Infrastructure as Code workflows. However, their benefits are only realised when engineers possess the necessary IaC skills. Key AI capabilities driving these improvements include large language models (LLMs) for code generation and documentation, machine learning (ML) models for anomaly detection and optimisation and natural language processing (NLP) for translating policies into code. Importantly, adopting AI doesn’t mean replacing your existing tools. Instead, AI enhances your current tool sets and workflows with intelligent automation. You retain control over critical decisions, while AI manages routine analysis and optimisation tasks.

Difference between Automation and AI

Although the terms automation and AI are often used interchangeably, they represent distinct concepts:

  • Automation: Relies on explicitly programmed instructions to perform repetitive tasks and works well for predictable, rule-based operations, but falters when facing unexpected scenarios or deviations.
  • Artificial intelligence: AI provides the capacity to analyse vast amounts of data, learn from patterns, and make informed decisions without needing step-by-step human intervention.

If we look at the key differences:

  • Focus: Traditional automation focuses on executing predefined tasks, while AI systems focus on learning and decision-making.
  • Function: Automation follows explicit rules and instructions, while AI systems learn from data and experiences to make decisions.
  • Adaptability: Traditional automation lacks adaptability and struggles with variations, while AI systems exhibit greater adaptability, such as continuously improving their performance based on new information.

Leveraging AI for infrastructure management and deployment isn’t about writing faster infrastructure as code, it’s about evolving the engineering philosophy for an organisation and elevating the way modern infrastructure is created, reviewed, and deployed. From my perspective, the future isn’t AI agents generating IaC it’s AI agents executing deployments safely by using pre-validated blueprints.

2025 Advent Calendar Schedule

Below is the schedule for the month. I’ll be publishing a new update daily, and the links will become active as each post goes live.

Date Title Description
The 12 Extensions of Christmas: Essential VS Code extensions for Azure Platform Engineering When working with Bicep and Azure infrastructure, it is important to have the right tools to maximise productivity, consistency and code quality. Here are the essential VS Code extensions I use daily for Azure Platform Engineering.
Deck the IDE: Supercharging GitHub Copilot with Awesome Customisations Unlock the true potential of GitHub Copilot by tailoring it to your specific workflows, languages, and standards using Custom Agents, Prompts, and Instructions.
Jingle Bells, Server Shells, and Model Context All the Way Introduction to Model Context Protocol (MCP) and their role in enhancing GitHub Copilot.
Naughty or Nice? GitHub vs. Azure DevOps in the Age of GenAI and Agentic AI Revisiting the GitHub vs Azure DevOps debate in relation to Generative AI and Agentic AI capabilities.
Merry Bicep-mas: Sleighing IaC in 2025 Exploring the new Bicep features and capabilities that have become GA in 2025.
Unwrapping Bicep’s Christmas Surprises: Experimental Features Coming in 2026 Unpacking new presents that will arrive in 2026. Stay tuned for exciting experimental features on the horizon.
Dear Santa, I’ve Been Writing Bicep Docs: A Letter to the North Pole Making a list and checking it with comprehensive Bicep documentation that even Santa would approve of.
All I want for Christmas is Azure Verified Modules A deeper look into how Azure Verified Modules should be your starting point for any Azure Bicep deployments.
Santa’s Little Helpers: Automating Bicep Deployments with GitHub Actions Let GitHub Actions be your elves in the workshop, automating Bicep deployments and keeping your infrastructure pipeline merry and bright.
Lokka the AI-Powered Reindeer: Guiding Your Sleigh Through Azure and M365 Meet Lokka, the magical middleware connecting LLM’s to your Azure and Microsoft 365 tenant using Microsoft Graph.
TBC Coming Soon!
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TBC Coming Soon!