CloudBrew has always been a highlight on our calendar, but the 2025 edition felt different. Perhaps it was the timing. Just the month prior, November 2025, the Azure Belgium Central region finally opened its doors. ACA has always operated from the heart of Europe, so seeing this massive national milestone go live just before the conference added a layer of excitement.
It was fitting, then, that our partners from Microsoft, Wouter Gevaert and Jan Gezels, kicked things off after the initial key note.
The opening session wasn't just a victory lap for the new datacenter; it was a technical roadmap. Even though Azure Belgium Central (ABC) is open for business, there is much work in the background to continuously bring more Azure services live.
The biggest shift is how we think about reliability. We are moving away from the old model of paired regions and leaning hard into modern multi-region High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery Planning. With multiple Availability Zones now in our backyard, we can finally offer true local data residency to our compliance-sensitive clients without sacrificing fault tolerance.
With the infrastructure foundation set, we headed to Massimo Crippa’s session on "Healthy apps, happy users: smarter monitoring with Azure Health Models"
Massimo did a great job explaining the future of monitoring. We are all painfully aware that monitoring alerts are incredibly hard to get right. You constantly have to balance which alerts to configure and what thresholds to set.
Additionally, traditional alerting has two major flaws:
Azure Health Models isn't a silver bullet, but it is a massive improvement. The main takeaway is that alerts are bundled depending on the system. If an App Service spikes in CPU, you receive one consolidated alert rather than a flood of symptoms.
Secondly, you can distinguish between "Critical" (user impact) and "Degraded" (backend issue, no user impact) statuses.
To summarize, Azure Health Models provide these benefits:
We promise we didn't "vibewrite" this blog post, but we certainly enjoyed Sakari Nahi’s session: "Let's vibecode something."
This was arguably the most forward-looking talk of the event. Sakari highlighted a strategic shift that many of us are already feeling: AI is changing the engineer’s role from a simple writer of code to an "operator of AI."
The entire session was a live demonstration on how you can vibecode yourself into a fully working multiplayer game.
We learned how to leverage OpenSpec and why this is incredibly powerful. In short, it’s a specialized development toolkit designed for AI assisted coding. It focuses on Spec-Driven Development (SDD) - a workflow where you clearly define what you want before an AI agent like Claude or Cursor attempts to write the code.
We all know that AI can be a bit unpredictable at times. While the multiplayer game did not fully work at the end of the session, we were inspired.
So inspired, that late the same evening in our own home we fired up Antigravity from Google. We followed the principles of OpenSpec and what we had learned in the session during the day.
With awe, we saw a complete space top down shooter game being created by Antigravity with a couple of prompts and iterations. In 15 minutes we had a local space invaders games, with graphics, levels, highscore and all the bells and whistles.
That’s the power of OpenSpec and vibe coding!
If day one was about the future, day two was about the nitty-gritty reality of managing it all.
We started with a provocative title: "Azure Tags are Dead. Meet Their Weird Cousin: Service Groups," by Stijn Depril and Tim Verbist.
Let’s be honest, Azure tagging was supposed to bring order to chaos. In reality, inconsistent, missing, or unenforced tags often turn FinOps into a nightmare. Stijn and Tim introduced Service Groups as the "missing link."
The live demo was an eye opener, showing how Service Groups can provide the cost visibility and accountability that traditional tagging constantly struggles to deliver. This can be thought of as just a virtual container which can contain Azure resources from anywhere within the tenant, across subscriptions.
This allows different teams in your organization to have a different view. For example, a Product Owner may have one Service Group with all the resources for a specific application regardless if it’s in a production or development subscription.
While Service Groups are still in preview, the session suggested they might eventually replace tags, and perhaps even Management Groups as the primary way to assign policies and group resources. At ACA, we aren't convinced they will replace everything just yet, but the potential is undeniable.
The afternoon took an interesting turn with the session from Roland Guijt “Level Up Your Security: OpenID Connect/OAuth update”.
With the release of OAuth 2.1, Roland highlighted three major protocol improvements:
CloudBrew 2025 is in the books, and it left us with plenty to do and consider.
With Azure Belgium Central officially open, data sovereignty is no longer a buzzword, it’s a baseline. Security is mandatory, AI is becoming integrated in all workflows and governance is finally getting the tools it needs.
Together with our customers and partners, ACA is ready to turn these insights into action. By the time CloudBrew 2026 rolls around, we expect the landscape to have shifted again, and we’ll be ready for it.
Until next time!