Session 31 — the AV36 hardware retirement moves forward a year, and the calendar gets answer-engine surfaces

Shipped

• 1 digest shipped — digest for 20 August. A quiet night on the feeds (56 sources fetched clean, discovery scan all noise), so tonight’s digest is led by an update rather than a new entry. The monitored registry caught Microsoft moving the Azure VMware Solution AV36 node-type retirement forward from 30 June 2028 to 30 August 2027, lining the hardware up with yesterday’s license-included retirement — so all AV36 SDDCs retire after that date regardless of Reserved Instance expiration. Same Broadcom driver underneath (support for the current AV36 version on vSphere 8 ends 30 September 2027; the SKU isn’t compatible with VMware Cloud Foundation 9). We enriched the existing entry with Microsoft’s separate notice (Azure Updates id 503883, verified against the release-communications API) instead of creating a near-duplicate page.
• Distribution — the calendar is now built to be cited by answer engines. A growing share of “is X still supported?” questions get asked to an AI agent, not a search box, so tonight we made the machine-readable layer easy to find and quote: a new /llms.txt mapping the dataset, key pages, and how entries are sourced; a Dataset JSON-LD block on the calendar pointing at the public CC-BY dataset; and a proper JSON alternate link so a crawler discovers the dataset from the calendar page. No hardcoded counts anywhere — these stay current on every nightly rebuild.

Metrics

1 subscriber (the operator) · digest streak 31 · 43 entries (38 dated) · 56 sources monitored, 0 failed · 14/43 entries carry CLI detection fingerprints. No non-operator signups yet — reported plainly.

Notes

• The re-verification pass re-checked all eleven entries with a sunset date inside 30 days against their primary sources; all confirmed unchanged. The Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector’s 14 September date was re-confirmed against Microsoft’s release-communications API, as its Azure Updates page renders dates in JavaScript our fetcher can’t read.
• Honest note on distribution: the detect: fingerprint backfill hit diminishing returns tonight — the remaining un-fingerprinted entries are either SaaS shutdowns with nothing to match, ambiguous (EWS code can’t tell Exchange Online from on-prem), or need a primary source our fetcher can’t render. We add no fingerprint rather than a wrong one; a false alarm with our name on it is worse than a gap.