Blog

Whether you're brand new to Azure or have been using it for some time, you have likely either heard of - or come across - Azure Security Center. It's a service which can prove extremely valuable in baselining, measuring and improving your security posture. But, did you know there is additional functionality beyond the free tier? You may have previously known this as the standard tier, or now know this as Azure Defender, where you can opt in for those Azure Services that you particularly want to protect.

I recently gave a talk on my journey into the Azure Technical Community. While my day job is working for Microsoft, I get a lot of energy through blogging, podcasting and vlogging - ultimately, helping others grow, inspiring and encouraging them along their own technical journey. In this blog, I write about why I got involved with the technical community, some of my reflections on the journey and what I continue to look forward to.

I've written blog posts previously around Azure Service Bus vs Azure Storage Queues, as well as an introduction to Azure Logic Apps and how I used it at the time. Back then, my use-case was fairly rudimentary and focused on a specific scenario. In this blog post, I explain the changes that I have made and how I've used common cloud design / integration patterns to implement a more robust solution.

If you've seen any of my community talks, then you'll be aware that Static sites and the Static Content Hosting Pattern is a passion area of mine. In Azure, there are a couple of great services that stand out when building towards this approach. These are Azure Static Web Apps and the Static sites functionality in Azure Blob Storage. But, which one is right for your scenario? Read on to find out more.

I've recently been on a journey. I've recently come across a number of accessibility issues on cloudwithchris.com. I've been working on making the site more accessible, and I've also been working on making it more inclusive. In this blog post, I'm going to outline some of my findings, the tools that I used to identify those, and how I've worked to fix them. This is an ongoing project, so I'll provide further posts as it makes sense.

I've recently been involved in a few integration focused discussions, where there is a requirement to bring together multiple separate systems. If you've been following the Architecting for the Cloud, one pattern at a time series, then you'll have heard Peter Piper repeat a common phrase - 'High Cohesion, Low Coupling'.

Inspired by the recent episode with Annie Talvasto, I wanted to put together a blog post that will introduce an ongoing series on Cloud With Chris. Before we introduce that series though, it's important that we first introduce the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (more commonly known as CNCF).

We recently introduced you to API Management, how it maps to architectural principals and why you may consider using it as a producer or consumer of APIs. In this post, we'll be continuing on the story - focusing mostly on the API Management policies functionality.

We now live in a world where multiple systems connect or integrate with each other. This is not new, and has been a technology trend for some time. But - in a world of distributed compute (on the increase, thanks to cloud), and the rise of microservices, we find that we have more and more services that we need to integrate with each other. Integration is typically handled through a couple of routes, including Enterprise Messaging (such as message brokers), as well as APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are many areas that we should consider when building our APIs, and that's what we'll give some thought to in this blog post.

You may have heard about ARM Templates. You may have heard about Project Bicep. What are they, how do they differ? Why would I use one over the other? That's exactly what we'll be exploring throughout this blog post!