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Great news! Azure Static Web Apps are now Generally Available! Just to provide some reassurance, Static Web Apps are a concept that I'm fairly passionate about. You may have seen this blog post on why I think JAMStack and the cloud are a great combination. You may have seen one of my many talks on how I use Hugo, Azure Storage, Azure CDN and GitHub to easily deploy a very cheap and scalable site into Azure. But hold on, if Azure Storage is an option already - Why am I so excited about the prospect of Azure Static Web Apps? Azure Static Web Apps offer so much more than just the hosting aspect!

I'm sat writing this blog post about 4 months after writing my 2021 kick off blog post. My aim for 2021 was to focus on one goal - contributing back into the technical community.

You may have heard of Event-Driven Architectures before, but haven't had the chance to get hands-on and build one as yet. That's exactly what we'll be working through in this blog post!

Recently on Twitter, I was asked by @thegraycat on whether I knew of any resources to manage pipelines in version control. I sent across several top of mind thoughts over Twitter, but it got me thinking that there may be others with the same question and it could make a good blog post. So here we are, as I talk through some of my considerations for pipelines as code.

Following on from my recent post where I discussed using schema.org for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I wanted to stick with a similar theme, but a slightly different angle or topic. This time, we'll be covering the topic of crossposting content.

One of my recent tasks for Cloud with Chris was to investigate some additional areas for SEO optimisation. If you're unaware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; a set of practices to improve your ranking in search engines such as Google, Bing and others when they crawl and index your site. I was already in a good position, but there were some things that were frustrating me, we'll explore those in this blog post.

Following hot off the heels of my recent blog post introducing Logic Apps and how I use the technology on cloudwithchris.com, I thought it made sense for the second post to continue the Logic Apps theme. This time, we'll be focusing on Logic Apps preview (sometimes referred to as Logic Apps v2) - the evolution of Logic Apps. Typically when you deploy Logic Apps, you deploy it as a multi-tenanted service. There are some benefits to that, including the serverless capability, so being able to pay per execution rather than an overall infrastructure cost. But what if cost is less of a requirement for you? What if you care more about portability, greater performance, and ultimately control over your environment? If those are more along the lines of your requirements, then you may want to investigate the Logic Apps previewhttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-overview-preview. The Logic Apps preview builds upon the Azure Functions extensibility model. Yes, you read that right - Azure Logic Apps is effectively building on top of Azure Functions. Why should you care? Anywhere that Azure Functions can run, then Logic Apps can run.

Many years ago, I wrote a blog post which introduced Logic Apps at a very high level when they were initially released. Ahead of a blog post that I want to write on Logic Apps v2, I thought that it may be worth writing a more thorough recap of Logic Apps as a platform. Logic Apps is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, which allows you to easily build visual workflow integrations. Whether that's plumbing several microservices together, entirely different solutions within an enterprise, or some of the repetitive backend administrative tasks for a podcast or blog site, Logic Apps may be worth exploring.

Principal of least privilege is a commonly used phrase within the Technology Industry. The idea is that we'll assign permissions of what the user needs to get the job done, rather than anything broader or more privileged. This helps reduce the blast radius in the event of a compromised account. This stretches to Azure resources at the management plane, but in some cases can also stretch to the data plane of those resources. We'll be exploring these further in this blog post.

Often, I'm asked the question how do I get started with Azure? Are there any resources, tutorials, guides that you can recommend? I know about topic X, but how do I learn more? I've been working with, and continuously learning Azure over the past 7 years or so. When I started, the main resources were Microsoft Docs and community sites. Both great resorces, but there was a gap for a truly educational resource, rather than technical reference material. Enter Microsoft Learn.