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It's hard to believe that 2021 is done, and we're now in 2022. In one sense, it feels like a 'blink and you miss it' year. In another way, it feels as though it's been one of the longest years to have passed us by. It's fair to say that 2021 has had its challenges, not least in the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. You may have caught my recent blog post on my mental health challenges. Practicing mindfulness and gratitude are excellent approaches for me to keep my overall mental health in balance. So, this post is just as much for me as anyone else. I want to highlight the achievements from the last year or so. I won't be setting any resolutions for 2021, but want to build upon what I've learned in 2021.

You will have noticed that there haven't been any updates on Cloud With Chris for some time. I've also been quiet on social media. For any of my colleagues, you may have seen that I've had time away from work by my out of office messages. In this blog post, I want to open up about my recent challenges and have an honest discussion. Whether you've experienced mental health challenges before, are currently going through tough times, or haven't experienced any and don't quite understand - I hope that me sharing this helps. We're going to be talking about mental health.

Did you know that Static Sites can help you build performant sites that easily scale globally? Better yet, they can be incredibly cost-effective!

In this session, Chris provides a series of updates focused around Azure, DevOps, GitHub and Cloud With Chris.

A little while ago, I wrote a blog post on Using the GitHub self-hosted runner and Azure Virtual Machines to login with a System Assigned Managed Identity, which seems to get a good amount of views week on week. Reflecting on some questions that have popped up this week (and regularly received over my time in the DevOps space), I thought that it makes sense to write a post on how to use Azure DevOps self-hosted agents to deploy to private resources. So, that's what we'll be covering in this post!

Chris is joined by LaBrina Loving, Developer Advocate for Gaming at Microsoft, who shares her journey from twenty years of .NET and enterprise development into the world of game development. The episode covers growing cloud adoption among game studios, the key technical differences between enterprise and game development (latency, UDP vs TCP), how enterprise development skills transfer directly to gaming, and practical tips for any developer considering the leap.

Chris plays Sea of Thieves with Johnny and Simon while discussing Johnny's upcoming Azure Quantum and Q# book with Apress, Simon's Azure certification journey from AZ-900 to AZ-500, in-person speaking at Welsh Azure User Group, and managing content creator energy levels.

Performance testing has traditionally lived in high-fidelity pre-production environments — but by the time you find a performance issue that late in the cycle, the cost to fix it is already compounding. In this episode, Chris is joined by HariKrishnan, Cloud Transformation Consultant, to explore a practical shift-left approach to performance testing. Hari shares real-world experience identifying the categories of performance issues that can be reproduced locally or in CI pipelines using tools like Gatling and Docker, reducing MTTR and avoiding the environment time-sharing bottlenecks that slow teams down.

Azure Arc is a suite of Azure Services that simplifies management of workloads in a Hybrid and Multicloud deployment. You've likely heard about this from the Infrastructure or Virtual Machine perspective, but how can it help with your applications? We'll explore how App Services, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Event Grid and API Management Gateways can be deployed to on-premises and other clouds using Azure Arc!

In this session, we'll navigate through a typical real-world architecture of a solution and consider the decisions that we may wish to make at various stages. Alongside that, we'll factor in how requirements and design patterns can help influence our overall design, based on learnings from Chris' 5+ year journey taking customers to production on Azure.