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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.

A double episode catching up on two weeks of Azure updates including AKS scale down modes, Cosmos DB Functions v4, and Azure Functions runtime 4.0 with .NET 6, plus GitHub CLI 2.0, Advanced Security secret scanning APIs, and a look at secretless application patterns with managed identities.

A decade after Patrick Debois coined "DevOps," the landscape looks radically different. In this episode, Daniela Fontani — CTO at Central Consulting and long-time open source contributor — breaks down the most important DevOps trends reshaping the industry today: DevSecOps, GitOps, NoOps, automation-first pipelines, and the growing role of platform engineering. Plus, the honest truth about which buzzwords actually matter and which you can safely ignore.

Migrating to the Cloud is more than just deciding which technology you want to adopt, or building out the appropriate architectures for your implementation. There is a significant amount of planning needed before you take your initial steps. For example, the initial migration process, establishing a foundation for your ongoing governance, and the wider management of expectations from your business, as well as establishing team structure and responsibilities. This is where the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework comes in.

Chris Reddington is joined by Thomas Thornton — DevOps specialist at Kainos — for a practical deep dive into real-world DevOps. They cover CI/CD pipeline design, Git branching strategies (including trunk-based development), pull request workflows, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitOps. Thomas draws on experience managing 83 Azure subscriptions and 120+ GitOps-driven applications in production.

Chris walks through the new GitHub Issues beta, showcasing project boards, table views, YAML-based issue forms, and converting checklists to sub-issues, alongside Azure capacity reservation, zone redundant disk storage, and DevSecOps shifting-left updates.

Most organizations undergoing digital transformation are moving through maturity stages — from localized, monolithic setups toward agile, cloud-native, data-driven platforms. But what does it take to architect that journey? In this session, Asanka Abesinghe shares a practical framework covering the six design principles of digitally-driven organizations (decentralized, lean-agile, open standards, customer-centric, cloud-native, and data-driven), how to layer business, information, application, and technology architecture, and the evolving role of the architect as an organizational bridge between business strategy and technical execution. From the build-vs-buy decision to maturity-model road-mapping, this is an essential session for architects leading or contributing to enterprise transformation programmes.

This post is similar to another I recently wrote on using Branch Protection Rules in GitHub. Instead of focusing on GitHub, we'll be looking at how you can use Branch Policies in Azure DevOps (specifically, Azure Repos). If you're using Azure Repos, but not using Branch Policies - I'd encourage you to start using them! I hope this post helps you learn how!

Cloud migration is as much a people and process challenge as it is a technical one — a fact underscored by a 2020 Cloud Security Alliance study in which 90% of respondents reported a failed migration. In this episode, Chris is joined by Suzanne Tedrick, Azure Infrastructure Specialist at Microsoft and award-winning author of 'Women of Color in Tech', to explore how the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework provides a holistic, structured path to successful migrations. From governance and stakeholder alignment to multi-cloud strategy, this conversation covers the critical foundations every organisation needs before and during their cloud journey.

In case you haven't heard, I'm planning to do some livestreams in the near future which are focused on live development / building in the cloud. I'm working on a few ideas, but if you have any suggestions - please throw them my way! To prepare for this, I've recently spent some time making sure my local development environment is in order. Windows Terminal and Windows Subsystem for Linux are a couple of the key tools in my local development environment. Windows Subsystem for Linux is the focus for this post.