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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.

Chris covers Azure updates including container app modernization, DDoS protection trends for H1 2021, and virtual network resizing in preview, alongside the general availability of GitHub Codespaces with a deep dive into how GitHub's engineering team uses Codespaces to develop GitHub.com. He also discusses Bicep and Infrastructure as Code on the Azure DevOps blog, plus upcoming sessions on AKS, application security, and cell-based cloud architectures.

When using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), there's a chance that kubenet might be the only possible choice due to your requirements. If so, you may still want to use Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) to leverage Azure Application Gateway's Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities. In this session, we will make the journey together to have a working AGIC in an AKS cluster with kubenet and managed identities.

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.

A community Among Us stream with twelve cloud professionals discussing Kubernetes trade-offs in production, Windows 365 Cloud PC versus Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Arc for multi-cloud app deployment, game engine choices between Unity and Unreal, and imposter syndrome in tech careers.

When COVID-19 forced the vOpen.Tech conference to pivot from a physical event to a fully virtual one, the organising team had fewer than two weeks to build a production-ready registration and identity system — with minimal budget. In this episode, Chris is joined by Facundo La Rocca (Faku), a .NET developer and conference organiser from Buenos Aires, who shares how Azure AD B2C became the silver bullet that made it possible: delivering a scalable, secure IAM platform with almost no custom code, at no cost, in under a fortnight.

Monitoring is often an afterthought — until something breaks. In this episode, Chris is joined by Vanessa Bruwer, Senior Engineer on Microsoft's FastTrack for Azure team, to explore how organisations can build a structured observability strategy using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and distributed tracing. Vanessa shares the FastTrack methodology for taking teams from zero monitoring knowledge to self-sufficient Azure Monitor configuration, covering alerting strategy, metrics, and the differences between monitoring a VM versus a distributed microservice architecture.

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.

Chris opens with a heartfelt tribute to Abel Wang before covering Azure updates including Site Recovery cross-region replication, ExpressRoute expansions, and immutable blob storage. The episode highlights GitHub's 15+ new code scanning integrations with open source security tools, a comparison of Azure Static Web Apps hosting options, and upcoming Cloud with Chris content plans.

Chris Reddington is joined by Dr. Keith McNally, a college professor with over 15 years of teaching experience who leads Microsoft's Software and Systems Academy (MSSA) — a skill-bridge programme helping US military veterans transition into IT careers through Azure cloud training. They discuss project-based learning, how to teach people to think (not just follow procedures), the soft skills civilians take for granted, and what it really takes to bridge the gap between military service and a career in cloud.