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Asanka Abeysinghe, Chief Technology Evangelist at WSO2, introduces the cell-based reference architecture — a vendor-neutral, decentralised framework for cloud-native applications. The session explores microservices governance challenges, how Domain-Driven Design scopes service responsibilities into well-bounded cells, and how the cell-based model aligns architecture, development, and DevOps teams into cohesive autonomous units built around business domains.

Chris is joined by Karl Cooke (IrishTechie.com) for a deep dive into the CloudWithChris.com integration platform — a real-world Azure integration architecture built to automate content distribution to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit, and to amplify updates from the Azure, GitHub, and Azure DevOps blogs. The session walks through the full architecture: Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus topics and queues, Azure Table Storage, Azure Logic Apps, and a Vue.js management UI, plus a custom URL shortener for per-platform analytics.

You'll have probably spotted by now that cloud architecture is a passion area of mine, and a regular topic that features on Cloud With Chris. We've talked a lot about Cloud Design Patterns and requirements-driven engineering in the past, as well as the various pillars of software quality. But one area that hasn't been explored too much is the Azure Well-Architected Framework. So in this blog post, we'll explore that, and identify how it can be used in your own projects.

Security vulnerabilities don't wait to be discovered — and developers are often unknowingly shipping them through open source dependencies. In this episode, Chris is joined by DeveloperSteve Coochin, Developer Advocate at Snyk, to explore the real-world state of vulnerabilities in modern applications. Steve shares findings from his research into the PHP ecosystem and explains how developers can shift vulnerability detection left — catching CVEs in dependencies before they reach production, by integrating tools like Snyk directly into their CI/CD pipelines and GitHub workflows.

Back in June, I wrote a blog post on API Management and how you can use API Management policies to enforce access restriction policies. I was going to write a follow up post on how to use API Management policies in additional scenarios, but it's one of those scenarios where great minds think alike!

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.