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Chris is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. He'll explore how GitHub Actions can be used to deploy your own static sites (or other apps!) to Azure.

Hearing impairment affects an estimated 430 million people worldwide — yet accessibility in public speaking is still an afterthought for most presenters. Kai Saata, a data consultant and cochlear implant user, joins Chris to explain why closed captions matter for audiences with hearing difficulties, how cloud-powered live transcription in tools like Microsoft Teams is changing inclusive communication, and what every speaker can do today to make their content accessible to more people.

Chris and community members sail the Sea of Thieves while covering Azure updates including Government Top Secret GA, ASP.NET app migration tooling, and Forrester Wave recognition for streaming analytics. GitHub updates include 2FA enforcement for git operations, Git 2.33, and Discussions GA, while the crew discusses Azure certification prep strategies, career transitions into DevOps, and the open-source Cloud Katana security assessment tool.

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.