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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.

If you've seen any of my community talks, then you'll be aware that Static sites and the Static Content Hosting Pattern is a passion area of mine. In Azure, there are a couple of great services that stand out when building towards this approach. These are Azure Static Web Apps and the Static sites functionality in Azure Blob Storage. But, which one is right for your scenario? Read on to find out more.

Chris and Simon play Sea of Thieves while covering Azure Firewall Premium features, 5G and cloud computing for IoT edge scenarios, GitHub Actions for static site deployments, and open source project best practices from a recent Cloud With Chris episode with JJ Asghar.

Open source projects and communities are the backbone of modern software development, yet the human side of building and sustaining them is rarely discussed as openly as the technology itself. In this episode, Chris is joined by JJ Asghar, Developer Advocate at IBM, who shares hard-won lessons from over a decade cultivating open source communities — from a small Linux distribution to OpenStack, Kubernetes, Tekton, and Istio. This is not a tools talk; it is a candid conversation about the soft skills, scoping decisions, and leadership approaches that separate thriving projects from those that burn out.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a DevOps practice where engineers frequently merge small code changes into a central repository, triggering automated builds and test suites to catch regressions early. This video explains how CI applies equally to application code, Infrastructure as Code, database schemas, and data science notebooks, and shows how GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines act as automated gatekeepers through pull request workflows.

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