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Chris is joined by long-time friend Erin Davies — an Agile Coach who accidentally stumbled into tech after applying for what she thought was a buying and merchandising role at John Lewis. Erin shares her journey from studying law and sociology at Warwick to becoming an Agile Coach, offers honest reflections on women in tech and imposter syndrome, and explains what Agile really looks like in practice when you're in the trenches. The episode also explores content creation, starting a podcast, and finding your voice in the tech community.

We now live in a world where multiple systems connect or integrate with each other. This is not new, and has been a technology trend for some time. But - in a world of distributed compute (on the increase, thanks to cloud), and the rise of microservices, we find that we have more and more services that we need to integrate with each other. Integration is typically handled through a couple of routes, including Enterprise Messaging (such as message brokers), as well as APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are many areas that we should consider when building our APIs, and that's what we'll give some thought to in this blog post.

In a first for the weekly vlog format, Chris goes live from Sea of Thieves, delivering Azure and GitHub news while sailing the seas with Simon — and timing it perfectly for the Pirates of the Caribbean crossover launching the following day. Azure updates include West US 3 region's sustainability-focused launch, 5G enterprise edge compute expansion, Bridge to Kubernetes replacing Dev Spaces, and Azure Data Factory plus Databricks integration improvements. Chris also recaps the Azure Bicep blog post, Shannon Keane's Azure VMware Solution session, and John Lund's cloud journey, with Aaron Davies (agile coach and women-in-tech advocate) lined up for Friday.

You may have heard about ARM Templates. You may have heard about Project Bicep. What are they, how do they differ? Why would I use one over the other? That's exactly what we'll be exploring throughout this blog post!

Chris sits down with John Lunn (aka jonnychipz) — technical architect at BT Enterprise, co-organiser of the Welsh Azure User Group, and creator of johnnychips.com. John shares his journey from M365 and unified comms into Azure cloud architecture, what sparked his commitment to the #100DaysOfCloud challenge, and his practical advice on navigating certifications, managing the overwhelming breadth of the cloud ecosystem, and why getting involved in the community is one of the fastest ways to grow. Whether you're just starting out with Azure or thinking about launching a blog or YouTube channel, there's plenty to take away here.

Chris is joined by Shannon Kuehn, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for an accessible deep dive into Azure VMware Solution (AVS) — the dedicated VMware platform hosted within Azure datacentres. Shannon explains how AVS lets organisations migrate on-premises VMware environments into Azure without a forklift upgrade, using live vMotion migrations via HCX with zero downtime, and unlocks Azure-native integrations including Azure Security Center, Azure Active Directory, Application Gateway, and PaaS services.

Recorded on a Monday morning after a sunny weekend, vlog #24 delivers the week's Azure, Azure DevOps, and GitHub news — covering Azure Virtual Desktop's rebrand, enterprise-scale landing zones for AKS, Azure Migrate private endpoint support, and GitHub supply chain security updates. Chris also recaps recent Cloud with Chris sessions on GitHub Actions, Azure Arc for apps, hybrid cloud, and the Geode pattern, then previews the upcoming Azure VMware Solution session with Shannon Keane and John Lund's cloud journey.

I recently started thinking about the typical setup process for a GitHub Action Workflow which will deploy into Azure. Typically, the process is to use the Azure/login GitHub Action, and then use the azure/cli or another Azure GitHub Action to deploy into GitHub. This is a nice approach. However, from my initial research - I wasn't able to see a way use the Azure/login GitHub Action to deploy into Azure using a System Assigned Managed Identity. This got me wondering, is this possible?

Episode 11 covered the Geode pattern in theory — now it's time to get hands-on! Will Eastbury returns to walk through a real-world OData service deployed across three Azure regions (US West, Australia Southeast, and UK West), stitched together by Azure Front Door for active-active routing. Watch how Cosmos DB replicates data across all regions as a shared backplane, how health probes detect and remove unhealthy geodes from rotation, and the ASP.NET middleware pattern needed to handle URL rewriting — a critical authentication gotcha when hosting services behind a reverse proxy.

In part 1 of this Using Azure Arc for Apps series, we explored Azure Arc and Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters. In this post, we'll be exploring Event Grid for Kubernetes. At time of writing, this approach is in public preview, so we may see certain limitations / features that are not yet available.