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Chris is joined by Matt Bradley, who helped establish the Public Cloud division at UKFast, to discuss four years of hands-on Azure experience. From migration and consultancy through DevOps automation, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud management with Azure Arc, Matt shares practical lessons, infrastructure as code trade-offs, compliance benefits, and why you must always design for failure in cloud workloads.

If you follow the news around Microsoft, you've probably found it very hard to miss the fact that the Microsoft //Build conference happened this week. Microsoft //Build is their annual developer-focused conference, where they typically announce new features, updates and share their strategy as they evolve technologies. In this update, I'll provide a summary of the announcements that particularly stood out to me and give you some context around why. Whether that's announcements that excite me, features that I think are crucial to be adopted, etc. It's worth noting that I'll be focusing primarily on the Microsoft Azure Updates here, as that's my typical area of expertise!

Microsoft Cloud Advocate Dean Bryen is joined by guests Carole Logan (developer and tech lead based in Glasgow) and Chris Reddington (Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect) as they take you through the end-to-end process of editing, committing and deploying code across different platforms and tools. We’ll end with a Q&A session and next steps for you to try the process out for yourself to see how agile and collaborative it is. We look forward to seeing you there!

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.

As I'm using GitHub Actions to deploy my site to Azure, it made sense for me to build a GitHub action that I can use within my GitHub Actions workflow to cross-post content. That's exactly what I'll be talking about in this blog post!

Weekly Vlog #21 builds anticipation for Microsoft Build, previewing Chris's upcoming presentation on friction-free developer workflows using GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Actions, and Azure Static Web Apps. Azure highlights include the Key Vault SLA raised to 99.99%, a preview of native Elastic integration, and Azure reaching its 100th compliance offering. Chris also recaps a hands-on Application Insights deep dive with Isaac Levin and covers a Helm explainer from the Azure DevOps blog alongside a Kubernetes Open Hack coaching week.

Understanding how our applications function in the wild is essential for developers when issues arise. With the power of knowledge, we can enable ourselves to provide the best experience to our fellow developers, and our stakeholders. One of the solutions that supplies this power is Application Insights. Application Insights is a service provided by Microsoft allowing you to monitor your application live, detect performance anomalies, and observe this data with powerful analytics. Together we will see how easy it is to add Application Insights to our applications, whether we have access to the codebase or not. Once instrumented, we will dive deeper into the capabilities of Application Insights and show how to leverage all the rich data collected from our application. Finally, as developers the last thing we want to do is troubleshoot an issue in Production, with everyone watching and the stakes are high. Watch as we monitor a live application that is throwing exceptions and how Application Insights can be used to help us solve the problem faster. When we are done, attendees will be empowered with the knowledge to leverage Application Insights to be more productive with their work.

Great news! Azure Static Web Apps are now Generally Available! Just to provide some reassurance, Static Web Apps are a concept that I'm fairly passionate about. You may have seen this blog post on why I think JAMStack and the cloud are a great combination. You may have seen one of my many talks on how I use Hugo, Azure Storage, Azure CDN and GitHub to easily deploy a very cheap and scalable site into Azure. But hold on, if Azure Storage is an option already - Why am I so excited about the prospect of Azure Static Web Apps? Azure Static Web Apps offer so much more than just the hosting aspect!

I'm sat writing this blog post about 4 months after writing my 2021 kick off blog post. My aim for 2021 was to focus on one goal - contributing back into the technical community.

Weekly Vlog #20 celebrates hitting 500 YouTube subscribers ahead of schedule, then reviews one of Chris's most content-heavy weeks: Azure Pipelines-as-code tutorials, an event-driven architecture walkthrough using Azure Event Grid and Azure Functions, and a candid mental health live stream. The headline Azure announcement is Azure Static Web Apps reaching general availability with built-in CI/CD, serverless API integration, and free SSL. GitHub rounds out the episode with new hardware security key support for SSH operations and native video uploads to issues and pull requests.