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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.

Azure Event Grid routes blob-created events from Azure Storage to downstream handlers, enabling scalable event-driven pipelines where producers and consumers are fully decoupled. This Cloud Drop builds an end-to-end workflow using an Event Grid system topic, subject filtering, an Azure Storage Queue as the event handler, a system-managed identity with the Storage Queue Data Message Sender role, and an Azure Function queue trigger to process and remove each message.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build a production SaaS platform in your own time? In this Tales from the Real World episode, Chris is joined by Jamie Maguire — Developer, Microsoft MVP (AI), and Pluralsight Author — who shares the full story behind Social Opinion, a Twitter analytics and productivity platform built with .NET and Azure. Jamie walks through the evolution from a custom Bayesian text analytics API (built during his master's degree) to a full SaaS powered by Azure Cognitive Services, covering social listening, sentiment analysis, content scheduling, and audience insights. He also shares practical advice for anyone looking to build their own product: pick something you're genuinely passionate about, validate demand before writing code, and ship early.

We often hear about Kubernetes, App Services, Virtual Machines and more. But did you ever think about using Azure Storage to host your sites? The Static Content Hosting pattern is a cost-effective way to host your sites, combined with a CDN can be incredibly performant! Chris will show how he uses these patterns, along with GitHub Actions to deploy and maintain his CloudWithChris.com podcast.

In this session, we’ll navigate through a typical journey when designing the architecture of a cloud solution and consider the decisions that we may wish to make at various stages. Alongside that, we’ll factor in how requirements and design patterns can help influence our overall design.

Chris is the producer and host of his podcast CloudWithChris.com. He uses GitHub to version control the site's source code, GitHub Actions to build and deploy the site to Azure and other clouds, and GitHub Issues/Boards to plan the episode backlog. In this session, we'll explore how GitHub can be used to deploy your own workloads to Azure.

Mental health affects us all, yet stigma and misunderstanding remain barriers to open conversation. In this candid livestream recorded during Mental Health Awareness Week, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan (Microsoft FastTrack for Azure) and Will Owen (formerly Microsoft, now Maersk) to share their personal mental health journeys — covering depression, anxiety, COVID-19 isolation, CBT therapy, medication, and the pressures of high-performance tech careers.

You may have heard of Event-Driven Architectures before, but haven't had the chance to get hands-on and build one as yet. That's exactly what we'll be working through in this blog post!