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Weekly Vlog #19 is broadcast live, opening with Azure's Fluent Design icon rebrand and covering key security and platform updates including the AKS Secret Store CSI driver add-on, Azure Security Center improvements for hybrid and multi-cloud Kubernetes, and new Azure VPN Gateway multi-authentication capabilities. GitHub Enterprise Server 3.1 launches with GitHub Actions, Packages, and Advanced Security, while the release radar spotlights Pulumi as an emerging cross-cloud infrastructure-as-code framework. Chris also recaps Cloud Gaming Notes episode four featuring Sudoku Social's Azure PlayFab backend and a new Cloud Drop on PowerShell in Azure Functions with Carol de Winter.

Once you have a working GitHub Actions workflow, the next challenge is safely deploying across dev, staging, and production with the right secrets in the right places. This episode deep-dives into GitHub Actions Environments: how to scope secrets per environment to enforce the principle of least privilege, configure required reviewers and wait timers as production gates, and assign service principals with minimal Azure RBAC permissions. A live demo deploys the cloudwithchris.com Hugo site to Azure Storage, making every concept concrete.

Azure Functions supports PowerShell Core as a runtime stack, enabling PowerShell scripters to build serverless event-driven workflows without compiled code. This Cloud Drop demonstrates creating an HTTP trigger and an Event Grid trigger function, configuring requirements.psd1 to load the Az PowerShell module, and using a system-assigned managed identity with the Contributor RBAC role to dynamically tag Azure resource groups on creation.

Following on from my recent post where I discussed using schema.org for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I wanted to stick with a similar theme, but a slightly different angle or topic. This time, we'll be covering the topic of crossposting content.

Chris is joined by Dominic, a Senior PM Manager in Microsoft Teams Engineering, who spent nearly two years building Sudoku Social as a passion project — the world's first cross-platform competitive Sudoku game for iOS and Android. Dominic walks through his decision to use Unity for its build-once deploy-to-many capability, and Azure PlayFab as the game backend-as-a-service powering leaderboards, friend systems, matchmaking, and player statistics. The conversation covers how PlayFab's APIs dramatically reduced backend development effort, how Azure DevOps supported the CI/CD pipeline for the game, and the iterative learning journey of a first-time game developer teaching himself Unity, iOS, and Android development simultaneously.

One of my recent tasks for Cloud with Chris was to investigate some additional areas for SEO optimisation. If you're unaware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; a set of practices to improve your ranking in search engines such as Google, Bing and others when they crawl and index your site. I was already in a good position, but there were some things that were frustrating me, we'll explore those in this blog post.

Weekly Vlog #18 arrives on a UK Bank Holiday, covering Microsoft's acquisition of Kinvolk to accelerate cloud-native investment and the preview launch of Azure Web PubSub — a managed WebSocket service for real-time applications. Chris reviews Delivery Plans 2.0 GA in Azure DevOps and GitHub engineering posts on feature flags and mono-repo performance optimisations, then shares a detailed update on the Hugo CrossPoster open-source project now featuring unit tests, SonarCloud analysis, and Polly resilience patterns including circuit breakers and retry logic.

Following hot off the heels of my recent blog post introducing Logic Apps and how I use the technology on cloudwithchris.com, I thought it made sense for the second post to continue the Logic Apps theme. This time, we'll be focusing on Logic Apps preview (sometimes referred to as Logic Apps v2) - the evolution of Logic Apps. Typically when you deploy Logic Apps, you deploy it as a multi-tenanted service. There are some benefits to that, including the serverless capability, so being able to pay per execution rather than an overall infrastructure cost. But what if cost is less of a requirement for you? What if you care more about portability, greater performance, and ultimately control over your environment? If those are more along the lines of your requirements, then you may want to investigate the Logic Apps previewhttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-overview-preview. The Logic Apps preview builds upon the Azure Functions extensibility model. Yes, you read that right - Azure Logic Apps is effectively building on top of Azure Functions. Why should you care? Anywhere that Azure Functions can run, then Logic Apps can run.

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 websites, 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.

Weekly Vlog #17 covers Azure's UK Met Office supercomputer partnership, Application Gateway URL rewrite now GA, and chaos engineering taking centre stage in the Azure DevOps blog — exploring how to test resilience systematically as part of your DevOps cycle. GitHub celebrates the Mars 2020 Ingenuity helicopter's open source story and announces protections for open source maintainers against crypto-mining abuse in GitHub Actions. Chris also unveils the Hugo CrossPoster — a new .NET pet project to automate cross-posting Hugo content to Medium and Dev.to with canonical URL support — and invites .NET collaborators for a live coding session.