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Gaming has evolved from isolated save files to persistent, cloud-powered experiences that follow players across every device they own. In this third episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris and Lee Williams explore the cloud architecture behind in-game inventory and economy systems — using Sea of Thieves as a live example. Topics include persistent state management with Azure Cosmos DB, managed gaming backends with PlayFab, Live Ops patterns, and how cloud infrastructure enables monetisation and long-term player retention at scale.

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

Microsoft Learn is a gamified education hub on docs.microsoft.com covering Azure, GitHub, Microsoft 365, and more through modules, learning paths, and the LearnTV video platform. Browse the catalogue by role, level, or product, earn XP to level up, and use renewal assessments to recertify without retaking full exams.

In this Easter Sunday livestream, Chris covers Microsoft's Forrester Wave leader recognition for Azure Functions (FaaS), a wave of AKS updates including the new run command feature and Open Service Mesh add-on, and the GitHub Advanced Security security overview beta plus GA of secret scanning for private repositories. Delivery Plans 2.0 in Azure DevOps approaches GA with card styling and dependency visualisation, while GitHub Desktop gains cherry-pick support and GitHub Mobile adds working-hours notification controls. Cloud with Chris highlights include a beginner Git 101 Cloud Drop, a community blogging panel, the External Configuration and Claim Check architecture pattern episode with Peter Piper, and a preview of the upcoming Northern Azure User Group talk alongside Scott Hanselman.

Windows Terminal is a modern multi-shell application available via the Microsoft Store or winget, supporting Windows Command Prompt, PowerShell, PowerShell Core, WSL distributions, and Azure Cloud Shell in a single window. This Cloud Drop demonstrates installing Windows Terminal, connecting to Azure Cloud Shell via device code login, and creating custom SSH profiles to connect directly to Azure virtual machines from both Windows OpenSSH and WSL.

Chris and Peter cover two cloud design patterns in depth. The External Configuration Store pattern addresses one of the most critical security concerns in cloud development: keeping secrets and connection strings out of source code. They explore Azure Key Vault and Azure App Configuration as canonical implementations, discuss deployment slot behaviour, and highlight the risks of committing credentials to version control. The Claim Check pattern tackles a different challenge — what happens when your message payload exceeds the size limits of your messaging infrastructure (Azure Service Bus, Azure Queue Storage)? By externalising the payload to a data store and passing only a correlation ID on the queue, you gain scalability and flexibility at the cost of added latency. Azure Event Grid's automatic claim check generation is also demonstrated. Security is a thread running through both patterns: compromised config stores and poisoned messages both demand an operational response plan.

I've recently released a few Cloud Drops episodes on Git related content. The Git Behind the Scenes video was incredibly well received. I'm also aware from my day-to-day discussions that there's a mix of experiences with Git, so also made a Git 101 Video. In this Cloud World that we live in, version control is an important concept beyond the 'traditional' developers. Infrastructure Engineers can now version control their Infrastructure as Code, or maintenance scripts. Data Scientists can version control their experiments and tests. And of course, developers can version control the code for their software. I also consider version control as a gateway or first step into the world of DevOps. Typically when you think about build and release pipelines, you are triggering based upon some version control event (e.g. a commit to a particular branch, a merge of a pull request, etc.). Over the past few years, I've seen a trend where organisations are looking to automate quickly, rather than relying on the traditional hands-on-keyboard approach which can be error-prone and time consuming. Whether we're talking in this context about Infrastructure as Code, Application Code, database schemas as code, data science experiments or any other representation as code, it doesn't matter. Typically the roads lead back to the same place, to version control. So in this blog post, I'll be covering the fundamentals of Git and how to get started. For anyone that is particularly inclined, there will also be some information on what's happening behind the scenes when you work through these fundamental concepts.

Chatting to some colleagues about blogging and sharing our success stories and failures!

Git is a distributed version control system where every developer holds a complete copy of the repository and its history locally, enabling offline work and fast branching. This Cloud Drop covers git init, git add, git commit, git status, git log, git push, git pull, and git clone, plus VS Code's built-in Git integration and the Git Credential Manager for authenticating against GitHub and other remote hosts.

Weekly Vlog #13 covers an action-packed Azure week: enterprise landing zones with modular designs, zonal disaster recovery via Azure Site Recovery, Security Center compliance enhancements, and Mark Russinovich's standout Ignite session on Azure innovation. The GitHub roundup highlights the GitHub Actions capture-the-flag security writeup and a multi-stage exploit chain from the GitHub Security Lab — essential reading for any DevSecOps practitioner. Cloud with Chris updates include the channel's most-viewed video to date on Git internals, a Fuse.js-powered site search, series navigation, and a packed April talk schedule featuring the Northern Azure User Group (alongside Scott Hanselman) and Global Azure Bootcamp.