Content

V012 - Weekly Technology Vlog #12 (Busy week, and quite a few blog posts to cover!)

V012 - Weekly Technology Vlog #12 (Busy week, and quite a few blog posts to cover!)

2021-03-22

Three months and 350+ subscribers in, with content shipping every day of the past week: a GitHub Codespaces Cloud Drop, the final GPG commit-signing instalment covering YubiKey hardware key storage, a Welsh Azure User Group lightning talk on GitHub Actions, and a Terraform Cloud deep-dive on Azure state management. Azure news centres on Microsoft's commitment to bring Availability Zones to every region by end of 2021, new forecasted cost alerts for Azure Budgets, and the Start Small & Expand landing zone guidance from Sarah Lean and Thomas Maurer. GitHub updates include Dependabot gaining private registry support, CodeQL scanning for Solarigate traces, and a detailed post-mortem on the recent GitHub.com security incident.

31 - Deploying to Azure through Terraform Cloud

31 - Deploying to Azure through Terraform Cloud

2021-03-19

You may have heard of Terraform, but are you aware of Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise? In this session, Chris walks through how he uses Terraform Cloud to deploy infrastructure onto Azure — covering HCL, the Azure RM provider, remote state management, Terraform modules, and a VCS-driven CI/CD pipeline via GitHub integration. Learn how Terraform Cloud's managed state compares to a self-hosted Azure Storage Account backend, and how terraform plan and terraform apply fit into an automated deployment workflow.

How GitHub can help in planning, building and deploying a Podcast/Blog site

How GitHub can help in planning, building and deploying a Podcast/Blog site

2021-03-18

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

Using GPG Keys to sign Git Commits - Part 4

2021-03-17 · 5 min

Part 4 - The final part (at least for now, until I find somewhere else that we can expand on with this)! This part will focus on porting the keys that we have recently generated onto our YubiKey device. I own a YubiKey NEO, so i'll be using that.

Cloud Drops - Introduction to GitHub Codespaces

Cloud Drops - Introduction to GitHub Codespaces

2021-03-16

Have you ever had to setup a development environment from scratch? You have to install a ton of dependencies, probably a few tools along the way as well. It's not fun, it takes a lot of time and it prevents you from being productive. This is where GitHub Codespaces comes in.

V011 - Weekly Technology Vlog #11

V011 - Weekly Technology Vlog #11

2021-03-15

Vlog #11 debuts a refreshed brand and on-screen layout, then covers a busy week: the third instalment of Chris's GPG commit-signing series (linking keys to Git and GitHub), the Cache Aside cloud design pattern episode, and a preview of the upcoming YubiKey-focused Part 4. Azure news centres on the preview of Trusted Launch VMs (defending against bootkits and rootkits), Azure Defender for Storage's new malware-upload detection, and Naraya — the ML system Microsoft uses to predict and proactively mitigate infrastructure failures at scale. On the security operations side, GitHub and Azure DevOps announce automated token revocation for leaked PATs found on public GitHub repositories.

30 - The Cache Aside Pattern (Optimise your caching approach!)

30 - The Cache Aside Pattern (Optimise your caching approach!)

2021-03-12

The cache-aside pattern loads data on demand from a data store into a cache, placing the synchronisation logic in the application layer when the cache does not natively support read-through or write-through operations. This episode covers cache-miss handling, expiration and eviction policies for Azure Cache for Redis, consistency challenges across distributed instances, and when to pre-warm the cache at startup instead.

Using GPG Keys to sign Git Commits - Part 3

2021-03-10 · 8 min

Okay, part 3! At this point, I'm assuming that you have already familiarised yourself with [part 1](./blog/gpg-git-part-1) and [part 2](./blog/gpg-git-part-2) of the series. As a quick recap, part 1 focused on why we would consider using GPG Keys in general. Part 2 focused on how to generate GPG keys along with some recommended practices on splitting out our master (Certification) key, from our specific purpose-driven keys. This post (part 3) focuses on using those keys as part of our usual development workflow using Git. We'll be assuming that GitHub is our end target, as GitHub supports [commit signature verification using GPG Keys](https://docs.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/managing-commit-signature-verification).

Cloud Drops - Installing, Upgrading and Auto-Upgrading the Azure CLI

Cloud Drops - Installing, Upgrading and Auto-Upgrading the Azure CLI

2021-03-10

The Azure CLI provides cross-platform command-line management of Azure resources from Windows, macOS, Linux, Docker containers, and Azure Cloud Shell. This Cloud Drop demonstrates az login, az account set, az group list, az upgrade, and the az config set auto-upgrade.enable=yes command for keeping your CLI automatically up to date.

V010 - Weekly Technology Vlog #10 (Episode backlog until Mid-July! New Microphone, Ignite Content!)

V010 - Weekly Technology Vlog #10 (Episode backlog until Mid-July! New Microphone, Ignite Content!)

2021-03-08

Vlog #10 is a milestone episode: Chris celebrates his birthday and a full year of Cloud With Chris with a new Shure SM7B microphone upgrade. The bulk of the episode is a walkthrough of Microsoft Ignite announcements, covering Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning for on-premises data sovereignty scenarios, the Azure Communication Services and Microsoft Teams interoperability story, and significant security updates including Azure Key Vault Managed HSM (preview) and Trusted Launch for VMs. GitHub Actions fans also get a bonus segment on four lesser-known platform capabilities, including semantic release note generation and bring-your-own-environment workflows.