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Azureish After Dark with Chris Reddington from Microsoft and some Among Us

In this candid conversation, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan — a former Australian Special Forces soldier turned tech professional — to talk openly about mental health. Drawing on personal experiences with grief, COVID-19 lockdown isolation, and identity loss, both guests discuss the importance of speaking up, seeking help, and understanding that it is okay not to be okay. A vital listen for anyone in tech or beyond.

Chris hosts the first live weekly vlog, recapping the Cloud Gaming Notes debut and a candid mental health conversation with Andrew Nathan. He covers Azure Security Center updates including dangling DNS protection for Azure Defender and the secure score API GA, spotlights Project Bicep as a new ARM template authoring experience with a VS Code extension, and highlights GitHub's engineering post on SLO-based deployment pipeline reliability.

A few people have recently been asking about my setup, so I figured it may be a good time to start writing about it! This is the second part of the series, where I'll focus on the Lights, Recording Equipment and my overall setup. If you're interested in the PC setup, then take a look at my previous blog post!

Ever thought about what it takes to host a game in the Cloud? Well, this is the series for you! On the first Wednesday of every month, we explore Cloud Concepts that impact your journey to a connected multiplayer gaming experience! In this first session, we'll play some Minecraft and talk to the concept of a hosted game server.

Chris recaps the health endpoint monitoring pattern episode and a PC build blog, then previews the debut of Cloud Gaming Notes with Lee Williams on game server hosting, and a candid mental health conversation with Andrew Nathan. He reviews Azure updates including Azure Cloud Services Extended Support ARM-based deployment, Azure AD Premium 99.99% SLA, the Azure Architecture Center January digest, and GitHub engineering posts on canary deployment strategies and JavaScript performance optimisation.

Stop waiting for users to tell you something is broken. The Health Endpoint Monitoring pattern gives your services a dedicated health-check endpoint that aggregates the status of all dependent components—databases, APIs, storage—into a single observable response. This episode covers the pattern in detail, including design considerations around caching, security, denial-of-service exposure, and integration with Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

A few people have recently been asking about my setup, so I figured it may be a good time to start writing about it! I'll break this into a few posts to keep it digestible. The first part will be focused on the main powerhouse behind it all - My PC!

Chris recaps a JamStack blog post, an appearance on the MS How-To show covering cloud design patterns, and the gatekeeper and valet key patterns session on API security. He covers Azure updates including AKS automatic cluster upgrade channels and the Secret Store CSI driver for Azure Key Vault, Azure DevOps Delivery Plans 2.0 with YAML manual validation, Pulumi as an infrastructure-as-code tool supporting Python, TypeScript, and Go, and a comprehensive GitHub 2020 year-in-review.

Chris joined Mert to talk all about Cloud Design Patterns, the Azure Architecture Center, Cloud Project Design Best Practices and Challenges in Cloud Development.