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Do you have an application with specific scalability and continuity-of-service requirements? What happens when traffic spikes dramatically — think a major concert or FIFA World Cup ticket sale crashing a site? In this Architecting for the Cloud episode, Chris and Will Eastbury walk through three closely related patterns: Queue-Based Load Levelling, Competing Consumers, and the Asynchronous Request-Reply pattern. They explore how message queues act as shock absorbers for traffic spikes, how competing consumers enable elastic horizontal scaling, and how async request-reply lets you retrofit these patterns into existing architectures with minimal disruption. Key trade-offs covered include queue depth limits, Azure Service Bus configuration, distributed tracing with Application Insights, and when the added complexity genuinely justifies reaching for these patterns.

Peter Piper joins Chris Reddington for another episode in the Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time series. Building on the Façade and Strangler patterns, they explore three related cloud design patterns: the Anti-Corruption Layer (translating between legacy and modern domain models), Gateway Aggregation (collapsing multiple backend calls into a single client response), and Gateway Routing (layer-7 routing to decouple consumers from versioned backend services). Real Azure service examples — including API Management, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door — are used throughout.

What if you stored not just the current state of your data, but every event that produced it? The Event Sourcing pattern captures the full history of changes as an append-only log — enabling audit trails, temporal queries, and history replay. Combined with Materialized Views for efficient read-side querying and CQRS for command/query separation, these three patterns form a cornerstone of modern event-driven architecture. Chris and Steph explore all three in this episode of Architecting for the Cloud.

You may know patterns like Retry, Circuit Breaker, or Deployment Stamps — but have you heard of the Geode pattern? In this Architecting for the Cloud episode, Chris and Will Eastbury (who contributed to the original Azure Architecture Center documentation for this pattern) explore how Geodes enable planet-scale, active-active applications where every node can serve any user from any region. Unlike Deployment Stamps (which are tenant-scoped), Geodes replicate data across all regions, eliminating active-passive compute wastage and delivering consistent low-latency experiences globally. The session covers key trade-offs around data sovereignty, replication costs, and the evolution toward intelligent edge deployments — and includes a walkthrough of a globally distributed real-time voting app built with Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, and SignalR.

What's actually powering Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 — and what can cloud architects learn from it? Chris Reddington takes to the virtual skies over Queensland with former colleague Cam Adams, flying a Cessna 172 from Archerfield aerodrome while discussing the real Azure services behind one of the most technically ambitious games ever made. From CDN-based asset distribution and event-driven live weather to PlayFab game backends and DDoS protection — this is cloud architecture on the fly.

GitHub Issues provides a lightweight project backlog with labels, milestones, assignees, and kanban project boards, while GitHub Discussions (launched at GitHub Universe) enables open community conversations through categorised threads for Q&A, ideas, and show-and-tell. This episode demonstrates converting issues to discussions, automating workflows with GitHub Actions issue and project event triggers, and using project board automation rules.

In this episode, we're going to be taking a slight detour away from GitHub actions and focus on some of the announcements from GitHub universe last week. We're going to explore them both from the announcements, and also take a look at some of those features that have already been released. Stay tuned!

How do you protect your infrastructure from traffic spikes, safeguard multi-tenant workloads from noisy neighbours, and handle transient failures gracefully? Chris and John Downs walk through three essential cloud resilience patterns: Throttling (protecting services from excess load via rate limiting and HTTP 429), Retry (handling transient faults with exponential backoff), and Circuit Breaker (preventing cascade failures). Part of the "Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time" series — essential viewing for any developer building on Azure.

Before deploying application code, you need cloud infrastructure in place. This episode demonstrates how to deploy Azure infrastructure using ARM templates (Infrastructure as Code) directly from a GitHub Actions workflow—covering ARM template structure, the azure/arm-deploy action, repository organisation, and service principal setup for automated, repeatable Azure deployments.

You have your .NET Core application code and your Azure App Service infrastructure is ready. Now it's time to wire them together with an automated GitHub Actions deployment pipeline. This episode walks through building a multi-job workflow that compiles, publishes, and deploys your .NET Core app to Azure App Service using publish profiles and GitHub Secrets.