// Content

Chris covers channel updates for Cloud with Chris, including a new video on GitHub Codespaces and a blog series on open source contributions to Hugo themes. He highlights the Azure Updates RSS feed as an essential resource for tracking Azure service changes, and spotlights community contributors JonnyChipz, Sarah Lean (TechieLass), CloudFamily.info, and Richard Hooper (PixelRobots).

Setting up a development environment—installing the right SDK versions, extensions, and tools—wastes hours and causes 'works on my machine' problems. This episode shows how VS Code's Remote Containers extension and GitHub Codespaces solve this with containerised, reproducible dev environments defined in a devcontainer.json file. See a live demo of editing cloudwithchris.com entirely in a browser-based Codespace.

During the 2020 Festive Break, I had a lot of time on my hands. I took 4 weeks of my Annual Leave, which meant I had the majority of December to personal time. Personal time / time off is great, but I also wanted to push myself and catch up on some pieces that were on my personal learning or achievement list for some time. I started refreshing my knowledge around Rails (having developed in it some years ago, it's progressed quite a bit!), NodeJS, GoLang and Rust. All interesting to learn, and I'm sure I'll be continuing on my journey with these throughout 2021. But that's not the point in this blog post. One of the activities that I kicked off was contributing into the Hugo Community. Read on to find out more.

Chris launches the weekly vlog format with a recap of December 2020, including open source contributions to the Hugo Castanet theme and the start of a new community-focused Hugo theme project. He reviews Azure updates covering Azure Synapse Analytics GA and Microsoft BGP routing security improvements, highlights GitHub's DevSecOps tooling with CodeQL and Dependabot, and explains the new Azure DevOps service tag for network security groups.

You may have noticed there are some posts preceding this one. I've had a few attempts at putting my blog together, but then dwindle out on my cadence... Well, given the recent success with my Cloud with Chris podcast, I'm beginning to consolidate... Starting with my blog! Here's an update on what you have to look forward to!

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.