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This series opener demonstrates source-controlling a .NET MVC project scaffolded with dotnet new mvc inside Windows Subsystem for Linux, using VS Code's built-in Git integration to stage commits, push to a new GitHub repository, and set a remote origin. It also introduces the GitHub Actions Azure Actions catalogue — including azure/login, azure/cli, and azure/webapps-deploy — as a foundation for the CI/CD automation covered in subsequent episodes.

New to GitHub Actions? This episode is your starting point. Chris walks through GitHub Actions workflow fundamentals—YAML syntax, jobs, steps, GitHub-hosted runners, and secrets management—then shows how to authenticate against Azure using the Azure Login action and a service principal, before running Azure CLI commands as part of your first automated pipeline.

Managing APIs across web, mobile, and multiple consumer types creates tight coupling that slows modernisation and makes versioning painful. In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Peter Piper to explore the Backend for Frontends (BFF) pattern — creating dedicated backends tailored to each consumer — alongside the Strangler Fig pattern for incrementally migrating legacy monoliths without disrupting existing clients. The Façade pattern also features as a key decoupling mechanism for smooth API migrations. Part of the "Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time" series.

Concerned about the scalability of your data layer, or do you need data segregation for customers with regional data residency requirements? The Sharding pattern addresses exactly these challenges. If you are using a NoSQL data store without native secondary index support, the Index Table pattern provides an elegant solution for efficient querying. In this episode, Chris is joined by Steph Martin to explore both patterns in depth: shard key strategies (lookup, range, hash), cross-shard query design, the Azure SQL Database elastic client library, and how the Index Table pattern solves query efficiency challenges in stores like Cassandra and Cosmos DB.

The Deployment Stamps pattern is a powerful cloud architecture approach for scaling, resilience, and multi-tenancy. In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by John Downs — who contributed the pattern to the Azure Architecture Center — to explore how stamping out independent copies of your application stack across regions enables geographic distribution, data sovereignty, isolated failure domains, and deployment rings for staged rollouts. Discover when to use this pattern, how Azure itself relies on it internally, and the key considerations around request routing, cross-stamp querying, and disaster recovery planning.

DDoS attacks have scaled to cloud-level volumes — terabits per second — that on-premises hardware simply cannot absorb. In this episode, Chris is joined by Cam Adams, an engineering manager from Brisbane, Australia, who shares first-hand experience helping customers across Asia-Pacific defend against distributed denial-of-service attacks using Azure. Whether workloads are fully in the cloud, in a hybrid state, or entirely on-premises, Cam explains how Azure can act as a scalable, cloud-powered defensive layer — and why the time to act is before an attack hits, not after.

Chris is joined by Christos Matskas — former Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, developer tools evangelist, and .NET identity expert — for a deep-dive into modern identity patterns in the cloud. They cut through the confusion between Azure AD, Azure AD B2B, Azure AD B2C, and External Identities, explain why the network perimeter is no longer your security boundary, and make the case for letting battle-hardened libraries like MSAL do the heavy lifting rather than rolling your own auth. From eliminating secrets in ARM templates to Zero Trust principles, this episode lays a practical foundation for securing any cloud application.

Chris walks through GitHub Actions fundamentals and demonstrates how to use them to build and deploy a multi-tenant Azure Functions API and a static frontend — both triggered automatically on push and pull request events. Using a pet project (a Yu-Gi-Oh card inventory app) as the real-world example, the session covers CI/CD concepts, workflow triggers, GitHub Secrets, publish profiles, Dependabot, and the GitHub public roadmap for upcoming Actions features like manual deployment approvals.

Building cloud integration solutions means choosing the right messaging and eventing tools — and understanding the critical difference between an event and a message. In this episode, Chris is joined by Ezhilarasi Chezhiyan, Technical Lead at Serverless360 (Kovai.co), to explore Azure's serverless integration landscape: Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Service Bus, Event Grid, and Event Hubs. The discussion covers cloud design patterns including queue-based load leveling, competing consumers, dead letter queues, retry policies, and circuit breakers — plus the observability gap that tools like Serverless360 fill when Azure Monitor falls short for business-level monitoring.

Moving to Azure? Security has to come first. Chris is joined by cybersecurity expert Andrew Nathan to explore how organisations can build a strong security posture in the cloud — covering Azure Security Center and Secure Score, identity strategy (Azure AD vs. Azure RBAC), multi-factor authentication, threat modelling, Azure Policy and Management Groups for governance, and the evolution of security operations into red team/blue team war gaming. Whether you're starting your cloud journey or course-correcting an existing environment, this episode will help you understand where to begin and how to keep improving over time.