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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.

Ever wondered what goes into building a technical podcast from scratch? In this behind-the-scenes episode, the tables are turned as colleague Fletcher Kelly interviews Chris Reddington about the creation of Cloud with Chris. Topics include choosing a podcast theme, microphone selection, post-production with Audacity, using Azure Cognitive Services for automated transcription, designing for accessibility from day one, and automating the Hugo-based website with CI/CD pipelines. A candid look at the content creation journey behind a technical podcast.

Hybrid cloud is no longer just a transitional state between on-premises and public cloud — for many enterprises, it is the end state. Chris is joined by Thomas Maurer, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, to explore how Azure Arc, Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI, and Azure IoT Edge help organisations run workloads wherever they make sense: from data centres and factory floors to the network edge and other cloud providers.

APIs are the connective tissue of modern cloud architectures — but poor API design compounds into technical debt that is expensive to unwind. In this episode, Chris Reddington and Peter Piper explore the full lifecycle of API design: defining versioning contracts up front, modernising legacy APIs using the Strangler and Façade patterns, and securing APIs with JWT tokens, OAuth 2.0, and OIDC. They also cover Azure API Management patterns, circuit breakers, throttling, key rotation with Azure Key Vault, and the DevSecOps practices that keep an API estate healthy at scale.

Hackathons are a powerful accelerator for learning, innovation, and community building — but what does it actually take to participate in, organize, or mentor at one? In this episode, Chris is joined by Maria Vrabie, an experienced hackathon participant, organizer, and mentor with a background at Microsoft. They explore the full spectrum of hackathon formats: from university weekend events and charity hack days to corporate open hacks run with enterprise customers. Maria shares candid stories from both sides of the organizer table, practical advice for first-timers, and why hackathons are just as relevant for seasoned engineers as they are for students looking to break into tech.

DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to end users — not just code or features. In this episode, Abel Wang, Principal Developer Advocate and DevOps Lead at Microsoft, joins Chris to cover the foundations of DevOps, telemetry-driven development, database DevOps, feature flags, Site Reliability Engineering, and the importance of shifting left on quality and security.