11 parts · reading order ↓
The Azure CLI provides cross-platform command-line management of Azure resources from Windows, macOS, Linux, Docker containers, and Azure Cloud Shell. This Cloud Drop demonstrates az login, az account set, az group list, az upgrade, and the az config set auto-upgrade.enable=yes command for keeping your CLI automatically up to date.
Have you ever had to setup a development environment from scratch? You have to install a ton of dependencies, probably a few tools along the way as well. It's not fun, it takes a lot of time and it prevents you from being productive. This is where GitHub Codespaces comes in.
Git LFS (Large File Storage) is a Git extension that replaces large binary files in your repository with lightweight text pointers, storing the actual data on a remote server. This Cloud Drop demonstrates git lfs install, git lfs track "*.mp3", staging and committing with LFS active, and using git clone --config lfs.fetchExclude to selectively skip large files when cloning.
Git stores all version history as compressed objects — commits, trees, and blobs — inside the .git folder. This Cloud Drop walks through the .git directory structure, uses git cat-file -p to inspect commit, tree, and blob objects, and shows how refs map human-readable branch names to commit hashes, including remote-tracking refs created when pushing to GitHub.
Git is a distributed version control system where every developer holds a complete copy of the repository and its history locally, enabling offline work and fast branching. This Cloud Drop covers git init, git add, git commit, git status, git log, git push, git pull, and git clone, plus VS Code's built-in Git integration and the Git Credential Manager for authenticating against GitHub and other remote hosts.
Windows Terminal is a modern multi-shell application available via the Microsoft Store or winget, supporting Windows Command Prompt, PowerShell, PowerShell Core, WSL distributions, and Azure Cloud Shell in a single window. This Cloud Drop demonstrates installing Windows Terminal, connecting to Azure Cloud Shell via device code login, and creating custom SSH profiles to connect directly to Azure virtual machines from both Windows OpenSSH and WSL.
Microsoft Learn is a gamified education hub on docs.microsoft.com covering Azure, GitHub, Microsoft 365, and more through modules, learning paths, and the LearnTV video platform. Browse the catalogue by role, level, or product, earn XP to level up, and use renewal assessments to recertify without retaking full exams.
Azure Functions supports PowerShell Core as a runtime stack, enabling PowerShell scripters to build serverless event-driven workflows without compiled code. This Cloud Drop demonstrates creating an HTTP trigger and an Event Grid trigger function, configuring requirements.psd1 to load the Az PowerShell module, and using a system-assigned managed identity with the Contributor RBAC role to dynamically tag Azure resource groups on creation.
You may have heard about Software Code or Infrastructure as Code. Well, in this video, we'll be talking about pipelines as code. If you're familiar with tools like Azure DevOps, Circle CI, GitHub, GitLab and Jenkins, you may notice a trend where these platforms are allowing you to define your pipelines as code. Throughout this video, we'll be defining a multi-stage pipeline in Azure DevOps, and picking up some tips along the way.
Azure Event Grid routes blob-created events from Azure Storage to downstream handlers, enabling scalable event-driven pipelines where producers and consumers are fully decoupled. This Cloud Drop builds an end-to-end workflow using an Event Grid system topic, subject filtering, an Azure Storage Queue as the event handler, a system-managed identity with the Storage Queue Data Message Sender role, and an Azure Function queue trigger to process and remove each message.
Continuous Integration (CI) is a DevOps practice where engineers frequently merge small code changes into a central repository, triggering automated builds and test suites to catch regressions early. This video explains how CI applies equally to application code, Infrastructure as Code, database schemas, and data science notebooks, and shows how GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines act as automated gatekeepers through pull request workflows.