// Architecture

The cache-aside pattern loads data on demand from a data store into a cache, placing the synchronisation logic in the application layer when the cache does not natively support read-through or write-through operations. This episode covers cache-miss handling, expiration and eviction policies for Azure Cache for Redis, consistency challenges across distributed instances, and when to pre-warm the cache at startup instead.

When modernising a legacy application, rewriting everything from scratch is rarely feasible. The Sidecar and Ambassador cloud design patterns offer a pragmatic alternative — attach a companion process to offload cross-cutting concerns like retry logic, circuit breaking, and protocol translation without modifying the application itself. Chris and Peter explore both patterns in depth, covering when to use each, how they relate to service meshes, and their role in Kubernetes-based architectures.

Ever thought about what it takes to host a multiplayer game in the cloud? In the second episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris and Lee Williams go hands-on with Halo 5 Guardians to explore the engineering behind matchmaking services. They cover the Actor model and Azure Service Fabric, skill-based matchmaking algorithms, the critical role of latency in competitive gaming, and how live ops and DevOps principles keep a game-as-a-service continuously updated without downtime. Real-world cloud architecture through the lens of AAA gaming.

What exactly is an Azure Landing Zone, and why does every cloud architect keep talking about it? In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Karim Fahmy — an Azure Solutions Architect with over 12 years of IT experience — to demystify Azure Landing Zones and their place within the Cloud Adoption Framework. Learn how landing zones provide the structured foundation covering networking topology, identity, governance, subscriptions, and security that your workloads need to succeed in the cloud. The episode also covers Azure Blueprints, Terraform automation, and real-world strategies for incrementally building and evolving your cloud foundation over time.

Mr Chris Reddington talks to us about his life as a Microsoft Azure Fast Track Engineer and some of the pain points he helps Customer navigate. We discuss DevOps and Infrastructure as Code as well as key skills needed for this modern IT world we now live in and more!

Are you running dedicated compute for every tenant, microservice, or application instance — and paying for it? The Compute Resource Consolidation pattern shows you how to consolidate tasks onto shared infrastructure, such as a single AKS cluster with namespace isolation or an Azure SQL elastic pool, to reduce costs and management overhead. This episode explores the key trade-offs: blast radius containment, noisy neighbour contention, scalability profiles, and multi-tenancy strategies. Part of the "Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time" series.

Chris Reddington and Will Eastbury cover three closely related messaging patterns in one packed episode. They start with the Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub) pattern — arguably the most transformative shift in enterprise messaging — where a single producer broadcasts to multiple isolated subscribers via Azure Service Bus topics or Azure Event Grid. Real-world use cases include insurance aggregators, credit check pipelines, and bank account sign-up workflows. From there they move to the Priority Queue pattern, which ensures high-priority messages are processed before lower-priority ones even when consumers are under load. Finally, the Pipes and Filters pattern decomposes complex message processing into a chain of discrete, reusable transformation steps — reducing complexity and enabling independent scaling of each stage. The episode also connects these patterns back to earlier topics like Competing Consumers and Queue-Based Load Leveling, and flags related patterns including Choreography and Compensating Transactions.

Ever thought about what it takes to host a game in the Cloud? Well, this is the series for you! On the first Wednesday of every month, we explore Cloud Concepts that impact your journey to a connected multiplayer gaming experience! In this first session, we'll play some Minecraft and talk to the concept of a hosted game server.

Stop waiting for users to tell you something is broken. The Health Endpoint Monitoring pattern gives your services a dedicated health-check endpoint that aggregates the status of all dependent components—databases, APIs, storage—into a single observable response. This episode covers the pattern in detail, including design considerations around caching, security, denial-of-service exposure, and integration with Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

Chris joined Mert to talk all about Cloud Design Patterns, the Azure Architecture Center, Cloud Project Design Best Practices and Challenges in Cloud Development.