// Automation

Feature flags sound deceptively simple — they're just if statements. But mastering them requires a mature DevOps foundation and disciplined release engineering. Chris Reddington is joined by Chris Ayers (Azure Fast Track Engineer at Microsoft) for a deep dive into separating deployments from releases, choosing the right tooling, and implementing feature flags safely using Azure App Configuration, LaunchDarkly, and Optimizely in .NET applications.

I recently wrote a blog post about using GitHub Actions to automatically add a GitHub Issue to a GitHub project (Beta) when the issue is opened. I received a question from my colleague and maintainer of the promitor and KEDA Open Source (OSS) Projects, Tom Kerkhove on doing the same with a user-owned GitHub repository, rather than organisation-owned.

If there's an easy way to achieve something, then I'm all for it! You may have noticed that I've been putting a lot of effort into refactoring my site and open sourcing the original Cloud With Chris theme. I've now released that as the Hugo Creator theme for Hugo. As part of the refactoring process into a reusable theme, I had to make several breaking changes. This meant that I'd need to update the contents of my site. I want to share a quick tip that I discovered to add captions to my images in markdown.

I've been following the GitHub Projects beta for a while now, and have been fortunate to be accepted as an early adopter. I'm a big fan of the direction, and the flexibility. One of the limitations I've noticed is that there's currently no built-in way to automatically add an issue to a project board. It's on the backlog, but not yet available. Fortunately, GitHub Actions has us sorted. I'll walk you through a sample I put together to do exactly that.

Performance testing has traditionally lived in high-fidelity pre-production environments — but by the time you find a performance issue that late in the cycle, the cost to fix it is already compounding. In this episode, Chris is joined by HariKrishnan, Cloud Transformation Consultant, to explore a practical shift-left approach to performance testing. Hari shares real-world experience identifying the categories of performance issues that can be reproduced locally or in CI pipelines using tools like Gatling and Docker, reducing MTTR and avoiding the environment time-sharing bottlenecks that slow teams down.

A decade after Patrick Debois coined "DevOps," the landscape looks radically different. In this episode, Daniela Fontani — CTO at Central Consulting and long-time open source contributor — breaks down the most important DevOps trends reshaping the industry today: DevSecOps, GitOps, NoOps, automation-first pipelines, and the growing role of platform engineering. Plus, the honest truth about which buzzwords actually matter and which you can safely ignore.

Chris is joined by Karl Cooke (IrishTechie.com) for a deep dive into the CloudWithChris.com integration platform — a real-world Azure integration architecture built to automate content distribution to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit, and to amplify updates from the Azure, GitHub, and Azure DevOps blogs. The session walks through the full architecture: Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus topics and queues, Azure Table Storage, Azure Logic Apps, and a Vue.js management UI, plus a custom URL shortener for per-platform analytics.

Security vulnerabilities don't wait to be discovered — and developers are often unknowingly shipping them through open source dependencies. In this episode, Chris is joined by DeveloperSteve Coochin, Developer Advocate at Snyk, to explore the real-world state of vulnerabilities in modern applications. Steve shares findings from his research into the PHP ecosystem and explains how developers can shift vulnerability detection left — catching CVEs in dependencies before they reach production, by integrating tools like Snyk directly into their CI/CD pipelines and GitHub workflows.

In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Peter Gallagher — Software Consultant, Microsoft Azure MVP, Pluralsight Author, IoT expert, and Meetup organiser — to explore the Internet of Things. They cover Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge, digital twins, IoT simulators, and the lessons learned from real-world IoT deployments. Whether you are just starting your IoT journey or looking to go deeper with Azure's cloud-connected device ecosystem, this episode has something for you.

Chris is joined by Karl Cooke (IrishTechie) for a live deep-dive into the GitHub Actions workflows powering CloudWithChris.com. They explore why GitHub was chosen over Azure DevOps, walk through a real-world CI/CD pipeline for a Hugo static site deployed to Azure Blob Storage with CDN purging, and examine how to manage secrets and approvals using GitHub Environments. The session also covers linting Markdown with GitHub Super Linter, early thinking on Playwright-based UI tests, the security considerations around third-party actions from the marketplace, and building a custom .NET GitHub Action for content cross-posting.