// Automation

Weekly Vlog #17 covers Azure's UK Met Office supercomputer partnership, Application Gateway URL rewrite now GA, and chaos engineering taking centre stage in the Azure DevOps blog — exploring how to test resilience systematically as part of your DevOps cycle. GitHub celebrates the Mars 2020 Ingenuity helicopter's open source story and announces protections for open source maintainers against crypto-mining abuse in GitHub Actions. Chris also unveils the Hugo CrossPoster — a new .NET pet project to automate cross-posting Hugo content to Medium and Dev.to with canonical URL support — and invites .NET collaborators for a live coding session.

Chris is a podcaster ('Hoster') in his own right with his 'Cloud with Chris' show (https://www.cloudwithchris.com/) . On this episode he talks to us about using GitHub Actions for processing of static file content (like you have on a Podcast for example).

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.

You may have heard of Terraform, but are you aware of Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise? In this session, Chris walks through how he uses Terraform Cloud to deploy infrastructure onto Azure — covering HCL, the Azure RM provider, remote state management, Terraform modules, and a VCS-driven CI/CD pipeline via GitHub integration. Learn how Terraform Cloud's managed state compares to a self-hosted Azure Storage Account backend, and how terraform plan and terraform apply fit into an automated deployment workflow.

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.

Before deploying application code, you need cloud infrastructure in place. This episode demonstrates how to deploy Azure infrastructure using ARM templates (Infrastructure as Code) directly from a GitHub Actions workflow—covering ARM template structure, the azure/arm-deploy action, repository organisation, and service principal setup for automated, repeatable Azure deployments.

You have your .NET Core application code and your Azure App Service infrastructure is ready. Now it's time to wire them together with an automated GitHub Actions deployment pipeline. This episode walks through building a multi-job workflow that compiles, publishes, and deploys your .NET Core app to Azure App Service using publish profiles and GitHub Secrets.

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.

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.

Consider this scenario. You are managing a software project using Azure DevOps, and you have multiple teams working towards a common cadence. Perhaps that cadence is managed by a central team. To gain the most value from your sprint planning, you would need to associate the iterations from the project level with each individual team. This is a scenario that I have for my fictitious Theatreers project, but also a scenario I encountered recently with a colleague. I have been helping them setup an Azure DevOps project to track the development of IP and collateral, so that they can more accurately forecast what they expect to land and show the value being delivered by the team.