// Azure DevOps

Chris marks two months of weekly vlogging with a big career update: leaving FastTrack for Azure to become a Cloud Solution Architect in Microsoft's UK Customer Success Unit, focusing on the Manufacturing & Resources industry. The cloudwithchris.com site is also refreshed with a PodScribe-powered interactive transcript player that highlights spoken words in real time and enables crowd-sourced corrections — a meaningful accessibility improvement. Azure news is substantial this week, headlined by Azure RBAC for Key Vault data plane reaching GA (enabling secret- and certificate-level access control) and Azure Front Door Standard & Premium entering preview with private origin support via Private Link.

Chris recaps his AzureIsh Live guest appearance and the messaging patterns episode with Will Eastbury covering pub-sub, priority queues, and pipes-and-filters. He showcases the Cloud with Chris v2 website prototype built in Hugo with AI-generated transcripts via Podscribe for accessibility, covers the npm dependency confusion attack vector affecting Azure Artifacts and GitHub packages, and highlights Azure's deployment to the International Space Station in partnership with HPE.

Chris hosts the first live weekly vlog, recapping the Cloud Gaming Notes debut and a candid mental health conversation with Andrew Nathan. He covers Azure Security Center updates including dangling DNS protection for Azure Defender and the secure score API GA, spotlights Project Bicep as a new ARM template authoring experience with a VS Code extension, and highlights GitHub's engineering post on SLO-based deployment pipeline reliability.

Chris recaps the health endpoint monitoring pattern episode and a PC build blog, then previews the debut of Cloud Gaming Notes with Lee Williams on game server hosting, and a candid mental health conversation with Andrew Nathan. He reviews Azure updates including Azure Cloud Services Extended Support ARM-based deployment, Azure AD Premium 99.99% SLA, the Azure Architecture Center January digest, and GitHub engineering posts on canary deployment strategies and JavaScript performance optimisation.

Chris recaps a JamStack blog post, an appearance on the MS How-To show covering cloud design patterns, and the gatekeeper and valet key patterns session on API security. He covers Azure updates including AKS automatic cluster upgrade channels and the Secret Store CSI driver for Azure Key Vault, Azure DevOps Delivery Plans 2.0 with YAML manual validation, Pulumi as an infrastructure-as-code tool supporting Python, TypeScript, and Go, and a comprehensive GitHub 2020 year-in-review.

Chris announces his involvement with relaunching the Azure Thames Valley meetup, recaps the static content hosting pattern episode and his open source blog, and previews upcoming talks at AzureIsh Live and a SquaredUp webinar on application observability with Azure Monitor and App Insights. He covers Azure Updates including public IP SKU upgrades, built-in Azure Policy for NSG flow logs, GitHub's availability in Iran, the GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 release candidate, and Docker Desktop integration with Azure Container Instances.

Chris launches the weekly vlog format with a recap of December 2020, including open source contributions to the Hugo Castanet theme and the start of a new community-focused Hugo theme project. He reviews Azure updates covering Azure Synapse Analytics GA and Microsoft BGP routing security improvements, highlights GitHub's DevSecOps tooling with CodeQL and Dependabot, and explains the new Azure DevOps service tag for network security groups.

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.

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.

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.