// Azure

Azure Front Door - It's an Azure Service that has been generally available for quite some time. It went Generally Available (GA) in April of 2019 after being in Public Preview since September 2018. It's had several updates since, including a slew of Web Application Firewall enhancements, Rules Engine support and much more. But did you know Microsoft released the Azure Front Door Standard and Premium SKUs in preview in Feburary of 2021? So, what are they? How do they compare to the aforementioned Azure Front Door offering? And when would you want to think about using Azure Front Door compared with Azure CDN? We'll be covering all of those points in this post.

Chris and community members sail the Sea of Thieves while covering Azure updates including Government Top Secret GA, ASP.NET app migration tooling, and Forrester Wave recognition for streaming analytics. GitHub updates include 2FA enforcement for git operations, Git 2.33, and Discussions GA, while the crew discusses Azure certification prep strategies, career transitions into DevOps, and the open-source Cloud Katana security assessment tool.

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.

You'll have probably spotted by now that cloud architecture is a passion area of mine, and a regular topic that features on Cloud With Chris. We've talked a lot about Cloud Design Patterns and requirements-driven engineering in the past, as well as the various pillars of software quality. But one area that hasn't been explored too much is the Azure Well-Architected Framework. So in this blog post, we'll explore that, and identify how it can be used in your own projects.

Whether you're brand new to Azure or have been using it for some time, you have likely either heard of - or come across - Azure Security Center. It's a service which can prove extremely valuable in baselining, measuring and improving your security posture. But, did you know there is additional functionality beyond the free tier? You may have previously known this as the standard tier, or now know this as Azure Defender, where you can opt in for those Azure Services that you particularly want to protect.

Chris covers Azure updates including container app modernization, DDoS protection trends for H1 2021, and virtual network resizing in preview, alongside the general availability of GitHub Codespaces with a deep dive into how GitHub's engineering team uses Codespaces to develop GitHub.com. He also discusses Bicep and Infrastructure as Code on the Azure DevOps blog, plus upcoming sessions on AKS, application security, and cell-based cloud architectures.

When using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), there's a chance that kubenet might be the only possible choice due to your requirements. If so, you may still want to use Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) to leverage Azure Application Gateway's Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities. In this session, we will make the journey together to have a working AGIC in an AKS cluster with kubenet and managed identities.

A community Among Us stream with twelve cloud professionals discussing Kubernetes trade-offs in production, Windows 365 Cloud PC versus Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Arc for multi-cloud app deployment, game engine choices between Unity and Unreal, and imposter syndrome in tech careers.

When COVID-19 forced the vOpen.Tech conference to pivot from a physical event to a fully virtual one, the organising team had fewer than two weeks to build a production-ready registration and identity system — with minimal budget. In this episode, Chris is joined by Facundo La Rocca (Faku), a .NET developer and conference organiser from Buenos Aires, who shares how Azure AD B2C became the silver bullet that made it possible: delivering a scalable, secure IAM platform with almost no custom code, at no cost, in under a fortnight.

Monitoring is often an afterthought — until something breaks. In this episode, Chris is joined by Vanessa Bruwer, Senior Engineer on Microsoft's FastTrack for Azure team, to explore how organisations can build a structured observability strategy using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and distributed tracing. Vanessa shares the FastTrack methodology for taking teams from zero monitoring knowledge to self-sufficient Azure Monitor configuration, covering alerting strategy, metrics, and the differences between monitoring a VM versus a distributed microservice architecture.