// CI/CD

The gap between raw Kubernetes and a developer-friendly platform is where the most interesting tooling is being built today. GitOps gives teams a declarative, version-controlled way to manage their clusters — but the YAML expertise and infrastructure knowledge required can be a steep barrier for developers. In this episode, Chris is joined by Laszlo Folgas, founder of Gimlet.io, to explore ClickOps over GitOps: a UI-driven deployment approach where developers click their way to production while the platform silently generates GitOps manifests and commits them to a Git repository. They cover Flux CD, how Gimlet's opinionated platform works end-to-end, and why developer experience has become the defining battleground in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Chris Nesbitt-Smith traces how governance policies are typically born — emotionally, reactively, and as one-shot documents — then shows how applying software engineering principles transforms policy into a living, versioned artefact. The talk covers iterative policy management, Kubernetes admission control, open-source policy tooling, and the cultural shift required to make policy genuinely effective rather than just technically compliant.

Chris and Matt set up federated identity credentials (OIDC) for passwordless GitHub Actions authentication to Azure, deploy container apps via CI/CD, and discuss workflow trigger strategies for container image deployments.

Chris and Matt containerize their Go microservices by writing Dockerfiles, building images, and publishing them to GitHub Packages container registry using GitHub Actions workflows with GITHUB_TOKEN authentication.

GitHub recently posted about a new GitHub Action that can be used to summarise your test results. The action is called test-summary/action, available at github.com/test-summary/action. There are several examples on how to use the action at github.com/test-summary/examples. However, there were no examples on how to use this with Go. I contributed a pull request which showed how to achieve this. In this post, I will show how to use the action with Go.

Chris and Matt start building the Player State API using .NET Web API, defining data models for the SpaceBar management sim game. They scaffold the project, discuss minimal APIs versus controller-based approaches, and set up a GitHub Actions CI workflow to build and validate the service on every commit.

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.

A little while ago, I wrote a blog post on Using the GitHub self-hosted runner and Azure Virtual Machines to login with a System Assigned Managed Identity, which seems to get a good amount of views week on week. Reflecting on some questions that have popped up this week (and regularly received over my time in the DevOps space), I thought that it makes sense to write a post on how to use Azure DevOps self-hosted agents to deploy to private resources. So, that's what we'll be covering in this post!

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.