// Cloud Architecture

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.

Chris Reddington is joined by Dr. Keith McNally, a college professor with over 15 years of teaching experience who leads Microsoft's Software and Systems Academy (MSSA) — a skill-bridge programme helping US military veterans transition into IT careers through Azure cloud training. They discuss project-based learning, how to teach people to think (not just follow procedures), the soft skills civilians take for granted, and what it really takes to bridge the gap between military service and a career in cloud.

Chris and Simon play Sea of Thieves while covering Azure Firewall Premium features, 5G and cloud computing for IoT edge scenarios, GitHub Actions for static site deployments, and open source project best practices from a recent Cloud With Chris episode with JJ Asghar.

Chris plays Sea of Thieves with community members James, Simon, and Dean while delivering Azure updates on Bastion Standard SKU, Application Insights authentication, and Windows 365 from Microsoft Inspire. The episode also covers GitHub blog highlights including GitHub Copilot and Issues forms, plus a discussion on making Cloud with Chris more accessible.

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 returns from vacation with Azure, DevOps, and GitHub updates covering resilience threat modeling, Azure Well-Architected Framework reliability, Privileged Identity Management with Azure Lighthouse, App Service Environment v3, and Azure Communication Services direct routing.

With so many data store options in Azure — relational SQL, NoSQL, document databases, blob storage, key-value stores, and more — how do you choose the right one for your workload? In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Steph Martin to explore the concept of polyglot persistence and the trade-offs between data store types. From Azure SQL and Cosmos DB to blob storage and microservices data patterns, they discuss how workload requirements, access patterns, RTO/RPO targets, and application architecture should guide your data platform decisions. A practical guide for architects and developers navigating the modern data landscape on Azure.

Game streaming and esports have transformed gaming from a private pastime into a global spectator sport, with cloud infrastructure at the heart of that transformation. Chris is joined by Lee Williams to explore how platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming have built entire business ecosystems around low-latency live content delivery, the community dynamics that make streaming sticky, and where AR and VR technology will take esports spectatorship next.

In this episode, Chris is joined by Mert Yeter — software architect, Azure MVP, and Traefik Ambassador — for a live-demo-driven tour of DevOps on Azure. Starting with Azure DevOps Starter, Mert walks through spinning up a full CI/CD pipeline for a containerized .NET application in just a few clicks, covering Azure Container Registry, Azure Container Instances, and Azure Kubernetes Service. The session then dives into Traefik: an open-source cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer with powerful pluggable middleware, dynamic service discovery, and a rich dashboard for managing Kubernetes ingresses. Whether you are new to containers or looking to level up your AKS deployments, this episode covers the essential building blocks.