// Cloud Architecture

Chris combines tech updates with a Sea of Thieves gaming session alongside Cloud Family community members James Cook, Mert Ata, and Dean Ellerby. Updates cover Azure FX series VMs for HPC, NFS 3.0 for Blob Storage GA, JBoss on App Service, Azure VM Image Builder GA, plus GitHub and Azure DevOps community roundups.

Chris sits down with John Lunn (aka jonnychipz) — technical architect at BT Enterprise, co-organiser of the Welsh Azure User Group, and creator of johnnychips.com. John shares his journey from M365 and unified comms into Azure cloud architecture, what sparked his commitment to the #100DaysOfCloud challenge, and his practical advice on navigating certifications, managing the overwhelming breadth of the cloud ecosystem, and why getting involved in the community is one of the fastest ways to grow. Whether you're just starting out with Azure or thinking about launching a blog or YouTube channel, there's plenty to take away here.

Chris is joined by Shannon Kuehn, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for an accessible deep dive into Azure VMware Solution (AVS) — the dedicated VMware platform hosted within Azure datacentres. Shannon explains how AVS lets organisations migrate on-premises VMware environments into Azure without a forklift upgrade, using live vMotion migrations via HCX with zero downtime, and unlocks Azure-native integrations including Azure Security Center, Azure Active Directory, Application Gateway, and PaaS services.

Recorded on a Monday morning after a sunny weekend, vlog #24 delivers the week's Azure, Azure DevOps, and GitHub news — covering Azure Virtual Desktop's rebrand, enterprise-scale landing zones for AKS, Azure Migrate private endpoint support, and GitHub supply chain security updates. Chris also recaps recent Cloud with Chris sessions on GitHub Actions, Azure Arc for apps, hybrid cloud, and the Geode pattern, then previews the upcoming Azure VMware Solution session with Shannon Keane and John Lund's cloud journey.

Episode 11 covered the Geode pattern in theory — now it's time to get hands-on! Will Eastbury returns to walk through a real-world OData service deployed across three Azure regions (US West, Australia Southeast, and UK West), stitched together by Azure Front Door for active-active routing. Watch how Cosmos DB replicates data across all regions as a shared backplane, how health probes detect and remove unhealthy geodes from rotation, and the ASP.NET middleware pattern needed to handle URL rewriting — a critical authentication gotcha when hosting services behind a reverse proxy.

Chris Reddington is joined by Sarah Lean (Techielass), Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for a deep dive into Azure Arc and hybrid cloud management. They explore how Azure Arc extends Azure governance, policy, and inventory capabilities to on-premises infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, data platforms, and app services across multi-cloud environments. The session then shifts to a candid conversation about life in Developer Relations — what cloud advocacy really entails, how to build a sustainable content creation rhythm, and how to protect your mental health in a role that blurs the line between work and passion.

Chris rounds up the week's Azure, Azure DevOps, and GitHub news — including the rebrand of Windows Virtual Desktop to Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure FHIR healthcare API updates, SAP on Azure, and a preview of the Azure Arc hybrid and multi-cloud digital event. On the GitHub side, supply chain security takes the spotlight with package registry credential scanning, Dependabot enhancements, and GitHub's Blacktocat fifth anniversary celebrating Black voices in tech. Cloud with Chris recaps include Carl Cook on GitHub Actions, Azure Arc for apps (Event Grid), Sarah Lean on hybrid cloud and DevRel life, and Will Esprit demonstrating the Geode pattern hands-on.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced game studios worldwide to rethink how developers, artists, designers, and audio engineers collaborate remotely on titles with massive file sizes and unforgiving release schedules. In this episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris is joined by Lee Williams to explore how the gaming industry adapted using cloud services — from cloud-hosted design environments and Azure infrastructure to source control workflows with GitHub and Azure DevOps, video collaboration tooling, and the emerging paradigm of building entire games in the cloud. They also touch on how live game streaming is creating an entirely new entertainment industry built on the same cloud foundations.

Chris is joined by Matt Bradley, who helped establish the Public Cloud division at UKFast, to discuss four years of hands-on Azure experience. From migration and consultancy through DevOps automation, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud management with Azure Arc, Matt shares practical lessons, infrastructure as code trade-offs, compliance benefits, and why you must always design for failure in cloud workloads.

Understanding how our applications function in the wild is essential for developers when issues arise. With the power of knowledge, we can enable ourselves to provide the best experience to our fellow developers, and our stakeholders. One of the solutions that supplies this power is Application Insights. Application Insights is a service provided by Microsoft allowing you to monitor your application live, detect performance anomalies, and observe this data with powerful analytics. Together we will see how easy it is to add Application Insights to our applications, whether we have access to the codebase or not. Once instrumented, we will dive deeper into the capabilities of Application Insights and show how to leverage all the rich data collected from our application. Finally, as developers the last thing we want to do is troubleshoot an issue in Production, with everyone watching and the stakes are high. Watch as we monitor a live application that is throwing exceptions and how Application Insights can be used to help us solve the problem faster. When we are done, attendees will be empowered with the knowledge to leverage Application Insights to be more productive with their work.