// Cloud Architecture

Azure Event Grid routes blob-created events from Azure Storage to downstream handlers, enabling scalable event-driven pipelines where producers and consumers are fully decoupled. This Cloud Drop builds an end-to-end workflow using an Event Grid system topic, subject filtering, an Azure Storage Queue as the event handler, a system-managed identity with the Storage Queue Data Message Sender role, and an Azure Function queue trigger to process and remove each message.

Azure Functions supports PowerShell Core as a runtime stack, enabling PowerShell scripters to build serverless event-driven workflows without compiled code. This Cloud Drop demonstrates creating an HTTP trigger and an Event Grid trigger function, configuring requirements.psd1 to load the Az PowerShell module, and using a system-assigned managed identity with the Contributor RBAC role to dynamically tag Azure resource groups on creation.

Chris is joined by Dominic, a Senior PM Manager in Microsoft Teams Engineering, who spent nearly two years building Sudoku Social as a passion project — the world's first cross-platform competitive Sudoku game for iOS and Android. Dominic walks through his decision to use Unity for its build-once deploy-to-many capability, and Azure PlayFab as the game backend-as-a-service powering leaderboards, friend systems, matchmaking, and player statistics. The conversation covers how PlayFab's APIs dramatically reduced backend development effort, how Azure DevOps supported the CI/CD pipeline for the game, and the iterative learning journey of a first-time game developer teaching himself Unity, iOS, and Android development simultaneously.

Spring, Spring Boot, and Azure Spring Cloud demystified. Chris is joined by Gitte Vermeiren (Microsoft FastTrack Engineer) to explore what Spring and Spring Boot offer Java developers, how Azure Spring Cloud provides a fully managed platform for running microservice workloads without managing underlying infrastructure, and how it compares to Azure App Service and AKS. Whether you're a Java developer evaluating Azure or a .NET developer curious about the Java ecosystem, this episode bridges the gap with clear analogies and live demos.

Karl Cooke (irishtechie.com) interviews Chris Reddington about the full architecture and GitHub workflow powering CloudWithChris.com. The session covers Azure Storage static website hosting, Azure CDN with a custom rules engine for enforcing HTTPS and security headers (CSP, HSTS, Permissions Policy), Hugo as the static site generator, multi-environment GitHub Actions pipelines (preview, staging, production), GitHub Codespaces for in-browser editing, and practical security hardening using securityheaders.com and Mozilla Observatory.

The Bulkhead pattern takes its name from the watertight compartments in a ship's hull. Just as those compartments prevent a single breach from sinking the whole vessel, the Bulkhead pattern isolates components of a cloud application so that failures or resource exhaustion in one service cannot cascade to others. This episode covers partitioning strategies, connection pools, Kubernetes resource limits, and multi-tenancy considerations.

Gaming has evolved from isolated save files to persistent, cloud-powered experiences that follow players across every device they own. In this third episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris and Lee Williams explore the cloud architecture behind in-game inventory and economy systems — using Sea of Thieves as a live example. Topics include persistent state management with Azure Cosmos DB, managed gaming backends with PlayFab, Live Ops patterns, and how cloud infrastructure enables monetisation and long-term player retention at scale.

Chris and Peter cover two cloud design patterns in depth. The External Configuration Store pattern addresses one of the most critical security concerns in cloud development: keeping secrets and connection strings out of source code. They explore Azure Key Vault and Azure App Configuration as canonical implementations, discuss deployment slot behaviour, and highlight the risks of committing credentials to version control. The Claim Check pattern tackles a different challenge — what happens when your message payload exceeds the size limits of your messaging infrastructure (Azure Service Bus, Azure Queue Storage)? By externalising the payload to a data store and passing only a correlation ID on the queue, you gain scalability and flexibility at the cost of added latency. Azure Event Grid's automatic claim check generation is also demonstrated. Security is a thread running through both patterns: compromised config stores and poisoned messages both demand an operational response plan.

Weekly Vlog #13 covers an action-packed Azure week: enterprise landing zones with modular designs, zonal disaster recovery via Azure Site Recovery, Security Center compliance enhancements, and Mark Russinovich's standout Ignite session on Azure innovation. The GitHub roundup highlights the GitHub Actions capture-the-flag security writeup and a multi-stage exploit chain from the GitHub Security Lab — essential reading for any DevSecOps practitioner. Cloud with Chris updates include the channel's most-viewed video to date on Git internals, a Fuse.js-powered site search, series navigation, and a packed April talk schedule featuring the Northern Azure User Group (alongside Scott Hanselman) and Global Azure Bootcamp.

You may have heard of Terraform, but are you aware of Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise? In this session, Chris walks through how he uses Terraform Cloud to deploy infrastructure onto Azure — covering HCL, the Azure RM provider, remote state management, Terraform modules, and a VCS-driven CI/CD pipeline via GitHub integration. Learn how Terraform Cloud's managed state compares to a self-hosted Azure Storage Account backend, and how terraform plan and terraform apply fit into an automated deployment workflow.