// Cloud Design Patterns

Communication between microservices is one of the trickiest challenges in distributed systems — especially when things go wrong. In this episode, Chris is joined by Francesco, a software engineer building a real-world payment gateway, to explore microservices communication patterns. They dive deep into the Saga pattern for managing multi-step distributed transactions, covering orchestration-based Sagas with AWS Step Functions, compensating transactions for graceful rollbacks, and event-driven messaging via EventBridge. The conversation also covers observability in distributed systems and applying Occam's Razor to architecture decisions.

Technology is always evolving. We’ve seen physical machines turn into virtual. Virtual machines turn into containers. But often, those containers need an orchestrator like Kubernetes to reap the full benefits. What if there was a simpler option? Join Tighe and Chris as they introduce you to Azure Container Apps (Preview), Dapr and Keda - Helping you get started on your serverless cloud native journey.

In this session, we'll navigate through a typical real-world architecture of a solution and consider the decisions that we may wish to make at various stages. Alongside that, we'll factor in how requirements and design patterns can help influence our overall design, based on learnings from Chris' 5+ year journey taking customers to production on Azure.

In this session, we'll navigate through a typical real-world architecture of a solution and consider the decisions that we may wish to make at various stages. Alongside that, we'll factor in how requirements and design patterns can help influence our overall design, based on learnings from Chris' 5+ year journey taking customers to production on Azure.

Chris Reddington is joined by Lee Williams to explore game streaming — the technology that streams a game to your device from cloud-hosted infrastructure, rather than running it locally. The episode covers how cloud economies of scale make low-latency game delivery viable, the consumer shift toward subscription models (Xbox Game Pass, Google Stadia), what the streaming model means for game creators building games as living services, and the future of multi-device gaming experiences.

Chris is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. He'll explore how GitHub Actions can be used to deploy your own static sites (or other apps!) to Azure.

Asanka Abeysinghe, Chief Technology Evangelist at WSO2, introduces the cell-based reference architecture — a vendor-neutral, decentralised framework for cloud-native applications. The session explores microservices governance challenges, how Domain-Driven Design scopes service responsibilities into well-bounded cells, and how the cell-based model aligns architecture, development, and DevOps teams into cohesive autonomous units built around business domains.

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.

In this session, Chris will discuss some of the fundamental concepts of the Cloud and Azure, and providing an introductory walkthrough of the Azure Portal.

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.