// Cloud Native

Manually maintaining SDKs across multiple programming languages is slow, error-prone, and a constant drag on developer velocity. This episode—featuring developer advocate Steve Kuching—explores using the open-source OpenAPI Generator to automate SDK creation from an OpenAPI spec, deploying the generator as a containerised service, and observing the entire pipeline with OpenTelemetry auto-tracing and Lumigo. Learn how to apply the same build, test, and observe principles you use for services to your SDK generation pipeline.

Chaos engineering is the discipline of proactively experimenting on distributed systems to build confidence in their ability to withstand production failures. Chris is joined by Ashish Balgath (Cloud Solution Architect at Thoughtworks) to explore how to introduce fault-injection experiments incrementally — from a developer's local machine all the way to production — using tools such as Chaos Monkey and fault-injection simulator tools.

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.

As systems grow in complexity across distributed architectures and microservices, traditional monitoring is no longer sufficient to maintain reliability and user experience. Observability goes beyond monitoring by correlating logs, metrics, and traces to rapidly pinpoint root causes across hybrid and multi-cloud landscapes. In this episode, Chris is joined by Samir Pradka, Enterprise Architect at Artos, to explore how organisations can build an observability platform incrementally, leverage AIOps for predictive analytics, and implement self-healing infrastructure using tools like Ansible and Azure Resource Manager.

Your monthly digest covering a packed May 2022 — headlined by Microsoft Build! In this episode, Chris walks through Azure Container Apps going generally available (and why it's one to watch), the limited access preview of Azure OpenAI Service with GPT-3 and Codex models, Azure DNS Private Resolver for hybrid name resolution, Open Service Mesh extension for Azure Arc GA, NGINX natively integrated on Azure, AKS host process containers in preview, Azure Communication Services Email GA, hierarchical partition keys in Cosmos DB, and much more. Plus GitHub and Azure DevOps highlights from a very busy month for the developer ecosystem.

Chris and Matt wire up Dapr state management for their .NET player state service, configure VS Code debugging for multi-service development, and document game use cases covering player enrollment, world event ticks, and decision lifecycle.

Your monthly digest of what shipped across Azure, GitHub, and Azure DevOps in April 2022. Notable Azure updates include Container Apps managed identity preview, Static Web Apps private endpoints going GA, Managed Grafana integrations, Microsoft Purview (renamed from Azure Purview), and Cosmos DB autoscale improvements. On GitHub: secret scanning revocation, Codespaces monorepo support, accessibility colour-blind themes, and required deployments for branch protection. Plus Azure DevOps opt-in auditing, Bicep validation in PRs, and a personal update on the Go-based microservices event platform Chris has been building on Azure Container Apps.

Migrating a legacy .NET application to Azure is rarely as simple as "lift and shift." Jonah Andersson — Microsoft MVP for Azure — shares candid lessons from a real-world cloud migration that became a cautionary tale, not because of Azure, but due to unresolved technical debt, database complexity, and organisational readiness gaps. Discover the critical questions every team should answer before committing to the cloud, and what Jonah would do differently today.

Chris is joined by LaBrina Loving, Developer Advocate for Gaming at Microsoft, who shares her journey from twenty years of .NET and enterprise development into the world of game development. The episode covers growing cloud adoption among game studios, the key technical differences between enterprise and game development (latency, UDP vs TCP), how enterprise development skills transfer directly to gaming, and practical tips for any developer considering the leap.

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.