// Cloud Native

A decade after Patrick Debois coined "DevOps," the landscape looks radically different. In this episode, Daniela Fontani — CTO at Central Consulting and long-time open source contributor — breaks down the most important DevOps trends reshaping the industry today: DevSecOps, GitOps, NoOps, automation-first pipelines, and the growing role of platform engineering. Plus, the honest truth about which buzzwords actually matter and which you can safely ignore.

Most organizations undergoing digital transformation are moving through maturity stages — from localized, monolithic setups toward agile, cloud-native, data-driven platforms. But what does it take to architect that journey? In this session, Asanka Abesinghe shares a practical framework covering the six design principles of digitally-driven organizations (decentralized, lean-agile, open standards, customer-centric, cloud-native, and data-driven), how to layer business, information, application, and technology architecture, and the evolving role of the architect as an organizational bridge between business strategy and technical execution. From the build-vs-buy decision to maturity-model road-mapping, this is an essential session for architects leading or contributing to enterprise transformation programmes.

Chris Reddington is joined by Ivo, a cloud evangelist based in Belgium with hands-on experience transforming one of the country's largest telco providers. They explore how telecommunications companies are leveraging Azure to evolve from traditional connectivity providers into platform-scale service businesses — covering 5G, IoT, edge computing, AI/ML, Azure Arc, security, compliance, and the cultural challenges of cloud adoption in a regulated industry.

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.

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.

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.

Open source projects and communities are the backbone of modern software development, yet the human side of building and sustaining them is rarely discussed as openly as the technology itself. In this episode, Chris is joined by JJ Asghar, Developer Advocate at IBM, who shares hard-won lessons from over a decade cultivating open source communities — from a small Linux distribution to OpenStack, Kubernetes, Tekton, and Istio. This is not a tools talk; it is a candid conversation about the soft skills, scoping decisions, and leadership approaches that separate thriving projects from those that burn out.

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.

Inspired by the recent episode with Annie Talvasto, I wanted to put together a blog post that will introduce an ongoing series on Cloud With Chris. Before we introduce that series though, it's important that we first introduce the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (more commonly known as CNCF).

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) gave us Kubernetes and Prometheus — but did you know there are over 90 more projects in the ecosystem? In this episode, Chris is joined by Annie Talvasto (CNCF/Kubernetes meetup organizer, Finland) to explore the most exciting CNCF projects across sandbox, incubating, and graduated tiers. They cover Helm for Kubernetes package management, Artifact Hub for centralised artifact discovery, Linkerd for lightweight service mesh with built-in observability and resilience, KUDO for declarative Kubernetes operator creation without deep Go expertise, and KEDA for event-driven autoscaling. Whether you're new to cloud native or a seasoned practitioner, this session will inspire you to explore — and contribute to — the wider CNCF landscape.