// Community

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.

Weekly Vlog #15 covers a lighter-than-usual Azure week, spotlighting Azure Cloud Services extended support GA with a migration tool preview, Azure Orbital's ground station-as-a-service partnership updates, and a great Azure DevOps blog post on building and publishing your first GitHub Action. Cloud with Chris highlights include a Windows Terminal productivity Cloud Drop, the Bulkhead resilience pattern episode, a Microsoft Learn introductory video, and a recap of the Northern Azure User Group talk alongside Scott Hanselman — with two Global Azure sessions on Hugo static sites and GitHub Actions just around the corner.

In case you missed it, Shannon Kuehn, Jamie Maguire, John Lunn and I joined Sarah Lean for a panel livestream on her channel talking about our experiences getting started with blogging, and our experiences with blogging platforms. In this post, I want to focus on the first aspect - how you can get started with blogging, and some of the common themes / recommendations I've heard, not just from this session, but from other active community contributors.

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.

Microsoft Learn is a gamified education hub on docs.microsoft.com covering Azure, GitHub, Microsoft 365, and more through modules, learning paths, and the LearnTV video platform. Browse the catalogue by role, level, or product, earn XP to level up, and use renewal assessments to recertify without retaking full exams.

In this Easter Sunday livestream, Chris covers Microsoft's Forrester Wave leader recognition for Azure Functions (FaaS), a wave of AKS updates including the new run command feature and Open Service Mesh add-on, and the GitHub Advanced Security security overview beta plus GA of secret scanning for private repositories. Delivery Plans 2.0 in Azure DevOps approaches GA with card styling and dependency visualisation, while GitHub Desktop gains cherry-pick support and GitHub Mobile adds working-hours notification controls. Cloud with Chris highlights include a beginner Git 101 Cloud Drop, a community blogging panel, the External Configuration and Claim Check architecture pattern episode with Peter Piper, and a preview of the upcoming Northern Azure User Group talk alongside Scott Hanselman.

Three months and 350+ subscribers in, with content shipping every day of the past week: a GitHub Codespaces Cloud Drop, the final GPG commit-signing instalment covering YubiKey hardware key storage, a Welsh Azure User Group lightning talk on GitHub Actions, and a Terraform Cloud deep-dive on Azure state management. Azure news centres on Microsoft's commitment to bring Availability Zones to every region by end of 2021, new forecasted cost alerts for Azure Budgets, and the Start Small & Expand landing zone guidance from Sarah Lean and Thomas Maurer. GitHub updates include Dependabot gaining private registry support, CodeQL scanning for Solarigate traces, and a detailed post-mortem on the recent GitHub.com security incident.

Vlog #11 debuts a refreshed brand and on-screen layout, then covers a busy week: the third instalment of Chris's GPG commit-signing series (linking keys to Git and GitHub), the Cache Aside cloud design pattern episode, and a preview of the upcoming YubiKey-focused Part 4. Azure news centres on the preview of Trusted Launch VMs (defending against bootkits and rootkits), Azure Defender for Storage's new malware-upload detection, and Naraya — the ML system Microsoft uses to predict and proactively mitigate infrastructure failures at scale. On the security operations side, GitHub and Azure DevOps announce automated token revocation for leaked PATs found on public GitHub repositories.

Vlog #10 is a milestone episode: Chris celebrates his birthday and a full year of Cloud With Chris with a new Shure SM7B microphone upgrade. The bulk of the episode is a walkthrough of Microsoft Ignite announcements, covering Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning for on-premises data sovereignty scenarios, the Azure Communication Services and Microsoft Teams interoperability story, and significant security updates including Azure Key Vault Managed HSM (preview) and Trusted Launch for VMs. GitHub Actions fans also get a bonus segment on four lesser-known platform capabilities, including semantic release note generation and bring-your-own-environment workflows.

Week nine of the vlog coincides with the one-year anniversary of the Cloud With Chris podcast. Chris kicks off a multi-part blog series on GPG key signing for Git commits, demonstrating how trivially easy it is to spoof a contributor's identity in Git without verification — and how GitHub's GPG validation feature closes that gap. Azure news this week is lighter than usual, covering serverless and low-code scenarios with PowerApps, the new Private Azure Marketplace, and the Azure Quota REST API, plus a significant list of retirement notices from the Azure Updates page all targeting 29 February 2024.