// Community

Chris marks two months of weekly vlogging with a big career update: leaving FastTrack for Azure to become a Cloud Solution Architect in Microsoft's UK Customer Success Unit, focusing on the Manufacturing & Resources industry. The cloudwithchris.com site is also refreshed with a PodScribe-powered interactive transcript player that highlights spoken words in real time and enables crowd-sourced corrections — a meaningful accessibility improvement. Azure news is substantial this week, headlined by Azure RBAC for Key Vault data plane reaching GA (enabling secret- and certificate-level access control) and Azure Front Door Standard & Premium entering preview with private origin support via Private Link.

In this candid conversation, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan — a former Australian Special Forces soldier turned tech professional — to talk openly about mental health. Drawing on personal experiences with grief, COVID-19 lockdown isolation, and identity loss, both guests discuss the importance of speaking up, seeking help, and understanding that it is okay not to be okay. A vital listen for anyone in tech or beyond.

Ever thought about what it takes to host a game in the Cloud? Well, this is the series for you! On the first Wednesday of every month, we explore Cloud Concepts that impact your journey to a connected multiplayer gaming experience! In this first session, we'll play some Minecraft and talk to the concept of a hosted game server.

Chris recaps a JamStack blog post, an appearance on the MS How-To show covering cloud design patterns, and the gatekeeper and valet key patterns session on API security. He covers Azure updates including AKS automatic cluster upgrade channels and the Secret Store CSI driver for Azure Key Vault, Azure DevOps Delivery Plans 2.0 with YAML manual validation, Pulumi as an infrastructure-as-code tool supporting Python, TypeScript, and Go, and a comprehensive GitHub 2020 year-in-review.

Chris announces his involvement with relaunching the Azure Thames Valley meetup, recaps the static content hosting pattern episode and his open source blog, and previews upcoming talks at AzureIsh Live and a SquaredUp webinar on application observability with Azure Monitor and App Insights. He covers Azure Updates including public IP SKU upgrades, built-in Azure Policy for NSG flow logs, GitHub's availability in Iran, the GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 release candidate, and Docker Desktop integration with Azure Container Instances.

Contributing to Open Source Software. It sounds so formal, doesn't it? I thought that for quite a long time, and it put a bit of a mental barrier in place for me to begin my journey. I am a classic over thinker, but that's perhaps another blog in its own right! Contributing to Open Source isn't as scary as it may first initially seem. Let's start with a few thoughts.

Chris covers channel updates for Cloud with Chris, including a new video on GitHub Codespaces and a blog series on open source contributions to Hugo themes. He highlights the Azure Updates RSS feed as an essential resource for tracking Azure service changes, and spotlights community contributors JonnyChipz, Sarah Lean (TechieLass), CloudFamily.info, and Richard Hooper (PixelRobots).

You may know patterns like Retry, Circuit Breaker, or Deployment Stamps — but have you heard of the Geode pattern? In this Architecting for the Cloud episode, Chris and Will Eastbury (who contributed to the original Azure Architecture Center documentation for this pattern) explore how Geodes enable planet-scale, active-active applications where every node can serve any user from any region. Unlike Deployment Stamps (which are tenant-scoped), Geodes replicate data across all regions, eliminating active-passive compute wastage and delivering consistent low-latency experiences globally. The session covers key trade-offs around data sovereignty, replication costs, and the evolution toward intelligent edge deployments — and includes a walkthrough of a globally distributed real-time voting app built with Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, and SignalR.

GitHub Issues provides a lightweight project backlog with labels, milestones, assignees, and kanban project boards, while GitHub Discussions (launched at GitHub Universe) enables open community conversations through categorised threads for Q&A, ideas, and show-and-tell. This episode demonstrates converting issues to discussions, automating workflows with GitHub Actions issue and project event triggers, and using project board automation rules.

Chris is joined by Christos Matskas — former Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, developer tools evangelist, and .NET identity expert — for a deep-dive into modern identity patterns in the cloud. They cut through the confusion between Azure AD, Azure AD B2B, Azure AD B2C, and External Identities, explain why the network perimeter is no longer your security boundary, and make the case for letting battle-hardened libraries like MSAL do the heavy lifting rather than rolling your own auth. From eliminating secrets in ARM templates to Zero Trust principles, this episode lays a practical foundation for securing any cloud application.