// Containers

In a previous blog post, I provided an overview of the Distributed Application Runtime (dapr) and explained how it is a useful framework when building microservices. In this blog post, I will show you how to use dapr to enqueue and dequeue messages locally with Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage Queues.

Azure Arc extends the use of Azure Services beyond the Azure cloud. With Azure Arc you are able to deploy and monitor Azure services in your own datacentres or other cloud providers. This event will focus on Azure Application Services and how they can be deployed outside of Azure through Kubernetes with Azure Arc.

In this debut episode of ToolUp Tuesday, Chris and Matt kick off a new series by planning a massively multiplayer management sim game from scratch. They design a microservices architecture, choosing .NET for the world events engine and Go for player decisions, and set up a GitHub repository with GitHub Projects for backlog management.

In this post, we're going to explore the Open Source project known as Dapr (The Distributed Application Runtime). This post is primarily aimed at those who already have an understanding of Containers, Kubernetes and Microservices. However, if you're not familiar with these topics - I'll do my best to set the right context and background without making the blog too lengthy!

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.

Chris covers Azure updates including container app modernization, DDoS protection trends for H1 2021, and virtual network resizing in preview, alongside the general availability of GitHub Codespaces with a deep dive into how GitHub's engineering team uses Codespaces to develop GitHub.com. He also discusses Bicep and Infrastructure as Code on the Azure DevOps blog, plus upcoming sessions on AKS, application security, and cell-based cloud architectures.

A community Among Us stream with twelve cloud professionals discussing Kubernetes trade-offs in production, Windows 365 Cloud PC versus Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Arc for multi-cloud app deployment, game engine choices between Unity and Unreal, and imposter syndrome in tech careers.

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).

In this episode, Chris is joined by Mert Yeter — software architect, Azure MVP, and Traefik Ambassador — for a live-demo-driven tour of DevOps on Azure. Starting with Azure DevOps Starter, Mert walks through spinning up a full CI/CD pipeline for a containerized .NET application in just a few clicks, covering Azure Container Registry, Azure Container Instances, and Azure Kubernetes Service. The session then dives into Traefik: an open-source cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer with powerful pluggable middleware, dynamic service discovery, and a rich dashboard for managing Kubernetes ingresses. Whether you are new to containers or looking to level up your AKS deployments, this episode covers the essential building blocks.

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.