// DevOps

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.

Chris is a Senior Azure Engineer at Microsoft. He'll explore how GitHub Actions can be used to deploy your own static sites (or other apps!) to Azure.

Hopefully by now you've had a chance to read [part 1](gpg-git-part-1) of this series, which explains why you may be interested in using GPG keys to sign your commits. Congratulations on getting to the second part! In part two, we're going to focus on how I worked through setting up GPG in my Windows environment, and generating a set of keys for use. There were some challenges/hurdles along the way, and we'll talk through those too!

Ever thought about what it takes to host a multiplayer game in the cloud? In the second episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris and Lee Williams go hands-on with Halo 5 Guardians to explore the engineering behind matchmaking services. They cover the Actor model and Azure Service Fabric, skill-based matchmaking algorithms, the critical role of latency in competitive gaming, and how live ops and DevOps principles keep a game-as-a-service continuously updated without downtime. Real-world cloud architecture through the lens of AAA gaming.

What exactly is an Azure Landing Zone, and why does every cloud architect keep talking about it? In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Karim Fahmy — an Azure Solutions Architect with over 12 years of IT experience — to demystify Azure Landing Zones and their place within the Cloud Adoption Framework. Learn how landing zones provide the structured foundation covering networking topology, identity, governance, subscriptions, and security that your workloads need to succeed in the cloud. The episode also covers Azure Blueprints, Terraform automation, and real-world strategies for incrementally building and evolving your cloud foundation over time.

For a while now, I've been using GPG Keys to sign my Git Commits to prove that my commits on GitHub are genuine and from me. Over the last few weeks, I've been inspired by a couple of colleagues (Kudos to Adrian and Julie if you're reading this) to dig out my YubiKey and use these for my key signing activities. While there are several blog posts on the topic already, I encountered a number of roadblocks along the way. The intent of this blog post is to be the first of a series, where we'll explore what GPG is, why it may be valuable to you and how you can get going using them. We'll then take this forwards an additional step, and show how you can use YubiKeys as a second factor of verification and the benefits of this approach. By no means am I the world's expert in cryptography, and some of these topics, but I wanted to document my own understanding for posterity, as I'll inevitably need to repeat/review the process in the future. I hope that this may be useful to you.

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.

Mr Chris Reddington talks to us about his life as a Microsoft Azure Fast Track Engineer and some of the pain points he helps Customer navigate. We discuss DevOps and Infrastructure as Code as well as key skills needed for this modern IT world we now live in and more!

Azureish After Dark with Chris Reddington from Microsoft and some Among Us

Stop waiting for users to tell you something is broken. The Health Endpoint Monitoring pattern gives your services a dedicated health-check endpoint that aggregates the status of all dependent components—databases, APIs, storage—into a single observable response. This episode covers the pattern in detail, including design considerations around caching, security, denial-of-service exposure, and integration with Azure Monitor and Application Insights.