// DevOps

Chris walks through GitHub Actions fundamentals and demonstrates how to use them to build and deploy a multi-tenant Azure Functions API and a static frontend — both triggered automatically on push and pull request events. Using a pet project (a Yu-Gi-Oh card inventory app) as the real-world example, the session covers CI/CD concepts, workflow triggers, GitHub Secrets, publish profiles, Dependabot, and the GitHub public roadmap for upcoming Actions features like manual deployment approvals.

Ever wondered what goes into building a technical podcast from scratch? In this behind-the-scenes episode, the tables are turned as colleague Fletcher Kelly interviews Chris Reddington about the creation of Cloud with Chris. Topics include choosing a podcast theme, microphone selection, post-production with Audacity, using Azure Cognitive Services for automated transcription, designing for accessibility from day one, and automating the Hugo-based website with CI/CD pipelines. A candid look at the content creation journey behind a technical podcast.

Hybrid cloud is no longer just a transitional state between on-premises and public cloud — for many enterprises, it is the end state. Chris is joined by Thomas Maurer, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, to explore how Azure Arc, Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI, and Azure IoT Edge help organisations run workloads wherever they make sense: from data centres and factory floors to the network edge and other cloud providers.

DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to end users — not just code or features. In this episode, Abel Wang, Principal Developer Advocate and DevOps Lead at Microsoft, joins Chris to cover the foundations of DevOps, telemetry-driven development, database DevOps, feature flags, Site Reliability Engineering, and the importance of shifting left on quality and security.

Moving to the cloud shifts infrastructure spend from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx)—but only if you think about cost correctly from the start. This episode covers the cloud cost mindset: right-sizing, auto-scaling (scale out vs scale up), compute resource consolidation, governance through resource tagging and policy, pricing calculators, reserved instances, and how to build cost awareness into your architecture from day one.

Every cloud project starts with requirements. In this episode, Chris explores the critical pillars of cloud architecture: resilience (SLA, RTO, RPO, MTTR, MTBF), scalability, performance, and cost. Learn why defining requirements upfront—before drawing architecture diagrams—is essential, and how the same on-premises thinking about availability translates directly into the cloud.

Moving workloads to Azure does not eliminate management decisions — scalability, resilience, and high availability all require deliberate configuration. This Azure Mythbusters episode contrasts scale-out via VM Scale Sets and auto-scale rules with scale-up by increasing VM SKU size, explains availability sets and availability zones, and shows how PaaS services like Azure Functions still require you to choose the right plan and design cross-region resilience with Traffic Manager.

In my spare time, I work on a pet project called Theatreers. The aim of this is a microservice based platform focused on Theatre / Musical Theatre (bringing a few of my passion areas together). I've recently re-architected the project to align to a multi-region serverless technology stack.

Consider this scenario. You are managing a software project using Azure DevOps, and you have multiple teams working towards a common cadence. Perhaps that cadence is managed by a central team. To gain the most value from your sprint planning, you would need to associate the iterations from the project level with each individual team. This is a scenario that I have for my fictitious Theatreers project, but also a scenario I encountered recently with a colleague. I have been helping them setup an Azure DevOps project to track the development of IP and collateral, so that they can more accurately forecast what they expect to land and show the value being delivered by the team.