// DevOps

APIs are the glue that connect rich user experiences to our data and services. Good governance using tools such as API Management are vital. Join us as we explore how to work with the deployment options for APIs in Azure API Management and how these can be integrated in CI/CD pipelines. This first episode is particularly suitable for Architects and Developers interested in applying Infrastructure as Code skills to APIs.

Back in November, GitHub announced its OpenID Connect capability for cloud deployments was generally available. This has been on my list to try out, and I finally managed to get around to it! With scenarios like this, I prefer to do something real and hands-on, rather than mocked, or a proof of concept. I decided to refactor my GitHub Action workflows for cloudwithchris.com, removing the need for secrets stored in GitHub. In this post, I outline my journey through this.

Chris and Matt start building the Player State API using .NET Web API, defining data models for the SpaceBar management sim game. They scaffold the project, discuss minimal APIs versus controller-based approaches, and set up a GitHub Actions CI workflow to build and validate the service on every commit.

Feature flags sound deceptively simple — they're just if statements. But mastering them requires a mature DevOps foundation and disciplined release engineering. Chris Reddington is joined by Chris Ayers (Azure Fast Track Engineer at Microsoft) for a deep dive into separating deployments from releases, choosing the right tooling, and implementing feature flags safely using Azure App Configuration, LaunchDarkly, and Optimizely in .NET applications.

I recently wrote a blog post about using GitHub Actions to automatically add a GitHub Issue to a GitHub project (Beta) when the issue is opened. I received a question from my colleague and maintainer of the promitor and KEDA Open Source (OSS) Projects, Tom Kerkhove on doing the same with a user-owned GitHub repository, rather than organisation-owned.

I've been following the GitHub Projects beta for a while now, and have been fortunate to be accepted as an early adopter. I'm a big fan of the direction, and the flexibility. One of the limitations I've noticed is that there's currently no built-in way to automatically add an issue to a project board. It's on the backlog, but not yet available. Fortunately, GitHub Actions has us sorted. I'll walk you through a sample I put together to do exactly that.

Did you know that Static Sites can help you build performant sites that easily scale globally? Better yet, they can be incredibly cost-effective!

A little while ago, I wrote a blog post on Using the GitHub self-hosted runner and Azure Virtual Machines to login with a System Assigned Managed Identity, which seems to get a good amount of views week on week. Reflecting on some questions that have popped up this week (and regularly received over my time in the DevOps space), I thought that it makes sense to write a post on how to use Azure DevOps self-hosted agents to deploy to private resources. So, that's what we'll be covering in this post!

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.

A double episode catching up on two weeks of Azure updates including AKS scale down modes, Cosmos DB Functions v4, and Azure Functions runtime 4.0 with .NET 6, plus GitHub CLI 2.0, Advanced Security secret scanning APIs, and a look at secretless application patterns with managed identities.