Enterprise on Chris Reddington

Rubber Duck Thursdays - Let's build down tech debt

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chris reviews the latest GitHub changelog and explores the major VS Code December release, then continues building custom agents for a game MCP server project.

GitHub Changelog Highlights

CodeQL 2.23.6 adds Swift 6.2.1 and new C# security queries
GPT-5.1 Codex Max now in public preview for GitHub Copilot across VS Code, GitHub.com, and GitHub Mobile
Workflow dispatch inputs limit increased from 10 to 25
Copilot code generation metrics now available in the enterprise insights dashboard
Enterprise teams limits increased over 10x — up to 2,500 teams and 5,000 users per team
Dependabot-based dependency graphs for Go now provide more complete transitive dependency trees
npm classic tokens revoked — replaced with session-based and CLI token management
Repository custom properties now support GraphQL management and a URL type with built-in validation
GitHub MCP server adds tool-specific configuration, lockdown mode for untrusted contributors, and default content sanitization against prompt injection
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.19 GA with rule set history import/export, SSH/TLS cipher configuration, and OpenTelemetry metrics
Auto model selection GA in VS Code for all Copilot plans

VS Code December Release — Agent Features

Agent HQ for managing multiple coding agents — background, cloud, or local — working simultaneously
Background agents with git worktrees for isolated workspaces, enabling multiple agents to work in parallel without file conflicts
Custom agents for organizations — share agents at the org level via .github-private repositories
Sub-agents via run sub agent — delegate tasks to specialized sub-agents with their own context windows to avoid context bloat
Claude skills support — reuse existing Claude Code skills within VS Code agents
Session management improvements — integrated sessions view, compact and side-by-side layouts, and persistent local agent sessions

Live Coding — Custom Agents and Background Agents

Chris demonstrates the new VS Code agent features by continuing work on a tic-tac-toe game with an MCP server backend. He creates a testing specialist agent using a TDD workflow, experiments with background agents running in git worktrees, and explores sub-agent delegation for specialized tasks like code quality review.

Manage your repositories at scale across the enterprise

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a demo video showcasing Enterprise Repository Policies. The video covers the following specific topics:

The need for enterprise-level repository governance: ensuring repositories meet naming, visibility, and operational standards across many organizations
Introduction to enterprise repository policies: restricting visibility changes, repository creation, deletion, transfer, and naming patterns
Configuring a policy enforcement status (active or disabled) and designating exempt roles or teams
Targeting policies across specific organizations and repositories within the enterprise account
Demonstrating a delete-prevention policy applied to the oct-academy organization, blocking repository deletion at the UI level
Flexible repository targeting using repository properties, mirroring the approach available in branch and repository rule sets
Repository properties at the enterprise account level: defining properties that are inherited and visible across all organizations
Organization admins seeing enterprise-defined properties in their own property views
Requiring properties to be set when a new repository is created, keeping metadata well-maintained from day one

Beyond Code With Github the AI Revolution in Software Development

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As AI continues to reshape the way businesses innovate, the conversation shifts beyond the mere integration of new technology. Chris emphasizes that adopting AI-powered software development is a significant cultural shift, requiring more than just technical tools. It demands a top-down approach, where leadership support and change management are critical to fostering a progressive culture within development teams.

Private Mirrors App

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a walkthrough of GitHub’s newly introduced Private Mirrors App. The video covers the following specific topics:

The challenge open source program offices (OSPOs) face balancing upstream contribution benefits (staying current, developer happiness, brand reputation, code reuse) against risks (IP leakage, secrets, PII, contributor licence agreements, incompatible licences)
How standard forking falls short for private review workflows, since a fork of a public repository must also be public
Architecture of the Private Mirrors App: a web front-end and service that maintains private mirrors mapped to public forks within a GitHub organization
Forking an upstream project (the GitHub org-metrics dashboard) and navigating to the fork in a GitHub organization
Configuring a new private mirror via the Private Mirrors App, including targeting a separate Enterprise Managed Users (EMU) organization
Managing multiple team mirrors for the same upstream project without overlap
Enabling quality gates (builds, tests, policy automation) that must pass before merging into the private mirror’s main branch
Automatic sync from the private mirror’s main branch back to the public fork when changes are merged
Completing the upstream contribution process by raising a pull request from the public fork to the upstream repository

GitHub Galaxy 2024 Amsterdam

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ready to explore our blueprint for AI-powered development? Join us to network with local tech leaders and learn the key to addressing tech debt, modernizing the software development lifecycle, and transforming your enterprise.

GitHub Galaxy 2024 Paris

Wed, 29 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub Galaxy 2024 Stockholm

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub Galaxy 2024 London

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub Galaxy 2024 Berlin

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond Monitoring: The Rise of Observability Platform

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 19:00:00 +0000

Monitoring tells you that something is broken. Observability tells you why. In this episode Chris sits down with Samir Pradka, Enterprise Architect and Distinguished Expert in Modern Applications at Artos, to trace the evolution from primitive task-manager debugging through APM dashboards to today’s full-stack observability platforms.

Key topics covered in this episode:

Monitoring vs. observability — why APM tooling falls short for distributed, cloud-native systems at enterprise scale
The three pillars — ingesting and correlating logs, metrics, and traces into a unified observability data lake
AIOps integration — adding machine learning to detect anomalies, predict failures, and generate actionable insights before users are impacted
Self-healing infrastructure — using Infrastructure as Code tools such as Ansible and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to drive automated remediation when thresholds are breached
Hybrid and multi-cloud coverage — extending a single observability pane of glass across on-premises workloads, single-cloud, and multi-cloud deployments
Incremental adoption — starting with a proof of concept, building a sprint backlog, and maturing the platform over time rather than trying to instrument everything at once

Whether you are running a handful of microservices or a global platform comparable to the scale of Walmart or Amazon, this episode gives you a practical framework for moving beyond reactive monitoring towards a proactive, intelligent observability strategy.

LunchBytes Series 1 Episode 3: Azure Arc for Application Services

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Things to Consider Before Migrating Old .NET Applications to Cloud

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 19:30:00 +0000

Migrating a legacy .NET application to the cloud can unlock powerful capabilities — scalability, resilience, built-in monitoring, and more. But moving to Azure without proper preparation is a recipe for costly surprises. In this episode, Jonah Andersson — Microsoft MVP for Azure and software engineer at Forefront Consulting Sweden — shares the real story of a .NET migration that turned into a hard-won lesson.

What Went Wrong (and Why)

The challenges Jonah encountered weren’t Azure problems — they were preparation problems. Key issues included:

Azure Quantum & Microsoft Q#

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Quantum computing promises to solve problems that classical computers simply cannot — from breaking cryptographic barriers to modelling complex pharmaceutical interactions. But what does that mean for a software developer today?

In this session, Chris is joined by Johnny Hooybergs — .NET consultant at Involved (Belgium), conference speaker, and author of Introducing Microsoft Quantum Computing for Developers — to make quantum computing approachable for developers.

Topics covered in this session include:

CGN8 - Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 8 - Azure for Game Developers

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Reddington and LaBrina Loving — Developer Advocate for Gaming at Microsoft — explore what it takes to get started with game development on Azure, regardless of your background. LaBrina brings twenty years of enterprise development experience, making her perspective especially relevant for developers considering a similar path.

Key Topics Covered

LaBrina’s background: Two decades in the Microsoft stack — .NET, SharePoint, Dynamics, and Azure since its early days in 2010. Her entry into gaming came through an interest in Unity for mixed reality and VR, before moving into a dedicated game developer advocacy role.
Cloud adoption in game studios: Game studios are at a similar inflection point to where enterprise organisations were several years ago — beginning to understand the power of cloud, moving workloads off dedicated servers, and realising the benefits of managed, scalable infrastructure.
Enterprise skills transfer directly: Software fundamentals — clean architecture, scalable design, testing, and DevOps practices — carry over to game development. There is more in common between the two disciplines than most developers expect.
Key technical differences: Latency is paramount. Where enterprise applications rely on TCP connections, game networking commonly uses UDP and socket-based communication for real-time, low-latency responsiveness. Recognising this early avoids painful rewrites.
Getting started with Unity: For .NET developers, Unity provides a natural on-ramp to game development, sharing the C# language and familiar tooling.
Accessibility of the cloud for games: Azure’s managed services remove much of the infrastructure complexity for independent studios and game developers, letting teams focus on gameplay rather than operations.

What is the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework?

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Migrating to the Cloud is more than just deciding which technology you want to adopt, or building out the appropriate architectures for your implementation. There is a significant amount of planning needed before you take your initial steps. For example, the initial migration process, establishing a foundation for your ongoing governance, and the wider management of expectations from your business, as well as establishing team structure and responsibilities. This is where the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework comes in.

Tales from the Real World - Architecting the Transformation

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Most organizations undergoing digital transformation are progressing through maturity stages — moving from localized, monolithic setups toward agile, cloud-native, data-driven platforms. But what is the architect’s role in guiding that journey, and how do you build a framework that is practical rather than theoretical?

In this session, Asanka Abesinghe returns to discuss his experience architecting enterprise transformations, covering:

Six design principles for digitally-driven organizations: decentralized, lean-agile, open standards, outside-in (customer-centric), cloud-native, and data-driven
The architecture value stream — how business architecture, information architecture, application architecture, and technology architecture each contribute to business outcomes
Maturity models as a GPS — assessing where you are, setting a destination, and re-routing when the journey deviates
The architect as elevator rider — connecting the business penthouse with the engineering engine room, requiring both broad strategic thinking and hands-on technical depth
BizArch — the case for a business architect role that bridges domain knowledge and technical execution, and why handoffs between business analysts and technical architects so often fail

Asanka also shares references to his open-source maturity model specification (released under Creative Commons) and his Architect to Architect blog series for those looking to go deeper.

Migrating to the Cloud

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this episode Chris is joined by Suzanne Tedrick — Azure Infrastructure Specialist at Microsoft and award-winning author of Women of Color in Tech — to unpack what it really takes to migrate applications and workloads to the cloud successfully.

Key topics covered in this episode:

Why migrations fail — the 2020 Cloud Security Alliance finding that 90% of respondents experienced a failed migration, and why most root causes come back to people and process rather than technology
The Cloud Adoption Framework — Microsoft’s holistic guidance covering not just technical steps but the business strategy, organisational readiness, and cultural changes required for a sustainable migration
Assess before you move — understanding your current application portfolio, identifying which workloads to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or retire, and setting realistic timelines
Governance from day one — defining who has access to what, managing cost controls, enforcing policy, and avoiding the chaos of ungoverned multi-cloud sprawl
Stakeholder alignment — bringing together infrastructure teams, application owners, business stakeholders, and support partners to act as a coordinated migration symphony rather than isolated silos
Incremental progress — using the Cloud Adoption Framework as a guide, not a checklist; taking measured steps forward rather than trying to migrate everything at once
Diversity and inclusion in tech — Suzanne shares insights from her book Women of Color in Tech, exploring how diverse teams build better, more equitable technology products

Resources mentioned: Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, Microsoft Learn, and Microsoft Assessments.

Tales from the Real World - Leveraging Azure as a Telco provider

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this Tales from the Real World episode, Chris is joined by Ivo — a cloud evangelist who has led digital transformation at one of Belgium’s largest telco providers — for a fascinating look at how an industry most people never think about as a cloud consumer is rapidly becoming one of cloud’s most interesting use cases.

What’s covered

Telco fundamentals — how traditional telephony works, and why the shift from voice to data changes everything for telco business models
Cloud adoption drivers — the economics of scale, competitive pressure from streaming platforms, and the need to move from subscription revenue to value-added services
5G and IoT — how connectivity evolves from calling and messaging into smart devices, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and hospitals
Azure Arc and edge computing — managing deployments from cloud to edge consistently, and why this matters for telcos owning physical network infrastructure
AI and machine learning — how telcos can leverage the data flowing through their networks to create new capabilities and services
Security and compliance — the trust challenges unique to the telco industry (data traversing their lines, regulatory requirements), and how cloud can help address them
Transformation challenges — the cultural and organisational struggle of modernising while keeping existing revenue streams alive; the mindset shift required at all levels
Business model evolution — connectivity → security → applications → manageability → services: the layered value stack Ivo recommends for telcos building on Azure

CGN7 - Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 7 - Game Streaming and Cloud-Powered Gaming

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Reddington and Lee Williams discuss game streaming — not live-streaming gameplay to an audience, but the technology that streams a game to your device from cloud-hosted infrastructure. This episode of Cloud Gaming Notes explores why cloud makes this possible and what it means for both players and game creators.

Key Topics Covered

What game streaming actually is: The game runs on remote cloud infrastructure; only the video stream is sent to your device, with your inputs sent back in real time. Low latency is critical to a playable experience.
Why cloud enables this: Economies of scale mean providers can amortise the cost of high-end GPU infrastructure across thousands of players, offering access via a subscription rather than requiring expensive local hardware.
Consumer behaviour shift: Just as audiences moved from DVD libraries to Netflix and Spotify, gamers are increasingly comfortable with subscription-based access to game catalogues — Xbox Game Pass and Google Stadia as leading examples.
Multi-device freedom: Players can switch between PC, phone, tablet, and TV without hardware lock-in — the game experience follows the user, not the device.
Games as living services: For game creators, streaming shifts the model from a one-time retail release to a continuously updated, platform-style service with DLC, in-game economies, and ongoing subscriptions (Minecraft and GTA Online as prime examples).
Development economics: Building for a streaming platform reduces per-platform porting costs and enables constant iteration, removing the need for major new release cycles to reach players on different devices.

Tales from the Real World - Azure AD B2C: A real silver bullet

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When COVID-19 forced the vOpen.Tech conference to pivot from a physical event to a fully virtual one, the organising team had fewer than two weeks to build a production-ready registration and identity system — with minimal budget. In this episode, Chris is joined by Facundo La Rocca (Faku), a .NET developer and conference organiser from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who shares how Azure AD B2C became the silver bullet that made it possible.

Tales from the Real World – Helping veterans transition into IT and Learn Azure

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 18:30:00 +0000

In this Tales from the Real World episode, Chris talks with Dr. Keith McNally — a Marine Corps veteran turned college professor — about the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA), a programme that has helped hundreds of transitioning military members gain Azure cloud skills and find employment in the IT industry.

What’s covered

The programme — how Microsoft and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University partnered to address 500,000 unfilled IT jobs in the US annually, running cohorts across 13–14 military bases from Virginia to Hawaii
Who it serves — why military veterans face a unique and stressful transition cliff when leaving a highly structured environment for the civilian workforce
Project-based learning (PBL) — how cohorts build real Azure solutions (including IoT Hub projects with robots and sensors) rather than studying in the abstract
Teaching people to think — the hardest shift for many veterans: moving from following a manual to reasoning about what-if scenarios, making recommendations, and briefing management
Soft skills — resume writing, LinkedIn networking, communicating technical knowledge, presenting to senior stakeholders; skills civilians take for granted
Azure curriculum — Windows Server, Azure cloud foundations, and hands-on IoT/cloud projects that produce a tangible portfolio
Learning lessons for everyone — the classroom as a safe space to fail, the importance of being open-minded, and why transitioning careers (military background or not) requires the same mindset shift

A deeply human episode about technology, learning, community, and making career change achievable for those who’ve served.

42 - How to choose the 'Right' Datastore for your scenario

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With so many data store options in Azure — relational SQL, NoSQL, document databases, blob storage, key-value stores, and more — how do you choose the right one for your workload? In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Steph Martin to explore the concept of polyglot persistence and the trade-offs between data store types. From Azure SQL and Cosmos DB to blob storage and microservices data patterns, they discuss how workload requirements, access patterns, RTO/RPO targets, and application architecture should guide your data platform decisions. A practical guide for architects and developers navigating the modern data landscape on Azure.

CGN6 - Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 6 - Gaming as Entertainment - Esports and Streaming

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Game streaming and esports have transformed gaming from a private pastime into a global spectator sport, with cloud infrastructure at the heart of that transformation. In this Cloud Gaming Notes episode, Chris is joined by Lee Williams to explore how platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming have built entire business ecosystems around low-latency live content delivery.

The conversation examines the business models that allow individual streamers to earn a living — from subscriptions and donations to sponsorship and ad revenue — and reflects on how this mirrors the broader shift towards live, social content across platforms like Instagram Live, Facebook Live, and Periscope. A core theme running through the episode is community: how the social bonds formed around shared gaming experiences are what keep audiences engaged and platforms sticky.

Why a Diverse Team is Crucial to Startup Success

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Diverse teams are not just a social imperative — they are a competitive advantage. In this episode, Melissa Jerkoys, co-founder of Diversify Thinking and a 25-year veteran of the technology industry, joins Chris Reddington to explore why diversity is critical to startup and enterprise success.

The conversation covers multiple dimensions of diversity:

Demographic diversity — age, race, sex, and ethnicity, and how these shape team dynamics and customer empathy
Personality diversity — introvert versus extrovert, differing thinking styles, and how varied perspectives drive better decisions
Functional diversity — engineering, design, copywriting, and other skill sets that together form a complete team

Melissa shares her personal journey as a woman in technology who has consistently been the only woman in the room, the communities she built to support others in the same position, and the realisation that safe spaces alone do not solve the underlying problem. That insight led her and her co-founder to establish Diversify Thinking — a grassroots effort to raise the level of action to meet the level of conversation.

Azure & VMWare - A Discussion with Shannon Kuehn

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Chris is joined by Shannon Kuehn, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for an accessible deep dive into Azure VMware Solution (AVS) — the dedicated VMware platform hosted within Azure datacentres.

What’s covered:

What Azure VMware Solution is: dedicated bare metal nodes running vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, and NSX-T inside Azure
Why organisations on VMware on-premises choose AVS over re-platforming — meeting infrastructure teams where they are
The AVS architecture: dedicated address space (/22 CIDR), ExpressRoute circuit, and peering into an Azure VNet to unlock integrations
Networking prerequisites: ExpressRoute Global Reach, BGP routing, and site-to-site VPN as an alternative during setup
HCX (Hybrid Cloud Extension): site pairings, tunnels, and live vMotion for zero-downtime VM migration from on-premises to Azure
HCX Advanced (3 site pairings) vs. HCX Enterprise (up to 10 site pairings) licensing
Azure integrations unlocked by AVS: Azure Security Center, Azure Active Directory, Application Gateway, API Management, and PaaS services via VNet injection
Infrastructure as Code with Bicep and ARM templates for AVS deployments
Pricing, regional availability, the AV36 SKU, and the capacity-management subscription whitelisting process
How Azure ExpressRoute Global Reach pricing reductions are improving the economics of migration

Ideal for infrastructure engineers, cloud architects, and VMware administrators exploring modernisation paths to Azure without a forklift migration.

Hybrid Cloud Update and Life as a Cloud Advocate

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Reddington is joined by Sarah Lean (Techielass), Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for a wide-ranging session covering two distinct topics.

Azure Arc & Hybrid Cloud

The first half focuses on Azure Arc — Microsoft’s solution for extending Azure management capabilities beyond the public cloud. Sarah explains how Azure Arc acts as a unified management plane for on-premises servers, Kubernetes clusters, data services, and (more recently) application services, regardless of whether they live in your own datacentre, AWS, or Google Cloud. Key capabilities discussed include:

37 - Your Career and Your Mental Health

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mental health and career development are more closely intertwined than people often appreciate. In this episode, Chris is joined by Glenn Small (Analytics Manager at AWS and long-time colleague from Microsoft) for an open and honest conversation about the pressures that working life places on mental wellbeing.

Both Chris and Glenn share personal stories. Glenn describes how unchecked work stress early in his career spiralled into severe anxiety, paranoia, and ultimately a breakdown — and how reaching out for support from trusted people and professional help was the turning point that allowed him to recover and build lasting resilience. Chris reflects on his own experiences, including a particularly difficult period during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns when social isolation compounded the everyday pressures of a demanding role.

CGN3 - Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 3 - Inventory and Economy

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this third episode of the Cloud Gaming Notes series, Chris Reddington and Lee Williams load up Sea of Thieves to talk through the cloud engineering challenges behind one of gaming’s most critical systems: inventory and economy.

Key topics covered in this episode:

Persistent player state — how modern games use cloud storage to ensure that every item, currency balance, and progression milestone is preserved across sessions and devices without the player needing to manage saves manually
Inventory architecture — treating in-game objects as first-class cloud entities, and the relationship between in-game mechanics (swords, loot, ammo) and the backing data stores that represent them
Economy design — structuring in-game currencies, rewards, and progression loops so they remain balanced, fair, and resistant to exploitation
Azure Cosmos DB and PlayFab — choosing between building a custom inventory data layer on Cosmos DB versus adopting a fully managed gaming backend like PlayFab, and the trade-offs each approach involves
Live Ops — continuously updating and evolving game content post-launch, and how cloud infrastructure supports rapid deployment of seasonal events, balance patches, and new rewards without server downtime
Cross-platform and cross-device — designing inventory systems that follow a player from console to PC to mobile via cloud synchronisation
Community and monetisation — how a well-designed economy builds long-term player engagement, supports streaming audiences, and opens monetisation opportunities for publishers

Next in the series: a conversation with Dominic from Australia on building a social Sudoku game with PlayFab.

28 - Intro to Landing Zones

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

26 - The Pub Sub, Priority Queue and Pipes and Filter Patterns

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Chris and Willy cover three fundamental messaging patterns in this episode of Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time.

Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub) transitions systems from point-to-point messaging (one sender, one receiver) to a multicast model where a single event triggers multiple independent subscribers simultaneously. Azure Service Bus topics and Azure Event Grid are the primary Azure implementations. Canonical use cases include:

Insurance aggregators fanning out quote requests to 15–50 backend services in parallel
Credit check pipelines triggering multiple reference agencies from a single event
Account sign-up flows dispatching to billing, provisioning, and notification services concurrently

Key benefit: subscribers are fully decoupled — adding a new consumer requires only a new subscription, with no changes to the producer.

23 - Gatekeeper and Valet Key Patterns - Secure your APIs and Resources

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing the ‘Architecting for the Cloud, one pattern at a time’ series, Chris and Peter Piper explore two closely related cloud design patterns that address a core challenge in distributed systems: how do you give clients access to exactly what they need — and nothing more?

The Gatekeeper Pattern

The Gatekeeper acts as a dedicated intermediary between untrusted clients (the public internet) and trusted backend services. Rather than exposing internal services directly, all traffic flows through the Gatekeeper, which can enforce:

19 - The Event Sourcing, Materialized View and CQRS Patterns

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

These three cloud design patterns — Event Sourcing, Materialized View, and CQRS — are frequently used together in event-driven systems and are especially well-suited to cloud environments like Azure. In this episode, Chris and Steph explore each pattern individually and explain how they complement each other.

Event Sourcing

Instead of storing only the current state of an entity, Event Sourcing records every event that led to that state as an immutable, append-only log. Think of it as a complete audit trail of decisions:

15 - The Sharding and Index Table Patterns

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Starting to think about the data layer of your application and concerned about scalability? In this episode, Chris is joined by Steph Martin to cover two complementary cloud data patterns: Sharding and Index Table.

The Sharding Pattern

Sharding horizontally scales a data store by partitioning data across multiple shards (database nodes), so no single node becomes a bottleneck. Key design decisions include:

Shard key strategies: Lookup sharding (explicit map of key to shard), range sharding (e.g., customer IDs 1–1000 on shard A), and hash sharding (consistent hashing to distribute load evenly).
Cross-shard queries: Designing your shard key to avoid cross-shard queries is critical — querying across shards is expensive and may require scatter-gather patterns.
Noisy neighbour problem: In multi-tenant SaaS, a single large tenant can saturate a shard and degrade performance for co-tenants. Good key design is the best prevention.
Data sovereignty: Sharding is an elegant solution for customers that require data residency in specific regions.
Azure SQL Database elastic client library: Microsoft’s tooling for managing shard maps and routing queries to the correct shard automatically.

The Index Table Pattern

14 - The Deployment Stamps Pattern

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Deployment Stamps pattern is a powerful cloud architecture approach for scaling, resilience, and multi-tenancy. In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by John Downs — who contributed the pattern to the Azure Architecture Center — to explore how stamping out independent copies of your application stack across regions enables geographic distribution, data sovereignty, isolated failure domains, and deployment rings for staged rollouts. Discover when to use this pattern, how Azure itself relies on it internally, and the key considerations around request routing, cross-stamp querying, and disaster recovery planning.

13 - Tales from the Real World - Defying DDOS

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

DDoS attacks have scaled to cloud-level volumes — terabits per second — that on-premises hardware simply cannot absorb. In this episode, Chris is joined by Cam Adams, an engineering manager from Brisbane, Australia, who shares first-hand experience helping customers across Asia-Pacific defend against distributed denial-of-service attacks using Azure.

Cam describes three distinct customer profiles: organisations fully committed to Azure, those in a hybrid state with workloads split between cloud and on-premises, and those yet to begin their cloud journey but still needing cloud-scale defence for on-premises systems. For the latter group, the approach centres on using Azure as an absorptive layer against what Cam calls the “last mile” bottleneck — the narrow point where an internet connection meets on-premises routers and security appliances with throughput measured in gigabits, now being targeted by attacks in the hundreds of gigabits to terabits per second.

6 - Hybrid Cloud

Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hybrid cloud is no longer just a transitional state between on-premises and public cloud — for many enterprises, it is an end state in its own right. Chris is joined by Thomas Maurer, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, to explore this shift in thinking and how Microsoft’s Azure platform is evolving to support it.

Thomas explains that hybrid today extends well beyond the traditional on-premises-plus-Azure model. It encompasses factory floors running IoT edge workloads that cannot tolerate internet dependency, retail stores with local compute requirements, disaster recovery and backup scenarios, and true multi-cloud deployments spanning multiple public cloud providers. The episode covers a broad range of Azure technologies designed to bring cloud-like management and consistency to all of these environments: Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI, Azure Stack Edge, Azure Arc, and Azure IoT Edge.

4 - Hackathons

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hackathons are a powerful accelerator for learning, innovation, and community building — but what does it actually take to participate in, organize, or mentor at one? In this episode, Chris is joined by Maria Vrabie, an experienced hackathon participant, organizer, and mentor with a background at Microsoft.

They explore the full spectrum of hackathon formats — from university weekend events and charity hack days to corporate open hacks run with enterprise customers. Maria shares candid stories from both sides of the organizer table, including the chaos of catering for hundreds of tired developers on a Sunday morning!

3 - DevOps in a Cloud World

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this first-guest episode of Cloud with Chris, Abel Wang — Principal Developer Advocate and DevOps Lead at Microsoft — joins Chris Reddington for a wide-ranging conversation on what DevOps really means and how to put it into practice in a cloud-first world.

Key topics covered in this episode:

Defining DevOps — Microsoft’s framing of DevOps as the union of people, process, and products focused on continuously delivering value to end users, not just shipping features
Telemetry and data-driven decisions — how telemetry revealed that only one-third of features built at Microsoft actually delivered the value users wanted (one-third were neutral and one-third were actively unwanted), and how measuring actual usage changed the team’s development approach
Feature flags — separating deployment from release, enabling safe experimentation with subsets of users, supporting rapid rollback, and keeping flag debt under control
Database DevOps — storing database schemas in source control, automating schema migrations, and breaking the traditional DBA bottleneck to support high-frequency deployments
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) — embedding on-call responsibility directly in cross-functional product teams, using live-site incidents as the fastest way to ramp up new engineers
Shifting left — moving quality, security, and reliability considerations earlier in the delivery pipeline to reduce the cost of fixing defects in production

If you are earlier in your DevOps journey or looking to level up specific practices like CI/CD pipelines, feature flags, or database automation, this episode is packed with practical insights drawn from real experience inside Microsoft engineering teams.

2 - Cost Control

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Moving to the cloud shifts infrastructure spend from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx)—but realising those savings requires deliberate, cost-aware design from the start.

What You’ll Learn

The CapEx → OpEx mindset shift and why cloud infrastructure should be treated as a commodity
Why requirements drive cost decisions—over-engineering for undefined SLAs leads to unnecessary spend and complexity
Right-sizing: identifying and correcting over-provisioned VMs and PaaS tiers migrated from on-premises
Auto-scaling: scaling out (more instances) vs. scaling up (larger SKUs), and why ephemeral scale-out is typically more cost-efficient for spiky or seasonal workloads
Compute Resource Consolidation: reducing 10 service instances to 2 via colocation or containerisation on Kubernetes
Governance and tagging: associating resources with metadata (environment, team, service) to enable cost reporting and chargeback
Using cloud pricing calculators for bronze/silver/gold architecture cost modelling with stakeholders
Reserved instances and licensing benefit portability (e.g., Azure Hybrid Benefit) for predictable, steady-state workloads
DDoS cost risk: why auto-scale maximum instance limits and DDoS protection services are also financial safeguards

Key Mindset Shift

Treat cloud resources as cattle, not pets. Right-size, auto-scale, and regularly review spend against your workload’s actual usage patterns—turning the monthly bill into a continuous optimisation feedback loop rather than a fixed infrastructure investment.

1 - Requirements in Context

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Every cloud project starts with requirements. In this episode, Chris explores the critical pillars of cloud architecture: resilience, scalability, performance, and cost—and why defining them upfront (before drawing any architecture diagram) is essential.

What You’ll Learn

Why requirements engineering is the foundation of any cloud architecture project
Key resilience metrics: SLA, RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPO (Recovery Point Objective), MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery), and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
How composite SLAs differ from looking at the weakest link in your architecture
The relationship between availability tiers (e.g., 99.9% vs 99.999%) and real-world downtime allowances
How scalability, performance, and cost form trade-off dimensions in every architecture decision
Why over-engineering for loosely-defined requirements leads to unnecessary cost and complexity

Key Concepts

This episode maps on-premises thinking (racks, data centres, zones, regions) to equivalent cloud failure domains, helping architects understand how availability requirements translate when moving to the cloud. Cost is introduced as a first-class design dimension—not a post-hoc optimisation—and the importance of composite SLAs over single-component SLA views is highlighted throughout.