// Gaming

Chris combines tech updates with a Sea of Thieves gaming session alongside Cloud Family community members James Cook, Mert Ata, and Dean Ellerby. Updates cover Azure FX series VMs for HPC, NFS 3.0 for Blob Storage GA, JBoss on App Service, Azure VM Image Builder GA, plus GitHub and Azure DevOps community roundups.

In a first for the weekly vlog format, Chris goes live from Sea of Thieves, delivering Azure and GitHub news while sailing the seas with Simon — and timing it perfectly for the Pirates of the Caribbean crossover launching the following day. Azure updates include West US 3 region's sustainability-focused launch, 5G enterprise edge compute expansion, Bridge to Kubernetes replacing Dev Spaces, and Azure Data Factory plus Databricks integration improvements. Chris also recaps the Azure Bicep blog post, Shannon Keane's Azure VMware Solution session, and John Lund's cloud journey, with Aaron Davies (agile coach and women-in-tech advocate) lined up for Friday.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced game studios worldwide to rethink how developers, artists, designers, and audio engineers collaborate remotely on titles with massive file sizes and unforgiving release schedules. In this episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris is joined by Lee Williams to explore how the gaming industry adapted using cloud services — from cloud-hosted design environments and Azure infrastructure to source control workflows with GitHub and Azure DevOps, video collaboration tooling, and the emerging paradigm of building entire games in the cloud. They also touch on how live game streaming is creating an entirely new entertainment industry built on the same cloud foundations.

Weekly Vlog #19 is broadcast live, opening with Azure's Fluent Design icon rebrand and covering key security and platform updates including the AKS Secret Store CSI driver add-on, Azure Security Center improvements for hybrid and multi-cloud Kubernetes, and new Azure VPN Gateway multi-authentication capabilities. GitHub Enterprise Server 3.1 launches with GitHub Actions, Packages, and Advanced Security, while the release radar spotlights Pulumi as an emerging cross-cloud infrastructure-as-code framework. Chris also recaps Cloud Gaming Notes episode four featuring Sudoku Social's Azure PlayFab backend and a new Cloud Drop on PowerShell in Azure Functions with Carol de Winter.

Chris is joined by Dominic, a Senior PM Manager in Microsoft Teams Engineering, who spent nearly two years building Sudoku Social as a passion project — the world's first cross-platform competitive Sudoku game for iOS and Android. Dominic walks through his decision to use Unity for its build-once deploy-to-many capability, and Azure PlayFab as the game backend-as-a-service powering leaderboards, friend systems, matchmaking, and player statistics. The conversation covers how PlayFab's APIs dramatically reduced backend development effort, how Azure DevOps supported the CI/CD pipeline for the game, and the iterative learning journey of a first-time game developer teaching himself Unity, iOS, and Android development simultaneously.

Gaming has evolved from isolated save files to persistent, cloud-powered experiences that follow players across every device they own. In this third episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris and Lee Williams explore the cloud architecture behind in-game inventory and economy systems — using Sea of Thieves as a live example. Topics include persistent state management with Azure Cosmos DB, managed gaming backends with PlayFab, Live Ops patterns, and how cloud infrastructure enables monetisation and long-term player retention at scale.

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.

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

Chris hosts the first live weekly vlog, recapping the Cloud Gaming Notes debut and a candid mental health conversation with Andrew Nathan. He covers Azure Security Center updates including dangling DNS protection for Azure Defender and the secure score API GA, spotlights Project Bicep as a new ARM template authoring experience with a VS Code extension, and highlights GitHub's engineering post on SLO-based deployment pipeline reliability.

Ever thought about what it takes to host a game in the Cloud? Well, this is the series for you! On the first Wednesday of every month, we explore Cloud Concepts that impact your journey to a connected multiplayer gaming experience! In this first session, we'll play some Minecraft and talk to the concept of a hosted game server.