// GitHub Actions

Microsoft Cloud Advocate Dean Bryen is joined by guests Carole Logan (developer and tech lead based in Glasgow) and Chris Reddington (Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect) as they take you through the end-to-end process of editing, committing and deploying code across different platforms and tools. We’ll end with a Q&A session and next steps for you to try the process out for yourself to see how agile and collaborative it is. We look forward to seeing you there!

Chris is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. He'll provide an overview of GitHub and explore how GitHub Actions can be used to build and deploy your own static sites (or other apps!) to Azure.

Weekly Vlog #21 builds anticipation for Microsoft Build, previewing Chris's upcoming presentation on friction-free developer workflows using GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Actions, and Azure Static Web Apps. Azure highlights include the Key Vault SLA raised to 99.99%, a preview of native Elastic integration, and Azure reaching its 100th compliance offering. Chris also recaps a hands-on Application Insights deep dive with Isaac Levin and covers a Helm explainer from the Azure DevOps blog alongside a Kubernetes Open Hack coaching week.

Weekly Vlog #20 celebrates hitting 500 YouTube subscribers ahead of schedule, then reviews one of Chris's most content-heavy weeks: Azure Pipelines-as-code tutorials, an event-driven architecture walkthrough using Azure Event Grid and Azure Functions, and a candid mental health live stream. The headline Azure announcement is Azure Static Web Apps reaching general availability with built-in CI/CD, serverless API integration, and free SSL. GitHub rounds out the episode with new hardware security key support for SSH operations and native video uploads to issues and pull requests.

We often hear about Kubernetes, App Services, Virtual Machines and more. But did you ever think about using Azure Storage to host your sites? The Static Content Hosting pattern is a cost-effective way to host your sites, combined with a CDN can be incredibly performant! Chris will show how he uses these patterns, along with GitHub Actions to deploy and maintain his CloudWithChris.com podcast.

In this session, we’ll navigate through a typical journey when designing the architecture of a cloud solution and consider the decisions that we may wish to make at various stages. Alongside that, we’ll factor in how requirements and design patterns can help influence our overall design.

Chris is the producer and host of his podcast CloudWithChris.com. He uses GitHub to version control the site's source code, GitHub Actions to build and deploy the site to Azure and other clouds, and GitHub Issues/Boards to plan the episode backlog. In this session, we'll explore how GitHub can be used to deploy your own workloads to Azure.

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.

Once you have a working GitHub Actions workflow, the next challenge is safely deploying across dev, staging, and production with the right secrets in the right places. This episode deep-dives into GitHub Actions Environments: how to scope secrets per environment to enforce the principle of least privilege, configure required reviewers and wait timers as production gates, and assign service principals with minimal Azure RBAC permissions. A live demo deploys the cloudwithchris.com Hugo site to Azure Storage, making every concept concrete.

Weekly Vlog #18 arrives on a UK Bank Holiday, covering Microsoft's acquisition of Kinvolk to accelerate cloud-native investment and the preview launch of Azure Web PubSub — a managed WebSocket service for real-time applications. Chris reviews Delivery Plans 2.0 GA in Azure DevOps and GitHub engineering posts on feature flags and mono-repo performance optimisations, then shares a detailed update on the Hugo CrossPoster open-source project now featuring unit tests, SonarCloud analysis, and Polly resilience patterns including circuit breakers and retry logic.