// GitHub

Chris recaps his AzureIsh Live guest appearance and the messaging patterns episode with Will Eastbury covering pub-sub, priority queues, and pipes-and-filters. He showcases the Cloud with Chris v2 website prototype built in Hugo with AI-generated transcripts via Podscribe for accessibility, covers the npm dependency confusion attack vector affecting Azure Artifacts and GitHub packages, and highlights Azure's deployment to the International Space Station in partnership with HPE.

I've talked in the past about my Open Source journey, and some of the contributions that I have made in the community. In my current role, I've been leading on the global strategy for my team's DevOps practice, defining the areas of focus and initiatives that may be beneficial for the team. In this post, I'm going to talk through one of these initiatives, and how you can contribute towards the Azure GitHub Actions experience!

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.

Chris recaps the health endpoint monitoring pattern episode and a PC build blog, then previews the debut of Cloud Gaming Notes with Lee Williams on game server hosting, and a candid mental health conversation with Andrew Nathan. He reviews Azure updates including Azure Cloud Services Extended Support ARM-based deployment, Azure AD Premium 99.99% SLA, the Azure Architecture Center January digest, and GitHub engineering posts on canary deployment strategies and JavaScript performance optimisation.

Chris recaps a JamStack blog post, an appearance on the MS How-To show covering cloud design patterns, and the gatekeeper and valet key patterns session on API security. He covers Azure updates including AKS automatic cluster upgrade channels and the Secret Store CSI driver for Azure Key Vault, Azure DevOps Delivery Plans 2.0 with YAML manual validation, Pulumi as an infrastructure-as-code tool supporting Python, TypeScript, and Go, and a comprehensive GitHub 2020 year-in-review.

Chris announces his involvement with relaunching the Azure Thames Valley meetup, recaps the static content hosting pattern episode and his open source blog, and previews upcoming talks at AzureIsh Live and a SquaredUp webinar on application observability with Azure Monitor and App Insights. He covers Azure Updates including public IP SKU upgrades, built-in Azure Policy for NSG flow logs, GitHub's availability in Iran, the GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 release candidate, and Docker Desktop integration with Azure Container Instances.

Serving static HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript from a general-purpose web server wastes compute and money. The Static Content Hosting pattern offloads these assets to cloud storage—Azure Blob Storage, AWS S3, or GCP Storage—optionally fronted by a CDN for global performance and storage-tier scalability. This episode walks through the pattern, a real-world implementation with Hugo and Azure CDN, and the trade-offs to consider.

Setting up a development environment—installing the right SDK versions, extensions, and tools—wastes hours and causes 'works on my machine' problems. This episode shows how VS Code's Remote Containers extension and GitHub Codespaces solve this with containerised, reproducible dev environments defined in a devcontainer.json file. See a live demo of editing cloudwithchris.com entirely in a browser-based Codespace.

Chris launches the weekly vlog format with a recap of December 2020, including open source contributions to the Hugo Castanet theme and the start of a new community-focused Hugo theme project. He reviews Azure updates covering Azure Synapse Analytics GA and Microsoft BGP routing security improvements, highlights GitHub's DevSecOps tooling with CodeQL and Dependabot, and explains the new Azure DevOps service tag for network security groups.

GitHub Issues provides a lightweight project backlog with labels, milestones, assignees, and kanban project boards, while GitHub Discussions (launched at GitHub Universe) enables open community conversations through categorised threads for Q&A, ideas, and show-and-tell. This episode demonstrates converting issues to discussions, automating workflows with GitHub Actions issue and project event triggers, and using project board automation rules.