// Governance

In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Melissa Jerkoys — technologist, co-founder of Diversify Thinking, and advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in tech. Melissa shares her 25-year journey from engineer to leader, the barriers underrepresented groups face in technology careers, and why a diverse team is not just the right thing to do — it is a critical driver of startup and enterprise success.

Chris Reddington is joined by Sarah Lean (Techielass), Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for a deep dive into Azure Arc and hybrid cloud management. They explore how Azure Arc extends Azure governance, policy, and inventory capabilities to on-premises infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, data platforms, and app services across multi-cloud environments. The session then shifts to a candid conversation about life in Developer Relations — what cloud advocacy really entails, how to build a sustainable content creation rhythm, and how to protect your mental health in a role that blurs the line between work and passion.

Chris is joined by Matt Bradley, who helped establish the Public Cloud division at UKFast, to discuss four years of hands-on Azure experience. From migration and consultancy through DevOps automation, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud management with Azure Arc, Matt shares practical lessons, infrastructure as code trade-offs, compliance benefits, and why you must always design for failure in cloud workloads.

Many years ago, I wrote a blog post which introduced Logic Apps at a very high level when they were initially released. Ahead of a blog post that I want to write on Logic Apps v2, I thought that it may be worth writing a more thorough recap of Logic Apps as a platform. Logic Apps is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, which allows you to easily build visual workflow integrations. Whether that's plumbing several microservices together, entirely different solutions within an enterprise, or some of the repetitive backend administrative tasks for a podcast or blog site, Logic Apps may be worth exploring.

Principal of least privilege is a commonly used phrase within the Technology Industry. The idea is that we'll assign permissions of what the user needs to get the job done, rather than anything broader or more privileged. This helps reduce the blast radius in the event of a compromised account. This stretches to Azure resources at the management plane, but in some cases can also stretch to the data plane of those resources. We'll be exploring these further in this blog post.

Week nine of the vlog coincides with the one-year anniversary of the Cloud With Chris podcast. Chris kicks off a multi-part blog series on GPG key signing for Git commits, demonstrating how trivially easy it is to spoof a contributor's identity in Git without verification — and how GitHub's GPG validation feature closes that gap. Azure news this week is lighter than usual, covering serverless and low-code scenarios with PowerApps, the new Private Azure Marketplace, and the Azure Quota REST API, plus a significant list of retirement notices from the Azure Updates page all targeting 29 February 2024.

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.

Continuing the 'Architecting for the Cloud, one pattern at a time' series, Chris and Peter Piper explore two closely related cloud design patterns for securing APIs and backend resources. The Gatekeeper pattern positions a dedicated host between untrusted clients and trusted backend services — handling authentication, authorization, request validation, protocol translation, and rate limiting. The Valet Key pattern complements it by issuing short-lived, scope-restricted tokens (such as Azure SAS tokens) so clients can access specific resources directly, reducing load on central services without sacrificing security. The episode covers practical implementation options on Azure including API Management, Azure Key Vault, and Azure App Configuration.

Chris is joined by Christos Matskas — former Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, developer tools evangelist, and .NET identity expert — for a deep-dive into modern identity patterns in the cloud. They cut through the confusion between Azure AD, Azure AD B2B, Azure AD B2C, and External Identities, explain why the network perimeter is no longer your security boundary, and make the case for letting battle-hardened libraries like MSAL do the heavy lifting rather than rolling your own auth. From eliminating secrets in ARM templates to Zero Trust principles, this episode lays a practical foundation for securing any cloud application.

Moving to Azure? Security has to come first. Chris is joined by cybersecurity expert Andrew Nathan to explore how organisations can build a strong security posture in the cloud — covering Azure Security Center and Secure Score, identity strategy (Azure AD vs. Azure RBAC), multi-factor authentication, threat modelling, Azure Policy and Management Groups for governance, and the evolution of security operations into red team/blue team war gaming. Whether you're starting your cloud journey or course-correcting an existing environment, this episode will help you understand where to begin and how to keep improving over time.