// Infrastructure as Code

A double episode catching up on two weeks of Azure updates including AKS scale down modes, Cosmos DB Functions v4, and Azure Functions runtime 4.0 with .NET 6, plus GitHub CLI 2.0, Advanced Security secret scanning APIs, and a look at secretless application patterns with managed identities.

A decade after Patrick Debois coined "DevOps," the landscape looks radically different. In this episode, Daniela Fontani — CTO at Central Consulting and long-time open source contributor — breaks down the most important DevOps trends reshaping the industry today: DevSecOps, GitOps, NoOps, automation-first pipelines, and the growing role of platform engineering. Plus, the honest truth about which buzzwords actually matter and which you can safely ignore.

Chris Reddington is joined by Thomas Thornton — DevOps specialist at Kainos — for a practical deep dive into real-world DevOps. They cover CI/CD pipeline design, Git branching strategies (including trunk-based development), pull request workflows, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitOps. Thomas draws on experience managing 83 Azure subscriptions and 120+ GitOps-driven applications in production.

Chris covers Azure updates including container app modernization, DDoS protection trends for H1 2021, and virtual network resizing in preview, alongside the general availability of GitHub Codespaces with a deep dive into how GitHub's engineering team uses Codespaces to develop GitHub.com. He also discusses Bicep and Infrastructure as Code on the Azure DevOps blog, plus upcoming sessions on AKS, application security, and cell-based cloud architectures.

Chris opens with a heartfelt tribute to Abel Wang before covering Azure updates including Site Recovery cross-region replication, ExpressRoute expansions, and immutable blob storage. The episode highlights GitHub's 15+ new code scanning integrations with open source security tools, a comparison of Azure Static Web Apps hosting options, and upcoming Cloud with Chris content plans.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a DevOps practice where engineers frequently merge small code changes into a central repository, triggering automated builds and test suites to catch regressions early. This video explains how CI applies equally to application code, Infrastructure as Code, database schemas, and data science notebooks, and shows how GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines act as automated gatekeepers through pull request workflows.

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.

You may have heard about ARM Templates. You may have heard about Project Bicep. What are they, how do they differ? Why would I use one over the other? That's exactly what we'll be exploring throughout this blog post!

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. Shannon explains how AVS lets organisations migrate on-premises VMware environments into Azure without a forklift upgrade, using live vMotion migrations via HCX with zero downtime, and unlocks Azure-native integrations including Azure Security Center, Azure Active Directory, Application Gateway, and PaaS services.