// Kubernetes

The gap between raw Kubernetes and a developer-friendly platform is where the most interesting tooling is being built today. GitOps gives teams a declarative, version-controlled way to manage their clusters — but the YAML expertise and infrastructure knowledge required can be a steep barrier for developers. In this episode, Chris is joined by Laszlo Folgas, founder of Gimlet.io, to explore ClickOps over GitOps: a UI-driven deployment approach where developers click their way to production while the platform silently generates GitOps manifests and commits them to a Git repository. They cover Flux CD, how Gimlet's opinionated platform works end-to-end, and why developer experience has become the defining battleground in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Chris Nesbitt-Smith traces how governance policies are typically born — emotionally, reactively, and as one-shot documents — then shows how applying software engineering principles transforms policy into a living, versioned artefact. The talk covers iterative policy management, Kubernetes admission control, open-source policy tooling, and the cultural shift required to make policy genuinely effective rather than just technically compliant.

Chris and Matt deploy their containerized microservices to Azure Container Apps for the first time, pulling images from GitHub Packages and exploring the Dapr, KEDA, and Envoy integrations that Container Apps provides.

Your monthly digest covering a packed May 2022 — headlined by Microsoft Build! In this episode, Chris walks through Azure Container Apps going generally available (and why it's one to watch), the limited access preview of Azure OpenAI Service with GPT-3 and Codex models, Azure DNS Private Resolver for hybrid name resolution, Open Service Mesh extension for Azure Arc GA, NGINX natively integrated on Azure, AKS host process containers in preview, Azure Communication Services Email GA, hierarchical partition keys in Cosmos DB, and much more. Plus GitHub and Azure DevOps highlights from a very busy month for the developer ecosystem.

In a previous blog post, I provided an overview of the Distributed Application Runtime (dapr) and explained how it is a useful framework when building microservices. In this blog post, I will show you how to use dapr to enqueue and dequeue messages locally with Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage Queues.

Azure Arc extends the use of Azure Services beyond the Azure cloud. With Azure Arc you are able to deploy and monitor Azure services in your own datacentres or other cloud providers. This event will focus on Azure Application Services and how they can be deployed outside of Azure through Kubernetes with Azure Arc.

Your monthly digest of everything happening across Azure, GitHub, and Azure DevOps — so you don't have to keep up with it all yourself! In this January 2022 roundup, Chris returns to the channel after a break with an honest discussion about mental health and burnout, recaps Cloud With Chris highlights from 2021, and covers a packed set of updates: AKS improvements (containerd GA, FIPS node pools, Kubernetes version aliasing), Static Web Apps Enterprise Grade Edge GA, Azure Cognitive Search semantic updates, Azure Monitor 1-minute frequency log alerts, GitHub Advanced Security, GitHub Projects, Dependabot, and much more. Plus an outlook for what's changing on the channel in 2022.

In this post, we're going to explore the Open Source project known as Dapr (The Distributed Application Runtime). This post is primarily aimed at those who already have an understanding of Containers, Kubernetes and Microservices. However, if you're not familiar with these topics - I'll do my best to set the right context and background without making the blog too lengthy!

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 and community guests Dean, John, Matt, and Simon play Among Us while discussing Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise, AKS custom policy updates, Docker Desktop's new pricing model, and tips for multi-platform live streaming setups.