// Resilience

Chaos engineering is the discipline of proactively experimenting on distributed systems to build confidence in their ability to withstand production failures. Chris is joined by Ashish Balgath (Cloud Solution Architect at Thoughtworks) to explore how to introduce fault-injection experiments incrementally — from a developer's local machine all the way to production — using tools such as Chaos Monkey and fault-injection simulator tools.

Communication between microservices is one of the trickiest challenges in distributed systems — especially when things go wrong. In this episode, Chris is joined by Francesco, a software engineer building a real-world payment gateway, to explore microservices communication patterns. They dive deep into the Saga pattern for managing multi-step distributed transactions, covering orchestration-based Sagas with AWS Step Functions, compensating transactions for graceful rollbacks, and event-driven messaging via EventBridge. The conversation also covers observability in distributed systems and applying Occam's Razor to architecture decisions.

Chris walks through the new GitHub Issues beta, showcasing project boards, table views, YAML-based issue forms, and converting checklists to sub-issues, alongside Azure capacity reservation, zone redundant disk storage, and DevSecOps shifting-left updates.

Azure Front Door - It's an Azure Service that has been generally available for quite some time. It went Generally Available (GA) in April of 2019 after being in Public Preview since September 2018. It's had several updates since, including a slew of Web Application Firewall enhancements, Rules Engine support and much more. But did you know Microsoft released the Azure Front Door Standard and Premium SKUs in preview in Feburary of 2021? So, what are they? How do they compare to the aforementioned Azure Front Door offering? And when would you want to think about using Azure Front Door compared with Azure CDN? We'll be covering all of those points in this post.

You'll have probably spotted by now that cloud architecture is a passion area of mine, and a regular topic that features on Cloud With Chris. We've talked a lot about Cloud Design Patterns and requirements-driven engineering in the past, as well as the various pillars of software quality. But one area that hasn't been explored too much is the Azure Well-Architected Framework. So in this blog post, we'll explore that, and identify how it can be used in your own projects.

Chris returns from vacation with Azure, DevOps, and GitHub updates covering resilience threat modeling, Azure Well-Architected Framework reliability, Privileged Identity Management with Azure Lighthouse, App Service Environment v3, and Azure Communication Services direct routing.

With so many data store options in Azure — relational SQL, NoSQL, document databases, blob storage, key-value stores, and more — how do you choose the right one for your workload? In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Steph Martin to explore the concept of polyglot persistence and the trade-offs between data store types. From Azure SQL and Cosmos DB to blob storage and microservices data patterns, they discuss how workload requirements, access patterns, RTO/RPO targets, and application architecture should guide your data platform decisions. A practical guide for architects and developers navigating the modern data landscape on Azure.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) gave us Kubernetes and Prometheus — but did you know there are over 90 more projects in the ecosystem? In this episode, Chris is joined by Annie Talvasto (CNCF/Kubernetes meetup organizer, Finland) to explore the most exciting CNCF projects across sandbox, incubating, and graduated tiers. They cover Helm for Kubernetes package management, Artifact Hub for centralised artifact discovery, Linkerd for lightweight service mesh with built-in observability and resilience, KUDO for declarative Kubernetes operator creation without deep Go expertise, and KEDA for event-driven autoscaling. Whether you're new to cloud native or a seasoned practitioner, this session will inspire you to explore — and contribute to — the wider CNCF landscape.

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.

Episode 11 covered the Geode pattern in theory — now it's time to get hands-on! Will Eastbury returns to walk through a real-world OData service deployed across three Azure regions (US West, Australia Southeast, and UK West), stitched together by Azure Front Door for active-active routing. Watch how Cosmos DB replicates data across all regions as a shared backplane, how health probes detect and remove unhealthy geodes from rotation, and the ASP.NET middleware pattern needed to handle URL rewriting — a critical authentication gotcha when hosting services behind a reverse proxy.