// Static Sites

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate your entire .NET software delivery pipeline — from build and test through to deployment on Azure. In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Isaac Levin, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and a lifelong .NET developer, to walk through how GitHub Actions YAML workflows streamline deploying .NET and ASP.NET Core applications to Azure App Service, Azure Functions, and Azure Static Web Apps (including Blazor WebAssembly). Isaac traces the evolution of CI/CD tooling from FTP and CruiseControl.NET through to modern GitHub Actions, demonstrates how Azure and Visual Studio integrate to auto-generate workflows, and shares practical tips for getting started quickly.

Three months and 350+ subscribers in, with content shipping every day of the past week: a GitHub Codespaces Cloud Drop, the final GPG commit-signing instalment covering YubiKey hardware key storage, a Welsh Azure User Group lightning talk on GitHub Actions, and a Terraform Cloud deep-dive on Azure state management. Azure news centres on Microsoft's commitment to bring Availability Zones to every region by end of 2021, new forecasted cost alerts for Azure Budgets, and the Start Small & Expand landing zone guidance from Sarah Lean and Thomas Maurer. GitHub updates include Dependabot gaining private registry support, CodeQL scanning for Solarigate traces, and a detailed post-mortem on the recent GitHub.com security incident.

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.

When I mention the term JAMStack, I'm not pretending that I'm Paddington bear with a stack of Jam sandwiches! If you hadn't heard, JAMStack is a term that describes applications based on JavaScript, APIs and Markup. That means, we're referring to files that are content in nature. Think about files like HTML, CSS, Images, etc. Ok, now with that context - why has it risen in popularity? Surely this is something that could have been done for many years, so why now? My hypothesis... Cloud.

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.

Chris covers channel updates for Cloud with Chris, including a new video on GitHub Codespaces and a blog series on open source contributions to Hugo themes. He highlights the Azure Updates RSS feed as an essential resource for tracking Azure service changes, and spotlights community contributors JonnyChipz, Sarah Lean (TechieLass), CloudFamily.info, and Richard Hooper (PixelRobots).

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.

Chris walks through GitHub Actions fundamentals and demonstrates how to use them to build and deploy a multi-tenant Azure Functions API and a static frontend — both triggered automatically on push and pull request events. Using a pet project (a Yu-Gi-Oh card inventory app) as the real-world example, the session covers CI/CD concepts, workflow triggers, GitHub Secrets, publish profiles, Dependabot, and the GitHub public roadmap for upcoming Actions features like manual deployment approvals.

Ever wondered what goes into building a technical podcast from scratch? In this behind-the-scenes episode, the tables are turned as colleague Fletcher Kelly interviews Chris Reddington about the creation of Cloud with Chris. Topics include choosing a podcast theme, microphone selection, post-production with Audacity, using Azure Cognitive Services for automated transcription, designing for accessibility from day one, and automating the Hugo-based website with CI/CD pipelines. A candid look at the content creation journey behind a technical podcast.