CGN8 - Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 8 - Azure for Game Developers
Chris Reddington and LaBrina Loving — Developer Advocate for Gaming at Microsoft — explore what it takes to get started with game development on Azure, regardless of your background. LaBrina brings twenty years of enterprise development experience, making her perspective especially relevant for developers considering a similar path.
Key Topics Covered
- LaBrina’s background: Two decades in the Microsoft stack — .NET, SharePoint, Dynamics, and Azure since its early days in 2010. Her entry into gaming came through an interest in Unity for mixed reality and VR, before moving into a dedicated game developer advocacy role.
- Cloud adoption in game studios: Game studios are at a similar inflection point to where enterprise organisations were several years ago — beginning to understand the power of cloud, moving workloads off dedicated servers, and realising the benefits of managed, scalable infrastructure.
- Enterprise skills transfer directly: Software fundamentals — clean architecture, scalable design, testing, and DevOps practices — carry over to game development. There is more in common between the two disciplines than most developers expect.
- Key technical differences: Latency is paramount. Where enterprise applications rely on TCP connections, game networking commonly uses UDP and socket-based communication for real-time, low-latency responsiveness. Recognising this early avoids painful rewrites.
- Getting started with Unity: For .NET developers, Unity provides a natural on-ramp to game development, sharing the C# language and familiar tooling.
- Accessibility of the cloud for games: Azure’s managed services remove much of the infrastructure complexity for independent studios and game developers, letting teams focus on gameplay rather than operations.
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