7 - Creating Cloud with Chris
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.
Chris shares practical lessons from setting up Cloud with Chris, including the equipment decisions behind choosing a Blue Yeti microphone, the workflow for recording remote guests with Zencastr, and the post-production steps in Audacity. He explains how Azure Cognitive Services Speech-to-Text powers the auto-generated transcripts that make episodes accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners — a deliberate accessibility-first design decision. The episode also touches on automating the Hugo static site and CI/CD pipeline that publishes content, balancing production quality with a busy day job, and advice for anyone considering launching their own technical podcast.
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6 - Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud is no longer just a transitional state between on-premises and public cloud — for many enterprises, it is the end state. Chris is joined by Thomas Maurer, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, to explore how Azure Arc, Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI, and Azure IoT Edge help organisations run workloads wherever they make sense: from data centres and factory floors to the network edge and other cloud providers.
3 - DevOps in a Cloud World
DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to end users — not just code or features. In this episode, Abel Wang, Principal Developer Advocate and DevOps Lead at Microsoft, joins Chris to cover the foundations of DevOps, telemetry-driven development, database DevOps, feature flags, Site Reliability Engineering, and the importance of shifting left on quality and security.
2 - Cost Control
Moving to the cloud shifts infrastructure spend from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx)—but only if you think about cost correctly from the start. This episode covers the cloud cost mindset: right-sizing, auto-scaling (scale out vs scale up), compute resource consolidation, governance through resource tagging and policy, pricing calculators, reserved instances, and how to build cost awareness into your architecture from day one.