// Videos

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build a production SaaS platform in your own time? In this Tales from the Real World episode, Chris is joined by Jamie Maguire — Developer, Microsoft MVP (AI), and Pluralsight Author — who shares the full story behind Social Opinion, a Twitter analytics and productivity platform built with .NET and Azure. Jamie walks through the evolution from a custom Bayesian text analytics API (built during his master's degree) to a full SaaS powered by Azure Cognitive Services, covering social listening, sentiment analysis, content scheduling, and audience insights. He also shares practical advice for anyone looking to build their own product: pick something you're genuinely passionate about, validate demand before writing code, and ship early.

Mental health affects us all, yet stigma and misunderstanding remain barriers to open conversation. In this candid livestream recorded during Mental Health Awareness Week, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan (Microsoft FastTrack for Azure) and Will Owen (formerly Microsoft, now Maersk) to share their personal mental health journeys — covering depression, anxiety, COVID-19 isolation, CBT therapy, medication, and the pressures of high-performance tech careers.

You may have heard about Software Code or Infrastructure as Code. Well, in this video, we'll be talking about pipelines as code. If you're familiar with tools like Azure DevOps, Circle CI, GitHub, GitLab and Jenkins, you may notice a trend where these platforms are allowing you to define your pipelines as code. Throughout this video, we'll be defining a multi-stage pipeline in Azure DevOps, and picking up some tips along the way.

Weekly Vlog #19 is broadcast live, opening with Azure's Fluent Design icon rebrand and covering key security and platform updates including the AKS Secret Store CSI driver add-on, Azure Security Center improvements for hybrid and multi-cloud Kubernetes, and new Azure VPN Gateway multi-authentication capabilities. GitHub Enterprise Server 3.1 launches with GitHub Actions, Packages, and Advanced Security, while the release radar spotlights Pulumi as an emerging cross-cloud infrastructure-as-code framework. Chris also recaps Cloud Gaming Notes episode four featuring Sudoku Social's Azure PlayFab backend and a new Cloud Drop on PowerShell in Azure Functions with Carol de Winter.

Once you have a working GitHub Actions workflow, the next challenge is safely deploying across dev, staging, and production with the right secrets in the right places. This episode deep-dives into GitHub Actions Environments: how to scope secrets per environment to enforce the principle of least privilege, configure required reviewers and wait timers as production gates, and assign service principals with minimal Azure RBAC permissions. A live demo deploys the cloudwithchris.com Hugo site to Azure Storage, making every concept concrete.

Azure Functions supports PowerShell Core as a runtime stack, enabling PowerShell scripters to build serverless event-driven workflows without compiled code. This Cloud Drop demonstrates creating an HTTP trigger and an Event Grid trigger function, configuring requirements.psd1 to load the Az PowerShell module, and using a system-assigned managed identity with the Contributor RBAC role to dynamically tag Azure resource groups on creation.

Chris is joined by Dominic, a Senior PM Manager in Microsoft Teams Engineering, who spent nearly two years building Sudoku Social as a passion project — the world's first cross-platform competitive Sudoku game for iOS and Android. Dominic walks through his decision to use Unity for its build-once deploy-to-many capability, and Azure PlayFab as the game backend-as-a-service powering leaderboards, friend systems, matchmaking, and player statistics. The conversation covers how PlayFab's APIs dramatically reduced backend development effort, how Azure DevOps supported the CI/CD pipeline for the game, and the iterative learning journey of a first-time game developer teaching himself Unity, iOS, and Android development simultaneously.

Weekly Vlog #18 arrives on a UK Bank Holiday, covering Microsoft's acquisition of Kinvolk to accelerate cloud-native investment and the preview launch of Azure Web PubSub — a managed WebSocket service for real-time applications. Chris reviews Delivery Plans 2.0 GA in Azure DevOps and GitHub engineering posts on feature flags and mono-repo performance optimisations, then shares a detailed update on the Hugo CrossPoster open-source project now featuring unit tests, SonarCloud analysis, and Polly resilience patterns including circuit breakers and retry logic.

Weekly Vlog #17 covers Azure's UK Met Office supercomputer partnership, Application Gateway URL rewrite now GA, and chaos engineering taking centre stage in the Azure DevOps blog — exploring how to test resilience systematically as part of your DevOps cycle. GitHub celebrates the Mars 2020 Ingenuity helicopter's open source story and announces protections for open source maintainers against crypto-mining abuse in GitHub Actions. Chris also unveils the Hugo CrossPoster — a new .NET pet project to automate cross-posting Hugo content to Medium and Dev.to with canonical URL support — and invites .NET collaborators for a live coding session.

Spring, Spring Boot, and Azure Spring Cloud demystified. Chris is joined by Gitte Vermeiren (Microsoft FastTrack Engineer) to explore what Spring and Spring Boot offer Java developers, how Azure Spring Cloud provides a fully managed platform for running microservice workloads without managing underlying infrastructure, and how it compares to Azure App Service and AKS. Whether you're a Java developer evaluating Azure or a .NET developer curious about the Java ecosystem, this episode bridges the gap with clear analogies and live demos.