// Videos

Ever thought about what it takes to host a multiplayer game in the cloud? In the second episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris and Lee Williams go hands-on with Halo 5 Guardians to explore the engineering behind matchmaking services. They cover the Actor model and Azure Service Fabric, skill-based matchmaking algorithms, the critical role of latency in competitive gaming, and how live ops and DevOps principles keep a game-as-a-service continuously updated without downtime. Real-world cloud architecture through the lens of AAA gaming.

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.

What exactly is an Azure Landing Zone, and why does every cloud architect keep talking about it? In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Karim Fahmy — an Azure Solutions Architect with over 12 years of IT experience — to demystify Azure Landing Zones and their place within the Cloud Adoption Framework. Learn how landing zones provide the structured foundation covering networking topology, identity, governance, subscriptions, and security that your workloads need to succeed in the cloud. The episode also covers Azure Blueprints, Terraform automation, and real-world strategies for incrementally building and evolving your cloud foundation over time.

Chris marks two months of weekly vlogging with a big career update: leaving FastTrack for Azure to become a Cloud Solution Architect in Microsoft's UK Customer Success Unit, focusing on the Manufacturing & Resources industry. The cloudwithchris.com site is also refreshed with a PodScribe-powered interactive transcript player that highlights spoken words in real time and enables crowd-sourced corrections — a meaningful accessibility improvement. Azure news is substantial this week, headlined by Azure RBAC for Key Vault data plane reaching GA (enabling secret- and certificate-level access control) and Azure Front Door Standard & Premium entering preview with private origin support via Private Link.

Are you running dedicated compute for every tenant, microservice, or application instance — and paying for it? The Compute Resource Consolidation pattern shows you how to consolidate tasks onto shared infrastructure, such as a single AKS cluster with namespace isolation or an Azure SQL elastic pool, to reduce costs and management overhead. This episode explores the key trade-offs: blast radius containment, noisy neighbour contention, scalability profiles, and multi-tenancy strategies. Part of the "Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time" series.

Chris recaps his AzureIsh Live guest appearance and the messaging patterns episode with Will Eastbury covering pub-sub, priority queues, and pipes-and-filters. He showcases the Cloud with Chris v2 website prototype built in Hugo with AI-generated transcripts via Podscribe for accessibility, covers the npm dependency confusion attack vector affecting Azure Artifacts and GitHub packages, and highlights Azure's deployment to the International Space Station in partnership with HPE.

Chris Reddington and Will Eastbury cover three closely related messaging patterns in one packed episode. They start with the Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub) pattern — arguably the most transformative shift in enterprise messaging — where a single producer broadcasts to multiple isolated subscribers via Azure Service Bus topics or Azure Event Grid. Real-world use cases include insurance aggregators, credit check pipelines, and bank account sign-up workflows. From there they move to the Priority Queue pattern, which ensures high-priority messages are processed before lower-priority ones even when consumers are under load. Finally, the Pipes and Filters pattern decomposes complex message processing into a chain of discrete, reusable transformation steps — reducing complexity and enabling independent scaling of each stage. The episode also connects these patterns back to earlier topics like Competing Consumers and Queue-Based Load Leveling, and flags related patterns including Choreography and Compensating Transactions.

In this candid conversation, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan — a former Australian Special Forces soldier turned tech professional — to talk openly about mental health. Drawing on personal experiences with grief, COVID-19 lockdown isolation, and identity loss, both guests discuss the importance of speaking up, seeking help, and understanding that it is okay not to be okay. A vital listen for anyone in tech or beyond.

Chris hosts the first live weekly vlog, recapping the Cloud Gaming Notes debut and a candid mental health conversation with Andrew Nathan. He covers Azure Security Center updates including dangling DNS protection for Azure Defender and the secure score API GA, spotlights Project Bicep as a new ARM template authoring experience with a VS Code extension, and highlights GitHub's engineering post on SLO-based deployment pipeline reliability.

Ever thought about what it takes to host a game in the Cloud? Well, this is the series for you! On the first Wednesday of every month, we explore Cloud Concepts that impact your journey to a connected multiplayer gaming experience! In this first session, we'll play some Minecraft and talk to the concept of a hosted game server.