// V003 - Weekly Technology Vlog #3 (Contributing to OSS, Azure Thames Valley and Tech News)

A significant highlight is Chris’s new role in relaunching the Azure Thames Valley meetup group, working with SquaredUp CEO Richard to revive and grow the local community. He previews upcoming speaking engagements: an AzureIsh Live Among Us gaming stream (February 10), a SquaredUp webinar on application observability in a distributed world using Azure Monitor, App Insights, and distributed tracing (February 25), and a session for the Limerick .NET Azure User Group on using GitHub Actions to deploy static websites (March 6).

From the Azure Updates page, notable items include the new upgrade path from basic to standard public IP SKUs — a prerequisite for availability zones and zone-redundant load balancers — and built-in Azure Policy definitions for enabling NSG flow log monitoring at scale using the deploy-if-not-exists effect. On the GitHub side, a security year-in-review post covers code scanning with CodeQL, secret scanning for token types, Dependabot, and the GitHub Advisory Database, reinforcing GitHub’s growing DevSecOps story. GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 received its release candidate for self-hosted deployments, and Peter de Tender’s blog demonstrates running Azure Container Instances directly from Docker Desktop CLI commands, bringing cloud container scheduling closer to the local developer workflow.