// V004 - Weekly Technology Vlog #4 (JamStack + Cloud, Upcoming Talks and Tech News)

Azure Thames Valley is gaining momentum with a website, Meetup page, Twitter account, and LinkedIn group, with the first meetup scheduled for February 16 (subsequently revised to the 17th). The committee agreed on a format of monthly virtual sessions on the third Tuesday of each month, open to speakers and attendees regardless of location.

On the Azure side, the AKS Secret Store CSI driver enters public preview, enabling Kubernetes workloads to inject secrets, keys, and certificates from Azure Key Vault without storing sensitive material in etcd. The new automatic cluster upgrade channels — patch, stable, and rapid — simplify AKS operations but require careful attention to Kubernetes API version deprecations between minor releases. Azure DevOps Delivery Plans 2.0 gains the uses statement for cleaner job resource declarations and a new manual validation task for pausing mid-stage YAML pipelines to verify configuration before continuing. Pulumi is introduced as an infrastructure-as-code tool that lets developers use Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, and .NET instead of domain-specific languages, supporting AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes with native GitHub and Azure DevOps integrations. GitHub’s comprehensive 2020 year-in-review covers the CLI, mobile app, Actions improvements (self-hosted runners, environments, environment secrets, manual approvals), dark mode, GitHub Discussions, Sponsors, and pull request draft conversions.