// V008 - Weekly Technology Vlog #8 (Changing Role, Guest Appearances, LOTS of Azure News)

In this episode, Chris recaps a packed week of personal and community milestones, and digs into a wealth of Azure news.

Career Update

After four years building FastTrack for Azure — joining as employee number nine globally and its first international hire — Chris transitions to a Cloud Solution Architect role in Microsoft’s UK Customer Success Unit, with a focus on the Manufacturing & Resources industry. A meaningful career milestone, with a big thank you to the FastTrack team for four great years.

Site Rebrand & Accessibility

The cloudwithchris.com MVP rebrand is live, featuring a cleaner layout that surfaces the latest episodes and blog posts front and centre. The episode player now integrates with PodScribe to display a real-time highlighted transcript as audio plays — every word is clickable and jumps you to that exact point in the recording. An edit button on the transcript allows any listener to help correct captioning errors, turning it into a community-maintained resource. This is a meaningful accessibility improvement for all content.

Recent Content

• Compute Resource Consolidation Pattern — another episode in the Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time series, covering cost control strategies at the compute layer.
• In Conversation with JonnyChipz — a wide-ranging conversation with fellow Welshman John Lund covering Microsoft Learn, Azure Docs, architecture patterns, and GitHub DevOps principles.
• Azure Thames Valley relaunch — the first session back featured Matthew Bradley on Azure Storage; next session is 16 March, with Sarah Lean confirmed for April.

Azure News

Azure RBAC for Key Vault data plane (GA): Previously, Key Vault access was managed at the vault level via access policies. With role-based access control now generally available for the data plane, permissions can be scoped to individual secrets, keys, and certificates — a granular security upgrade many customers have been waiting for.

Azure Front Door Standard & Premium (preview): New SKUs consolidate CDN, WAF, and Front Door capabilities with simplified pricing and a major new capability: private origin support via Private Link. Back-end services no longer need to be publicly exposed.

Azure Firewall Premium (preview): Adds TLS inspection, IDPS, URL filtering, and web categories to the Azure Firewall feature set.

Azure Image Builder Service (GA): Enables teams to define, build, and distribute secure, compliant VM images — a DevOps approach to virtual machine lifecycle management with native Azure DevOps integration.

Azure Automation 2020 recap: GitHub integration, Private Link support for Update Management, DSC support for Oracle Linux 7 and Ubuntu 18.04, and enhancements to hybrid runbook workers.

App Insights work item integration (preview): Enables issues detected in Application Insights to be automatically logged as work items in Azure DevOps or GitHub, closing the loop between live environment monitoring and sprint planning.

Azure Cosmos DB composite indexes: Additional indexing options to further optimise query performance and manage request unit consumption.

Email one-time passcode authentication: Starting 31 October 2021, Azure AD email OTP becomes the default for B2B guest invitations, replacing redemption via unmanaged Azure AD accounts.

Azure DevOps News

• New auditing events for billing setup and Personal Access Token/SSH key management events provide better organisational security visibility.
• Free compute grants for public project pipelines are being removed due to widespread crypto-mining abuse — a necessary but unfortunate change for open-source projects.
• Abel Wang and Steve Moraski launch a new video series on migrating on-premises applications to Azure, starting with success criteria definition and Application Insights-based dependency mapping.

Upcoming

• Squared Up webinar (Thursday): Application Observability in a Distributed World.
• Introduction to Landing Zones with Karim Fahmy (Friday episode).
• GitHub & GPG key signing blog series starting this week.
• Upcoming speaking slots at Welsh Azure User Group, DotNet Limerick, and DevOps NL.