// V009 - Weekly Technology Vlog #9 (1 year of Cloud With Chris, Azure Retirements, Microsoft Ignite)

In this episode, Chris marks one year of the Cloud With Chris podcast, unpacks the first week in his new Cloud Solution Architect role, and covers a lighter-than-usual Azure news cycle — with Microsoft Ignite right around the corner.

Content Highlights

One Year of Cloud With Chris: The first podcast episode dropped on 1 March 2020. A huge thank you to everyone who has listened, subscribed, and shared along the way.

GPG Key Signing Series — Part 1: Chris publishes the first post in a new DevSecOps-focused blog series on signing Git commits with GPG keys. The post demonstrates a key problem: without verification, it takes only a few lines of config to push commits appearing to come from any name and email address — including those of trusted colleagues. GitHub’s GPG validation feature (upload your public key, verified commits get a green “Verified” badge) is the solution this series builds toward. Parts 2–4 will cover key generation, Git integration, and uploading to GitHub.

SquaredUp Webinar — Application Observability in a Distributed World: The session ran on Thursday with some logistics to navigate, but generated great audience questions. The recording is available on the SquaredUp website.

Intro to Landing Zones with Karim Fahmy: Another episode in the Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time series, covering Azure Landing Zones as a foundational pattern for any cloud journey. Karim’s building-and-plumbing analogies make the concept tangible.

Events / Talks page on cloudwithchris.com: Speaking engagements — webinars, meetups, podcasts — are now listed on the site. Upcoming: GitHub for static site deployment at DotNet Limerick (Saturday).

Coming Up This Week

• Cloud Gaming Notes Ep. 2 (Wednesday): Matchmaking and DevOps/LiveOps in cloud gaming, with Lee.
• GPG Keys Part 2 (Wednesday): Hands-on key generation.
• Ambassador & Sidecar Patterns (Friday): Another episode with Peter Piper — with a bingo game baked in.
• DotNet Limerick Azure User Group (Saturday): GitHub Actions for deploying a static podcast/blog site.
• Microsoft Ignite begins this week — full round-up in next week’s vlog.

Azure Blog Posts

Serverless Applications on PowerApps and Azure: A deep-dive into low-code application development using PowerApps, covering when to embrace or avoid a serverless back end — useful for teams evaluating rapid prototyping approaches.

Private Azure Marketplace: Organisations can now govern which third-party Azure Marketplace offers are available to internal teams — an important control for enterprises managing their approved service catalogue.

Azure Quota REST API: A new API enables automation to request quota increases for Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Machine Learning resources, removing a common manual bottleneck when applications scale.

Azure Cost Management & Billing — February Recap: Summary of billing feature updates from the month.

Demystifying Cloud Economics: Covers idle capacity, right-sizing, predictable vs. unpredictable scaling, hybrid benefits, and regular pricing reviews — themes aligned with the early Cloud With Chris episodes on cost control.

Azure Updates: Retirement Notices (29 February 2024)

A notable cluster of retirements all land on the same date. Key ones to plan for:

• Jenkins plugins for Azure → migrate to the Azure CLI.
• AKS legacy Azure AD integration → upgrade to the managed AAD integration.
• Classic Application Insights → migrate to workspace-based Application Insights.
• Azure RM PowerShell modules → upgrade to the Az module.
• Azure Media Services REST API / SDKs → upgrade to v3.
• Network Performance Monitor → transition to Connection Monitor in Azure Network Watcher.
• Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics v2, App Gateway Analytics, Azure AD Connect sync (older versions), Azure Batch transcription API v2, Azure Cosmos DB Java SDK (older versions), Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 1.

Also noted: AKS pod security policy retires 30 June 2021 — called out in every AKS release note. The recommended path is Azure Policy for AKS. CSI drivers become the default for Kubernetes 1.20+.

Azure DevOps Blog

• Project-scoped users (early preview): Organisation settings can now be hidden from users scoped to specific projects, reducing information exposure.
• Ansible on Azure Fun Bytes: A primer covering nodes, inventory, modules, tasks, and playbooks — useful for teams evaluating Ansible for configuration management on Azure.
• On-prem to cloud — Lift & Shift: Abel Wang and Steve Moraski continue their series, covering Azure Migrate and the key considerations for rehosting vs. re-architecting.