// V010 - Weekly Technology Vlog #10 (Episode backlog until Mid-July! New Microphone, Ignite Content!)

In this milestone tenth episode, Chris marks a birthday and a one-year podcast anniversary, picks up a new microphone, then spends the majority of the runtime covering the best of Microsoft Ignite.

Personal Milestones

• Vlog #10 & Birthday: A new Shure SM7B microphone arrives — a noticeable audio quality upgrade. Episodes are now booked through to mid-July with more guests lined up into August.
• One Year of Cloud With Chris: The podcast launched on 1 March 2020.

Recent Content

• GPG Keys Part 2: Hands-on guide to generating GPG keys; Part 3 (linking keys to Git commits and uploading to GitHub) is coming this week.
• Cloud Gaming Notes Ep. 2: Chris and Lee discuss matchmaking in cloud gaming-as-a-service — how cloud infrastructure shapes the player experience when joining sessions dynamically rather than connecting to a fixed server. Next episode covers Sea of Thieves, inventory systems, and in-game economies.
• Sidecar & Ambassador Patterns with Peter Piper: Another co-hosted patterns episode with a bingo card of API buzzwords.
• DotNet Limerick Azure User Group: A live presentation on using GitHub Actions to build and deploy a static podcast/blog site. Recording available on cloudwithchris.com.

Upcoming

• Welsh Azure User Group (18 March): Lightning talk — GitHub for podcast/blog deployment.
• MSHowTo Live with Mert (25 March): DevOps discussion.
• Northern Azure User Group (6 April): Sharing the bill with Scott Hanselman.
• Cache Aside Pattern episode (this Friday).
• GPG Keys Part 3 (this Wednesday).

Microsoft Ignite Highlights

Azure Cognitive Search — Semantic Search: Results ranked by user intent rather than keyword frequency, powered by Microsoft Research models.

Azure Machine Learning + Azure Arc: Azure ML is now available in hybrid environments via Azure Arc. Organisations with data sovereignty constraints (healthcare, financial services) can run ML training and inference on-premises without data leaving the boundary.

Azure Cache for Redis — Enterprise & Enterprise Flash tiers: New higher-performance tiers with active geo-replication across regions — enabling distributed cache patterns (such as the Geode pattern) that were previously complex to build on Azure.

Azure Cosmos DB:

• Continuous backup and point-in-time restore (PITR) — now in preview.
• Role-based access control for the data plane — now in preview. Follows the same pattern as the recently GA’d Key Vault RBAC.

Azure Resource Mover (GA): A managed service for moving resources between Azure regions — useful as new regions come online or requirements change.

Azure Communication Services + Microsoft Teams interoperability: End customers (patients, shoppers, citizens) interact through Azure Communication Services-powered portals while back-office staff use familiar Teams interfaces — bridging consumer and enterprise communication seamlessly. Chris highlights this as one of the most impactful Ignite announcements.

.NET Upgrade Assistance: Tooling to help migrate large .NET Framework Windows applications to .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5 cross-platform targets.

Private Azure Marketplace (GA): Moved from September preview to general availability — enterprises can now govern which Marketplace offers are available internally.

Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes (GA): Manage Kubernetes clusters running outside Azure using the Azure control plane.

Azure VMSS Flexible Orchestration (preview): Scale sets can now mix Spot and pay-as-you-go VMs in the same set, and VM sizes can be changed without redeployment.

Azure Disk Updates: Premium SSD and Standard SSD now support zone-redundant storage. Auto key rotation for customer-managed keys on managed disks removes a historically tricky operational burden.

Networking:

• Azure Routing Server: BGP-based routing that simplifies NVA high-availability deployments, potentially replacing the standard load balancer requirement in front of NVAs.
• Azure Front Door Standard & Premium (preview) and Azure Firewall Premium (preview) also featured.

Azure Percept: A comprehensive platform for building AI models on low-power edge devices, with Azure Percept Studio for model development.

Microsoft Mesh: Azure Remote Rendering reaches GA; Azure Object Anchors enters preview. Microsoft Mesh announced as a cross-platform presence and collaboration platform. Chris watched the keynote live in an Oculus Quest 2.

Security Updates:

• Azure Key Vault Managed HSM (preview): A fully managed, single-tenant HSM service validated to FIPS 140-2 Level 3, for organisations with high compliance requirements.
• Confidential Computing for Azure SQL (preview): Confidential queries in Azure SQL DB and SQL Server 2019.
• Trusted Launch for VMs: Boot integrity protection against bootkits, rootkits, and kernel-level malware using a virtual TPM (vTPM).

Azure AD & Identity:

• Passwordless authentication updates.
• Conditional access authentication enhancements.
• ADFS Activity Insights Report in the Azure portal.
• New Secure Hybrid Access integrations.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing (preview): End-to-end supply chain and operational efficiency scenarios — directly relevant to Chris’s new CSA focus area.

GitHub Actions — Four Things You Didn’t Know

A GitHub blog post highlights four underused capabilities:

1. Compress images for the web — automated image optimisation on push.
2. Generate semantic release notes — changelog automation based on commit messages.
3. Run workflows like a Makefile — use GitHub Actions as a general-purpose task runner.
4. Bring your own environment — custom runner environments for specialised tooling needs.

Chris uses two of these four in his own cloudwithchris.com CI/CD pipeline.