V018 - Weekly Technology Vlog #18
Welcome to Weekly Vlog #18, recorded on a UK Bank Holiday! This week’s episode covers an action-packed set of updates across Azure, Azure DevOps, and GitHub, plus a detailed engineering update on the Hugo CrossPoster open-source project.
Azure Highlights
- Microsoft acquires Kinvolk: A significant cloud-native investment — Kinvolk are contributors to Flatcar Container Linux and CoreOS, reinforcing Azure’s commitment to containers and the Kubernetes ecosystem.
- Azure Web PubSub (Preview): A new fully managed WebSocket service enabling real-time applications such as live chat, bidding platforms, and gaming backends, priced per connection unit similarly to Event Hubs.
- Azure Site Recovery + Azure Policy (Preview): Enables onboarding VMs into Azure Site Recovery at scale via Azure Policy — a key governance unlock for enterprise disaster recovery.
- Delivery Plans 2.0 GA: Azure DevOps now offers improved portfolio-level planning with higher team limits, start/target dates, dependency tracking, and richer roll-up visualisations.
- Red Hat Summit recap: JBoss EAP preview on App Service, RHEL Reserved Instance hybrid benefits, Azure Arc-enabled OpenShift cluster onboarding, and upcoming Ansible integration enhancements.
GitHub Highlights
- Feature flags engineering post: How GitHub decouples deployments from releases using feature flags at scale.
- Mono-repo optimisation deep dive: Bitmaps, pack files, and multi-pack indexes — how GitHub engineers tackle maintenance costs on large repositories.
- Dependabot Preview retirement: The legacy Dependabot Preview and
dependabot.comwill be shut down on August 3rd — migrate to native GitHub Dependabot now and review the feature parity roadmap. - GitHub Desktop 2.8: Whitespace hiding, diff expansion, and repository aliases.
Hugo CrossPoster Update
Chris’s Hugo CrossPoster open-source project is progressing with several new engineering practices in place:
- Unit tests now cover the Markdown converter pipeline.
- SonarCloud integration tracking technical debt and code smells with near-zero debt remaining.
- Polly resilience patterns added — retry policies and circuit breakers handle rate-limiting from the Dev.to API, directly applying cloud design patterns in the codebase.
- Next steps: mocking HTTP calls for service tests, token validation before bulk posting runs, and community contributions via GitHub Live Share.
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