V019 - Weekly Technology Vlog #19
Welcome to Weekly Vlog #19, broadcast live! This week leads with Azure’s visual rebrand and covers a wide range of security, platform, and community updates across Azure, GitHub, and Cloud with Chris.
Azure Highlights
- New Azure Fluent Design Icon: Microsoft’s Fluent Design language arrives in Azure with a refreshed icon — widely celebrated across the developer community on social media.
- AKS Secret Store CSI Driver Add-on: The open-source Secret Store CSI driver is now a managed AKS add-on (alongside App Gateway Ingress Controller and Pod Identity), making Kubernetes secret management significantly simpler.
- Azure Security Center Updates: New hybrid and multi-cloud Kubernetes protection via Microsoft Defender for Kubernetes; recommendations for Defender for DNS and Resource Manager; Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10 Virtual Desktop now supported in Defender for Endpoint integration.
- Azure VPN Gateway Enhancements: Multi-authentication type support (Azure AD, certificate, RADIUS) on a single gateway, BGP diagnostics, VPN packet capture in the Azure portal, and per-connection reset support.
- Azure Backup for Blobs (GA): Operational backup for block blobs is now generally available.
- Prevent Shared Key Authorization: New control to disable shared key authorization for Azure Storage accounts, improving security posture for teams moving to identity-based access.
GitHub Highlights
- GitHub Enterprise Server 3.1: Now available, adding GitHub Actions visualisations, pull request auto-merge, Advanced Security improvements, and the mono-repo performance enhancements discussed in a prior week’s engineering post.
- GitHub Release Radar: Pulumi 3.0 highlighted — a compelling cross-cloud infrastructure-as-code framework supporting multiple languages; distinct from Terraform’s approach.
- GitHub Web Components: Engineering insight into how GitHub builds and maintains its own open-source UI component library.
- Availability Report: Transparent post-incident analysis covering a DNS resolution failure affecting GitHub Packages and an elevated API error rate impacting repository creation, with clear remediation steps.
Cloud with Chris
- Schema.org SEO blog post: How structured data — breadcrumbs, video previews, speaker cards — influences search engine result rendering.
- Hugo CrossPoster open-source project post: Introducing the cross-posting automation tool for Dev.to and Medium, complete with GitHub Actions integration plans.
- Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 4 with Dominic Williamson: Sudoku Social — a social sudoku game built with Unity and Azure PlayFab, now in beta on iOS and Android at sudoku.social.
- Cloud Drop with Carol de Winter: A beginner’s guide to PowerShell in Azure Functions — the first Cloud Drop featuring a guest.
- GitHub Actions + Azure Environments session: A focused walkthrough of environment-based deployment gates and approvals in GitHub Actions.
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