V021 - Weekly Technology Vlog #21
Welcome to Weekly Vlog #21! This week is a focused build-up episode ahead of Microsoft Build, with Chris previewing his upcoming conference presentation and covering a compact but impactful set of Azure and GitHub updates alongside a hands-on Application Insights deep dive.
Upcoming: Chris at Microsoft Build
Chris will be presenting at Microsoft Build on Wednesday 26th May at 14:30 UTC alongside Dean Brian and Carol Logan. The session — Creating Friction-Free Code Across All Tools and Frameworks — demonstrates an end-to-end developer workflow using GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Actions, and Azure Static Web Apps, with a spotlight on UK developer communities and meetup groups.
Azure Highlights
- Azure Key Vault SLA raised to 99.99%: A significant reliability improvement for any application depending on Key Vault for secrets, certificates, and key management.
- Native Elastic Integration (Preview): A fully managed Elastic offering on Azure, removing the operational burden of running and maintaining the Elastic Stack independently.
- Azure’s 100th Compliance Offering: Azure reaches a milestone with the EU Cloud Code of Conduct, bolstering data sovereignty support across European regulated industries.
- Azure IoT Hub + Azure AD Access Control (GA): Service API access now leverages Azure Active Directory, extending the platform-wide identity modernisation pattern to IoT workloads.
- Azure ExpressRoute: Five new peering locations added — Bogotá, Madrid, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Toronto 2.
- Azure Key Vault SLA to 99.99%: Raised from the previous 99.9% target, making Key Vault a more dependable dependency in high-availability architectures.
Azure DevOps & GitHub Highlights
- Helm Demystified (Donovan Brown & Jay Gordon, Azure Fun Bytes): A practical explainer on Helm as a Kubernetes package manager — relevant context following Chris’s week coaching teams at a containers Open Hack.
- GitHub Artifact Exporter (Open Source): GitHub’s new tool enables export of issues, milestones, projects, pull requests, releases, and associated comments — ideal for migrations, archiving, or compliance purposes.
- readme Podcast Launch: A new audio series from GitHub’s readme project, shining a light on the maintainers of major open-source projects.
Cloud with Chris
- 500 Subscribers Thank You Post: A personal reflection on hitting the 2021 channel milestone, now climbing to 524 subscribers.
- Azure Static Web Apps GA Blog Post: Chris’s perspective on why Static Web Apps should be the default starting point for new static site projects.
- Application Insights Deep Dive with Isaac Levin: A demo-heavy session on telemetry, live metrics, dependency tracking, and why Application Insights is Isaac’s favourite Azure service.
- Coming Up: Matt Bradley on building a cloud practice at UK Fast, and a blog post on authoring a GitHub Action using a .NET Core console app and Docker.
Related Content
Discussing the Cloud with Chris GitHub Architecture and GitHub setup
Cloud with ChrisKarl Cooke (irishtechie.com) interviews Chris Reddington about the full architecture and GitHub workflow powering CloudWithChris.com. The session covers Azure Storage static website hosting, Azure CDN with a custom rules engine for enforcing HTTPS and security headers (CSP, HSTS, Permissions Policy), Hugo as the static site generator, multi-environment GitHub Actions pipelines (preview, staging, production), GitHub Codespaces for in-browser editing, and practical security hardening using securityheaders.com and Mozilla Observatory.
V012 - Weekly Technology Vlog #12 (Busy week, and quite a few blog posts to cover!)
Three months and 350+ subscribers in, with content shipping every day of the past week: a GitHub Codespaces Cloud Drop, the final GPG commit-signing instalment covering YubiKey hardware key storage, a Welsh Azure User Group lightning talk on GitHub Actions, and a Terraform Cloud deep-dive on Azure state management. Azure news centres on Microsoft's commitment to bring Availability Zones to every region by end of 2021, new forecasted cost alerts for Azure Budgets, and the Start Small & Expand landing zone guidance from Sarah Lean and Thomas Maurer. GitHub updates include Dependabot gaining private registry support, CodeQL scanning for Solarigate traces, and a detailed post-mortem on the recent GitHub.com security incident.
V020 - Weekly Technology Vlog #20
Weekly Vlog #20 celebrates hitting 500 YouTube subscribers ahead of schedule, then reviews one of Chris's most content-heavy weeks: Azure Pipelines-as-code tutorials, an event-driven architecture walkthrough using Azure Event Grid and Azure Functions, and a candid mental health live stream. The headline Azure announcement is Azure Static Web Apps reaching general availability with built-in CI/CD, serverless API integration, and free SSL. GitHub rounds out the episode with new hardware security key support for SSH operations and native video uploads to issues and pull requests.