// V023 - Weekly Technology Vlog #23

In weekly vlog #23, Chris covers a packed week of Azure, Azure DevOps, and GitHub news alongside a series of Cloud with Chris episode recaps.

Azure News

Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly Windows Virtual Desktop) received a full rebrand and platform update, adding Azure Active Directory support, multi-session Windows 10 Enterprise VM management, and quick-start application scenarios — a timely evolution for a service that kept organisations productive throughout the pandemic.

The Azure API for FHIR received updates relevant to the healthcare industry, with changes required by July 1st for organisations using the CMS Patient Access and Provider Directory APIs.

Mark Russinovich continued his engineering reliability series, this time deep-diving into the factors behind critical-environment reliability engineering at hyperscale — covering UPS, power distribution, and how technologies like Azure Sphere feed into pre-production validation.

SAP on Azure featured prominently, with Microsoft outlining why customers choose Azure for SAP S/4HANA migration: access to hybrid solutions, cost savings, enterprise-grade security and compliance, and the ability to unlock business insights from SAP data.

A major teaser: the Azure Arc hybrid and multi-cloud digital event on June 29th, promising a major Azure Arc announcement alongside customer stories from Avanade, Siemens Healthineers, and SKF Group.

Azure Updates rapid-fire covered: TLS 1.2 deadline for MARS agent backups (September 1, 2021), PostgreSQL Flexible Server (Postgres 13 public preview), Azure Cache for Redis zone redundancy GA, enterprise-scale landing zone reference implementation for AKS, Azure Monitor syslog collection for Linux (public preview), Application Insights alert-based smart detection, and Azure Defender GA for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB.

Azure DevOps News

Azure Fun Bytes episodes this week featured Thomas Maurer on hybrid cloud and a session on migrating data to Cosmos DB. Community posts covered integration testing for ASP.NET Core with EF Core Cosmos and xUnit, Azure Synapse dedicated SQL pool dark packs, automated Azure API Management deployments, and CI/CD pipelines for Databricks notebooks.

GitHub News

GitHub highlighted supply chain security improvements: scanning for leaked package registry credentials prevents malicious actors from poisoning source code in the supply chain. A companion deep-dive explored a seven-year-old Linux privilege escalation vulnerability, illustrating the importance of security mindset.

The May GitHub recap included video uploads in issues/PRs/discussions, one-click fork sync, GitHub Desktop 2.2 with Apple Silicon support, GitHub Discussions, GitHub Enterprise compliance reports, Dependabot updates (ignoring major/minor/patch by version, Go advisory database), and SSH authentication with security keys.

Blacktocat turns five — GitHub’s initiative to amplify Black voices and talent in tech reached its fifth anniversary. Chris reflected on the broader responsibility of representation across gender, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity, and sexual orientation, committing to do more on the channel.

Cloud With Chris Updates

• Carl Cook (@irishtechie) joined for a GitHub Actions deep-dive, discussing CI/CD automation for Cloud with Chris and future integration platform plans.
• Azure Static Web Apps: Chris appeared on the DevRealio show alongside Sven, Buzz, Diane, and Maxim.
• Azure Arc for Apps blog series concluded with an Event Grid post — showcasing seamless mapping of event topics and subscriptions in an Arc-enabled scenario.
• Sarah Lean joined for a dual session on hybrid cloud enthusiasm and an honest look at the realities of developer advocacy — the shiny side and the less-visible challenges.
• Will Esprit returned to take the Geode pattern from theory to practice, building a globally distributed application using CosmosDB nodes that continue serving requests even if individual nodes go down.

Coming up: Shannon Keane on Azure VMware Solution (Wednesday), and John Lund on his cloud journey (Friday).