V026 - Sailing the Sea of Thieves while talking Cloud
Chris kicks off a new biweekly format combining tech updates with community gaming sessions, joined by Cloud Family members James Cook (Cloud & DevOps Advocate), Mert Ata (Software Architect & Azure MVP), and Dean Ellerby (Get Modern channel).
Azure Blog Updates
- Azure FX Series VMs — New high-performance compute virtual machine SKUs with benchmark details for HPC workloads.
- NFS 3.0 for Azure Blob Storage — NFS 3.0 protocol support is now generally available for Blob Storage.
- JBoss on Azure App Service — Red Hat JBoss EAP is now GA on Azure App Service, available as a runtime stack selection.
- ISC 2021 HPC Innovations — Microsoft presenting at the ISC 2021 conference on high-performance compute advances.
- Cloud Adoption Framework for Retail — New retail-specific guidance for cloud adoption and migration planning.
- Azure VM Image Builder GA — Managed service for building VM images (similar to HashiCorp Packer) is now generally available.
Azure DevOps Updates
- Azure Fun Bytes episode on Azure Data Factory security.
- Jay Gordon on creating a personal blog with Gatsby and Azure Static Web Apps.
- Community stories covering dark/light themes in Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions with Bicep, Azure Key Vault secrets in variable groups, and more.
GitHub Updates
- GitHub Packages Container Registry GA — Container registry is now generally available.
- Open Graph Image Framework — Engineering post on how GitHub builds and renders repository preview images.
- New GitHub Issues Beta — Introduction to the redesigned GitHub Issues experience with project planning features.
- GitHub Security Bug Bounty — 7 Years — Retrospective on the bug bounty program with 2020 highlights.
Cloud With Chris Roundup
- Introduction to Azure API Management blog post covering core concepts for API consumers and producers.
- Session with Aaron Davies on Agile coaching and the agile mindset.
- Upcoming: Annie Talvasto on top CNCF projects, Mert Ata on DevOps and container technologies with Traefik, and a live event with The Latte Bar on Azure fundamentals.
Sea of Thieves & Cloud Gaming
The crew sails a galleon, completing treasure vault quests and battling skeleton ships while discussing cloud gaming infrastructure. Topics include how Sea of Thieves leverages Azure cloud servers for real-time multiplayer coordination, world events, inventory management, and continuous deployment — a real-world example of DevOps principles applied to game development.
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