V028 - Weekly Technology Vlog #28

Chris returns from a week off with a packed set of Azure, Azure DevOps, and GitHub updates, plus a Cloud With Chris content roundup.

Azure Blog Updates

Genomic Data Analysis with Azure CycleCloud — Using CycleCloud for high-performance compute in healthcare and genomics research.
Resilience Threat Modeling for Distributed Systems — A deep dive into building a culture of risk management, covering premortems, failure mode analysis, postmortems, and evolving threat models as living documents rather than static artifacts.
Privileged Identity Management with Azure Lighthouse — Preview of Azure AD PIM integration with Azure Lighthouse for just-in-time, time-bound access control across multi-tenant environments, reinforcing zero trust principles.
Azure Well-Architected Framework — Reliability — Updates to the WAF reliability pillar, emphasizing shared responsibility in cloud, availability zones, multi-region deployments, and the free self-assessment tool.
Apache Spark 3.0 Connector for SQL Server GA — The Spark connector for SQL Server and Azure SQL based on Data Source v1 API is now generally available.

VM Bursting GA — Virtual machine bursting now generally available on DSv4, ESv4, FSv2, B-series and more, enabled by default at no additional cost.
Cognitive Services Form Recognizer Containers — Container support now in public preview for running Form Recognizer close to data sources.
IoT Hub IP Address Change — Infrastructure update changing underlying DNS records; best practice is to avoid IP address dependencies.
OWASP ModSecurity CRS 3.2 for WAF — Core Rule Set 3.2 now in public preview for Azure Web Application Firewall on Application Gateway.
Azure Communication Services Direct Routing — Public preview enabling Teams integration with telephony infrastructure for end-to-end customer communication scenarios.
App Service Environment v3 — Major update removing the stamp fee, simplifying deployment, and adjusting pricing for the single-tenant App Service model.
Key Vault Secret References with User-Assigned Managed Identity — App Service and Azure Functions can now use user-assigned managed identities for Key Vault references, eliminating secrets in code.
Azure Bastion Standard SKU Preview — New SKU supporting manual scaling (2–50 instances), IP-based connections, and cross-network connectivity.
Blob Storage Container Soft Delete GA — Container-level soft delete is now generally available.

Azure Fun Bites episode on Microsoft Power Apps and the Power Platform for citizen developers.
Community stories on .NET 6 deployments, C# Azure Functions with multi-stage pipelines, on-premises performance testing, deploying to Azure Container Instances, Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session with Terraform and Packer, and adding accessibility to development processes.

GitHub Availability Report for June — No downtime incidents reported for core services.
Cross-Cluster Associations in Rails 7 — Engineering post on GitHub’s Rails monolith architecture with 15 database primaries and replicas, functional partitioning, and horizontal sharding considerations.

Weekly Vlog 27 featured GitHub Copilot exploration.
Blog post introducing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) — first in a series covering individual CNCF projects.
Episode on diversity and inclusion with Melissa, discussing neurodiversity, mental health, and building diverse teams to avoid groupthink.
Cloud Gaming Notes with Lee Williams on esports, streaming, and cloud-enabled gaming.
Episode with Steph Martin on polyglot persistence — choosing the right data stores (SQL, Blob Storage, Azure Search, Time Series Insights) for different scenarios.
Upcoming: Pete Gallagher on IoT simulation with Azurio and real-world learnings.