// V029 - Sailing the Sea of Thieves while talking Cloud

In this combined gaming and tech update session, Chris is joined by community members James Cook, Simon, and Dean for a Sea of Thieves adventure while weaving in weekly cloud news and updates.

Azure Blogs

Chris covers three Azure blog posts focused on optimizing cloud spend with cost management tools (Azure Advisor, pricing calculator, and consistent dollar-based pricing across regions), a recap of July cost management updates including App Service Environment v3 savings and new free services, and the growing importance of sustainability and carbon footprint reduction through cloud adoption.

Azure Updates

Key updates include HPC Cache GA, Azure Bastion Standard SKU in public preview, API Management policy updates, Disk Pool for Azure VMware Solution preview, Event Grid integration with AKS, and creating AKS clusters without local user accounts. Notable announcements also cover Azure AD authentication for Application Insights, Azure Monitor standard availability tests, Azure SQL enabled by Azure Arc GA, Service Bus support for large messages, and Windows 365 alongside Azure Virtual Desktop GA.

Azure DevOps Blog

Updates include an OpenShift on Azure episode, Azure DevOps Server 2020.1.1 RC availability, and a series of community contributions covering NuGet versioning, variable sharing across pipeline stages and jobs, and GitHub Actions for mobile app version management.

GitHub Blog

The June 2021 recap highlights GitHub Copilot, GitHub Discussions integration with GitHub Actions, GitHub Desktop 2.9 with commit squashing and Apple Silicon improvements, GitHub Enterprise Server 3.1 GA, the introduction of GitHub Issues forms for structured issue templates, and GitHub Packages container registry reaching general availability.

Cloud with Chris Updates

Chris shares his work on improving website accessibility including color contrast and screen reader support, a blog post comparing Azure Storage Queues versus Azure Service Bus, and an upcoming introduction to continuous integration video. He also previews his Azure Thames Valley meetup talk on deploying static sites with GitHub Actions.

Community Discussion

The gaming session features conversations about Simon’s Azure certification roadmap (AZ-900 through AZ-700), James exploring VPN gateways on a Raspberry Pi with infrastructure as code, and Dean transitioning to a more cloud-focused role. The group discusses content creation schedules and the value of consistent publishing, referencing Scott Hanselman’s prolific blogging as inspiration.