// V031 - Weekly Technology Vlog #31

Chris begins this episode with a heartfelt tribute to Abel Wang, a beloved community member who passed away after a battle with cancer. Abel was the first guest on Cloud with Chris and a major inspiration for Chris starting his content creation journey. Chris reflects on Abel’s advice to “just start” and encourages listeners to embrace the philosophy of “get busy living.”

Azure Blogs

Three posts are covered: tools for optimizing cloud spend including Azure Cost Management, Azure Advisor, and the pricing calculator with consistent dollar-based pricing across regions; July cost management updates featuring App Service Environment v3 savings, disk-level bursting, and new free-tier services like Key Vault, Logic Apps, and Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL; and the growing focus on sustainability and carbon footprint reduction through cloud adoption ahead of COP.

Azure Updates

Key updates include Azure Virtual Desktop availability in Azure China, Azure Stream Analytics tools for VS Code reaching GA, and Azure Site Recovery Update 56 with 46% faster replication and cross-continent region support. New ExpressRoute peering locations were announced in Campinas, São Paulo 2, and Dublin 2. VMware Site Recovery Manager reached GA, immutable storage with versioning for blob storage entered public preview with WORM support, and both WAF geomatch custom rules and WAF bot protection on Application Gateway became generally available.

Azure DevOps Blog

Highlights include an Azure Fun Bytes episode on Azure Arc-enabled data services, the DevOps Dojo series on people and teams in DevOps transformations, and April Edwards’ comparison of Azure Static Web Apps versus Azure Web Apps versus Azure Blob Storage static sites. Community contributions cover Azure DevOps NuGet versioning, Azure Test Plans for data professionals, automating Virtual Network Gateways with infrastructure as code, Terraform conditional logic, and Peter Dettender’s guide to monitoring Azure with Grafana dashboards.

GitHub Blog

GitHub announced the Developer Rights Fellowship at Stanford Law School to provide legal support for DMCA cases, and introduced 15+ new code scanning integrations with open source security tools including Psalm, Semgrep, tfsec, Brakeman, PSScriptAnalyzer, Kubesec, NodeJsScan, and others — reinforcing the DevSecOps shift-left approach.

Cloud with Chris Updates

Chris shares website brand and color updates aimed at improving accessibility and readability. Upcoming episodes include a session with Vanessa Brewer on proactive monitoring in Azure and Facundo La Roca on using Azure AD B2C for conference authentication. Chris also announces new Among Us community gaming streams alternating with Sea of Thieves sessions, and notes the content calendar is nearly full through the end of 2021 with topics spanning greener software, closed captions in public speaking, Azure Virtual Desktop, migrating .NET applications to the cloud, microservices, platform engineering, and Azure governance.