Blogs

If there’s an easy way to achieve something, then I’m all for it! You may have noticed that I’ve been putting a lot of effort into refactoring my site and open sourcing the original Cloud With Chris theme. I’ve now released that as the Hugo Creator theme for Hugo. As part of the refactoring process into a reusable theme, I had to make several breaking changes. This meant that I’d need to update the contents of my site. I want to share a quick tip that I discovered to add captions to my images in markdown.

I’ve been following the GitHub Projects beta for a while now, and have been fortunate to be accepted as an early adopter. I’m a big fan of the direction, and the flexibility. One of the limitations I’ve noticed is that there’s currently no built-in way to automatically add an issue to a project board. It’s on the backlog, but not yet available. Fortunately, GitHub Actions has us sorted. I’ll walk you through a sample I put together to do exactly that.

In this post, we’re going to explore the Open Source project known as Dapr (The Distributed Application Runtime). This post is primarily aimed at those who already have an understanding of Containers, Kubernetes and Microservices. However, if you’re not familiar with these topics - I’ll do my best to set the right context and background without making the blog too lengthy!

I love learning. Especially when it’s about brand new things that I wasn’t aware of! For this post, I need to give a big shout out to my friend and colleague Sam Rowe for the tip. It wasn’t a product/service that I was aware of, but felt like something that could be useful for me on Cloud With Chris. In this post, I’ll dig into what it is and how it may be able to help you.

It’s hard to believe that 2021 is done, and we’re now in 2022. In one sense, it feels like a ‘blink and you miss it’ year. In another way, it feels as though it’s been one of the longest years to have passed us by. It’s fair to say that 2021 has had its challenges, not least in the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. You may have caught my recent blog post on my mental health challenges. Practicing mindfulness and gratitude are excellent approaches for me to keep my overall mental health in balance. So, this post is just as much for me as anyone else. I want to highlight the achievements from the last year or so. I won’t be setting any resolutions for 2021, but want to build upon what I’ve learned in 2021.

You will have noticed that there haven’t been any updates on Cloud With Chris for some time. I’ve also been quiet on social media. For any of my colleagues, you may have seen that I’ve had time away from work by my out of office messages. In this blog post, I want to open up about my recent challenges and have an honest discussion. Whether you’ve experienced mental health challenges before, are currently going through tough times, or haven’t experienced any and don’t quite understand - I hope that me sharing this helps. We’re going to be talking about mental health.

A little while ago, I wrote a blog post on Using the GitHub self-hosted runner and Azure Virtual Machines to login with a System Assigned Managed Identity, which seems to get a good amount of views week on week. Reflecting on some questions that have popped up this week (and regularly received over my time in the DevOps space), I thought that it makes sense to write a post on how to use Azure DevOps self-hosted agents to deploy to private resources. So, that’s what we’ll be covering in this post!

Migrating to the Cloud is more than just deciding which technology you want to adopt, or building out the appropriate architectures for your implementation. There is a significant amount of planning needed before you take your initial steps. For example, the initial migration process, establishing a foundation for your ongoing governance, and the wider management of expectations from your business, as well as establishing team structure and responsibilities. This is where the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework comes in.

This post is similar to another I recently wrote on using Branch Protection Rules in GitHub. Instead of focusing on GitHub, we’ll be looking at how you can use Branch Policies in Azure DevOps (specifically, Azure Repos). If you’re using Azure Repos, but not using Branch Policies - I’d encourage you to start using them! I hope this post helps you learn how!

In case you haven’t heard, I’m planning to do some livestreams in the near future which are focused on live development / building in the cloud. I’m working on a few ideas, but if you have any suggestions - please throw them my way! To prepare for this, I’ve recently spent some time making sure my local development environment is in order. Windows Terminal and Windows Subsystem for Linux are a couple of the key tools in my local development environment. Windows Subsystem for Linux is the focus for this post.