Blogs

At Microsoft //Build 2021, Microsoft announced a series of updates relating to Cloud Native Applications anywhere. In summary, those updates refer to running Azure Services (such as App Services, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Event Grid and API Management) in any Kubernetes cluster which is managed by Azure Arc. That means you could have Azure App Services running in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or in your on-premises Kubernetes deployment. This is a significant update, so I’ve decided that I’ll be writing a series of blog posts on the topic - as one post would not do the topic justice!

If you follow the news around Microsoft, you’ve probably found it very hard to miss the fact that the Microsoft //Build conference happened this week. Microsoft //Build is their annual developer-focused conference, where they typically announce new features, updates and share their strategy as they evolve technologies. In this update, I’ll provide a summary of the announcements that particularly stood out to me and give you some context around why. Whether that’s announcements that excite me, features that I think are crucial to be adopted, etc. It’s worth noting that I’ll be focusing primarily on the Microsoft Azure Updates here, as that’s my typical area of expertise!

As I’m using GitHub Actions to deploy my site to Azure, it made sense for me to build a GitHub action that I can use within my GitHub Actions workflow to cross-post content. That’s exactly what I’ll be talking about in this blog post!

Great news! Azure Static Web Apps are now Generally Available! Just to provide some reassurance, Static Web Apps are a concept that I’m fairly passionate about. You may have seen this blog post on why I think JAMStack and the cloud are a great combination. You may have seen one of my many talks on how I use Hugo, Azure Storage, Azure CDN and GitHub to easily deploy a very cheap and scalable site into Azure. But hold on, if Azure Storage is an option already - Why am I so excited about the prospect of Azure Static Web Apps? Azure Static Web Apps offer so much more than just the hosting aspect!

I’m sat writing this blog post about 4 months after writing my 2021 kick off blog post. My aim for 2021 was to focus on one goal - contributing back into the technical community.

You may have heard of Event-Driven Architectures before, but haven’t had the chance to get hands-on and build one as yet. That’s exactly what we’ll be working through in this blog post!

Recently on Twitter, I was asked by @thegraycat on whether I knew of any resources to manage pipelines in version control. I sent across several top of mind thoughts over Twitter, but it got me thinking that there may be others with the same question and it could make a good blog post. So here we are, as I talk through some of my considerations for pipelines as code.

Following on from my recent post where I discussed using schema.org for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I wanted to stick with a similar theme, but a slightly different angle or topic. This time, we’ll be covering the topic of crossposting content.

One of my recent tasks for Cloud with Chris was to investigate some additional areas for SEO optimisation. If you’re unaware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; a set of practices to improve your ranking in search engines such as Google, Bing and others when they crawl and index your site. I was already in a good position, but there were some things that were frustrating me, we’ll explore those in this blog post.