In case you missed it, Shannon Kuehn, Jamie Maguire, John Lunn and I joined Sarah Lean for a panel livestream on her channel talking about our experiences getting started with blogging, and our experiences with blogging platforms. In this post, I want to focus on the first aspect - how you can get started with blogging, and some of the common themes / recommendations I’ve heard, not just from this session, but from other active community contributors.

Do you know what caused the Titanic to sink? Poorly designed bulkheads. How can you ensure resilience between components in your cloud application? Effectively designed bulkheads! In this session, join Chris as he explores how the bulkhead pattern can help you prevent excessive load or failures in one service impacting the consumers of that service!

For some time now, I’ve been using Windows Terminal as my local terminal for interacting with my command-line tools for quite some time now. Whenever I’m demonstrating Kubernetes concepts or working with the Azure CLI, I’ll likely have had the Windows Terminal open at some point. I always get questioned about which terminal that is, and how people can get access to it. I recently put together a Cloud Drop on How Windows Terminal can make YOU productive with Azure, so I figured it’s time to also write up a blog post on the same! Whether you’re a Developer, DevOps Engineer, Infrastructure Operations or Data Scientist, you’ve probably had to interact with a command-line terminal / shell at some point, so I hope this will be useful for you!

Ever thought about what it takes to host a game in the Cloud? Well, this is the series for you! On the first Wednesday of every month, we explore Cloud Concepts that impact your journey to a connected multiplayer gaming experience! In this third session, we’ll play Sea of Thieves and talk about building an inventory system and economy that powers certain games like MMORPGs or open world games like Sea of Thieves.

Chris is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. He’ll explore how GitHub Actions can be used to deploy your own static sites (or other apps!) to Azure.

Have you wanted to get started learning Azure, but you’re not quite sure where to start? Then you need to check out Microsoft Learn! Microsoft Learn is a hub for learning content, including modules and learning paths, information around the official Microsoft certifications, and a curated video platform called learn tv.

In this livestream, Chris covers the latest and greatest in the Azure, Azure DevOps & GitHub world, as well as the latest and upcoming content releases on Cloud with Chris!

Windows Terminal is a modern application that allows you to use your command-line of choice, whether that is the Windows Command Prompt, PowerShell, PowerShell Core, Windows Subsystem for Linux or the Azure Cloud Shell. This Cloud Drop shows you how to install Windows Terminal, and some tips/tricks in making you productive in Azure!

How often do you think about the configuration of your applications across environments/regions/deployment boundaries? What if that configuration was stored somewhere externally but centralised, to make management easier? That’s the idea behind the external config pattern! How about another scenario - What about those times where you’ve wanted to use a messaging service, but your payload is too big? Thought about externalising that payload too? Well, that’s the Claim-check pattern! Join Peter and Chris as they talk about both of these patterns in this episode of Cloud with Chris!

I’ve recently released a few Cloud Drops episodes on Git related content. The Git Behind the Scenes video was incredibly well received. I’m also aware from my day-to-day discussions that there’s a mix of experiences with Git, so also made a Git 101 Video. In this Cloud World that we live in, version control is an important concept beyond the ’traditional’ developers. Infrastructure Engineers can now version control their Infrastructure as Code, or maintenance scripts. Data Scientists can version control their experiments and tests. And of course, developers can version control the code for their software. I also consider version control as a gateway or first step into the world of DevOps. Typically when you think about build and release pipelines, you are triggering based upon some version control event (e.g. a commit to a particular branch, a merge of a pull request, etc.). Over the past few years, I’ve seen a trend where organisations are looking to automate quickly, rather than relying on the traditional hands-on-keyboard approach which can be error-prone and time consuming. Whether we’re talking in this context about Infrastructure as Code, Application Code, database schemas as code, data science experiments or any other representation as code, it doesn’t matter. Typically the roads lead back to the same place, to version control. So in this blog post, I’ll be covering the fundamentals of Git and how to get started. For anyone that is particularly inclined, there will also be some information on what’s happening behind the scenes when you work through these fundamental concepts.