Chatting to some colleagues about blogging and sharing our success stories and failures!

Have you ever had a scenario where you need to maintain versions of a set of files? Or have you needed to collaborate on files with colleagues in some way? That’s a common scenario for developers, infrastructure engineers or data scientists/developers. It’s an increasingly common problem. Some people solve this using file shares or FTP Servers with numerous files, v1, v2, v2-final, but that doesn’t scale and is quite a messy approach. Surely there is a better way? That’s where a Version Control System can really help you. One such option is Git. Git is a distributed version control system, which means that rather than relying on a central location to host and store the entire set of files and history, each machine has a full version of the codebase and history locally. This means each user can be productive locally and independently on their own machine. Git is also optimised to be very lightweight and perfomant.

In this video, Chris provides an update on the Azure Blogs (lots of great updates this week), a quick-fire round of Azure Technology Updates, dives into the Azure DevOps Blog and GitHub Blogs. Then we cover a VERY busy week of Cloud with Chris over the last week, and what’s coming up talk-wise over April (It’s looking to be a packed month!)

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want. With .NET Core bringing a cross platform approach, getting your applications to the Cloud is easier than ever. In this session we will learn the different ways to deploy our .NET applications to the cloud and how we can use GitHub Actions to make it faster!

Chris joins Mert Yeter on the MSHowTo show talking all things DevOps, including CI/CD tools, Azure DevOps and GitHub, Azure Development related tooling, and the importance of monitoring as part of a DevOps approach!

For some time, I’ve been using GitHub actions to update the content of my site (i.e. pages, descriptions, metadata, etc.). Through Hugo, these content updates automatically update the RSS feeds. This then makes the episodes appear in podcast services such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. However, throughout that time I have been manually uploading the podcast files to my storage account. It wasn’t a significant overhead, but I kept thinking that there must be a better way to do this. And, there is - I’ve implemented it! This blog post will walk you through why I’ve made these changes, how I made them and what the result is.

Have you ever wondered how Git works behind the scenes? We’ll go ahead, initialise an empty folder as a Git repository and explore the .Git folder that is created.

Have you ever considered storing large binary files in your Git repositories? There are times where you may want to do this, e.g. for my podcast cloudwithchris.com to store my podcast files. Git LFS is an extension to Git which replaces large files with text pointers inside Git. Listen in to find out why you should care, how it works and what it is!

This marks 3 months of the weekly vlogging! Chris talks about last week’s very busy week (New content/talks every single day!). A new Cloud Drop episode on GitHub Codespaces, Part 4 of using GPG Keys to sign your Git Commits & GitHub, Welsh #Azure User Group and Using #Terraform #Cloud with Azure. As well as a series of #Azure Blogs, #Azure Updates, #DevOps Blog Updates and #GitHub Updates.

You may have heard of Terraform, but are you aware of Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise? In this session, Chris will give a rundown of how he has used Terraform Cloud as the underlying engine to deploy some of his own projects onto Azure. Prepare to get meta as we even look how Terraform can help set up Terraform Cloud in this episode of Cloud with Chris!